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These have felt fake to me since college, so, for 20 years or so? They’re so far from the environment where I’m most productive and creative that I’ve always considered them to be performative nonsense at best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could never wrap my head around the idea. They're often framed by employers as perks: Look, we're giving you the chance to come and work overtime for free, isn't that great?
I’ve never heard of a company encouraging their employees to participate in a hackathon that they sponsored. Are you thinking of internal “hack week” periods where employees get a chance to build something “for fun” at work?
Often sold as team building and way to level up in competence/skill, with an undertone of proving your loyalty to the company.
At the end there was a big presentation that anyone in the company could attend and each team would present what they came up with.
Some of them eventually became products directly, or at least set the groundwork for future products.
So in a sense it was basically just "work", but it was driven by the individual contributors and not a top-down directive.
The only exception was one I went to put on by Atlassian a long time ago which was a hardcore geek-vs-geek live coding night with lots of drinking and real prizes. This was before they went public and didn’t care about offending.
The reason is simply because there is very little money in indie video games. But still a ton of passion. If you want authentic nerd dev time, it's still there.
Just don't expect it to be catered.
Recently on HN: "The Gang Has A Mid-Life Crisis" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43860696 Hackathons are fun and productive when what you need to do/learn — something you haven't already done/learned — can be done/learned in a weekend. Once you graduate, there's a lot fewer of those things lying around. Quote: > We need look no further than the "hackathon," that sad facsimile of the days when we were all learnin…
Corollary: if your company promises to have a hackathon one day, it's best to get prepared and have a bunch of good ideas well ahead of time.
Yeah, hackathons were always shit. They're an apparatus for getting essentially free labor out of unsuspecting and gullible nerds.
Could never wrap my head around the idea. They're often framed by employers as perks: Look, we're giving you the chance to come and work overtime for free, isn't that great?
A recent boss mandated that people come on weekends. Everyone’s contract said you have to, except mine. I pointed out to the boss that even though he can ask people to work on weekends, there are laws that prevent how much (you need more and longer breaks, and you can’t do it every weekend.)
He got cold feet and cancelled the event. But he forgot to tell people. The most junior developer had spent 2+ hours on the commute.
These are not real hackathons.
They’re corporate knockoffs.