Your last paragraph here implies that a developers work is either A) able to be shared and not owned by their employer, or B) they spend their free time coding after doing it at work all day, instead of having other hobbies. If thats the bar an employer wants to set, thats perfectly reasonable. They shouldn't ever complain about not being able to find employees however, if they are going to artificially limit their prospective employee pool to people who have no interests outside of programming
1 - I've been active in sports my whole life. I work 40 hours a week, play in several competitive hockey leagues and still have time to tinker and build stuff in my own time. I'm also studying to get my commercial drone license, and have a host of other hobbies that keep me busy outside of coding.
2 - The only way I feel like a developer can possibly stay in tune with how fast our industry is changing is to code outside of where they currently work.
A good example is at my current gig we're building apps with AEM (Adobe Experience Manager), Java and AngularJS (1.4). If I wanted to go work in a smaller startup, do you think my knowledge of 1.4 is going to be helpful when most of my friends who are working at similar places have been developing with Angular2 for almost 6 months now? If I'm not working on my own to keep up, my skills will be completely obsolete when I want to get a new gig.
That's just a fact of life. I don't have any friends who simply show up, work 9-5, spit out some code and then go home and not do anything. Likewise, they don't go home, crack open Visual Studio and code until they pass out on the keyboard. It's pretty easy to do stuff in your off time and still have a social life.
I say this from the position of someone who has side projects on their own.
The general feeling that an engineer can't be any good without working unpaid outside of their job seems like a self inflicted and unnecessary cultural norm we've adopted as an industry. I can't think of any other industry where someone who goes home and doesn't practice their craft after hours is looked down upon as much as it is in software.
I don't have the label for it. It's similar to how employers want to hire developers for junior pay but don't want to provide any training and expect them to have taught themselves on various tools while lamenting the lack of skilled developers. Someone else in this thread mentioned the view of software engineers being viewed as artists who have to have a burning passion for their craft and I think that's bullshit.
Yea there are always guys who actually have that passion and enjoy programming as a hobby, but they are the minority like any other profession. It's become some sort of virtue signaling. I've talked to a number of devs who go through the effort of having publicly available work to show off who have confided to me that they do it just so that prospective employers feel that they are passionate
