The issue I take with this opinion as noted above, it selects for people who have available time. I am genuinely interested in programming, but I come home and spend time with my 4 month old son.
I think the "more than just a 9-5" idea is a toxic pattern which has been championed by the privileged. In short, by wanting something like this, you risk selecting for a fairly homogenous set of people.
I think you can write a good coding challenge which doesn't look like all the others (the socialite example in Takehome.io is particularly good because it scales with skill level – it's not a pass/fail, but a spectrum from just making it work, to showing you have thought about and dealt with an array of odd things that might crop up).
That's fine, and I think the nonsense testing that is popular with valley jobs is a toxic pattern as well. I'm sure there are reasonable coding challenges, but none of them are ever highlighted around here.
The biggest reason for this attitude stems from the immense amount of people who are getting into CS just for a paycheck. Sure, we're only working to get paid, but in my experience, these people have zero motivation outside of it. Endless hordes of bootcamp type people, who see six figure salaries, and can spew out all of the stuff they've memorized in a book. Without actually thinking about why or when. I'm not looking for "rockstars", "ninjas", "gurus" or whatever other nonsense words phrases use, but rather people who are genuinely interested in their field.
I think the "more than just a 9-5" idea is a toxic pattern which has been championed by the privileged. In short, by wanting something like this, you risk selecting for a fairly homogenous set of people.
I think you can write a good coding challenge which doesn't look like all the others (the socialite example in Takehome.io is particularly good because it scales with skill level – it's not a pass/fail, but a spectrum from just making it work, to showing you have thought about and dealt with an array of odd things that might crop up).