

Facebook's Legendary Hackathons - shill
http://www.fastcompany.com/3002845/secrets-facebooks-legendary-hackathons-revealed?utm_source=twitter

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brd
I worked at a very large, boring, and bureaucratic fortune 500. Our little
team got into the tradition of "hack nights" which happened every Thursday.
We'd come in at a regular time, work until somewhere between 4-10am the next
day (yes, 20-26 hours of work) and then go home for a long weekend.

It turned into a thing of legend around the office. VPs and the CIO would
crack jokes about it during meetings and stop us in the hallways to ask about
our hack nights. When our team wrapped up the project and we moved on to
different groups some of us were asked to run hack nights for those teams.

Hackathons are a healthy thing for a company to do. It lets people relax and
get to know each other better and it creates a strong sense of camaraderie.
I'm happy to know FB has taken this idea and ran with it but I'm also
surprised that I don't hear about more companies in the valley doing these
sort of activities.

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suresk
I've worked 24+ hours straight a handful of times in my career. "Healthy" and
"relaxing" are not two adjectives I'd use to describe such coding marathons,
and a lot of the code that comes out of them is pretty low-quality.

I understand there are circumstances that call for them, but I really hope the
idea of making it a regular part of doing business doesn't catch on.

~~~
borplk
I have mixed feelings about hackathons.

I'm seeing this culture of _hack all night_ and attitude in the industry and
it bothers me a little bit.

Mainly because _hackers_ are the only ones pulling _hackathons_.

Sure you might enjoy it to some extent, but should we do it in a commercial
environment?

This trend over time has created an expectation of hackers and programmers to
work like machines.

It's everywhere, pulling all-nighters, hacking for ramen noodles, sleeping on
the couch, staying until 5am, etc...

Whether you want it or not, or like it or not, this sends a signal to everyone
else, that the opportunity cost of your time is lower than them because you
enjoy what you do, soon enough it becomes the norm, they will take it for
granted that you are a hacker and you enjoy what you do and that's all you do.

Compare that with the attitude that lawyers have for example, who knows maybe
they fucking love their job, but they don't brag about it everywhere and will
make sure to never look like they enjoy their job in front of you. No one asks
them to say until 4am and _hack_ on legal documents for fun. If they want they
can do that too at their own place.

They charge you per minute and you wont dare to ask them for 5 extra minutes
because hey it's no fun! But god forbid you are a programmer and working on an
open-source project. If you don't dedicate your evenings for free to other
people you are doing nothing.

I feel like we are being taken advantage of because we are constantly talking
about _hack_ and _fun_ together.

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paul_milligram
Using peer pressure to encourage others into working all night without pay can
be called "pizza parties", "hackathons", or even plain old "exploitation".
Tomato, tuhmahto. \--- EDIT: Added clarification

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Hovertruck
I like our implementation of hackathons at Chartbeat, which is a week-long
hackathon every 6 weeks. Some of our most loved products and features have
come out of them.

I wrote a little blog post about it once, if anyone cares:
<http://blog.chartbeat.com/2012/03/16/hacking-chartbeat/>

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bitops
I'm surprised they only order from Jing Jing in Palo Alto. I mean, it's a
great place but there are lots of other good places too. (Hunan Garden on El
Camino comes to mind).

~~~
flyt
It's tradition. The Facebook office used to be directly above Jing Jing back
in the day.

