Yep, this is a way to filter out people that aren't nearly friendless nerds with no life outside of coding. I think it's fine to have that lifestyle but it's very limiting to stick to that stereotypical lifestyle for hiring engineers.

One of the best engineers I hired was a woman that took 15yrs off to raise a family and came back into the profession. Yes she didn't have a good grasp of all the current technologies but she was a /very/ quick learner and brought a whole slew of other skills that applied to the "project management" and client relations side of things. When stuff broke, our internal customers loved going to her - she worked with them to figure out what they were doing and then what the likely issues were. Sometimes she fixed them herself, especially with code she wrote or maintained, and other times she just just provided technical info and what she thought the issues were. Most of the time she was right. Sad when I lost her due to a big reorg from a couple new VPs.