[kcon]

I understand this article is a little dated, but for a follow-up blog post, I'm interested in hearing more about Tinder's internal hackathons. What motivated hosting an internal hackathon? What format was chosen, i.e. duration, criteria for projects, criteria for participants, etc.? How often are they held? Do employees retain any rights for the projects they work on? How is participation encouraged?

[maffydub]

I don't know about Tinder, but the (telecom) software development company I work for holds internal hackathons twice a year (one in May, one in November). We've been doing this for about 6 years, with over 150 attendees each time from offices around the UK. We normally have teams of 3-5, with a focus on innovation (e.g. bots, IoT, AI). Each runs for 24 hours from 17:00 on Thursday through to 17:00 on Friday when pitching/demos start (2 minutes each) followed by prizes and food/drinks/party. Any work produced belongs to the company (bear in mind this is mostly during work time) although we look at most innovative ideas for patent angles, and we get bonuses for patents that get filed as a result. Prizes are relatively token, but prestigious. Participation hasn't actively had to be encouraged - most engineers who are available attend. The main motivation for the hackathons are innovation and morale (everyone seems to enjoy them), but other benefits are education (learning new skills, languages, APIs, etc.), working with new people/teams and personal development (e.g. it's not unusual for new employees to take on technical lead roles that they wouldn't have normally).

We also hold "vacathons", which are hackathons just for the interns in the summer. There are about 50 attendees, and because they haven't always done too much software development beforehand, these are 3 days long and people are less likely to work through the night (although we lay on food in the evening, and people often stay until 10ish). The theme for these is more general - anything loosely to do with communication is accepted. As with the full hackathons, teams form and generate ideas themselves, but we also assign a mentor (a full-time employee) to each team to help them with any technical problems as well as planning/working as a team.

Hope that's informative!