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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."

7 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 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!
    2. 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
    3. 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.

    4. 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. 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

  3. 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."