[corytheboyd]

Completely agree, I hate the “hackathon” for so many reasons, guess I’ll vent here too. All of this from the perspective of one frustrated software engineer in web tech.

First of all, if you want innovation, why are you forcing it into a single week? You very likely have smart people with very good ideas, but they’re held back by your number-driven bullshit. These orgs actively kill innovation by reducing talent to quantifiable rows of data.

A product hobbled together from shit prototype code very obviously stands out. It has various pages that don’t quite look/work the same, Cross-functional things that “work everywhere else” don’t in some parts.

It rewards only the people who make good presentations, or pick the “current hype thing” to work on. Occasionally something good that addresses real problems is at least mentioned but the hype thing will always win (if judged by your SLT)

Shame on you if the slop prototype is handed off to some other team than the hackathon presenters. Presenters take all the promotion points, then implementers have to sort out a bunch of bullshit code, very likely being told to just ship the prototype “it works you idiots, I saw it in the demo, just ship it.” Which is so incredibly short sighted.

I think the depressing truth is your executives know it’s all hobbled together bullshit, but that it will sell anyway, so why invest time making it actually good? They all have their golden parachutes, what do they care about the suckers stuck on-call for the house-of-cards they were forced to build, despite possessing the talent to make it stable? All this stupidity happens over and over again, not because it is wise, or even the best way to do this, the truth is just a flaccid “eh, it’ll work though, fuck it, let’s get paid.”

[jcgrillo]

You touched on this but to expand on "numbers driven bullshit" a bit, it seems to me the biggest drag on true innovation is not quantifiability per se but instead how organizations react to e.g. having some quantifiable target. It leaves things like refactoring for maintainability or questioning whether a money-making product could be improved out of reach. I've seen it happen multiple times where these two forces conspire to arrive at the "eh, fuck it" place--like the code is a huge mess and difficult to work on, and the product is "fine" in that it's making revenue although customers constantly complain about it. So instead of building the thing customers actually want in a sustainable way we just... do nothing.

We have to do better than that before congratulating ourselves about all the wonderful "innovation".