To people out there who are software engineers, do you have Hackdays at work? That is, a day (or other period of time) set aside where everyone can work on some project outside of their normal projects. Sometimes these are for people to learn new skills, or sometimes to showcase ideas for new projects/features that might be useful for the company.
if you have hackdays, how are they organized? Do you like them? What do you like about them, or what don’t you like about them?
Thanks!
My company doesn’t have an official policy, but some teams do set aside time on their own.
My team of twelve has been doing so for a little over a year. It’s every other Thursday. There was quite a bit of discussion about whether we should do larger blocks less often, or what.
We are a services team, so we are beholden to many masters, and it’s hard to ever find time that nobody on the team has anything urgent. For that reason, there is always a subset of the team that does normal work during that time. Because of that fragmentation, we haven’t really been building it into our team’s “culture” the way we expected.
I have probably joined in… twice in that time? Not a lot.
So my main takeaway has been that if you’re going to do it, really do it – take it seriously and make it mandatory.
At the place I am currently contracting they use SaFE (scaled agile framework) which has product iterations - at this client they are 3 months. Between PIs we have a sprint of planning the next PI and retro on a bigger scale. We get these 2 weeks to do a hackathon and generally people try to come up with ideas to make the overall project better. At the end of the PI planning sprint the hackathon stuff gets demoted to everyone and many times planned as a new feature or enhancement. It’s really pretty nice to get that much time for new ideas 4 times a year.
Yup I get Friday to study stuff if I’m not too busy. Any good ideas get supported, I set up TeamCity for instance for all our projects on the side. It’s nice but we’re growing so fast I’m afraid things will change.
Do you like them? What do you like about them, or what don’t you like about them?
At my previous, we used to do a jam-style thing about once a year. Sometimes if was just one day, sometimes it was two. People could pitch their ideas in mini-presentatons prior the event, and then people would group accordingly based on what they dug. It wasn’t necessarily about software projects - if anyone wanted to bring tools and tinker to improve or add something in the office, they might have proposed that.
In general, it’s a fun thing for most because people get to do something outside the boundaries dictated by the usual work. Also, doing something within such restrictions (i.e., the small amount of time available and the corresponding scope) tends to be a neat challenge. I also really like the team-building aspect of it because in these temporary projects you’d often have people work together who might not get to collaborate that much under other circumstances, e.g. being in different departments or from different disciplines.
As suggested by JPR, I think it needs to be a team-wide event. Doing it the “you can join if you want to” way is better than nothing, but there’s always a given set of people who will never participate because they don’t feel like socialising or think they cannot afford to take time off due to work commitments.
Not for us. We do get a subscription to Pluralsight to use in our free time so I’ve got that going for me.
My company does the hackathon thing once a year which I loathe with the burning passion of a 1000 suns.