
How we run hackathons - yurisagalov
https://www.aerofs.com/blog/how-we-run-hackathons/
======
ditonal
I don't care about trophies, certificate, gift cards, etc. What sounds most
positive to me about your internal hack days is your effort to productionize
the efforts. That means you actually realize that all those smart, ambitious
people you hire might actually have good ideas.

I recently left an NYC ed-tech startup that would have 'hack days', but during
the hack days there were games, distractions, and once even a live band. Now I
like parties, but it indicated to me that the non-technical CEO was allowing
the hack day because Facebook did it, and he viewed it more as a recruiting
effort than something he took seriously. I won one of the categories once and
received no followup whatsoever, and the impression that I got was that if I
wanted to work on it nights and weekends after the fact, then maybe it would
be considered. Lots of people did do 'real work' during hack day, and most of
the projects were fluff or things that were obviously going to be on the
product roadmap anyway. To me, the entire thing was a waste of time, which is
unfortunate, because I really wish more companies looked for creativity out of
their engineers. Many companies (especially NYC ones) will begrudgingly pay
you for your coding skills, but then put you at the whim of a product manager
with no experience building anything. I always say that if you think about why
designers/coders learned these skillsets, it's often because they are
extremely interested in the end-products and that's what motivated them to
learn to build products in the first place, and so to totally ignore their
input and put them in pure heads-down coding roles is really unfortunate. This
blog post indicates to me that you're not that type of company.

As for external hackathons, to me they are a waste of time as a coder because
nobody actually checks that your implementation works. And worse, they hire
people like journalists to judge (looking at you Angelhack). What that means
is that the 'hackathon' really turns into a 'pitchathon', and the winners go
to the best designers (which I can at least respect), or slide decks and
charismatic pitches (which I don't). Getting the judging right so that time
spent actually coding is valued is really difficult, but something more
hackathon organizers should consider.

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markolschesky
How did you manage support during the hackathon?

I liked that you mentioned that everyone had to contribute and no one got a
"hall pass" to do real work, but I often need to manage our customer requests
and it's difficult to say "I can't help you for 1-3 days because we're
focusing on team building".

We do one of these quarterly and I'm trying to think how I can avoid being the
worst hackweek teammate ever next time around. Maybe it is saying that we'll
have limited availability for 1-3 days to some customers.

~~~
yurisagalov
One benefit of doing a hackathon around the holidays is that support volume is
generally way down as well (at least in an enterprise software world). That
being said, one of our internal company values is (bear with me for the
impending cliche) "customer first", and that's a golden rule for the team, so
if something major comes up that would indeed take precedence. For minor
things, it's not crazy to adjust the SLA. Some companies adjust support SLAs
for all-company meetings, conferences, offsites, and so on.

That, and we may've also just gotten lucky :)

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jasonlotito
I'm the hackathon guy here at MeetMe, where we are starting to plan our 9th
internal hackathon since 2012 that we call HACKD. Most of these thoughts
presented here I agree with. A few additional points I'd like to add:

Themes can also back fire. I'd highly suggest going with no themes as well.
Heck, even encourage things outside of your day to day job. You might be
surprised at what people come up with. Hackathons are about exploration, and
while themes can be great to help people come up with ideas, they can also
hinder. We've had hackathons with themes and those without, and I can't say
that the themes made any noticeable impact on the ideas presented.

Prizes are dangerous. Don't make it tangible, such as money or a thing. We
tried many different prizes, and the one that worked the best was a paid team
outing. Limo to and from a restaurant of their choice, all paid for, and the
net result was a team that had a lot of fun getting out, relaxing, and just
getting to know one another better. The specific outing isn't important, but
that the activity is done as a team. Indeed, the activity itself was chosen by
the team.

Support is also crucial. If the idea is something that can be put into
production, it should be. In this case, those teams were given an additional
week of time to clean up the product and make it ready to ship. Focal came out
of this, and while it's a hobby of ours, it's simple and fun, and still
supported (with new changes coming!).

Voting is interesting. I do votes via a Google Form. Generally we have between
15-20 projects per hackathon, and some projects get 1 vote. You don't want to
be that guy to get the 1 vote. It's demoralizing. We announce the top 3. You
have to account for larger teams. They'll vote for themselves, and that's in
some ways fine. After all, if you can convince 3 other people to help you with
your idea, that should count for something.

Also, look beyond just programmers. We include QA, design, project managers,
and product on our teams. I've had our QA people build websites, and product
people programming iOS apps, and even projects managers working to streamline
processes that needed improvements. They did spend their time learning this
stuff, but that's the whole point of a hackathon. To stretch yourself.

We've had a blast with our hackathons, and I can't wait for HACKD 9.

~~~
therealjonp
It sounds like we agree on a lot of points.

What you said about the prize element really resonated with me - it's fraught
with peril. One thing I noticed is that your suggested prize is 'experiential'
rather than tangible. I thought the ability to choose the movie for Movie
Night would be more coveted than the certificate...

Your points about voting as the company scales are interesting. It's something
we're going to have to watch as we grow. We did use secret ballots (we are a
bit obsessed with privacy...) so the whole presentation-to-voting transaction
could be done in one setting.

As for applying outside the engineering department - this is one of my
priorities going forward.

~~~
jasonlotito
Yep, we do. And while I'm sure it's obvious, I do want to make clear this is
what has worked so far with us. We've tried different things, and some have
worked better than others. Each group of people will be different and value
different things.

The most important thing is obviously that everyone enjoy themselves and have
fun.

Oh! And one more thing I forgot:

5 minute presentations, and you can't use presentation software like Keynote.

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heitortsergent
Really good read, and great tips on how to run an internal hackathon. 100%
agree on having a theme open to interpretation, prize categories, and kinds of
prizes you are giving. :)

Are you guys running it quarterly already? How much time have you guys waited
in between hackathons? Also, you say "every engineer who was present was
expected to participate". Were the other departments allowed/expected to
participate as well? This is something really positive for improving internal
relations.

~~~
yurisagalov
(Responding for Jon because he's in meetings this AM) -- The first two
questions are related, and actually somewhat adressed in Jon's "frequency"
section. I'm not sure what the "exact" distance between the events should be,
but as he mentions in the blog post, _" setting the events far enough apart
that each time feels like a special event - a welcome visit from an absent
friend."_

This is likely different for different people and companies.

Regarding other departments -- yes! Everyone participated in giving ideas,
feedback, etc. In fact, it's actually the sales people who fell in love with
the results of the hackathon the most and are now vocally asking for more
hackathons.

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sriram_sun
Great way to utilize some low productivity days! If people have something
planned for the actual week, maybe you could consider giving them the next 3
days off so they still get a "week" off.

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lowglow
I organized and ran Hackendo
([https://hackendo.techendo.com/](https://hackendo.techendo.com/)) in April.
Hackathons are super rewarding, but a lot of hard work if you don't have help.
My biggest takeaway from throwing a hackathon is: Find reliable people who
want to help volunteer to support before/during/after your hackathon.

~~~
yurisagalov
We probably should've been more clear, but this was about how to run an
internal company hackathon :)

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cool-RR
I'd appreciate a hackathon for making AeroFS sync reliably. I've been using it
for years, since when it was invite only, and it often simply refuses to sync.
I've spoken with their support a dozen times. They're nice and courteous but
the problems don't get solved. I've already given up on AeroFS; it's great for
moving files inside a lan quickly but not for much else.

