Judging passion is a different thing, but anyone reading this article and agreeing with the sentiment of it better be really careful about how they act about this during the interview process.
Discrimination is legal except for the few specific cases outlined in the various civil rights, equal pay, and age discrimination acts. Might as well take two minutes to research before making these types of posts.
Interviewer: Do you work on an open source project outside of work?
Candidate: No, I'm too busy looking after my kids and Church activities
Interviewer (thinking): Oh shit, I better have a damn good reason to give to HR if I reject this candidate...No, not in this case. This is relevant to the job. An employer can easily ask, "Do you have a software project portfolio?" or "What's your experience in python, professional or otherwise?" It's very much on-topic.
I'm not saying that external work and side projects can't lead to experience or knowledge that would make someone a good candidate. Someone might be qualified because of the work they've done on the side. But they can't be disqualified because of a lack of it.
I agree 100%.
That's kind of a meaningless statement. In a competitive atmosphere, not having a qualification is the same as being disqualified if the other guy has the qualification, and among programmers, the other guy usually does have that qualification.