I almost entirely agree with this post.

Every place I have worked, I have consistently been among the most performant. I am relied upon to solve many of the hardest problems, despite my age, because I have a track record of learning enough to solve them very, very quickly. I will find myself thinking about the current problems my team faces, as well as odds and ends and interesting behavior in the languages, frameworks, etc, that we use, even outside of work hours. I love learning and teaching new technologies, and am frequently the one to introduce new tech into projects at work (along with giving talks to teammates about how it works).

However, I have never worked more than 40 hours a week.

If there was a dire emergency due to things failing in production, and I had hit my 40 hour limit, I'd not -mind- spending time investigating/fixing it, but I would not tolerate a workplace that expected it outside of that kind of issue.

When I play with code outside of work, it's usually to learn something, not write something useful. I have almost nothing on Github because most of what I've done outside of it has been things that already have solutions out there; I just want to learn more about the problem, rather than seeing some deficiency in the existing solution.

I don't consider myself 'passionate', as such. Coding is something I try to keep compartmentalized; I may allow it to come up in conversation when it's contextually relevant, but I actively try and avoid talking about it, and I don't feel any need to spend inordinate amounts of time on it outside of working hours.

And yet there's this demand for passionate programmers. Which, yes, seems to come from companies that expect you to put the code above all else. You see it in their perks; food and gyms and doctors and sleeping pods, why do you even need to go home, you can stay here! No, I want work/life balance, and to have that balance I need separation.

This definitely feels like a bind; I have to cross companies out like Google and such, because I don't want to work at a place that seems to have the expectation I should stay at work beyond 8 hours. And I likely wouldn't be hired even if I pretended to ignore that feeling, as I don't feel any inclination to fake interviews any more. "How would you solve (algorithm question typical of interviews, but which I don't remember offhand how to solve)?" "I would Google it, as that sounds like the kind of thing others have solved, and there's no way I'll be able to come up with as good a solution in 20 minutes, on a whiteboard, as I'd find online in 5" "But what if you didn't have the internet available to you?" "I would work on constructing the internet, then, nevermind your problem, because I've apparently time traveled to before it existed and there's money to be made". "Fine, but just, how would you solve -this- problem, if it wasn't already solved?" "Probably go sit by myself to mull it over a while." "But I want you to solve it right now." "Why? It's research material; no one else has ever solved it, apparently, I can't just write out how to do it in such a case." "Well, we really think you ought to be able to." "Yeah? I guess we're done here."