Why your company should do an internal hackathon • Hacker News Board

Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon

#11

Post by nbm » Sat, Jul 09, 2011, 5:51 PM UTC

jmount wrote: post #9

A common outcome of a hackathon is a demonstration to the engineers how much faster they can work when the don't have to deal with: other engineers, product managers, mandated company tools and company release processes. Not sure that is something most companies want to teach.

Agreed on having to have a good enough culture around people, processes, and tools.

On the other hand, if your problem is more about animosity between groups or individuals than broken processes and an unwillingness to have them change, then there's merit. Having engineers partner on non-critical projects with other engineers, product managers and other non-engineering staff can build up an understanding of their value and purpose, as well as just letting each to know the other as a person.

Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon

#12

Post by jmount » Sat, Jul 09, 2011, 6:34 PM UTC

nbm wrote: post #11

jmount wrote: post #9

A common outcome of a hackathon is a demonstration to the engineers how much faster they can work when the don't have to deal with: other engineers, product managers, mandated company tools and company release processes. Not sure that is something most companies want to teach.

Agreed on having to have a good enough culture around people, processes, and tools. On the other hand, if your problem is more about animosity between groups or individuals than broken processes and an unwillingness to have them change, then there's merit. Having engineers partner on non-critical projects with other engineers, product managers and other non-engineering staff can build up an understanding of their val…

I like the partner idea. My only real gripe with hackathons is the transience. I don't like the "here work effectively for just one day, and then back to your silo" feeling of a transient event.

Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon

#13

Post by parbo » Sat, Jul 09, 2011, 7:28 PM UTC

At Spotify, we have hackdays every sprint where we can do what we want as long as it is in some way related to Spotify, e.g. new client features, exploring new server thingamajigs or writing libspotify bindings for other languages. Finished hackday projects are demoed at the sprint demo. It happens that the product development team sees something they like, so hackday projects can turn in to real sprint stories.

btw, we're hiring!

Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon

#14

Post by nbm » Sat, Jul 09, 2011, 7:32 PM UTC

jmount wrote: post #12

nbm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on having to have a good enough culture around people, processes, and tools. On the other hand, if your problem is more about animosity between groups or individuals than broken processes and an unwillingness to have them change, then there's merit. Having engineers partner on non-critical projects with other engineers, product managers and other non-engineering staff can build up an understanding of their val…

I like the partner idea. My only real gripe with hackathons is the transience. I don't like the "here work effectively for just one day, and then back to your silo" feeling of a transient event.

If you have them often enough, I think the transience factor isn't a problem. The tempo of Facebook hackathons seems pretty good to me - somewhere around 8-10 weeks or so between the last three.

Doing it once or twice a year in isolation is probably too infrequent to get lasting value - the positive value might have a total lifetime of about 4 months, so I'd suggest three or four times a year is a minimum - unless you have some other mechanisms that try to solve the same issues that hackathons do.

Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon

#15

Post by donnaware » Sat, Jul 09, 2011, 11:26 PM UTC

I wish my company knew what a hack-a-thon is. That is what I get for working for a fortune whatever to big to fail blah blah...But I agree, side projects spawn innovation, it is an fantastic idea. It is a great way to build techie networking with each other, people who ordinarily struggle with that. big benefit for the corp on that I think.

Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon

#16

Post by jespern » Sun, Jul 10, 2011, 2:33 AM UTC

At Atlassian (where Bitbucket now lives), we do something called FedEx (who can ship a product the fastest.) It's a 2-day sprint, where you write up a Shipment Order detailing your crazy idea, giving other people a chance to help you out if they find it interesting. At the end of it, you present what you've done, and everyone votes for a winner.

We just held one a few weeks ago, and several awesome things came out of it. One even shipped the following week: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2011/07/07/redesigned-commits-scre...

It's always a lot of fun, and this, in addition to the 20% time we get, means we get to work on really cool things which sometimes even make it to the public.