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Comment by dqh | Hacker News Reader

For the same level of commercial experience, someone who spends most of their time outside work coding has more experience coding than someone who doesn't, and they probably love it. I think these things are worth knowing about a candidate when hiring?

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That is awfully close to just discriminating against candidates who have families or especially single parents. This level of gatekeeping that a programmer who decides to have a full life outside of work is inherently an inferior programmer is a really superficial way to look at it. Equation passion with "Is this person willing and able to spend 60 hours a week coding" is a disgusting attitude that should just completely end in this industry.

In my entire career the single most talented Programmer I ever knew was a single mother who logged off the computer every day after 8 hours period, and choose to spent her life with her kids.

What you are saying is the same thing as "a programmer with 5 years of experience can be much better than one with 10", which is true, but does that mean that we shouldn't consider how much experience someone has? Nobody said that more is always better, just that it isn't worthless information.

People who want to have families often split the difference. One partner gets a government job that doesn't pay very much, but has great benefits, job security, and work/life balance, and the other takes a more demanding job with longer hours that pays better.

All else being equal, people get better at things they do more of, and part of the interview process is finding out how much coding a person has done.

I'm sure that mother would give amazing answers to the other parts of this interview.

Or it just points out candidates who are too unskilled to pickup coding practices on the job, or who have families, or who are likely to burn out in 6 mos of working in their new job because they worked 40hr weeks then went home and worked 40 hours more.

Yes, or. That 'or' includes the sort of person that is so endlessly fascinated with programming that they can't stop themselves from creating things with code in their spare time.

Alternatively, they could be terrible coders and looking to improve outside of work, whereas the question gleans no substantial information for those that don't code outside of work.

Sure. Which is why it's just part of a conversation, not a boolean filtering question.

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