
What the hack? - e15ctr0n
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21679457-tech-industry-tradition-has-entered-corporate-mainstream-what-hack
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CLGrimes
If you run into a paywall like I did, click

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi018fK5cLJAhUCVT4KHViIDIcQqQIIOjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fnews%2Fbusiness%2F21679457-tech-
industry-tradition-has-entered-corporate-mainstream-what-
hack&usg=AFQjCNHEzNrxLbJlMuJDdX32DWFr1Y8rkQ&sig2=VwRGvDr-cMe-rR8EWgZilA)

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ferentchak
I worked as the Developer Advocate at my last company (An Agile tools vendor).
While I was there I had helped out some larger companies run their own
internal hackathons. One of the services that we helped them with was planning
the event.

For the most part I worked as a therapist for their executive team, usually I
spent most of my time reassuring them that losing a day of engineering time
would be a good investment and that they didn't need to vet the projects that
the teams worked on. It was fun work bringing that awesome kind of "goof-off"
dev work to engineers that had been working with the same team for 20 years
and had been pidgeonholed onto some old legacy system.

The execs pretty much always loved it, you got to see teams led by interns
with grizzled senior neckbeards getting to write some code for them.

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baxter001
Is this new or just 'new mainstream enterprise practice' I was under the
impression that hackathons had been subverted as a tool of corporate
exploitation of young devs for some time now.

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ferentchak
The events that I ran were about team building and giving the younger folks a
safe chance to build some leadership skills. They were fully internal events
though, not a "win a free monkey if you make the best app on my api" kind of
hackathons.

~~~
baxter001
A few of my local user groups run similarly positive events, split into teams
riff on an idea and do a show and tell at the end.

Great fun and a positive exposure to code for newbies or the simply curious.

~~~
ferentchak
I found that lots of the older folks were happy to get a chance to sit down
and program again. They had moved into jobs that were more about managing and
communication, so they were not able to find time to code like they used to.
Giving the newer devs a chance to lead a team gave them a chance to hone that
skill if it was something they were interested in developing.

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roymurdock
This article presents no data and does not feature any discussion of
economics. It simply lists off a couple of different hackathons, namedropping
Mastercard, Disney, and Dropbox. I haven't seen a good article from The
Economist on HN in a long time.

