Sorry, but I have to really object to this idea that programming every waking hour with great passion is a positive job qualification. Sounds more like a recipe for burnout.
Edited for clarity.
If I am interviewing people then I would try to avoid this line of thinking (i.e. how much time is spent out of work programming) as it strikes me as unfair. My reasons are that not all candidates could spend every waking hour of their time even if they wanted to for various legitimate reasons. For example if you are a parent looking after a baby/toddler, it would be totally unreasonable to expect you to be coding "every waking hour".
If you had two candidates that were 100% equal except one had no real non-work-commitments of note and spent their evenings messing around on github, and the other was a parent who wanted to code all night but had to look after their kids in the evenings, which would you pick? If you picked the non-parent based only on the non-work github commits are you descriminating someone based on the fact they have kids? I dunno - but I thinik it would need careful consideration.
As I said - I dunno, but it strikes me as this would be an unfair thing to look for. Afterall, you're recruiting fill a role, not recruiting a lifestyle.
Not really. It doesn't tell me how well they play with others, or how well they work to someone else's requirements. Finding obnoxious pricks who know how to write code but stink up the workplace with a terrible attitude isn't particularly hard.
i.e. at significantly greater risk of burnout. I'd prefer to hire staff with a healthy work/life balance
A good looking github contribution graph looks kind of professional, also if you have starred some repositorys (which probably means you are active and love what you are doing)
WTF how is this a good thing?
Of course, if being a develoepr is only a "job" - this sucks.
For example, I am coding 8h+ a day during my fulltime job. When I am back at home/weekends, I also spend a lot of my time to code private projects instead of playing games
Someone can certainly enjoy their job--and software development is certainly nothing special--without also wanting to spend their nights and weekends doing the same thing. For that matter, I'd probably take such a narrow set of interests as something of a disqualification.
It doesn't mean that you have a narrow set of interests. It just mean I use a part of my free time to code. Others are watching tv, playing games or doing other time wasting stuff.
There's no need to say X is "wasting time" in such an objective tone. For many, spending hours on the weekend doing programming is a waste of time (and it can be, most of the time). For you, it's fun. For others, they just don't have time to do it. No need to judge or expect others to live the same life as you.
https://help.github.com/articles/why-are-my-contributions-no...