'Coding in your spare time' isn't quite as extreme as having no life outside of tech. Hey, I code a bit in my spare time too, so let me clarify.
It's the people who don't do anything else but code that I've, in my experience, had real issues with - they might make great computer scientists, but as a group they're not very good in a team of software developers. Arrogance, problems cooperating with others, excessive nitpicking, 'engineer's disease', poor social skills...
I'm not saying you're guaranteed to have any or all of those problems if all you do 24/7 is code, but I've seen it one hell of a lot, and I'm perplexed why this type of person tends to be preferred over more well-rounded individuals. It's not like they're actually better at their jobs.
I'm not arguing for going through an organization and sacking everyone who codes on the weekend. But I strongly suspect that if interviewers didn't glorify the obsessive 24/7 coder, either deliberately or subconsciously as 'what a real developer looks like', we'd have both a much more diverse tech industry and a much more functional one.
It's the people who don't do anything else but code that I've, in my experience, had real issues with - they might make great computer scientists, but as a group they're not very good in a team of software developers. Arrogance, problems cooperating with others, excessive nitpicking, 'engineer's disease', poor social skills...
I'm not saying you're guaranteed to have any or all of those problems if all you do 24/7 is code, but I've seen it one hell of a lot, and I'm perplexed why this type of person tends to be preferred over more well-rounded individuals. It's not like they're actually better at their jobs.
I'm not arguing for going through an organization and sacking everyone who codes on the weekend. But I strongly suspect that if interviewers didn't glorify the obsessive 24/7 coder, either deliberately or subconsciously as 'what a real developer looks like', we'd have both a much more diverse tech industry and a much more functional one.