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Internal corporate hackathons: bad idea or the worst idea?
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Sep 1, 2020 12:55
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smackfu posted:Internal corporate hackathons: bad idea or the worst idea? sometimes people end up demoing some pretty hilarious security exploits to senior management so they can be funny, at least but other than that they suck and I do everything in my power to find "more important work" to avoid them
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Sep 1, 2020 13:25
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I heard of a company that had a $100 prize pool for most innovative hackathon project. Just heard of them though, at my old job the hackathons were simply encouraged and nobody ever presented anything interesting, people would instead work on their usual sprint work.
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Sep 1, 2020 13:34
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For ours, they haven’t figured out how to avoid rewarding “cheaters” because the most polished demo always wins and they always did pre-work to get it that polished.
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Sep 1, 2020 14:47
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smackfu posted:Internal corporate hackathons: bad idea or the worst idea? If you organize one, you get a promotion. If you participate in one, you get to work on a Saturday.
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Sep 1, 2020 15:16
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Internal hackathons that take place during work hours can be fun and useful to both the company and employees.
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Sep 1, 2020 15:34
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we have a twice-annual hackathon, I’m on the organizing committee for this iteration. our biggest challenge has been to figure out how to keep people from sneaking in pet product features as their project
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Sep 1, 2020 15:36
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Plorkyeran posted:Internal hackathons that take place during work hours can be fun and useful to both the company and employees. This, they're a nice way to have a week to just stretch your creative muscles. Very good ideas also have the potential to be turned into actual products, which is very cool.
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Sep 1, 2020 15:38
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Two jobs ago we had hackathons once a year and they coincided with the holiday party. We split into teams of 2: one developer and one non developer. The last one I was a part of had two prizes: one extra day PTO or $200 cash. Me and another guy ended up building something that won us the "most business value" prize and we got to turn it into a product a few months later. We showed off the demos at the end of the day, then went to the holiday party where they gave out prizes and drank a lot. That was fun. I imagine it very much depends on your company. If you have a good engineering culture it'll probably be fun, if you don't, it won't.
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Sep 1, 2020 15:42
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I did an internal hackathon that got me a trip to Seattle last year, I get along pretty well with my coworkers so it was cool to spend a few days exploring the city with them before doing the final presentation. We didn't win because like others said, teams just had better presentations and the winning team had a lot of ground work done and even lined up a sponsor for their project, but it was no skin off my back, I had fun  Winners were total tryhards though.
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Sep 1, 2020 15:54
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Everything is bad if the company expects you to do it outside work hours. My current place does hackathons a few times a year, they take place over a single workday and it's just kind of nice! Not terribly well organized and the one I've taken part in so far was pretty early in my time there so I didn't really have anything specific I wanted to focus on, but I did manage to spend the day cleaning up small things in production code that had been bugging me but that there hadn't been time to work on during regular days. Probably also depends on country though, I can imagine US firms expecting you to spend your weekend in exchange for beer and pizza or something, and gently caress that.
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Sep 1, 2020 15:54
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Just lol at executives patting themselves on the back for the brilliant idea of addressing technical debt and spurring innovation a couple times a year, instead of constantly, and the peons acting like this is some kind of treat, instead of desperately dysfunctional.
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Sep 1, 2020 15:57
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We just had a hackathon at work. 15 teams pitched an idea to a couple judges, then they where ranked and the top team got a price. That was it. No development or research or anything. This is very representative of how the company operates, so I was at least amused in a dumpster fire kind of way (I didn't join for obvious reasons)
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Sep 1, 2020 15:58
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After I left my last place started a drive where you could pitch a new product and they’d pay you some pittance like $100 if it was good. They were then very disappointed and surprised when nobody spent their free time thinking up Innovative Business Value for their bosses to literally steal
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Sep 1, 2020 16:09
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Plorkyeran posted:Internal hackathons that take place during work hours can be fun and useful to both the company and employees. Ours was Wednesday into Thursday. Anyone that did it got Friday off, and top 3 teams got a decent chunk of cash. The ideas were very cool as well. Lots of VR demos
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Sep 1, 2020 16:13
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CPColin posted:Just lol at executives patting themselves on the back for the brilliant idea of addressing technical debt and spurring innovation a couple times a year, instead of constantly, and the peons acting like this is some kind of treat, instead of desperately dysfunctional.
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Sep 1, 2020 16:33
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Woebin posted:Probably also depends on country though, I can imagine US firms expecting you to spend your weekend in exchange for beer and pizza or something, and gently caress that. The problem is definitely US work culture. Some idiot middle manager read some lovely blog piece on LinkedIn about how "innovation is the key to your business' success" and then tried to encourage innovation in laziest, probably intentionally exploitative way possible. Then they read some meaningless metric that it was somehow helpful and now it's a destructive cycle.
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Sep 1, 2020 16:37
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uncurable mlady posted:we have a twice-annual hackathon, I’m on the organizing committee for this iteration. our biggest challenge has been to figure out how to keep people from sneaking in pet product features as their project Are these product features that the business explicitly does not want in their product? Otherwise, why would you stop engineers from improving your product if that's what they want to do? What's the goal of the hackathon, to produce specifically useless things? CPColin posted:Just lol at executives patting themselves on the back for the brilliant idea of addressing technical debt and spurring innovation a couple times a year, instead of constantly, and the peons acting like this is some kind of treat, instead of desperately dysfunctional. I don't really care what the executive circle jerk looks like, if I have the opportunity I'll take it. If that means a twice yearly hackathon, fine. At this point in my career though I incorporate technical debt management into feature work - if a "simple" feature takes much longer than it sounds like it should, chances are it's because there's a piece of tech debt throwing up a big wall in front of me, and I'm going to tear it down. Product people have no ability to prioritize technical debt, and they're not technical enough to know if a piece of technical debt is vital to address or just an annoyance, so they have to rely at least somewhat on our judgement. The degree to which they do that is a factor in how long I stay at a given job.
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Sep 1, 2020 16:52
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I'm fighting a lot with senior management about hackathons currently. We just had a 5 day one across two weeks, it was the first one in 2 years and next one wont' be for at least 9 months. There were 8-12 really good ideas that came out of it, none of which will be brought to production before the next one. The culture at my last place that I fostered was that we'd have a monthly hack day based on large themes. Usually alternating monthly of, "Improve the project you're working on." followed-by, "Improve yourself." the frequent cadence made people not think they had to burn themselves out or preplan or anything since the next one is 4 weeks away.
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Sep 1, 2020 17:34
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We have quarterly hackathons. Sometimes they offer a "bounty" for doing a project they want (like if we're gearing up to use a new technology, they incentivize playing with it) but usually it's open ended. In one of the recent ones my colleague and I built a little testing tool so we could work with one of our vendors more easily (they add features or configuration to support upcoming releases and we need to test their side, and had no ability to do that in isolation). After the hackathon we spent another few days improving it to the point where it was flexible and a bit more easy to use. It's been immensely helpful. If we weren't able to bring some of the products of these hackathons into production, or at least internal use, I would only bother with either normal work, or just learning something for myself.
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Sep 1, 2020 17:58
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:After I left my last place started a drive where you could pitch a new product and they’d pay you some pittance like $100 if it was good. it still surprises me how there are actual human beings who think that that's a good idea that would work
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Sep 1, 2020 19:48
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Inacio posted:it still surprises me how there are actual human beings who think that that's a good idea that would work Business people. I once took a survey for some startup after looking at their webpage. They had a question like, “what would we have change to get you to check this page every day? What about several times a day?”
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Sep 1, 2020 20:18
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CPColin posted:Just lol at executives patting themselves on the back for the brilliant idea of addressing technical debt and spurring innovation a couple times a year, instead of constantly, and the peons acting like this is some kind of treat, instead of desperately dysfunctional. While I'm sure this is how it looks at some places, I don't think that periodic hackathons and constant innovation are mutually exclusive, or necessarily look the same. There is a spectrum of how much individuals have free reign to innovate/prototype/etc, and I think there's an argument that spending a day to a week every so often with things cranked further towards "do whatever you want or find interesting" can yield benefits that you don't see otherwise, even if normal operations are already pretty solid in that respect.
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Sep 1, 2020 20:21
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lifg posted:Business people. "Put it on a monitor in front of the urinals at work."
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Sep 1, 2020 22:15
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Che Delilas posted:Product people have no ability to prioritize technical debt, and they're not technical enough to know if a piece of technical debt is vital to address or just an annoyance hell, same
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Sep 1, 2020 23:31
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redleader posted:hell, same The way I think about the distinction between bad code, unhealthy code and technical debt is by remembering that "debt" and the idea that "debt compounds" is an important part of the framing. Bad code could be sitting somewhere in the guts of some library that nobody every opens up - hard to maintain for sure but nobody has to interact with it on a regular basis. Bad code could also be visible and interact with other APIs - you might call this "unhealthy code" because it is actively hard to work with and creates pain in dev and testing - but it is not something that spreads. Real technical debt is bad code that makes you actively write more bad code. It is the legacy API that is highly coupled with a bunch of legacy cruft that all its clients have to transitively depend on. It is the test-resistant framework that hates mocking and forces you to write more untestable code.
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Sep 2, 2020 00:42
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Paolomania posted:Real technical debt is bad code that makes you actively write more bad code. One programming axiom I've really taken to heart is the "Make the change easy, then make the easy change". Most of my feature development starts by refactoring the code around the new feature. Often that's exploratory: what happens if I inline this, or consolidate some shared functionality? Why is this function so long? Can I break it up into smaller pieces? It helps me get my head around the preexisting work, which usually helps me to see the seams where the new feature can be slotted in. Sometimes I'll end up reverting all the refactoring I've done as it turns out my assumptions were wrong. More often than not it makes the rest of the feature go much more smoothly than it would otherwise. Whether that's because the code is cleaner or just because I have better context for everything is debatable. It's really nice to work on a team that has a culture of doing this kind of regular cleanup. Nobody bats an eye if your pull request touches a few more files than it technically has to. As a result, huge technical debts don't pile up. Occasionally there's something major that needs to be done (like when a library needs updating and everything that uses it has to change) but overall I much prefer a "clean as you go" approach.
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Sep 2, 2020 13:43
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Che Delilas posted:Are these product features that the business explicitly does not want in their product? Otherwise, why would you stop engineers from improving your product if that's what they want to do? What's the goal of the hackathon, to produce specifically useless things? Can you not think of a reason why you wouldn't want random crap no one else even heard of appearing in your product?
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Sep 2, 2020 15:55
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Yeah that's what my post implied: that the output of the hackathon just appears in production without anyone approving it. My question was, if the goal of the hackathon is not to come up with stuff that will improve the product (eventually, after appropriate review from stakeholders and code owners, like anything else that goes into a product, which is something that I didn't think I had to explicitly state but here we are), then what is the goal of the hackathon there?
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Sep 2, 2020 20:47
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Che Delilas posted:Yeah that's what my post implied: that the output of the hackathon just appears in production without anyone approving it. Just because someone thinks it may improve the product, doesn't mean it will work out that way. There may also be ideas for entirely different things that aren't products. It's also a great chance to learn some new thing, which you may decide would work just wonderfully instead of something else in the future. If you're only hacking on stuff that you think will make the final cut eventually, what's the point of having the hackathon? At that point you may as well just call it a "buy in week".
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Sep 2, 2020 21:14
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If done correctly a hackathon could be, if nothing else, a good source of self-improvement for developer skills, and any manager with a brain would see the value in that.
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Sep 2, 2020 22:02
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I can see the value of a hackathon on company hours. But some of these stories are clearly just corporate bullshit to get freebies to take advantage of employees.
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Sep 3, 2020 04:28
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The ones I've been a part of have largely been our senior leadership deciding that that's what cool tech companies do and so we should do it as well. Run for 2-3 days with some pretty substantial prizes so you got a lot of people working insanely hard to try and convince that their C-levels will make megabucks if it gets put into production or trying to scare the crap out of them with security flaws.
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Sep 3, 2020 06:58
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Yeah I should probably mention that the ones my company runs are on company time, and generally people do love to get a break from the long-term product priorities that change every couple of weeks.Protocol7 posted:If done correctly a hackathon could be, if nothing else, a good source of self-improvement for developer skills, and any manager with a brain would see the value in that. Well sure. I just don't see the point of actively fending off people who do want to work on something for the product that may or may not be approved in the end, but that hasn't been allowed into the normal work stream.
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Sep 3, 2020 07:18
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The ones I’ve been part of have been two days inside company time. Not many “features” ever made it into being adopted by teams to make it to production but some cool internal dev tools came out of them. The value was always a couple of days developing with sometimes new tech with a mix of people you didn’t normally work with.
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Sep 3, 2020 08:01
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Che Delilas posted:Well sure. I just don't see the point of actively fending off people who do want to work on something for the product that may or may not be approved in the end, but that hasn't been allowed into the normal work stream. I feel like the argument here is spending your time in a hackathon just doing more regular work doesn’t really make it a hackathon; like the other goon said it’s just more of a “buy-in week” at that point.
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Sep 3, 2020 13:56
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Protocol7 posted:like the other goon said it’s just more of a “buy-in week” at that point. To be honest a "buy-in week" just sounds like a type of hackathon I don't see how there's a difference, besides the goal ostensibly being related to the goals of the company
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Sep 3, 2020 14:05
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ChickenWing posted:To be honest a "buy-in week" just sounds like a type of hackathon I mean if you’re just going to be working on another feature or bug during a hackathon why even call it a hackathon? That’s just business as usual. At least like try a new technology, work with a different team, or do something that breaks up the routine.
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Sep 3, 2020 14:22
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Protocol7 posted:I mean if you’re just going to be working on another feature or bug during a hackathon why even call it a hackathon? That’s just business as usual. I think the point is that it's supposed to be something important to you, but not necessarily something that the company would prioritize. I sure as hell know that if I had a week for a hackathon I'd be taking our application server and dragging it kicking and screaming into {{current_year}} because by christ it needs it but nobody's willing to devote the time
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Sep 3, 2020 14:32
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I dunno, think there’s confusion around something else. The other goon mentioned pet projects which sounds like a PM trying to exert control during hackathons to me.
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Sep 3, 2020 15:18
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