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by spudlyo
416 days ago
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One company I worked for had a culture of semi-regular hackathons and are they were often a lot of fun. As an old, I got to work with some non-jaded wide-eyed interns from U of Waterloo who worked their asses off on inspired hackathon projects as well as doing some solid work for our team. Interns had plenty of motivation to make a splash (and to take chances) and working with them was often a breath of fresh air. On our larger team, we'd have week long hackathons where the theme was the elimination of jank/cruft/hazards/annoyances across code, infrastructure, and process. We'd split into 2-4 person teams and do our work, and at the end there'd be presentations and war stories, celebrations and the occasional defeat. Somebody would win a prize, and we'd do it again in 6 months. Corporate Hackathons have been a net positive for me, but I've also seen them implemented poorly, where you were still expected to shovel a full load of story points that sprint. |
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My company puts on an internal hackathons, but it feels fake. Looking at the winners, it seemed like a team had been working on the project for months, and the hackathon was the company’s way of marketing it internally before launch.
There is precedence for this kind of action, which is why I’m skeptical of the legitimacy of the hackathons. There was a video contest and the top 3 were shown at a town hall. My team was one of the top 3. I had never seen the video and had no idea about this contest, nor had my boss (Sr Dir), nor had his boss (VP). As far as we could tell, some video production team was tapped to hack together a video in 30 minutes, they threw our name on it, and shipped it. I don’t trust much after that.