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Comment by anon12345678 | Hacker News Reader

I was told that working on those projects was a privilege and that we had to perform at our jobs (minus any output from hackathons) before we could work on the stuff we wanted to. I think it's a sensible strategy. Hackathons do keep engineers on the edge and excited about work, but you want to avoid it distracting from the core focus too much.

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Hackathons are bullshit, period. If you're working, producing anything of value to the company, even if that be simply "worker engagement," it better be on company time. Simple as that.

Agreed. Unpaid labor is not "culture" its slavery.

I like the way my company does it. We have periodical "hack weeks", where for the entire work week, you can work on whatever you want that's at least loosely related to company technology or objectives.

A whole week? That's unheard of. Sounds good, sounds like my kind of down time, but I doubt most companies would embrace that time span.

There's another way to do whatever you want at work, and that's covertly. During the times you're meant to be doing other things. Depends where your desk is I suppose, or if working remotely.

Certain companies have code freezes during large sales pushes, mainly e-commerce and the like. These are times when whole weeks could be spent on a hackathon-like deal with little impact on other plans.

I worked at a company that had "hack weeks" - most people loved them, and they produced good prototypes. But personally, I just hated hack weeks. But then again, I hated trying to work in that office at all, and trying to work on something "fun" there just felt worse than trying to do my regular job.

I think, though, if I was running a company, I wouldn't have hack weeks or 20% time - I'd try, for as long as possible, to give people extreme latitude to work on whatever they think might be useful/fun/interesting for the company - more like the Valve model, I guess.

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