Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I hate Hackathons

pgpt.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 70 posts

Re: I hate Hackathons

#51

Post by Fredej »

I love hackathons. But what is described in the article indeed sounds horrible.

At my job, we have a hackathon once a year. You are free to decide if you want to join. It is during work-hours and you can work on anything you want, provided it is somewhat company related. That, however, is a very wide umbrella. Like, someone made a "lego-gun" for automatically plugging USBs in and out. It also helps that we're hardware company, so the ideas can be a bit more high-flying sometimes. Snacks and drinks are served during the day.

After work-hours, there would be a lightning round of presentations to management, and we would vote for different categories. After that, pizza and beer.

Now, it's expanded a bit, and people said they didn't like sticking around after working hours. So it's one day of building and one day of presentations. Both are completely voluntary, but are usually a lot of fun.

I'd never do it on a weekend, and I'd only stick around after hours for a social event.

Re: I hate Hackathons

#52

Post by hit8run »

nagonago wrote: post #40
hit8run wrote: post #20

Was this article written with AI? Felt a bit like at least assisted. Don’t know why when reading it triggered the assumption.

It's hard to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised, given "I've created an extension to overcome ChatGPT's limitations. Do check it out." at the top. I asked ChatGPT which parts were most likely AI assisted: > The parts that were most likely written with help from ChatGPT are the definitions of the three types of hackathons, the explanation of the hidden agendas in external corporate hackathons, and the description of th…

I don't want to read AI generated stuff that is cloaked as personal opinion or thoughts of an individual. In this case "I hate Hackathons" infers human emotion. Getting then presented a mostly AI article doesn't sit right with me.

Re: I hate Hackathons

#53

Post by data_maan »

brunojppb wrote: post #21

This kind of hackathons outlined by the OP indeed sounds like trouble. In the current company I work at, we have every 6 weeks, 2 full days to hack on whatever we want. Zero expectations. This has been really cool because: - it’s during normal working hours. 9 to 5. No weekends or all nighters. - you are entitled to cancel all your meetings - you can work on product-related ideas or experiment with a new language. It…

Do you work 5 days a week during those 6 weeks? If yes, 2 days off is nice - but not generously nice. There are companies (but not FAANG) that by default have a 4-day week, so there you'd have in 6 weeks essentially 6 days off.

Re: I hate Hackathons

#54

Post by snapetom »

jesseryoung wrote: post #36

I tried to organize a corporate hackathon at one point in my career. My initial idea was to make it freeform. However after talking to people who wanted to participate, I found that nobody really had any ideas and just wanted to join and hack on somebody else's idea. My (possibly incorrect) take away - people with great ideas will build them themselves without a hackathon. I still love the idea of hackathons, I just…

[dead]

Re: I hate Hackathons

#55

Post by throwaway019254 »

When I was younger, I loved hackathons. I could spend multiple days in a row coding without interruptions, or meetings. Great time.

Now I'm older and I still love hackathons. Now I can have a few days where I can take it easy, tinker with some new interesting tech, chat with colleagues about how good/bad the tech is. Still a great time.

Re: I hate Hackathons

#56

Post by bawolff »

musicale wrote: post #24
laserbeam wrote: post #9

I must say, I have encountered free-form hackathons (category 3) at companies with no ideas provided by management, and no expectations. It happened at a team-building event at some nearby lake, only half of the people who were there even participated, and that was fine. People made games, stupid hacks, only one team came up with some cool tool that we kept around and used internally.

> It happened at a team-building event at some nearby lake Given the choice of 1) Being shipped off to a nice location where managers will demonstrate their authority by requiring you to perform suspiciously work-like fake recreation with other employees or 2) Actual time off I am pretty sure which one I'd pick, most of the time at least.

Any team building event i have been to has always been paid work. Why would anyone do that for free?

Now some of them were fun nice breaks from the normal day to day while others sucked and i wish i was doing normal work instead, but either way i was on the job and being paid.

Re: I hate Hackathons

#57

Post by benja123 »

vladmk wrote: post #6

Very true - few people who won hackathons went on to achieve big things because its a marathon not a 48 hour race. If they did 1 to 2 week competitions I'd be more interested

I love hackathons and before having kids I use to do them quite often. I usually placed in the top three and from my experience at least you are a 100% right!

Personally I love building things and seeing people use them, but then I get bored really quickly and tend to let them die out. It’s something I am actively working on because I do want to do another startup at some point in my career.

Re: I hate Hackathons

#58

Post by lloydatkinson »

Of the three hackathons that have been arranged in my current job over the span of three years none of them have had any bearing on direction, design, requirements, or processes. It's been pointless.

This isn't because what was researched and created wasn't relevant or valuable, it was because (mis)management just discarded the results immediately.

Every hackathon entry could have either saved months of work or prevented the shitshow of broken and bug ridden software we have now (again, a result of mismanagement but hey we're Agile© so everything must be good). It's beyond frustrating seeing the management hand-wringing over issues that would have been fixed by now. None of the devs are empowered to use the results and research at all. Absolutely pointless and entirely lip services to the devs.

It's put me off ever getting involved in any future ones here.

Re: I hate Hackathons

#59

Post by SilverBirch »

If your boss wants you to do a corporate hackathon why not have a little fun with it? We all know how marathons work, you need months and months of training doing shorter runs, cardio training etc. So for the 6 months before the hackathon completely stop your day job and just pound out leetcode style problems (at this point coincidentally, your weirdly well prepared to go interview somewhere else). Then once the marathon begins, start coding very slowly, It's important you pace yourself for the hackathon. Also ensure that your boss tells you exactly what do - marathons don't just let you pick your own route, you have to follow the exact route correctly. Once the hackathon is finished, take a week or two off to recover.

If you really want to push the boat out, insist on wearing a funny costume for it and go around your coworkers asking them for donations too.

Re: I hate Hackathons

#60

Post by charcircuit »

nandalism wrote: post #47
blue039 wrote: post #31

Hackathons are generally an excuse to get more work for less pay. No different than pagerduty or any number of other scams the technocracy has devised to drive wages down. People would be happy to do them if they'd get paid. However, there's another problem. No one wants to work on "regular everyday" stuff for even a 9-5 M-F hackathon. I and many other people just call this "doing our job". Sometimes there are fringe…

Programmers need to stop working for free and stop aiding the normalization of free work. No other profession works for free. On the rare occasions they do, they expect and receive massive social status boosts.

Hackathons are not work. If you play esports for work not every time you play a video game it is work.
Post reply on HN