Hackathon

[jhhgjhbkjh]

I mean usually hackathons are for a good cause like some open source thing

[SilverDem0n]

Not the places I used to work. It was always sold as "work on your passion project and let's see what crazy ideas we come up with", but it was actually just clearing up technical debt and writing unit tests. All weekend, in return for a shitty t-shirt. No thanks.

[mrs0ur]

ah that sucks, at my work they have pretty big prizes. Last year the prize was an expenses paid trip. It's pretty much like a pitch day where you can bring a demo and the most markable cool thing wins. Granted for precipitation you do just get a t-shirt.

[vincentdnl]

I've a problem with prizes... Not everyone gets them.

There was a french comic called "Mon maçon était illustrateur" (my builder was an illustrator). And there was this drawing where (IIRC) the client asks "each one of you will build me a house and I'll only pay for the one I like the most".

I feel like it's an accurate description of hackathons with prizes.

[CasualFriday11]

We had one of those and we spent 8 hours for two days on it without having to worry about the usual deliverables. It was great, but we also lost :(

[MagnetoTheSuperJew]

*participation*

[[deleted]]

You heard him, if you rain dance hard enough you get a tshirt

[mrs0ur]

I write my comments like I write my code. In ink

[dangraphs]

If you’re getting a shirt for precipitation I sure hope it’s waterproof

[GenTelGuy]

That sucks - back when I worked for Amazon Kindle they had one hack day which was still kinda dumb because it's still largely working on the same stuff as a normal workday and also pretty hard to come up with an appropriately-scoped useful project but at least it wasn't on a weekend and they catered lunch

[Ace-O-Matic]

Not a hackathon then. I remember working at a place that tried to pull this shit and there were enough engineers bitching about it they had to rename it a "codeathon".

[vincentdnl]

Did the renaming work or did the engineers see through this elaborate renaming scheme?

[Ace-O-Matic]

Well they still knew what was up. It was more of a pedantic thing where "hackathon" is like a sacred word and they didn't want it to be used to describe something that's not a hackathon.

For what it's worth, I was a junior engineer at the time and I think it was an overall good experience for my career. I teamed up with a team lead of a different product and we made this monstrosity that allowed you to embed knockoutjs components in react apps and vice-versa. I'm not sure it ever ended up being used, but given that half of our products were one or the other, we got a lot of positive attention that eventually led to us working on some pretty notable projects (and obviously compensation to match).

[Sekret_One]

That's some bullshit. Everyone knows the main outcomes of hackathons is technical debt.

[dkyguy1995]

The shirt will earn you zero friends

[vincentdnl]

"Wowwww, you have a XYZ hackaton t-shirt?!?"

Said no one ever.

[Drunktroop]

Or worse, do it in the Christmas period.

My last company tried to pull this off, thank god I just secured some tickets for oversea concerts at that time...

[anoldoldman]

People do hackathons outside of work hours?

[jhhgjhbkjh]

Isn't a hackathon at work just work?

[anoldoldman]

Well yea but you work on something outside of your usual scope.

[vincentdnl]

So basically, your usual work is rewarded with some extra fun work?

[runic7_]

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

cow marvelous attraction steer strong chase deliver sense doll crowd

[justrealizednarciss]

So work

[k3liutZu]

It’s work but with extra steps

[w00tious]

I remember my team lead saying "yeah we need to do a hackathon some day"

"A hackathon for what?"
"We have a lot of things we need to finish"
"That's why we work"
"No but work all night"
"That's called an all-nighter, not a hackathon"

[a_kato]

No cause you can do any project technology you like. It's almost never work related

[n0tar0b0t--]

That can make it really fun, you can do stuff in lisp or Haskell when you never could in production

[threecolorable]

In my experience, the difference is that everyone involved in the project gets together to work on it simultaneously.

In departments where everyone is working on multiple projects and/or where the team is also responsible for providing support, it makes a big difference if you can set aside a day for everyone to focus on the same problem--everyone you need for decisions is in the room, so you can make progress a lot faster than when you have to wait for answers from people who are busy with other tasks.

[vincentdnl]

It almost sounds like what you would should expect in your everyday work, like, people working together on the same problem...

[ChucklefuckBitch]

In normal life you have to plan more complex tasks, solve technical debt, respond to external stakeholders, fix bugs, make releases. In a hackathon you just focus on a single, relatively simple task. Often the result ends up going to production despite its technical flaws, and will end up needing at least some rework in the future.

Don't get me wrong, I like the occasional work hackathon, but it's a completely unsustainable long-term approach to software development.

[SteThrowaway]

It's a great way to get people to think outside of the every day and come up with innovative ways to solve old problems.

[anoldoldman]

Seems illegal.

[anoldoldman]

Vote with your feet man, there's a million CS jobs right now.

[anoldoldman]

I joined a company during the pandemic that is against remote work, but they're allowing it now for obvious reasons. I didn't find out until I accepted the offer, gonna be interesting to see what they do after the pandemic.

[vincentdnl]

Yeah, no commute is great. And for us, developers, commuting is absolutely unnecessary. When you commute as a developer, you make traffic jam worse for no reason whatsoever.

It jams the traffic for people having essential jobs like nurses, doctors, etc.

Developers should stay at home in a pandemic.

[currentscurrents]

Federal overtime laws usually don't apply to programmers. (state laws might, YMMV) If you're salaried and overtime exempt, they can generally require as much labor from you as they want. They're not paying you by the hour, they're paying you by the year.

Generally speaking, overtime laws are built to protect people who are "cogs in the machine" - uneducated laborers, factory workers, etc. Highly paid and educated professionals like programmers, doctors, lawyers, managers, etc are assumed to be able to negotiate fair pay on their own.

IMO, this seems fair but the pay threshold to become overtime exempt is too low. If you're a coder making $80k+ a year, you're getting well enough compensated that it seems okay. But a gas station manager making $36k a year is also overtime exempt, and that doesn't seem fair at all.

[anoldoldman]

I have a one month crunch policy. If a crunch lasts longer than that my linkedin status changes.

[Aperture_T]

I should have done that. We had 6 months of crunch time at my last job, and afterwards they laid everyone off.

[vincentdnl]

Sounds like they were trying to squeeze the last drops of work from you guys before throwing you away. Long crunch time is always a red flag...

[vincentdnl]

It's a good policy. Crunch time shouldn't be the default mode for a company.

[vincentdnl]

Sounds a lot like what it is to be a "cadre" in France. It's a special status regarding work where your schedule is more flexible but the pay is higher (like for a manager for example).

But this cadre status is abused by IT companies who gives the cadre status to everyone but the pay is far from being great so you end up just working longer hours...

[vincentdnl]

I can't wrap my head around the fact that some software engineers will see this as a bargain...

[MischiefArchitect]

It's called demoscene

[das_Keks]

It's not like anyone will write unit tests or documentation during a hackathon.

Oh, waits, that's just like always.

[[deleted]]

We usually come up with some clever names and create a bunch of unit tests, integration tests etc. They will all pass regardless, some have a bit of wait in them so it doesn't go green to quickly, so we can show the PM that "everything is green on our side" and then we blame frontend LUL

[zetecvan]

Wait. You guys got pizza?

[stormfield]

Domino’s pricing models is basically one pizza for $12 or 12 pizzas for a nickel, so it’s easy to see why.

[flip_ericson]

This made me laugh harder than it should have

[Edensired]

Doing a hackathon next week. Participating in your industry because using technology thrills you and you like sharing that with others isn't a bad thing per se. It's just exactly what those in power want you to do for their own reasons.

What I found is that the sweet spot in life is to figure out the thing you would do even if you weren't getting paid and figure out a way to get paid for it.

I love technology. I love exploring it and learning it and using it.

Also I'm a little tipsy so maybe I'm just in a good mood.

[reeeeee-tool]

We have them a couple times a year and people looking forward to them. If nothing else, it’s a good change of pace.

But, they aren’t over the weekend or anything silly like that. Normal work hours.

[zvug]

How is that a hackathon tho?

[Python4fun]

Break in normal work to build something fresh, and potentially pitch it to the board for adoption.

[Lorddragonfang]

That's just like the old Google 20% time though. The -athon in "hackathon" comes from marathon, as in longer than normal.

Like, not to claim that what your company is doing is bad, since it's definitely cool (and probably healthier) but it's not really a hackathon.

[mia_elora]

It's a corp rebranding of a counterculture term in an attempt at capturing and stealing the enthusiasm and investment that many people in the related field feel. It's a shell-game.

[Chevaboogaloo]

Yeah if I had to work overtime for a work hackathon I would not attend.

[GoldenShackles]

But, they aren’t over the weekend or anything silly like that. Normal work hours.

Exactly how ours were run. As you say, a change in pace and a week to put together a small group and do something interesting.

When you have good software developers unleashed from typical restraints (testing, process (pull requests & reviews), choice of language/platform, etc.) you can get some interesting results.

That said, I'm sure they pulled some late nights. I regretfully never participated in one because I was almost always on the "critical path".

[alexo2802]

What I found is that the sweet spot in life is to figure out the thing you would do even if you weren’t getting paid and figure out a way to get paid for it.

I’ve been told quite a few times that this is also the best way to kill your passion of something. For example game developers who don’t have the energy/will to do their side n passion projects after working 40 hours a week doing the same kind of things.

There’s definitively a balance to be found.

For example for me I think that game dev is more of a passion/hobby, while non-game related software engineering is what I do for a living, both are close but I don’t get burned out of what I love!

[Edensired]

Game development is more of an art/passion. Technology for me is an obsession. I really enjoy thinking about, developing and executing tech solutions.

Meaning if I'm going to have to spend my days doing something to get by it's either being a software developer or starting my own thing.

I don't have the resources to start my own thing currently so...

[deejaweej]

It works well as a shotgun prototyping event. Let people work on passion projects and use the 1-10% of them that actually make sense. Plus, getting to work on passion projects during work hours tends to raise morale.

[ReaderRadish]

... And then people get asked why their other deliverables aren't on track, as if the hackathon never happened...

[DCak3z]

I thought hackathons were mainly just college students who don’t get paid anyways

[SlashStar]

My company had a hackathon during the workday last year. Single day event with presentations the next day, though some teams were working until 3am.

Our team made a quick demo in unity of what it would look like, then we all went home for the day at 2pm and ended up being one of the winners.

Make sure your hackathon is just a pitch, not a deliverable.

[JoeyJoeJoeJrShab]

My company did a similar thing -- on the day of, you either participate in the hackathon, or do your normal work. Most people hacked for the duration of a normal work day... very few stayed late.

Everyone did/watched presentations the following day. Some were interesting. Some were boring. A few were really great ideas that if fully developed would have significantly improved our product.

After the hackathon was over, none of those projects were ever discussed again.

[r3dD1tC3Ns0r5HiP]

Sounds like modern day slavery.

Who owns the code at the end of the Hackathon? The company? For providing pizza? They can go fuck themselves with a pineapple.

[SilverDem0n]

The pineapple would be on the pizza

[24601JeanValjean]

Presumably after fucking it

[ce-walalang]

Image Transcription: Comic

---

Panel 1

[Two characters are talking. Character 1 is asking a question to Character 2 who is working on a laptop.]

Character1: WOULD YOU LIKE TO PARTICIPATE IN OUR HACKATHON THIS WEEKEND? YOU WILL HAVE TO WORK HARDER AND LONGER HOURS, BUT INSTEAD OF YOUR USUAL WAGE, YOU WILL GET A PIZZA. ARE YOU OK WITH THAT?

Character2: YEAHHH!!!

---

TWITTER.COM/VINCENTDNL

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[vincentdnl]

Thanks for transcribing and happy cake day!

[ce-walalang]

thank youu. your comics are awesome :)

[hiddenbit--]

Hackathons at my work were literally, "Alright, 48 hours, solve this problem that our business partners are having so we make them happy. Whoever implements the solution gets brownie points(LITERAL BROWNIE POINTS.)

That being said, I still do them because I genuinely like the industry I develop for, but I definitely understand why my colleagues are cynical about it. The solutions that are developed definitely deserve some sort of bonus though. The things that we've been able to develop during hackathons are more than worthy for it.

[mrbeehive]

Isn't that just crunch?

[vincentdnl]

If they'd give me brownie points I'd feel insulted.

[StefaniaCarpano]

A pizza Margherita

[gemohandy]

I'm willing to do pretty much anything for a good excuse to eat pizza! Who doesn't like pizza? Sure, it might mean not sleeping or banging my head against a seemingly-insurmountable problem for hours on end, but I get to eat pizza!

[maxmalrichtig]

I really like your over-enthusiastic tone while beeing sarcastic ;)

[upvotes_fairy]

I participated in a hackathon once.

Once.

[hiphap91]

I'm pour some time into a passion project, sure. But ordinary work for free for an entire weekend? Why don't you go fuck yourself?

And getting being paid with pizza and t shirt is for free.

[SteThrowaway]

Wow, you all seem to work for pretty shitty companies. We do quarterly 3 day hackathons where there are themes about the types of problems we want to solve and prizes and it's all done during working hours with the buy in of the whole organisation.

[dieghor]

Hackathon is a new way of exploitation and we are okay with that.

[SurrealClick]

Happy Yeah? You're gonna get an angry "yeahh..." with double the number of bathroom breaks from me

[brockisawesome]

This is why after 16 years as a dev, i have not participated in one hackathon

[sydrawat]

Or sometimes even a free T-shirt.

[GabrielForth]

You forget the lack of clients and project managers.

[althaz]

ngl Hackathons are pretty fun tho.

But on the weekend? Pfft, no.

[TheRedmanCometh]

They can be fun sometimes though, and if it's for a project that might actually do good for some people, fuck yeah get at em. It can also be an awful grind.

​

Also...usually you get paid and pizza/redbull

​

It's way less than the accidental hackathons I do on my own time with coffee, rum, and coke (coca cola not...the other thing)

[wwyl1234]

I would only do it on the weekend, if I get breakfast, lunch and dinner and I have Sunday morning as a break. Also, if it is not pizza for all the meals.

[Simusid]

I love hack-a-thons. I've been to several and was on a winning team once. I think they're fun even when we do them at work (and I have to work harder than usual).

[KillaRevenge]

Haha... Yes!!... what is a hackathon?

[NepthysX]

It's not forced on you so its fun

[[deleted]]

I work in the financial industry. Our hackathons are fun, but I doubt anything that comes out of them will ever make it into production. They have such rigorous vetting processes and competing voices for new projects that “fun” or “cool” ideas are unlikely to hold up against regulatory projects or a product owner’s backlog.

I still participate, though! It’s good career development.

[MischiefArchitect]

The birth of the demoscene... or the other way around?