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Agreed on having to have a good enough culture around people, processes, and tools. On the other hand, if your problem is more about animosity between groups o
by nbm 15y ago
Agreed on having to have a good enough culture around people, processes, and tools.
On the other hand, if your problem is more about animosity between groups or individuals than broken processes and an unwillingness to have them change, then there's merit. Having engineers partner on non-critical projects with other engineers, product managers and other non-engineering staff can build up an understanding of their value and purpose, as well as just letting each to know the other as a person.
- jmount 15y agoI like the partner idea. My only real gripe with hackathons is the transience. I don't like the "here work effectively for just one day, and then back to your silo" feeling of a transient event.
- nbm 15y agoIf you have them often enough, I think the transience factor isn't a problem. The tempo of Facebook hackathons seems pretty good to me - somewhere around 8-10 weeks or so between the last three. Doing it once or twice a year in isolation is probably too infrequent to get lasting value - the positive value might have a total lifetime of about 4 months, so I'd suggest three or four times a year is a minimum - unless you have some other mechanisms that try to solve the same issues that hackathons do.