Facebook's Legendary Hackathons | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's Legendary Hackathons

fastcompany.com

56 pointsshill15 comments

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.

Every Thursday? What was the average age of your team? I would think after a few weeks this kind of habit would be exhausting!

Most Thursdays, yes. The age range was roughly 21-35. We all liked the 3 day weekend enough to do it regularly but I agree that physically it probably wasn't the healthiest of choices.

Interestingly enough, on slower weeks even when we could have gotten all our work done during the week we would end up doing a hack night. We had gotten so used to the habit that we would find ourselves procrastinating during the week so that there was work left for Thursday night.

Sounds like what my college group projects do weekly; and to think we thought this was the end of that lifestyle!

I agree. Hackathons, hack nights, awesomeness.

Sounds like you had a great team. It takes a lot of blood sweat and tears (and time) to build a high performing team. Too often these teams just get broken up or disintegrate. Think of what you could have done were you supported as a team and allowed to move on together to the next big challenge. I know a lot of teams disband voluntarily as everyone's interests for their next project vary, but employers should do more to honor and value the achievements of teams like these and provide incentives to keep them together and apply them to the next big challenge.

Absolutely. Its unfortunate that corporate environments seem so ill equipped to to acknowledge and respect, let alone foster, good team dynamics.

In our case the powers that be decided to it was smart to spread us out throughout the organization so that we could carry the torch to other teams. It worked to some extent but the gains paled in comparison to what we could have continued to do as a more cohesive team. C'est la vie.

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.

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.

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

The idea isn't to ship the code from these events, but to test and idea end-to-end without worrying about scalability, code cleanliness, etc. Just see if the idea has legs.

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/

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).

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

Oh Jing Jing... So kinda tasty..,

Reply on news.ycombinator.com