Hackathons are bad for you

I was part of the 'startup weekend' in raleigh last april. Our team came in 2nd out of 20 (actually, there was a 3 way tie for 2nd).

Most other teams had somewhere between 4 and 8 developers or related technical folks. Our team had 1 - me. I know other teams got mired in arguments about what version of Rails to use, which gems, and various other technical trivia, I had just me to answer to, and I got quite a lot done. Other teams got a lot done too, no doubt, but one person just hacking with some non-dev minds to bounce ideas off of was just as effective - perhaps moreso - than a team of developers.

At the halfway point we chatted with another team. I showed what we'd (I) had done, and one guy smirked some. He then showed their system - a mobile app that did XYZ, had some neat features, and was pretty far along. Someone on my team said "but we've only got one developer", and the guy changed his tune, and became visibly impressed in what I'd been able to build in... at that time, around 12 hours. They'd had a team of, I think, 6 devs.

The point is not that I'm some super coder, but that focused concentration and time blocks with a handful of people can get a lot done quickly.

Doctors can read medical journals and call it "working time". Most programmers have feces thrown at them if they're caught learning on the job. This is just something we have to suffer until we develop a stronger tribal identity and demand the conditions of a profession (including ethical rights and obligations that supersede immediate managerial authority).

Do surgeons spend 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, cutting open bodies? Of course not. No one would allow it. They work a full work-week, but they spend a lot of that time keeping current with the field. That's how professions are supposed to work. Your metered work obligation is ~15 hours per week, and the other 25-40 you spend keeping current, networking, and performing other off-meter, self-directed work that is important to you and the profession.

Now, hackathons. There are two things one should know about that. The first is that the association of programming with the night hours is a bit of cultural legacy. Forty years ago, when computing resources were shared and scarce, night was the only time you could get low-priority (exploratory) jobs to run. So the hobbyists (young people, usually with access through a connection or favor) did their work at night. Now, we have enough in the way of resources that people can work at any time. Some people are most productive between 6 and 10 in the morning. Others are best from 8 pm to midnight. Whatever works.

The second is that hackathons seem, in many organizations, to exist to recapture the college lifestyle for people who haven't realized yet that It's Gone Forever. The hackathon recreates the "good old days" (?) of the 3:00 am, caffeine-fueled coding fests to get that hard-ass final project to work. It's not terribly unhealthy when you're a college student and have that kind of schedule autonomy (you can crash for a week) but it's a terrible idea to mix that lifestyle with the 9-to-5 regular workday. Also, most final projects are Done, submitted for a grade, and never need to be looked at again. This isn't the case for real-world software.

I tend to see most company's 20%-time and hack-day programs as negative spaces that define anything programmers actually enjoy as "not real work" (because they can be tricked into doing it "for free"). I can't even count the number of times I've seen people using 20%T programs to do things that, if they didn't have short-sighted imbeciles for managers, would just be regular-ol' working time.

Where did you get that idea? I grew up in a family of doctors. If they aren't seeing patients, they aren't billing. They go to school an unthinkably long number of years and then they're put into a sleep depravation nightmare called "interning" for years before they get to have a career that normally includes "on call time" where they're woken up at all hours of the night to go save someone's life.

Sitting around reading journals is what they do on their off time. Everything in your analogy is wrong.

And the hackathons weren't a distraction. Yes, some people ran around and talked a lot and there was definitely socializing going on (if you're not a people person, a hackathon may not be for you), but really: a lot of the talk was with people who were experts in the problem area we were gathered to deal with and this made us so much more productive. I've been to five or six hackathons now and generally just about everyone turns out plenty of great stuff there.

We got a lot of great stuff done, had some fun, caught up with old friends and got to visit a new country (well, not me. The hackathon was here in Paris).