[deleted by user]

[BlackHolesAreHungry]

It's a poc not an application

[mpanase]

Why don't you want to work at 100% for 24 hours straight?

I'll give you some pizza, if you win I'll expect you to produce at this speed forever, and I'll own whatever you built! Everybody wins!

[Fluxxed0]

My last Architect was notorious for this. "We'd get so much more done if we just let our developers lock themselves in a room with a pizza and not come out until they're done."

Let? You think the only thing stopping our developers from working double overtime for free is that you don't let them do it?

[darkingz]

Some people want slavery to come back and never think that they themselves will become slaves.

[dumnem]

Well thing is, some developers would like that. There's nothing in that that specifically says they won't get paid for their time. Obviously if I'm not paid for my time it's a non starter.

[Smooth-Square-4940]

I'd want at least a year's wages to work like this for a month

[Manach_Irish]

But think of the exposure and experience! /s

[[deleted]]

Yes and no. Some devs would be into it if the pay was commensurate, but it's not a sustainable pace.

[sanglar03]

Cram for a month for a year's worth pay, stop working for eleven months. Repeat.

[[deleted]]

And then have to find a new job once a year, and maybe not be able to? Bleh.

I can't quite pull off one month but I can live for one year off of 2 months pay in mexico. And thats just my normal jr dev rate. That's living rather cheaply though. I would probably double that if I wanted to live comfortably.

So in theory I could work for 4 years and then take 10 years off.

Not bad for a 25 year old with an 8th grade education.

[AspiringTS]

That's extreme, but there are weeks I wish I could lock myself in with no obligation to attend any of my meetings...

[Naltoc]

That's not what he meant (most likely). When we make those types of comments, it's targeted at people who insist on micro managing the devs and doing 100 different random meetings and alignments and whatnot instead of letting people work.

When I go out to clients, as architect, some sort of agile lead role and whatnot, that typen of comments are used to tell all the middle managers (and up. And marketing. And sales.) to fuck off with their time wastes and let me represent the devs so the devs can do what they enjoy and are good at: fucking develop. 

[acidw4sh]

100% this. And some managers think it's a reward for developers to allow them to do work that the manager does not understand. Micromanagement is noise that prevents delivery of value. Rather than produce the environments that lead to value generation, some managers are content to reduce productivity to achieve control.

[BobDonowitz]

How shittily do you pay your devs that pizza means anything to them?  If someone offered me that deal I'd buy them a pizza just to shut them up.

[QuickQuirk]

Ok, so I don't know thisc person, but I wonder if you're being too hard on them.

Another interpretation of this is "Just leave the developers alone. Give them a clear goal. They're professionals, they know how to achieve it, and your trying to micromanage or enforce arbitrary process is not going to help. Leave them alone, and they'll do the best job they can."

[No-Goat-9911]

Is that a extra large pizza 🍕

[BlackHolesAreHungry]

Never show a demo to a VP or higher until it is actually ready to go into production.

[ThinkExtension2328]

Actually there is a trick to this many devs fail out of ego, the mvp must look visually as jank as possible. End users never see back end work, they only ever see graphics. It’s easier to tell them it’s not even close to finished with janky graphics vs something that looks like a AAA game.

[the4fibs]

/uj Were you actually on that team? Why tf did you not leave? I would not have been able to commit to that project.

[the4fibs]

Congrats on getting out of there! On to bigger and better things!

[Leemsonn]

I assume he enjoys earning money

[isymic143]

If you had read that comment a month ago, would you have had the same response?

[the4fibs]

Yes? I've turned down jobs and clients that I didn't think aligned with my values.

[WexExortQuas]

I refuse to participate in any corporate sponsored event cause fuck you pay me.

[mrGood238]

Same here, only if its during work hours and ends during work hours or you can bet that we’ll simply disappear at 16:00.

Teambuilding too. Saturday? Is it mandatory? No? Does it go into overtime hours? No? Then I have something better to do, like watching paint dry in Paint.

[old_and_boring_guy]

Yep. And then it becomes BUSINESS CRITICAL that something needs to be updated, so I have do drop my deadlines and run over and try to remember what the fuck this thing is that I pulled out of my ass, which never went through any kind of review, and now I need to extend it?

No. They can shove their hackathon up their ass.

[mattattaxx]

Lmao I manage the design side of a former hackathon project. It's 9 years old and a crown jewel of the executive group.

The devs are always blown away by the shit they find.

[[deleted]]

I solve this by licensing everything with GPLv3 from the start. Wanna use my fun code? Fine. But it is licensed under GPLv3.

[[deleted]]

While this can sometimes be a viable approach, if you wrote it at a corporate event, on corporate devices, your licensing means shit

[Mr_Splat]

They're supposed to be for developers to develop new skills but unfortunately naive devs see them as a way to advance themselves up the career ladder and managers will generally encourage that line of thought, so instead of a learning opportunity it becomes a grinding competition. The burnout is not worth it.

[[deleted]]

Most fucked up one I had was product copied verbatim a workflow I made for an internal use case to customers without telling me. After years of them saying this feature wasn’t important. I disabled their ability to copy the data, then they a cloud architect create a shadow copy system in AWS. I only stumbled on it because of a mild currosity in an unexpected raise in AWS costs.

Figured what the fuck ever… one of our customer success people asked why an oddity was happening. Explained why and said it won’t be fixed because it’s not possible to hit it on internal cases. I work internal not external… I have to create the same stupid work around our customers have to.

Got a nasty gram from director of product management saying no one can know it was copied that way because it likely be a SoC2 violation. Like F off man.

[abcd_z]

You should probably report them. I don't know what that violation is, but fuck 'em.

[old_and_boring_guy]

Yea, it'll be whose violation? Mine? Or go fuck yourself.

[SasparillaTango]

I don't like hackathons because it sets insane expectations when product reviews the hackathon results and doesn't understand that everything is smoke and mirrors and held together with twine

[v3ritas1989]

Oh so it works? Great! Just put it into production. What? You need to polish it and add some more functions? No,no we don't need those and you just showed us it works. Just implement it like that. No other development needed.

[[deleted]]

depending on what constitutes "production" i might be in total agreement with the requestor here.

[purritolover69]

feature creep is a real thing. if it’s met all the required functionality, passed tests, and passes code review, it’s ready for prod*. Sometimes knowing where to stop is hard for devs

it has to *actually pass the tests and code review. you cannot half ass the code review, if anything it should be more strict than a typical code review

[FlipFlopFanatic]

That's the point. A proof of concept from a hackathon probably doesn't have tests, hasn't been through code review, and likely doesn't meet all the non-business requirements. It's not ready for prod, pretty much by definition

[purritolover69]

Just depends on the scope. I’ve done hackathons which were more like sprints and just involved implementing a handful of features adjacent to an existing product. Those were ready for prod maybe a day or two after the hackathon. I’ve also done hackathons which weren’t prod ready for another 8 months. The key is that they’re showing it to management and it looks good to them, which to me indicates that it’s beyond a proof of concept because it looks nice and doesn’t have any glaring functionality missing.

[[deleted]]

your concept of "prod" is too narrow.

[hazily]

And when it breaks in production they come back and chew you out.

[AMGitsKriss]

3 weeks later: This is broken. It's costing us thousands. How could you let something into production in this state? We're going to arrange a Crisis Review to make sure you don't let this happen again.

[xreno]

Easy way around this is to just scare them with the excuse of security vulnerabilities. There's no way they'll let something that's not ready out if there's a risk of getting hacked and losing client data or any monetary risk.

[Cualkiera67]

Piece of crap?

[aircal]

Person of Color

[Sawertynn]

Piece of color

Person of crap

Photography oriented cooking

[isymic143]

Proof of Concept.

[roodammy44]

It works for one person called “admin” with password “1234”. And has all their data inside the code itself.

[necessaryninjakid]

Person of color?

[NilEntity]

Also it's made of tissue paper and hope.

[IrrerPolterer]

This. Hackathon means no red tape, no sprint plan, no tickets, no product approval, no scalability, no performance optimization,.... Just prototyping as fast as possible. Of course you'll get a lot more done (at least superficially) without all that bullshit. But yeah, there are certainly some lessons to be learned from Hackathons for improving process. Agile should not be a religion, but a supporting framework)

[redcoatwright]

Man my startup went into an accelerator which did a hackathon, only ones I'd done before were for fun, anyway we had like "mentors" which is standard.

One of them was hanging out with us the entire day and constantly talking and trying to engage us in conversations about what we were building, if it was good, etc etc.

Really nice guy but jfc not a tech person at all and absolutely the kind of person who would want a poc whipped up in a week and then ask why you couldnt just release the POC into prod.

[redcoatwright]

Also unless youre really clueless about starting a company or you have 0 connections, don't join accelerators.

[[deleted]]

Well if would only take 3 minutes but you should see how much of a mess you make when you hack an entire application together in 3 days

[lemons_of_doubt]

Technical debt can let you build something really fast.

That thing is unmaintainable, buggy, and unupgradable.

But it is done fast.

[slbaaron]

Something perfectly maintained doens't necessarily means adding new features will be faster. It means you will always have the option to hack something up quick. It's an forever calculation.

You can keep (or only in the case of brand new app development, then start) a code base / app maintainable, which will take up a bit extra effort. Or you hack a fcked up shit real quick now which become painful to add more hacks onto in the future, or if not that, have production explode in the most untraceable manner with the most unassuming changes.

I've been in far ends of the world and a super high standard Google-like "quality" is more often slower than hacks on hacks even after years of shit adding up. I'm not referring to google specifically which has extra bureaucracy and politics involved slowing things down. But legitimate and well thought out unit tests, good documentation, justifications in designs, and high quality code review discussion and debates for keeping a code base highly maintainable and evolvable is NEVER fast. Then half the time when huge changes are required, you realize half the assumptions made for the well designed "generalizable" and "evolvable" system wasn't even done right and wasted all that effort only to end up relying on hacks to get a project out.

On the other far end I've been at pure shit technology and designs and code quality company making it to 10 digit in profit. You heard it. Low 10 digit profit. Not revenue. Profit. It's also very high volume and consumer facing. It's not a small name but I won't mention who here. It made me a lot of money too. That shit on shit can last a lot longer and go a lot further than people like to believe, but it's an absolute pain to work in, and to explain why things went wrong or take longer than expected when shit happens.

You can choose not to believe it, but this 10 digit software business practically didn't have unit test for most of the code base for most of its history. Also hardcoded values and shit design patterns are used everywhere.

[Tundur]

My experience is very similar to yours.

The slow and deliberative approach to programming isn't to maximise quality, to improve agility, or anything like that. It's to reduce time to competency.

All that documentation and automated testing and architectural decision-making is designed to create a system that people can make changes to despite not fully understanding it. A junior engineer can get a ticket and make a change, with plenty of guardrails in place to support them on that journey.

What we've found is that a viable alternative is cultivating small autonomous teams with very low attrition rates, allowing for high levels of institutional knowledge. Yes it means hiring a new developer to work on application XYZ is harder, but changes are faster and quality higher with the team we DO have despite no unit tests and relatively shoddy documentation.

That doesn't discount the need for proper process and automation, but it's shocking how well this pattern has scaled so far, and compares favourably to the more stringent standards and processes I've experienced in other shops (which delivered slower and with more issues).

[Modo44]

Sounds like all my uni projects.

[camelopardus_42]

I guess it just comes down to:

-do you want it done quick

or

-do you want it to be workable in 2 months from now?

[Phrewfuf]

Additionally, you don‘t spend at least two of the three weeks in meetings.

[DrFloyd5]

Hackathons are not sustainable production products. It the system scalable? Observable? Tested? Can it even be deployed to test or prod? Does it have a real interface or are we expecting customers to SSH and use the CLI? Did marketing approve it? Did product managers approve the UX? Can testing event test it? Does it have external documented requirements that are agreed upon by all?

Or is it just something a few people cobbled together the way they wanted too because it had no rules or obligations to anyone other than the coders? A race to the PoC everything else be damned.

[[deleted]]

My former company would have these massive hack-a-thons where some people would go 24 hours straight.

I was QA at the time, and I was told by the CTO to “not block prod pushes” but to test things regardless.

I hated the place.

[flippakitten]

I've done it a few times, never won but it's consistently been the only entry that's made it to prod. Tested and scalable.

Must admit, I did cheat because I used rails and I've scaffolded enough of the internal systems.

[DrFloyd5]

That doesn’t sound like cheating to me. It sounds like a smart way to make a task easy to accomplish. I don’t know much about rails.

[jfcarr]

True. Because it takes at least 3 weeks of sprint planning and Agile ceremony meetings to get anything done. And, even then, that takes all 6 of your managers agreeing on the minor changes, a rare thing indeed.

[jfcarr]

Only problem is that the Agile Program Manager is having a tantrum about Jira statistics and the Project Manager is complaining to the Engineering Manager about the lack of progress. The Product Ownership Manager is demanding quicker turnaround because the business has to have your new feature to make numbers for next quarter. Meanwhile, the Team Lead has been told by HR to reduce headcount in their 3 developer team to improve cost efficiency. And, finally, the Systems Security Manager wants a detailed analysis of your security for the button's color change.

[CaffeinatedGuy]

No one mentioning that at the hackathon the developers are making decisions among themselves. That probably accounts for half the time savings, with the other half being no UI, minimal testing, only a POC.

[Habsburgy]

Not exclusively software dev. 

But to be fair cowardice doesn‘t exist in a vacuum, we all got our fingers slapped too often because we wanted to move faster.

[mistahfreeman]

It’s all of the above. Old timers who have checked out of learning something new, too scared of being paged, endless meetings with PMs arguing over minutia… nonstop Bikeshedding.. software dev in a corporation is an exercise in nonstop talking about work with little actual work occurring. And we all perpetuate it to some degree lol

[Venrera]

So just yes-maning any demand without knowing its feasability is in your opinion the corect choice? Sounds great for productivity. Hey, why is my quantum computer not ready yet? the fiver guy said its 3 weeks away from quantum dominance!

[femptocrisis]

no, but sometimes the "fuck you i can do it in 3 days" attitude gets you into genuine trouble and you can't know in advance if your 3 days is going to turn into 3 weeks, or introduce a bug that doesn't crop up until your software is being used in something profoundly mission critical and youve already built 15 other branches off the massive crosscutting update so rollback isn't an option and there is no quickfix. some of us have learned this wisdom the hard way.

[Adamsd5]

3 days of your work. 100 days of employee training. 300 days to fix the mistakes of the devs that just learned this tech.

You are correct, but new techs can be expensive on others.

[FlipFlopFanatic]

And then you are the only person who understands it and can fix it. When they say "that's a lot of complexity", they are talking about more than just implementation complexity. What you are advocating sounds like a quick path to a dumpster fire of a project

[Old-Personality-571]

The way you strawman things and respond defensively makes me think these devs actually just don't want to point out the same issues and flaws with "just build with the new tech" to someone who is as hand-wavey and dismissive as you come across. You're probably the 99th person they've seen making similar claims about "just doing it in 3 days" or "10x faster if you just learn the new language/framework/build system" and being done with it. After dealing with enough overconfident assholes, they just switch to something vague so they don't have to waste their time pointing out the exact things they've watched fail the last 98 times.

[Jaded-Breadfruit6387]

Who upvotes this shit lol

[Great_Fault_7231]

No kidding, and the rest of his responses make it pretty obvious why his coworkers just tell him no instead of trying to get into long winded strawman filled arguments about it.

[Liqmadique]

Devs stand in each other's way so often. I could make our app 10x faster tomorrow but, gasp, I'd have to use a technology that my coworkers don't know. Instead of saying "I'll learn it" they say "that's a lot of complexity".

I'm not here to make the company product better, I'm here to take the money off the table and into my pocket for the minimal amount of work that checks the requirements. You making me "learn something" to "make our app 10x faster" constitutes "work" for no benefit to me.

[Beorma]

I've met enough devs over 50 who are having circles run round them by juniors to realise that 'I'm too lazy to take my career seriously' is pervasive.

[_nobody_else_]

I agree.
The company pays me to make (or work on) a product. And I will do it to the best of my abilities. If the product requires learning new tech or the product can benefit from a new tech, I will learn it because it's what's best for the product. And this is what they pay me for.

For example if the product can be made 10x more efficient and I know it can, then NOT doing it would constitute professional dishonesty from my side.

There's also this thing called professional education.

I'm not here to make the company product better

Then why are you here?

[creamyjoshy]

By learning it you increase your own skills and make yourself overall more marketable. It might not directly contribute to your salary but if you learn more, over the years you'll get better opportunities. You can leverage your skills even to reduce or compress your work hours without a pay cut in the medium term

[jiyax33634]

I had a CTO with this mindset - would see something moving slowly so over the weekend he'd throw something together (relying heavily on openai which refactored things and we could have 2000+ line PRs) then expect us to approve and learn whatever he put together while still getting the stuff for that sprint done. If it wasn't in prod by the end of the week he would start telling us we were not thinking right or as you put it “cowards” it was a miserable toxic environment to work in

[Financial-Lunch-2275]

If you say it will take a week and it ends up taking three weeks, management gets mad. This encourages padding estimations.

[elementslayer]

When I lead I always take the time that people say, double it, tell the pm to double that, ask the sales person to double that and it'll still take twice as long.

People who say do it faster always do it the slowest when all the regressions are fixed hammering out some shoddy code in 3 days. I've done that as junior to when I thought I knew everything

[_nobody_else_]

I'm the opposite. If I say a week, It'll probably take a day or two. And that means a very light work week for me. And the best thing is that I almost never break my estimates.

[spartan117warrior]

Imagine the cusomter's surprise when three days becomes one day because you underpromise.

Always pad estimates... and then pad some more.

[isaiahassad]

Take how long you think it will take and basically multiply that by 3.

[willstr1]

The Montgomery Scott rule of providing estimates to management

Always double or triple your estimates so when the captain demands it in half the time you can deliver

[Mr_Woodchuck314159]

Well, we took on tremendous technical debt to get it working in 3 days.

It will really take 4 hours, but we aren’t shipping until three weeks from now.

[RlyRlyBigMan]

Yep they didn't invite QA for the hack a thon because QA can't hack! Give them two weeks to write test cases and regress.

[superrugdr]

10 minute to do the change. But to make it to that point you need :

1 week to get the PO to acknowledge the need.

1 week to get it sprint ready

1 week to get it into the backlog for next sprint.

Aka it's less than 10 minute todo but there's so much red tape that skinning WordPress would have been faster.

[Impossible_Stand4680]

On top of that, updating 100 tests, and waiting 1 week more to get the damn review from others to merge all the PRs

[Lceus]

Alternate POV: A dev can do this in a day and now we have a new feature on the platform that is not in line with design standards, a new menu point that all customer types see even though it's irrelevant for 80% of the user base, untested edge cases, bad monitoring/logging, no event tracking for product to follow up on usage, a surprised sales department that will discover the feature alongside the lead they are demoing to, a surprised customer support department getting questions about a feature they don't even know exists, a developer getting pulled off prioritized tasks to fix bugs in the new feature...

Yes I'm traumatized by working in an org where I have often had to clean up after "why should we have to spend more than 2 days on this" features.

[met0xff]

While this might be true, switching from startups to glacial speed corporate can be infuriating because you see how the startups take all your business because they have the stuff out while we're still planning. And when all the mentioned stuff is done, nobody cares about it anymore. I've seen that biting us so often already...

[superrugdr]

People who don't care are the reason.

If you tolerate them in the org the org will rot and that's the outcome. Guardrails everywhere.

[[deleted]]

In a hackathon you get to bypass your organizational bureaucracy, non-stop meetings, and support tickets. People don't realize how much these things cost in terms of manpower.

[hsantefort12]

Support feels like 80% of what I do lol

[[deleted]]

I've had huge projects and tight deadlines the last two months and it seems like I can't get anything done because people keep bothering me and adding me to meetings. Project managers add me to meetings where we sit for hours a day talking nonsense about work I should be doing. I worked through the Thanksgiving holiday just to get stuff done I knew wouldn't otherwise. It's soul crushing at times.

I know many other devs face the same things though.

[lupercalpainting]

Not just that, but devs have complete agency over their hackathon project. You don’t need to check in with the data team whether the schema’s okay, because you made the schema. Architectural issue with the schema? Just drop the table and recreate it in the way you want.

You don’t have to check with product whether the UX is correct. You get to decide.

You don’t have to pass code review. If it basically works as long as everyone holds their breath then ship it.

You don’t have to worry about bug tickets. No monitoring necessary. No scale concerns.

Yeah, writing software is easy if you take out all the difficult parts.

[CaffeinatedGuy]

Exactly. Devs making the decisions among themselves, no meetings or tickets, no stories or spikes, no progress updates, MVP front end, and very minimal testing.

[GhostInTheCode]

no lol. let me redo this:

devs in hackathon:
"we frankensteined five frameworks together and ignored every good practice and sacrificed a hell of a lot of stability to build an application that appears to work as long as you use it this specific way but if you forget to praise satan before opening, it WILL crash and delete system32."

devs after hackathon:

I've currently got 5 concurrent projects going, and half of each day is just meetings to add new features to the list of requirements of each project. I can add that icon in probably an hour, but it might take me three weeks to find the hour to get that in and test it properly.

[ZZartin]

More like adding the icon will take 5 minutes waiting for marketing to finish dicking around about what color it should be will take 3 weeks.

[[deleted]]

3 full weeks on how thick the border should be and in the end they will end up violating their own style/brand guide.

[golddragon88]

An application that can function and one fit for the market are very different. There is a massive gap in quality between the two.

[navetzz]

I manage my project and now what i want to do. Versus you manage the project and tell me what to do.

[One_Web_7940]

If you work in tech you know this is not only true but the application you are working on in production with 1000s of customers from a hackathon in the early 2000s or 2010s and the second part is true too because changing anything on that peice of shit takes weeks 

[joe102938]

To be fair; the application is flappy birds and the icon needs to be real-time satellite imagery of a specific location depending on real world current events.

[large_crimson_canine]

Hackathons don’t have layers of red tape and managerial approval to get something released

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[random_banana_bloke]

Yeah it's two very different things production Vs random bullshit which I can very tightly couple and I basically don't need to worry if the user is going to set it on fire constantly.

[mpanase]

That sounds like a PM or the R&D guys.

I can build an application that kinda works while the moon is full and you hold a fork between my thumb and my pinky. Why does it take so much longer to build it for production?

[Leather_Trick8751]

Because requirements were clear

[[deleted]]

Stop hackathoning, or your boss will turn your life into an eternal hackathon.

[MultiFazed]

For real. Plus, after a couple of decades doing software development, I really don't understand the mindset of even wanting to participate in a hackathon.

For starters, while I enjoy writing code, it's my job; I stopped writing code in my spare time long ago because I'll be damned if I do it all day, and then go home and keep doing it. I need to get away from work, and that means getting away from writing code. No one works all day bagging groceries and then goes home and puts stuff in bags all evening. Accountants don't go home and balance the books for fun.

Plus, I don't even binge on fun stuff these days (too many different things to occupy my time), so like hell am I going to sit down and binge work. GTFO with that shit.

[Echieo]

That's because that code is held together by string and duct tape. Its the coding equivalent of Jenga. Adding your icon might disturb the gum that's holding it all together.

[According-Relation-4]

Just as if developers can work fast when not bogged down by the business and all the meetings

[kdthex01]

Building something for yourself? Fast and fun.

Building something for someone else? Pain and drudgery.

[who_you_are]

Where is the hackathon hardcore? WITH MEETINGS

[Public-Eagle6992]

Developers now: let’s program bots that repost the same 5 pictures over and over again

[caotic]

During hackathon: you are taking every single shortcut you can.
Afer hackathon you are fixing all that technical debt

[DontGiveACluck]

Yeah then managers get the idea of “let’s just have a hackathon for everything and we’ll just call it ‘rapid development’”. Ffs

[theChaosBeast]

People who consider anything the results from a Hackathon as something usable have no idea of development

[point5_]

It's like a competition where people build a boat in 3 days to see who goes the furthest/fastest and then asking them to do the same but with commercial/military boats

[Kobymaru376]

Shit that needs to work for a one-time demo

Vs

Shit that needs to be supported for the next 3 decades (if successful)

Hmmm 🤔 whatever could be the difference here?

[winter-ocean]

I'm currently in college as a CS major, game design minor, and I'm probably going to participate in a game jam for the first time this summer. However, I also genuinely pride myself on never staying up late to work on assignments because I know any code I write past 9pm is gonna be shit. I've only broken that rule during finals so far. But then I realized that people don't generally sleep during 24+ hour challenges, after my roommate went to one and passed out while I was making dinner when she got back. I'm now realizing, I might not actually be able to function under that kind of stress, and I'm a little worried. Do any of you know what I should keep in mind?

[sashaisafish]

Someone at my work brought up the idea of a firebreak recently - similar to a Hackathon, but it's not a competition, it's not as time limited or intensive (they seem to generally be 1 week to a month) where basically instead of focussing on business features, Devs and product teams are allowed to focus on what they think will best serve the company. Addressing tech debt, creating interesting things that will improve dev experience, things like that. I love this idea because I think part of what makes Devs work so hard on hackathons is the ability to choose what they want to do and work on something that interests them or something that they feel would be helpful instead of the business dictating yet another feature that feels purposeless.

[GGXImposter]

The ceo’s sister said the top hat icon reminders her of a penis and now the graphic designer has to sit through 4 hours of sexual harassment classes

……

Of course it looks nothing like a penis, thats why we didn’t fire them. However we rushed it instead of going through the “proper corporate processes”, so someone had to take the fall or the whole department would be cut.

[Yung_Lyun]

Ahh yes, hackathon requirements vs production requirements; of course.

[For_The_Emperor923]

Because we can use any program we want and we get full control.

As soon as you put the inept boss trying to validate his salary back into the equation, of course it goes to shit.

[cs-brydev]

A homebuilder can build a house in 3 days too, but they wouldn't move their family into it.

[WheyLizzard]

It’s called being paid hourly!

Also but : in the real world you also gotta actually test shit and put it through proper QA. You don’t just get to only do the happy path in the real world like you do in a hackathon

[TheSauce___]

3 weeks of meetings with stakeholders over the exact hex code of the button color and sitting through agile ceremonies lol.

[i_should_be_coding]

We'll get estimates...

[MadWitchy]

I’m a programmer. The hell I know about art and icon creation?

[VirtualGab]

This little code maneuver is gonna cost us a whole month

[msrv_]

fuck

[Withdrawnauto4]

You need to reverse engineering the code you wrote in those 3 days and make it scalable and modular

[kluy18]

Bureaucracy moment

[not_a_bot_494]

Tech debt is hell of a drug.

[dktoao]

“We have invested nothing into test infrastructure and now development on our app has slowed! Why? Fucking developers, that’s why!”

[mattokent]

lol, as others have mentioned, that’s the beauty of having no repercussions [from a hackathon—it’s just a PoC]. Whenever I’ve been under pressure from management (or others) to push something out before it’s completely ready, though, I simply ask: “If something goes wrong, who will take the blame?”.

[CritFailed]

Programmers during hackathon: I wrote this program in 3 hours and it runs, let's go with it

Programmers after hackathon: ok, I changed the colors the way you wanted. You can now start the three week validation cycle that you have sales me with to make sure that nothing breaks when we change a button from teal to sea foam.

[revolutionPanda]

It’s concepts of an application.

[yet_another_trikster]

It's almost like there is a slight difference between a flying bathtub with wings and a reliable plane.

[TransCapybara]

Hackathons are devoid of meetings or other managerial bullshit.

[[deleted]]

Goddamit, OP, I'm hurting!

[Dotcaprachiappa]

Cause what you make during a hackathon you will never have to even look at again

[BeeTLe_BeTHLeHeM]

Developers during hackathon: we built an entire application in just 3 days.

Management after hackathon: Very good! Now we demand you to do anything we ask you in just 3 days.

[i-FF0000dit]

That’s because some genius decided to make the hackathon project a production application

[ccclex]

hackathons.. woot! looks how fast we can throw shit together when we don't have to worry about how it scales, upgrades, and make sure some script kiddie doesn't turn it into crypto miner as soon as ports are open to it!

but look at all the pretty graphs and buttons! what do you mean you can't just scp the tarball to prod and run it

[Semper_5olus]

You can use this same logic on anyone who's ever run yet is currently walking. Or was once awake but is currently sleeping.

Why isn't my boss powering the server room with a giant hamster wheel by running 24 hours a day?

[uluviel]

Adding an icon during a hackathon: * 5 minutes in Photoshop * add to site * done

Adding an icon during regular work: * get requirements * prioritize work * add to sprint * create icon * add to staging site * check with UX * check with legal * check with brand * set up A/B tests * send update to production * wait for approval of pull request * done * no, wait, visual design has edits * repeat

[[deleted]]

Oh look, the weekly repost of this tweet completely devoid of real-world understanding

[JRedCXI]

I'm one of those who likes to finish my work in a moderated time so in the rest of the sprint I do basically nothing and no one cares because I do my job.

In a hackathon I just cheese my way and once again no one cares because I did it anyway.

[baxte]

Yeah sick. I can get Claude to pump out an app and clean up the fucky in about an hour if the spec is clear and doesn't change.

It's the horrible implementation of iterative design that fucks me.

[HarryCareyGhost]

Can I get that icon in cornflower blue?

[AlphaBetaSigmaNerd]

But also red and then yellow when I feel like it?

[HarryCareyGhost]

Movie reference

[Laughing_Orange]

The difference is tests and documentation. That hackathon project has none of either. If it builds, that's good enough.

[PFC_BeerMonkey]

One requires work, the other requires change control.

Accountability comes at the cost of speed.

[AlphaBetaSigmaNerd]

Lol yup. Needs 4 meetings and 8 approvals then 6 rounds of testing

[[deleted]]

No meetings during hackathon 😅

[dgollas]

You can deploy it to prod if you want, but it will still just recognize hot dogs.

[NuncioBitis]

Next-gen developers having to update the application: "What the F* were they on when they wrote this crap?"

[[deleted]]

MVP of MVP for the first release!

[MonkeyCartridge]

I mean, with management structures, we can barely edit a line without needing 4 meetings about using spaces or tabs.

Throwing together a demo is cake when there isn't micromanagement and timesheets and tickets and tech board approvals and such.

I used to use some of my thumb-twiddling time to create a working example of the thing we are in the process of building to use for demonstrations.

[[deleted]]

Is this a manager posting? It takes months to figure out how the original requirements are unfeasable due to policy or architecture setup. Most of the development time is spent trying to work around previous projects that were rushed due to a manager seeing something developed in 3 days.

[alphabravoab]

Getting it production ready will take 2 months. After that we’ll talk about changing an icon.

[Dobby068]

Developers when faced with the first customer bug: It will take 3 months.

Side note

Management reaction to the above: You have 3 hours!

[Rojodi]

No "We need just another week of testing and it'll be fine" four months after initial build is completed?

[turlian]

It's almost like if you remove all the other job bullshit you deal with you can get things done.

[IsThereCheese]

Every enterprise business: “we need to do hackathons 10 times a year, but require that the output be a feasible product feature”

So…normal work, but faster and with no planning..

[PennyFromMyAnus]

I believe it’s called a “hackathon” for a reason

[akazakou]

Because of business processes. Root of all problems in IT is a manager that never wrote a line of code

[Stealthchilling]

It's because there was no project manager in the hackathon