No.<p>I understand the mentality that draws people to try new things, experiment with new technologies, and learn different ways of doing things they've previously struggled with. Personally, I don't have any side projects anymore. All of my effort goes into my job, simply because the challenges that I face at work are more complex, more demanding, and more interesting than anything I can reasonably hope to accomplish at home. If a problem is truly hard, I don't think I can solve it in 2 hrs/week, and if it is interesting enough that I think it is valuable to solve, I will try to find a way to integrate it into my work.<p>My tone here is probably harsher than it needs to be, but it's in reaction to the tone of the title and the self-congratulatory responses I expected to find ("at least those who are passionate ... are similar"). A certain type of techie has a huge list of pet projects, but there are people at the other end of the spectrum. Call them researchers, as opposed to builders, and they want to solve abstract problems with no immediate use or UI. Their interesting problems, like data mining, hardware scaling, and distributing programming, are a lot harder to do on the side than creating a Rails/Google Earth/Yelp mashup, but not necessarily because of the absolute difficulty of the problem. The former problems only exist when you have a lot of resources already invested in a project, and trying to investigate them on the weekends is much less rewarding than learning Haskell. Ultimately, I find that these at-scale problems are the ones I'm interested in, so I don't come home and code in my free time. I just stay at work for 12 hours a day.<p>It's certainly an artifact of being engaged in your job, but I think that should make it even more clear that all techies do not have a huge list of pet projects. Having one is certainly not a necessary condition of talent or passion.