You're right: what you do outside of work isn't your employer's business. However, I would not hire a programmer who will not program at home. That's not to say I would expect them to be contributing to so Open Source project, or to be running a side business, but that they can and do put together code in their own time, for their own reasons.
For example, the guy who runs a personal blog, and put together his own widget to display some sort of stat, seems like a good idea. The guy who runs a personal blog, and spends a day (off) hunting down a widget that someone else made, that kind of does what he wants, and costs $20 to use, would not be a good fit.
My view on it is something similar to: I wouldn't take my car to a mechanic who takes his own car to the dealer. Why would I hire a a programmer who, when he needs a program written for himself, goes and finds someone else's work?
I've been a programmer professionally for over 10 years and worked with a variety of teams. In my experience, I haven't observed a correlation between tinkering with programming as a hobby and the ability to be an effective employee. From what I've seen, communication skills, interpersonal skills, and the ability to motivate oneself have more impact than hobby programming.
"I wouldn't take my car to a mechanic who takes his own car to the dealer." -- I see your point, but use your imagination a bit more. Perhaps there are really good mechanics out there who really love being mechanics but at the end of the day want to do something different than work on cars. In other words, you can love something and be good at it without it consuming all of your waking life.
You have to be careful with taking such a hard line. As a developer, I would hesitate to work with you.
EDIT: For the record, I work on lots of side projects outside of work.
That is a really bad an strange example of a good programmer. Why should a programmer spend his time and company programming a widget if their is an equivalent that can be bought for cheaper. I'd rather be a programmer that finds the right tool for the job than be one that sees everything as nails.
My mechanic specializes in Asian/Japanese cars. He drives a BMW. The shop next to him specializes in BMWs. He could spend $1000s of dollars to get the special tools and equipment to fix his car. Or he could pop over to his neighbor, borrow 30 minutes of his time. His neighbor has the tools, training and competence to work on his BMW. He does not.
The guy who runs a personal blog, and spends a day (off) hunting down a widget that someone else made, that kind of does what he wants, and costs $20 to use, would not be a good fit.
That is probably what the majority of real-world software development consists of, tho'. E.g. is every piece of software you use an absolutely perfect fit for your needs, and if not why haven't you rewritten it? Because that's not a good use of your time.
Maybe because the programmer is an adult and isn't wowed by the prospect of spending more than 5 minutes writing something (s)he can buy for $20?
Also, this is seriously nasty ageism. Once you grow up the same thing will happen to you: significant others, friends, activities, hobbies, pets, kids, etc, most of which don't involve sitting on your ass in front of a computer. In fact, having put 10 years into this industry, I work a lot harder and better at my actual job if I don't spend all my off hours in front of a computer.
It doesn't sound like much fun to just buy something for $20 rather than create it yourself. Obviously if you're going to buy it, you don't consider creating it to be fun. Some people like to create things for fun, and that is their activity or hobby. I'm not sure why doing what you do professionally can't also be your hobby. Why is buying something rather than creating it the "adult" thing to do?
The programmers that prefer creating to buying are sometimes bad for business. They may prefer to create software in-house (expensive) rather than use an existing software library (cheap). At the end of the day, a developer is only as good as the value she adds to the business.
Did you read the post your replying to? The poster pointed out that he's got other things in his life. When you grow up you might decide that $20 to spend time with your kids when they're young is cheap.
Yes, and how you spend your time is personal decision. Just because one person decides to code in their free time doesn't mean they aren't an adult nor that that's a blanket bad decision. The wording in the comment I'm responding to ("Once you grow up", "sitting on your ass in front of a computer") is kind of inflammatory and seems to imply that only non-adults have time to do coding or hacking, that it's a "kids activity", and that coding can not be a hobby (since "hobbies" is called out as another possible thing that "adults" do).
In the context of this discussion, however, if you were to ask during an interview "Talk about a personal programming project you've worked on recently" and you heard back:
Candidate A: "I don't do or think about coding outside of the office, but I did just recently spend $20 purchasing tool to upload images to flickr and I had to read the docs to configure it to work with my firewall."
Candidate B: "Well, I wanted to upload the 2,000 pictures of my son to flickr to share with my family, but doing that with the flickr web UI manually was taking a long time, and there isn't a good flickr uploader for Linux, so I hacked out a shell script that gets invoked when automount mounts my camera or flash drive that uploads the images to flickr with their API"
Is anyone seriously going to consider Candidate A, just based on this question, as more valuable for a coding/hacking/technology position? Obviously, other factors come into play, as techiferous points out elsewhere in this thread, but this is meant to show someone's passion, not if they have good judgement as to if something is worth doing (hopefully, you've got a battery of other interview questions that help determine that).
I know a lot of people like Candidate B and I would not like to work with any of them. Life is a balance. Passion for programming is good, obsessive compulsion is not.
Wow, that seems kind of extreme. We have both "adults don't program in their free time" and "programming in your free time is possibly obsessive compulsive" in this thread.
If passion is a good thing to have, how do you measure it other than with a question like this? And what would be a good way to measure unhealthy dedication to a hobby that could be obsessive compulsive?
1 - it's unreasonable to not ask why saving $20 is worth many hours of your life;
2 - Why would you assume that mucking about with php and wordpress, then validating front end code in ie{6,7,8}, ff, safari, and chrome is in any way fun for the vast majority of developers?
Most of the responses seemed to focus on the cost aspect of purchasing the widget. I was trying to imply that there was a significant amount of time investment to go out and find someone who made it before you could even buy it from them. I've known several people professionally who would rather spend 6 hours hunting down a product they could purchase rather than writing it themselves in a similar amount of time. No, what they would have written isn't as robust or well optimized as the product they purchased, but it would have fit their needs better, and they would be better able to change the functionality as needed.
To create a better (real) example: I had a co-worker who, a while back, needed to have a handful of files converted from one somewhat obscure format to another. He already had a utility to do the conversions one at a time, but he needed to do several hundred of them and they took around a minute each to do by hand. He then spent all evening (by his words, I'm not sure how long that actually amounts to, but would guess in the 3-4 hour range from the way he talked about it) tracking down a software company that produced a bulk conversion utility, which charged $50 for the application to do it. When he told me about all the time he spent tracking it down, I asked him why he didn't just write it himself, since he definitely had the skills to write, at the very least, a script to read through the folder structure and do the conversions in the amount of time he spent looking for it. His response was that it just had never occurred to him to write it himself, despite the fact that he had the skill set to do it.
My previous example was due to the fact that I have seen many, many "companies" (read: high school/college kids with some php experience) offering widgets that could be hacked together in a couple of hours by anyone with a rough understanding of PHP and JQuery. They make their money by targeting a rather obscure, specific functionality, and waiting for someone to come along who just happens to need that function. In my discussions with a person who did this, he told me that he frequently gets emails about how a user had spent hours/days searching for something to do just that task, and that the widgets were often used on "tech" sites, where (I would think) the administrator should know at least basic PHP programming.
For example, the guy who runs a personal blog, and put together his own widget to display some sort of stat, seems like a good idea. The guy who runs a personal blog, and spends a day (off) hunting down a widget that someone else made, that kind of does what he wants, and costs $20 to use, would not be a good fit.
My view on it is something similar to: I wouldn't take my car to a mechanic who takes his own car to the dealer. Why would I hire a a programmer who, when he needs a program written for himself, goes and finds someone else's work?