Hack Day
This is one of the many amazing concepts, which I came across in Bar Camp this weekend (on 2nd December 2006). I know my reputation is not that great in this regard so quick disclaimer is that its nothing to do with bars and camping. This was a 2-day technical event on various topics conducted by Thought Works this time.
And it has nothing to do with hacking the government databases. In this, any organization gives its employees freedom for 24 hrs to write a piece of working code (can be anything from a complete application to a code snippet) which can be running on any platform, related to any domain, written in any of the programming languages, absolutely no holds barred.
It can be done either by individuals or small teams as well.
Statutory Warning: it’s a NO Power Point Zone.
Ground rules:
1. Needs to be announced well in advance. This gives the participants enough time to come up with ideas and organizers time to arrange for any resources if required.
2. Hack day is only for 24 hours. Timings can be decided on when to start and end it. But if the duration is something else, its not “hack day” anymore though it can be referred by any other name.
3. Code written during this duration should be working in the end.
4. At the end of the day, each team (or individual) has to give EXACTLY a 90 seconds presentation of what that piece of code does. Ideally a screen is shown next to him showing the huge timer. If the time exceeds beyond 100, a buzzer starts that totally drowns his voice so no way he can continue beyond that.
5. Whole environment is to be kept totally informal so even the top dudes from the company are not allowed to get onto a podium and give coma-inducing speeches. But it’s made sure that they are part of the crowd when the presentations are done. Then the participants can be assured that the management recognizes and supports this event fully.
6. What all allowed for participants before the event beginsà if they require access to any special databases or servers, they need to inform the organizers in advance. Once the access is provided, they can test all the required connections before the event begins. Such basic staging is allowed.
7. There should not be any theme associated to the topics. The moment some catch is associated to the event, it is more on the lines of work and restricts the freedom to think.
Probable Advantages:
Though the primary idea of this event is to raise motivation level of employees (mostly techies in this case), there are a few good outcomes from management perspective as well. This will work as a marketing pitch when you go and try to convince them for this event.
Foremost being the amount of amazing ideas, which get generated in a short span of time. People come up with all kinds of crazy ideas and implement them in the given time frame. This has proved very successful especially in a product centric company like Yahoo. For the last 3 Hack Days conducted by Yahoo, various ideas are already been converted to the products. 2 of them are going to be released in the market very soon.
This can lead to a better interaction among the teams working on different tiers. If a team working on main frames wants to make a web application, then they need to contact a web developer for that from the other team.
This concept according to me will take some time or probably eternity to catch up in huge service industries. Probable reasons being they won’t see any value in getting new product ideas as the clients drive everything. And even harder to convince to the HR people that this unconventional approach which is not taught to them in the management schools can work as a great motivation for the techie people. Maybe it can be conducted at ODC level perhaps, which may involve 100 people or so.
