I'll bite. Yeah. I want that guy. I want that guy because he's got energy and enthusiasm to burn, and I'm confident I can give him a place to use it.. Additionally, we'd love to see more open source projects come out of what we're working on..

I feel like the energy I could spend doing a side project is probably better spent getting these last two features in, or fixing those lingering bugs, or getting that automation solid, etc....

Awesome, if this was how it works, but it's not. The people that get itchy enough to bang out these projects on the side need to keep building stuff. Great stuff. I burn out on bug fixes, and automation.. and sometimes I feel like working on something different, so I bang on a new cache library for Django, or write something a little tangential to what we're currently iterating on. In my case, I'm really stoked with all of the problems we have that need doing, so none of my 'side-projects' are totally sideways to the values of our company... but lots of them aren't exactly high priorities :)

This actually might the crux of the difference. While we have an open moonlighting policy the people that work here are a lot more likely to use the extra coding energy on something directly related to the priorities we have. There's no shortage of things to do. And t's not like you spend three straight weeks fixing bugs -- there's plenty of diversity in things that we need to in the business -- and I suspect most companies I'd want to work at are similar.

And again, I'm not necessarily against side projects. But it seems like an odd way to measure a potential employees passion to the job. It does seem like a great way to measure their passion for side projects, but we generally aren't hiring people explicitly to work on side projects. It seems like a much better way to measure their job passion is to see what they actually did at their job -- look at what they shipped.

If they shipped a crap product, but had a cool side project, what is that really saying? If anything its telling you to NOT hire them, but to get them interested in your product on the side! :-)

My current employer has profit sharing, I love the work we do and there's always more interesting work to do than a 10 hour day allows. So now the projects I do at home are my pet projects for work that excite me but aren't part of my core tasks.

The question is "Is this someone passionate about programming?" and involvement with open source projects are a great way to find that out, but it's not the only way.

Some one who shows initiative and puts in extra work for a company they're excited about show's just as much passion for programming.

It's that programmer who puts in their hour and a half of coding in between reddit posts and forgets about it when 5 oclock hits that you want to stay away from.

My point is the lead dev for Angry Birds ends up at your desk and it seems almost pompous to say, "Where's your GitHub app?" This person broke his neck to ship, upgrade, and maintain a product that you can look at (the NBA game), yet a lot of people still seem to be saying, "w/o seeing your code (your practice sessions) I need the GitHub repo" (I need to watch you play at the park).

I guess as an employer this works to my advantage if more startups require GitHub accounts, since I can pick off proven talent that doesn't have this requirement. So yeah... it's a great idea! :-)

EDIT: And I should add that I was responding to someone who said that if you aren't working on something in your spare time that this is a red flag. So according to that poster, simply having great code from my "daytime" job isn't sufficient. Kobe Bryant NBA footage isn't sufficient. If he doesn't also play pickup games there must be a problem?!