Are you evaluating also how much time it took to complete the after hour project? What if I complete a clone game in 2 years? This might be excluding anybody that cannot work after hours, for a reason or another.
Maybe I'm reading into this but I see this type of response a lot on HN.
> A: You need experience. Get some after hours
> B: I don't have any time after hours. It's not fair
Like gees! What do you expect?
B: I wanna be guitar player in a rock band
A: Well, if you don't play guitar, take lessons after hours
B: I don't have any time after hours
A: So what do you expect me to do about it? I'm not about to add someone who's never played guitar and can't demonstrate the skills as a guitarist in my band. It's not my problem that you can't play, don't have the time to learn, and yet want to be in my band.
---
Same for any company: So what do you expect me to do about it? I'm not about to add someone who's never programmed games and can't demonstrate the skills as a game programmer in my team. It's not my problem that you can't code games, don't have the time to learn, and yet want to be in my gamedev company.
Please, please please think about you comment when/if you ever have kids. I guarantee your perspective will have changed a great deal.
They want to hire people who already have some degree of relevant experience. That is a reasonable requirement. If that excludes some parents who don't have time, so be it. Being a parent is one of many lifestyle choices that can limit one's ability to arrive at an interview with sufficient background knowledge. It does not warrant special treatment & exception just because it's parenting.
I work in quantitative trading and the number of people that think they can just throw a script together and make money is... well, if I had a dollar for each...
I don’t care how long it took. Longer would demonstrate a sustained interest. Shorter would demonstrate efficiency. Both are valuable
I don't care how long it took (specially if it's a hobby after work kind of thing) as long as I can see you have a solid understanding and experience of what the work really is.
Not having time after hours it's a hard problem to solve. Gamedev problems are quite different to other software industries so previous experience might not immediately translate, this is specially true for gameplay programmers or things like tools and engine where you need to have experience with working with artists/designers and within the constraints typical of games (memory, performance, platforms, etc). But other fields like, backend, devops, data analysis I've seen often hire from outside the industry