I didn't assume anyone was evil. More like ineffective or self-defeating. If it starts out combined with a regular workday and includes the day's allotment of sleep time (by being just 24 hours), then people are already going to be at reduced effectiveness. This means hackathons produce weaker results, leading to the conclusion that hackathons don't work, so maybe the next one doesn't happen or is hobbled. The result of that is worse for all of us -- less opportunity to explore discretionary projects that could be game-changing (or at least helpful and interesting).
Maybe I've gotten too used to what I see at my company. When they declare a hackathon, it's for a week (with the understanding that you might get interrupted by high-priority bugs, but otherwise you can focus on this), and it's your normal work time. We've seen some great things come out, and some duds -- it doesn't always work, but that's the nature of exploratory work and experimentation. (We are, alas, not very good at including people other than developers; I have done some doc hackathon projects, but the scheduling is usually pesimal for doc -- right after code freeze on a release.)
(I didn't know or remember who your employer is, by the way.)
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Date: 2020-08-17 01:06 pm (UTC)Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding.
I didn't assume anyone was evil. More like ineffective or self-defeating. If it starts out combined with a regular workday and includes the day's allotment of sleep time (by being just 24 hours), then people are already going to be at reduced effectiveness. This means hackathons produce weaker results, leading to the conclusion that hackathons don't work, so maybe the next one doesn't happen or is hobbled. The result of that is worse for all of us -- less opportunity to explore discretionary projects that could be game-changing (or at least helpful and interesting).
Maybe I've gotten too used to what I see at my company. When they declare a hackathon, it's for a week (with the understanding that you might get interrupted by high-priority bugs, but otherwise you can focus on this), and it's your normal work time. We've seen some great things come out, and some duds -- it doesn't always work, but that's the nature of exploratory work and experimentation. (We are, alas, not very good at including people other than developers; I have done some doc hackathon projects, but the scheduling is usually pesimal for doc -- right after code freeze on a release.)
(I didn't know or remember who your employer is, by the way.)