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Oh, right -- I have limits
Physical limits, that is.
This week was the annual Hackathon at work. It's a delightful time: you get to choose your own projects, and while it is generally considered appropriate for them to have at least something to do with work, there's a lot of leeway to do what you think would be useful. All strictly optional, mind -- something under 10% of the people in the company take part, but I think it's a hoot.
I wound up going mostly solo, which was almost certainly a mistake -- it reminded me that no, I really don't know React at all well (and Typescript not at all), so trying to do major enhancements to a mildly complex React website alone was unwise. So I didn't finish, but will probably keep working on it in spare minutes over the next few weeks, teaming with the guy who actually owns the UI and knows what he's doing.
Anyway -- the main discovery is that this pushed right up to the limits of my stamina. After a full workday yesterday, the Hackathon kicked off at 5pm. I did about eight hours of coding, went to bed, got up and back to work around 8am, worked on my project straight through to 6pm, and then watched two hours of presentations of people who did get to the point of having something that was worth presenting. Total comes to 28 hours at work between two days, I think.
I am now approximately kaput. Even by my usual excessive standards from Arisia and Pennsic, that was overdoing it.
Still and all, it's fun to overdo it occasionally. One problem of living in Quarantinia is that daily life gets very routine, so kicking myself in the ass now and then is a nice change of pace...
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Ah, of course -- everything will be so much clearer with all that blood rushing to my head...
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Oh, is this one of those "have a hackathon, but do it in your off hours" companies? That's unfortunate; everyone starts off handicapped (by coming off a work day), and if you had any outside obligations like, say, helping your kids with schoolwork, you have to deal with that. Under those conditions, it's no surprise you no longer have the stamina of a 20-something.
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Almost exactly incorrect. The Hackathon is strictly optional -- maybe 10% of the company participated. It runs 24 hours -- that's 5pm-5pm for me in EST, but much of the company is not EST. So it includes one full workday, but precisely how that hits your hours depending on your timezone. And how many hours you work on it is up to you: most people aren't silly enough to keep pushing to 1am, but nobody ever said I was entirely sensible.
Seriously: folks are too eager to assume that every company is evil. So far, Rally has managed to be an unusually good place to work, despite no longer being a small company. That's why I'm still here...
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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.)
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Rally's been doing Hackathons for a fair number of years now, and has a pretty healthy attitude towards them. It's well-understood that they are exploratory, and most of the projects won't come to anything significant, but a modest fraction turn out to be pretty important (my project this year involved enhancing one of our common systems, which itself started from a Hackathon four or five years ago). They pretty much never result in something complete, but that's not the point: they're mostly about prototyping and idea-generation.
And yeah, historically it's been mainly for the engineers. But given this year's weird circumstances, they decided to open it to anyone who wanted to play along, with the result that we got a somewhat broader set of ideas, and some better-rounded teams. Overall, I think it was a nice success...
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Hackathons shouldn't be for finished products. They should be for exploration and prototyping, which by its nature involves cutting corners and skipping stuff that's not on the critical path.
As a tech writer, I used one hackathon to set up a different build system (later improved and now in use) and one to prototype a significant doc refactoring (actually implemented a year later). Hackaathons can work for doc, and UI design, and QA, and others. We have this chicken-and-egg thing where hackathons are for dev so they're scheduled for dev, so it's harder for others to participate, so non-devs don't show up so hackathons are for dev and should be scheduled... I've intentionally broken into hackathons a few times, in part to try to break this cycle and get other writers involved, but so far no one else has joined in. :-( (QA has, though, which is good.)
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This year we had a team that I think was entirely front-office, no techies involved: they came up with a new design to allow employees to use their Rally Coins to buy company swag. That was actually in-line with some common requests (the swag is pretty nice), and it set a good example of how the time can be spent not on code-related stuff.
("Rally Coins": one of the company's many products is basically employer-sponsored gamification of healthy-living goals. Rallyers are encouraged to join in.)