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You don't consider real world work experience relevant when hiring? Just side projects or contributions to open source projects?

That seems like you're looking for someone who lives and breathes programming. Do you have something against developers who work 40 hours a week and instead of programming as a hobby as well, they do other, non-tech, things for their hobby?

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I don't consider work experience relevant at all unless I can verify the work done or hold a particular recommendation in high esteem. Not getting fired for a length of time, while a skill, is not often what I care most about. Without knowing a company's policies, culture, and tech leads I cannot accurately judge whether someone spent 3 years playing ping pong with the CEO or was responsible for programming a successfully delivered system. In a perfect world, I might try to suss out each candidate's strength and then decide based on the totality of data, but I don't often have that kind of time. I look for public or provided code first, and if it's reasonable, will use that to begin a pointed conversation on our trade.

I was asked about that kind of "programmer universe" stuff during my interview process with my current employer. I said I didn't have a GitHub, never been to a programming conference, didn't participate in the local dev scene, and didn't really program on my free time. I said in my free-time I like being outside, hiking, camping, and fishing...It didn't hurt me because I got the job, of course, I'm working for a utility company and not some flashy SV/NY tech startup...

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