> I love working with people who care about this stuff.
Yes, absolutely. However, when orgs start using that against the individual to drive down pay or eke out more from the person, is when that show starts becoming to cliched and downright exploitative.
A civil engineer who is good at what he does and loves construction will not (easily) let anyone in his team have wrong proportions of concrete and sand, cause he understands the ramifications. But that passion in him towards the trade should in no way be constitued by his employer as a notion indicating that he could work for lesser pay cause "he seems to be loving that work anyway, so that actually is a perk!" (IT IS NOT!)
Passion for what someone does is awesome, in that they'll actually notice (and speak up) when sh*t is messed up. I love working with people who care about this stuff.
It's entirely orthogonal to whether or not they have side-projects, so I would always try and get signal for this in the interview itself, rather than looking for a GitHub or whatnot (although I almost always look at someone's code when it's on their CV, which isn't all that common in data science).