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Facebook's Hackathons Get a Rethink

Posted by Unknown on from the sleep-deprivation-optional dept.

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."

11 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. hackathon? by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    1. Re:hackathon? by multiben · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:hackathon? by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    3. Re:hackathon? by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Funny

      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. :)

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    4. Re:hackathon? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:hackathon? by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    6. Re:hackathon? by bieber · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  2. Coding all night is stupid. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:... and then spend by Sarusa · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  4. Re:hope by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  5. Facebook itself needs a rethink. by Animats · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Facebook has some big problems:

    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.