Facebook's Hackathons Get a Rethink

itwbennett writes "They'll still be all-night coding sessions, but starting with this week's 'Project Mayhem' event, there are a few notable changes. First, they're longer — starting at 11 a.m. Thursday and continuing until 2 p.m. Friday. And coding through the night is optional. 'It's like, "let's take this day off to do this, and then if I need to get more done, we can hang out and finish at night,"' said Facebook engineering manager Pedram Keyani, who organizes the hackathons."

Comments

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook now gets nothing done, and has fallen the way of Myspace.

hackathon?

[girlintraining]

Is this a "hackathon" or a let's work our employees ragged just before the weekend because we know they have no lives outside of our company? The hackathon is a time-honored tradition amongst hobbyists. When done by professionals, it's not cool, it's exploitative.

Re:hackathon?

[multiben]

Could not agree more. Where I work this type of thing comes around from time to time. "Show us how passionate you are about programming! Stay all night! We'll shout you pizzas and coffees!" Sure, that sounds worth it. When you start giving me random increases in pay, I'll start doing random amounts of unpaid overtime.

Re:hackathon?

[Samantha Wright]

The really weird thing is that they bothered to call it Project Mayhem, when it's well-known that Facebook's codebase is a gigantic messy hairball of bewildering PHP.

Re:hackathon?

[girlintraining]

When you start giving me random increases in pay, I'll start doing random amounts of unpaid overtime.

Make sure the ranges for the call to random() are acceptable, otherwise you're going to get screwed by the law of averages. And if there's one thing you can count on managers to mess with... it's statistics. :)

Re:hackathon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hackathons at Facebook are purely optional. Also, everyone's actually encouraged to not hack on something related to their day-time job. So no, it's not exploitative. Just because your day-time job is related to your hobby, it doesn't mean you can't enjoy that hobby as a professional anymore.

Re:hackathon?

[phantomfive]

Easy situation to deal with.....by going home earlier in the day, randomly. I agree with you, unfortunately, it is necessary to be vigilant to make sure your employers (and anyone else for that matter) don't rip you off.

Re:hackathon?

[bieber]

Truly optional. It's very informal, employees kind of organize themselves into teams centered around ideas they've come up with: what you're working on for the hackathon won't generally have anything to do with your day-to-day work, so if your manager is at all concerned with your hackathon project it will likely only be a matter of personal curiosity, not to evaluate your performance. And it's pretty much a given that you're not going to be in any shape to get a significant amount of work done the next day (the all-nighters have typically been Thursday nights), so it's not like you're being pressed to squeeze in an extra day of work, it's more like rearranging your existing working hours.

Re:hackathon?

[CodeBuster]

when it's well-known that Facebook's codebase is a gigantic messy hairball of bewildering PHP.

If true, that's not surprising given the culture of hackathons and all nighters. As a developer who takes pride in quality work, the whole hackathon phenomenon really bugs me because it idolizes practices which have long been known to produce shitty and unmaintainable code. As others have said, hackathons are fine for hobbyists and those who're just having fun, but this is no way for those who call themselves professionals to be writing code that has even the slightest chance of being taken into production.

Coding all night is stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do it very occasionally when I am really in the groove and banging out a lot of code and I don't want to stop. Or once or twice when deadlines loomed and there was no other way (I'm a game developer). But all-nighters really wreck my productivity for 1-2 days afterward. I'll be tired and make more mistakes than usual, or just not have the mental energy to do a proper day's work. On the whole it is always A NET LOSS of productivity.

Re:hope

[Trepidity]

The great thing about only hiring from a very specific demographic (sub-30 male engineers with no families) is that they're masochists, so it doesn't take much convincing for them to put up with the abuse! It's the same kind of culture that leads people to think pulling all-nighters doing your engineering degree is a sign of hardcoreness (as opposed to just poor time management).

Re:... and then spend

[Sarusa]

Yo bro it's to prove that you're ready to CRUSH CODE and brogram like a real brogrammer bro.

That is of course tongue in cheek... yet accurate. http://www.metafilter.com/113526/Want-to-bro-down-and-crush-code

Re:hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. yes they do. Although I wouldn't call it "abuse", it's just a culture where people are very enthusiastic about what they do and genuinely enjoy their work. I interviewed there and I was impressed by how upbeat everyone was. In the end I decided not to join them because I just didn't feel that excited about their product.

Re:hope

[phantomfive]

Yes. yes they do. Although I wouldn't call it "abuse", it's just a culture where people are very enthusiastic about what they do and genuinely enjoy their work.

I understand that, and I am glad the employees enjoy it. The trap people get into right out of college is they think their current company is the best ever and they won't enjoy any other company. Employers can then take advantage of the situation by underpaying them.

That is abuse: underpaying your employees just because they enjoy their work. It's ok to enjoy your work and get paid well, too.

Re:hope

[phantomfive]

It's a shame you don't enjoy your job enough to want to do it.

I do. I also want to get paid fairly for it.

Enjoying my job is no excuse for letting my employer abuse me.

Re:hope

[phantomfive]

That's good to hear. Let them work all night then.

Facebook itself needs a rethink.

[Animats]

Facebook has some big problems:

• Facebook traffic peaked in mid-2012.
• Facebook profits peaked in 2011.
• Facebook is no longer "cool".

Social just isn't that big a business. Facebook made only $53 million in profit last year, on $5 billion in revenue. (Way down due to some dumb acquisitions. They did better in 2011.) Despite all the noise it makes, Facebook is small compared to Dell or Google or Microsoft or HP or Oracle. VMware and Adobe have revenue roughly comparable to Facebook.

Facebook hasn't had that revenue for long, either. Social networks have a short lifespan. AOL, Geocities, Orkut, Friendster, Myspace... the list of once-big social networks is long. It's hard to make money in "social". Blast out too many ads and users leave. That's what killed Myspace.

Facebook is desperately trying to develop something that will make them cool again, or some way to get people to swallow more ads. All-night hacking sessions probably won't help. They've been acquiring other companies, but that may not help either. Buying Instagram is where their 2012 profits went. Instagram is cool, but not profitable. This year, they bought Hot Studio, a San Francisco design house whose mantra is "build brand loyalty first and ask for payment later". That's so late-1990s first dot-com boom.