{"id":5848,"date":"2013-12-11T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-11T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/creator\/?p=3795"},"modified":"2020-03-30T19:09:43","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T23:09:43","slug":"hackathon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/ideas\/professional-development\/hackathon","title":{"rendered":"Hackathon and on and on"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s been much talk recently about the criteria we should use when hiring new people onto a technical team. Over recent years, I\u2019ve seen that people are using Github commits (the number of times you contribute to open source software projects) and other measures to vet people as to how good, committed, involved, and generally important people are.<\/p>\n

This week, there\u2019ve been a few\u00a0posts<\/a>\u00a0about<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0idea<\/a>\u00a0that by including stats about what people do in their spare time in the hiring process, we run the risk of severely weighting our teams towards people who have lots of spare time.<\/p>\n

That could mean losing out on talented people and biasing hiring decisions towards young people, non-parents, people who don\u2019t have to have two jobs to make ends meet, people who don\u2019t have to travel long distances to get to their place of work because of property prices, people who don\u2019t have elderly or disabled relatives to care for and so on.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t want to consider these measures in hiring decisions at Makeshift, and I\u2019ll be continuing to push that idea next time we\u2019re interviewing (which is pretty much all the time).<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another thing that people sometimes ask in software interviews:\u201cHave you been to any hackathons?\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a question that on the surface seems sane enough, but it got me thinking\u2026<\/p>\n

Are hackathons for the privileged?<\/h3>\n

I spent recent years\u00a0researching hacker culture<\/a>\u00a0and cultural hacking, and I\u2019ve attended (and won!) my fair share of hackdays and hackathons. I love them. It\u2019s a chance to\u00a0move fast and break things<\/i>, to\u00a0learn by making<\/a>, to explore ideas with new people and to demonstrate what technology can do in an area that is in need of some fresh thinking.<\/p>\n

Yet it tends to be a young man\u2019s sport in the main.\u00a0Young Rewired State<\/a>\u00a0do a good job at balancing things gender-wise for younger hackers, but those of us with kids find it harder and harder to attend weekend events with no clear outcome and the very real costs of childcare and time away from home to consider.<\/p>\n

It occurred to me today that if we\u2019re giving Github commits (those units of open source contribution) a hard time as hiring criteria, we should probably apply the same thinking to the idea that attendance at 24-36hr hackathons and hackdays will make you more employable.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written at length about the idea of\u00a0sustainable work in a startup<\/a>. I have a rule of\u00a0leaving by example<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 making it clear to my team they really aren\u2019t expected to kill themselves working long hours. I was speaking to\u00a0ntlk<\/a>\u00a0the other day, who\u2019s one of the best software people I\u2019ve ever worked with, and they said\u00a0\u201cIf I have weeks where I work more than eight hours a day, I find those extra hours just don\u2019t seem to help\u201d<\/i>\u00a0(Or similar words to that effect).<\/p>\n

Hacking into the small hours<\/h3>\n

Hackathons encourage the opposite, in my experience. People working long hours into the night to make something, sacrificing sleep, health and whatever they have planned the following week.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the dark side of hack culture and it often seeps into the modes of Monday- Friday working too. Hackathons seem to double-down on reinforcing an already entrenched idea of \u201clong hours = maximum potential success for your startup\u201d, which depresses me to no end.<\/p>\n

\u201cHackathons are a great way to learn, but not about working sustainably\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In one company I founded I remember a week where I\u2019d been working, or attempting to work, every single waking hour of the week and clocked about 120 hours of productive time. No joke. Sadly it wasn\u2019t isolated, just the peak of a wave of work.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s insanity.<\/i>\u00a0You don\u2019t get anywhere screwing yourself and your team over by working long hours into the night \u2014 you write bad code and end up cleaning up your mess anyway. Nobody wants you to do it, and it\u2019s only some odd idea about\u00a0work heroism<\/i>\u00a0that makes you think that you should have this behaviour. When I see it happening on any team I\u2019m working on I stamp on it.<\/p>\n

Bad hacker. No.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the\u00a0\u201cFTW\u201d hacker culture<\/b>\u00a0pervades all of software. The 120-hour hacking week, to many would probably seem like some kind of holy grail of personal productivity. If you\u2019re not making something, you\u2019re wasting time. 8 hours a day? That\u2019s for those corporate losers! We\u2019re the start-uppers! We\u2019re going to win by pulling longer hours! Oh hang on\u2026<\/p>\n

No. On a good team, you want smart, committed people who work hard, are diligent, work well with others, care about their work, about quality, about people and know where their limits lie. And they probably, just like ntlk, have realised that after about eight hours of looking at a screen and attempting to solve a hard problem, that they\u2019re probably done for the day and it\u2019s time to go and do whatever else they do in their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf hackathons are a factor in hiring we\u2019re filtering out \u00a0people who don\u2019t have spare time\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that\u2019s where privilege comes in. Because if we have teams of people that realise that, not only is the long-hours hacker culture generally a bad idea for teams, there might suddenly be a lightbulb moment where people hiring for those teams might realise: hackathons are a great way to learn, but not about working sustainably. If we hire based on hackathon attendance we\u2019re filtering out a lot of talented people who don\u2019t have the luxury of attending. We should look for people who are skilled and committed for eight hours a day.<\/p>\n

Then perhaps we\u2019d open up a wider pool of potential hires. And that would have a pretty big effect, because then we\u2019d be hiring people based on their software or technology abilities, and not on how much spare time they have.<\/p>\n

Editor’s note: This story originally appeared here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s been much talk recently about the criteria we should use when hiring new people onto a technical team. Over recent years, I\u2019ve seen that people are using Github commits (the number of times you contribute to open source software projects) and other measures to vet people as to how good, committed, involved, and generally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":935,"featured_media":34059,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43902],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-professional-development"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHackathon and on and on<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There\u2019s been much talk recently about the criteria we should use when hiring new people onto a technical team. 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