Hackathons Are An ANTI-PATTERN?! Developers Are Raging!

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all right folks I'm headed to the office it's a Tuesday I got a big presentation today that I'm uh not super excited about to be honest um a part of this big project I'm working on so I don't usually go to work on Tuesdays but this is going to be a Monday Tuesday Wednesday at least kind of office week for me going to Reddit for a topic which is going to be about hackathons and if hack aons these are like ones held by your company are an anti- pattern and I wanted to chat through that um so friendly reminder if you want questions answered uh leave them in the comments please and if uh you want to write something that's lengthy or you want to be kept Anonymous look for Dev leader on social media it's my main YouTube channel and also my uh social

media handle that I use for everything so you can reach out to me there or on LinkedIn my Prof while should be open for messages it's Nick centino and apologies in advance I'm in a pretty terrible mood right now um so I'm just trying to I want to talk through this kind of stuff I just want to make sure I can uh not let sort of my emotions and stuff leak into the things I'm talking about because yeah I I'm I am aware that I'm in a pretty awful mood so okay so this person was kind of uh taking the stance on on their Reddit post like um because of how they frame their question right like are hackathons an anti pattern so let's kind of start with like what a hackathon is um for those of you that don't know because there's a you

know different variety of viewers and stuff that are that are on the channel so uh when we talk about hackathons at companies generally this could be something that's like a week long it could be sometimes like 24 48 hours kind of thing I know when I was at a startup we could absolutely not get a week for hackathons which is funny because some people are saying in the thread like you know how little time and stuff and it's like I think we only had like 24-hour hackathons and we would literally like we would stay at the office overnight and stuff um but we could we could build anything right so some companies will do it so that you have like maybe you just use that time for learning for the week like and usually I would say it's pretty common to get like a week

of time for a hackathon u for places that do but there's a variety here so use that time for learning or building projects um and some companies will scope it so like hey yes it's a hackathon you can work on anything you want as long as it's related to the business uh and other times like when I had done hackathons uh the startup I was at before Microsoft um we would kind of like the whole the goal of the hackathon was learning right now that meant that we could go you could like I made video games and stuff like we would use unity and we'd build fun games and it was just a way to collaborate with other people and build stuff and just you know see what you could do in in 24 hours I think eventually we changed it to like 48 hours

or something just cuz 2 24 hours is pretty rough to get you know stuff done and like it's not that we were forcing people to be there overnight or anything like that but it was like they would have like late night snacks and games and stuff and I know that there's probably some rolling their eyes like oh like you're probably a place that was like we're all family yeah and I think for the most part a lot of us did feel that way so um yeah it might be cliche but uh I think it was a lot of fun and there was a lot of people that that they would stay late and they would they' do like Acro yoga and they play video games I think we had like Guitar Hero and stuff like anyway no one was forced to do it um and

we kind of opened it up that you can work on anything you want uh not just work related now some places will do strictly work rated um I know so like Microsoft at least from my experience it's not purely work related I think it's often encouraged that it is but you could go do learning you don't necessarily like we call it fhl fix hack learn and um I think if you might guess one fix is probably like opportunity to fix up anything you want uh hack to go build things generally it's like leveraging some type of like you know uh technology that you haven't had the exposure to or learn um because the whole thing is about learning but uh one thing I want to touch on too is like I think it's really important for companies to kind of figure out genuinely um genuinely

like what's the motivation for hackathon right it's because the reason I'm saying this is I'm thinking about it's like when cult companies say our culture is X and it's like you can't just assign the culture and it happens like culture is like an observed thing so with a hackathon it's not like you can't say oh we want you know the hackathon is we just want to encourage learning and that's the whole goal and then the your actions kind of make it like yes but what what new interesting thing are you trying to help us ship as a business right like those are at conflict with each other and it's not I'm not here to say that one of them is right and one of them is wrong but you want to make sure that you're alied on what the goal actually is so if you're

saying we just want to make sure that people have that entire week where they can go learn or build about like learn about or build anything they want because it's just time back for you to be creative go explore uh build things with other other teams like people on different teams stuff like that and it's completely open-ended then encourage and enable that don't like don't structure the whole thing or like make people feel guilty that they didn't work on um you know something else right now the other way is fine but you just be transparent about it right yes it's a hackathon but like we want people to work on business related things so like you could structure it like hey come up with a a pitch for why we should incorporate this in our product or service or why this would be a cool

thing for the business to do and you can roll your eyes at any of these or whatever I'm not trying to hopefully if you've watched my channel before I'm not trying to say like this is the way to do it I'm just saying like have alignment don't send mixed messages about it because I think that's where people start to get really bent out of shape like okay you said it's for learning but now like you're making me feel guilty that I went and like we built like a a unity game that was like this is at the startup was a unity game that was like a horror game where we had an Easter bunny that would chase you and um we had like we were keeping all of the bugs like kind of like goat simulator all of the bugs that didn't break the game

we kept in so the first bug we had that was hilarious was the Easter Bunny would chase you but the model was backwards so you had this Easter Bunny that would chase you backwards uh throughout these levels um so so like don't make us feel guilty for playing around and building stuff and learning these other things and they didn't by the way I'm just using it as an example it don't make us feel guilty for doing that if you want to encourage like cross team collaboration uh you know learning different stuff if that's truly your goal okay so hopefully that kind of makes sense like I said different constraints different timelines all and different motivation from all of different companies and stuff some compies don't do this at all um I know Microsoft does for our organization we do four of them that are a

week long in the year which is super cool uh I I think it's awesome that Microsoft offers this um I I'm I'm sorry I'm bit of a brain fart I'm I was going to say like as an engineering manager I kind of fall into this trap of like okay like we we end up canceling meetings and stuff so that we can make sure the team has dedicated time for for our hackathon which I think is awesome the side effect is like uh I end up having a bunch of free time to go do like catch up on my own work so unfortunately I end up using that time uh to catch up and even though I can and should participate that's kind of the the Trap that happens and I wanted to mention that because I think that's uh for some people some of the

sentiment they have around like oh you're giving us a hackathon okay but um you know you're we we all know that we have all these other priorities so I'm going to feel guilty about not doing them so I know well I shouldn't say I know I feel like at Microsoft I have at least on the teams I've been on and I'm not saying directly from me like I'm the one responsible for this I mean I feel like there is a lot of encouragement in the organization to participate in our hackathons so like you will like I see that like we have a hackathon coming up and I already see all the meeting cancellations coming in like people are trying to clear calendars to make sure that everyone has that availability um they schedule week-long learning sessions so again like clear up the calendar of all

your other meetings so that you have this type of availability so I feel like there is uh again from my perspective a strong push to encourage people for this kind of stuff which is which is great um now does everyone feel that way I would say probably not there's probably some people that that feel like hey I I have this looming deadline or there's a lot of pressure to get something done and it feels irresponsible for me to go work on a hackathon right to give you an example um we have a hackathon coming up but the project that I'm leading right now um I'm I actually have to check with my leadership and say like should we be postponing our participation in this and I've seen other teams go through similar projects and they do postpone it and it's not that they skip it

but they they give a dedicated time for the team to go to do a hackathon it's really unfortunate because the learning sessions like they only happen during the time they're going to be recorded but um I need to clarify because the project that I am leading right now that I have a presentation on today is such high priority that we are rescheduling effectively everything else so it feels to me like it is at odds with priorities to say and yes we're going to give people a week to work on other stuff directly not quite in the middle of the of the this big project but um towards the the second half and that's a it's a shitty spot to be in right because I'm looking at this the from the business priority perspective given that this project that I'm leading apparently Trump's all of the

other efforts were literally canceling other things shifting people to come help on this um if it's truly that significant that it's going to disrupt absolutely everything else we do it seems like it is not in the best interest to use this particular period of time for a hackathon right that's a really challenging thing to message because I don't want to suggest that giving people time in general for this type of thing isn't worth it personally I think it's one of the most important things to make sure people have opportunities like this so I I feel like I'm in a pretty sticky situation and I want to make sure that I have sort of agreement with my leadership team on expectations I have a feeling I know what they're going to say and if it's alignment with my perspective which is to postpone it I want

to make sure that I have their support that it's postponed and not canceled because if they're going to cancel it for my team that feels much worse um I can rationalize that but I want to make sure that I have a consistent story right um it's this is the the joy of being a middle manager is like I can have a perspective on a lot of things but in many situations it's like I have to I have to snap up whatever the the consensus is and and be ready to be aligned with it so been rambling a lot but one of the ideas in this thread with respect to it hackathons being an anti pattern is like why is it that we need to have dedicated time carved out instead of just having Innovation and stuff built into our regular work which I think is

a fair question but I think this goes the reason I was trying to frame up before getting to this part was that I think that comes back to what is the goal of the hackathon because if the goal of the hackathon is we want you to innovate on stuff for our products and services then I feel like yeah that might be a bit of an anti pattern right like why don't you just make sure that we have that kind of built into our regular workflow so that we can be getting support to try and innovate on things uh and maybe the answer is like it's it's too challenging or the people that are organizing things find it too challenging to build in regularly and their opportunity to build it in regularly is effectively to carve out dedicated time every couple of months perhaps right it's

still regular it's just not the Cadence or at the at the interval that you would like which is more frequent for smaller amounts of time again I'm not I'm trying to take an unbiased approach and just share like different perspectives on what could be happening here not saying it's good or bad um now if we take another perspective on what is the goal of the hackathon if the goal of the hackathon is to sort of Kickstart more collaboration in situations where you normally wouldn't get it I might make the argument like no I don't think anyone's discouraging cross team collaboration in general I would hope but perhaps in regular streams of work you're not getting that type of opportunity and that could like it could just be the nature of the work you're doing so again this is one of those things where the natural

occurrence of it might be at a at an irregular interval or infrequent and having something like a hackathon where it's like hey you have this opportunity to go col collaborate with other people you don't normally work with I think that could be a good thing is it an anti pattern like for for that reason I don't think so but I would say it's an anti pattern if you were discouraged from regularly you collaborating across team I just don't think that it's a discouragement thing I think it's probably more likely some of the work you're doing doesn't align that way there's a I don't have my 360 C on cuz it's really wet out but there's a truck in the far right lane that must have like an oil issue or something they're blowing smoke everywhere it's insane there's like 100 ft of white smoke trailing

behind them and they're just flying down the highway that's cool um again would be a good opportunity for 360 cam to go but uh apparently it doesn't work when it's a little bit wet um so I don't think it's an anti pattern necessarily around promoting collaboration um personally uh is it an anti- pattern for learning right and what I'm doing here is trying to talk about different goals of a hackathon right so this is just my framework for trying to kind of think through this and so another goal that we could talk about is promoting learning and again maybe someone does argue that this is an anti- pattern but um when it comes to time to go learn about Technologies I I struggle with this one a little bit because again if your regular work streams are not aligned where you're being exposed to different

Technologies then I don't necessarily feel like it's an anti pattern to have a dedicated period of time to to encourage you to go do that um there's a I'm trying to find a good way to articulate this but I feel like it's the difference between being discouraged on a regular basis versus like the opportunity itself doesn't naturally come up I think that's my my big differentiator here so to give you an example um and I've talked about this on a couple other videos I've had you know Engineers that report to me over time um that like hey like is there an opportunity where I could be exposed to like frontend development or some tech stack or something like it's an interest of mine um I've had individuals that uh were interested in role switching right and they were actually saying like hey like is there

an opportunity where I can have some more exposure to doing uh like ux design and development right from a from a tester role so they were doing a lot of uh user experience testing and they said like hey like I know that's my role but like is there an opportunity where I could be doing some design work right so some of these types of things don't end up just naturally coming up in in the work they're doing so the most recent example I have is uh from Microsoft where I had Engineers like my teams that I've been on at Microsoft are almost 100% backend work and some of the engineers have said like hey like I would be really interested in being able to do some front-end development do we have anything like that and I have tried to you know work with them to

find such opportunities even like to participate in projects with uh sort of like sister teams but that's just not work that regularly comes up in our normal work Stream So a like in my opinion a hackathon to enable that is like not an anti- pattern it's like carving out opportunity for it now you could say well and I don't know if this is the argument or not so I'm open to your perspective on this in the comments but you know are people asking if it's an anti- pattern because they would rather see instead of I'm just making up a Cadence every if you're doing it quarterly every 3 months we're going to do um a hackathon where we encourage learning about different things you don't get exposure to are you is the suggestion then like I think that that's an anti- pattern because I would

like to see every week we get time for that um or like or or what's the what's the alternative I guess is what I'm wondering so I know that for some of the people I work with currently they will actually use we have no meeting Fridays and they'll tell me in their one-on-one updates they're like hey like you know on Friday I'm actually going to carve out a little bit of time to go learn a little bit more about some some right some topic generally it's work-related or at least workplace adjacent that's a cool Porsche I don't really like a lot of Porsches to be honest I know that's blasphemous to some people but and that one's a station wagon and I don't like Station Wagons at all which is also Blasphemous to a lot of people so actually look pretty cool um so yeah

like people will give me some updates where they're saying like hey I'm going to be looking at this and like they're kind of just baking into their regular work time you know every week spending a little bit of time doing some extra learning which I'm totally cool with right these are generally people that are not like they're like super behind in their work or they're having a lot of issues like people that are doing great awesome work and on top of that you know I'm going to carve out couple hours or something on a Friday to go do some extra learning oh my God buddy you have to complete this person is trying to merge lanes so they almost came to a complete stop and didn't even have a signal on so they basically almost just stopped in the lane with no uh indication of

what they were trying to do Bo okay so I talked about three different potential goals of hackathons and you could surely come up with more but then you know the the root of this question is like is it an anti pattern to carve out dedicated time for this stuff instead of regularly encouraging it and I think you know from scanning some of the comments I think that what I noticed was a lot of people feel feel that it is an anti pattern and they feel that it's frustrating that they're not getting some types of these opportunities on a regular basis but from my little scan through it kind of feels like people are being put into a situation where it's like we want you to innovate for work so here's some time to go do it and then they're going okay but like why don't

you just let us do that on a regular basis or the argument for uh what we call fix hack learn at Microsoft right like why do I need dedicated time carved out to go fix things like why can't we just prioritize that as part of our regular work which I think that's that's a fair question like in that case with fix hack learn the the fix part does irk me a little bit um but again I think it's this difference between like you might be you might be jumping to some other spot and you're like hey like I want this opportunity to go check out this code and you know make changes to it put up a poll request try to fix things it might not even be the area you're directly working in necessarily right like I don't know I feel like it's this

opportunity where you're working on something that has been deemed a lower priority and maybe that's again like there's this discrepancy between how a business is prioritizing things versus where your interests are so part of me feels like man I don't know like if the goal of it is to like get engagement and you know get people interested in doing things that that they're genuinely interested in or passionate about and if you're passionate about you know going to to make changes in some part of the code base to to fix it or to clean it up even though it hasn't been a business priority then I I don't know like I feel like that's not a bad thing but probably still kind of dancing around this question of like well don't you want regular engagement why wouldn't you want to promote that regularly and to me

that kind of brings us back to like maybe the people scheduling this kind of stuff have a really difficult time trying to balance all of it to be honest maybe that's what it comes down to and I'm not I'm not blaming them it's not easy right as an engineering manager I have to sit in between uh aligning business priorities making sure that stuff is getting delivered on but like I don't know if you thought about this but I can't just like treat people like um like machines where it's like okay Bobby you do this Sally you do this and like go go go on repeat because the people doing the work are humans they have growth opportunities for their career they have certain they have certain skill sets or things that they have challenges with they have opportunities for some types of challenges they should

be focused on to help grow and like I need to balance those things in there as well so and I need to make sure people are engaged right so there will be times where I'm like okay like does it make sense to let someone work on this it's a it is a priority it might not be the topmost from a business deliverable perspective but like this person been busting their ass and like I know that their engagement is starting to take a bit of a hit so like maybe this is a good pivot for them to get some engagement back and also it's going to be uh helping them get this opportunity for some career growth that we want to see them demonstrate more of like I might get them to Pivot into that so it's not like a black and white like purely business

priority list them out and actually funny story like one of the reasons why this project that I'm currently leading is so draining for I I would say like probably everyone participating is because it's purely like that it is purely this is the most critical business thing this is the next one go do it right we don't have a lot of opportunity to be like oh um like I I can guarantee if we could plot the engagement and the happiness level of people woo should have committed to the lane change I didn't um if we could plot those things I could guarantee they would be plummeting which makes me feel terrible because that's not my intention and you know I spend a lot of time on this current project trying to do damage control on that oh no the suction cup is not doing its thing

here we go that's me thanks for hanging in there get it because you were hanging from the ceiling of my car good joke um okay but yeah to to wrap it up for hackathons I I don't know I I think I can rationalize why people feel like they may be anti- patterns I I guess my recommendation for people would be to like if you feel that some of the things that you only get time for in hackathons should be more part of the the regular Dynamics on the team like can we be socializing that more right can we be bringing awareness to that I realize it's easier to say that than to do it um one of the things and I I don't know like this is going to be different everywhere one of the things I really admired about where I used to work

was that there were people that would get vocal about stuff where they'd be they'd be upset about it like you know frustrated like hey we don't get time to do this and sometimes people would say it and just complain and sometimes people would say it complain and then offer up like suggestions right which is what I encourage people to do honestly like if you're going to complain about something I want people to be vocal but like I would love to hear your proposed Solutions too right I I I just definitely encourage that but I recognize for some people they're like what's the point and maybe where you're working what is the point I don't know but at least where I've been and I would I would tell this to any engineer that's reporting to me and I do like if you find that you're frustrated

with something whether that's internal tooling build systems the way we're doing things like raise awareness to me like I I want to hear from you and I I have a couple of Engineers let's say over the past 5 years that like they are very vocal with me to the point where sometimes they'll say like hey like I'm so uh they'll they'll apologize before they start to tell me some of their perspective right like hey I'm not not trying to to stir the pot here or I'm not trying to tell you like I think something's super shitty but and I'm like no don't apologize like like this is the whole point of having conversations like this right so if you're finding that you're frustrated by you know the hackathons seem like a a cheat to like give us the opportunity we should normally have I would

raise awareness to that I like I certainly wouldn't recommend giving up on I'm trying to drive change is I guess what I'm trying to say with that said though like the option between no hackathon and hackathon I think hackathons are I think they're super cool to be offered um you know I and I wish that I carved out more time for myself uh to go participate I know for maybe not this next one if we have to postpone it but my plan was like there's an engineer on my team that I wanted to work with on on doing a prototype for something and like I'm very excited to go try that out so like I am trying to make that opportunity but it can be really challenging so yeah I'm about to pull into the office here uh those are my thoughts on on hackathons

hopefully that was coherent enough like I said I'm in a a pretty awful mood this morning um on the way home home last night from work I I said this on my live stream I actually I stopped the video about 20 minutes in because I was just uh kind of all over the place being pretty upset and then this morning I I know I know this morning I am in a very very terrible mood so um and now there's no parking spots in this parking garage why are there so many people here today this is ridiculous I'm trying to end this video and can't even park my car there people in this parking garage can't park properly God okay I'm going to wrap it up here so you don't hear me moaning and groaning trying to park so thanks for watching I'll see you next

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