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I've worked 24+ hours straight a handful of times in my career. "Healthy" and "relaxing" are not two adjectives I'd use to describe such coding marathons, and a

by suresk 14y ago

I've worked 24+ hours straight a handful of times in my career. "Healthy" and "relaxing" are not two adjectives I'd use to describe such coding marathons, and a lot of the code that comes out of them is pretty low-quality. I understand there are circumstances that call for them, but I really hope the idea of making it a regular part of doing business doesn't catch on.

borplk 14y ago
I have mixed feelings about hackathons. I'm seeing this culture of hack all night and attitude in the industry and it bothers me a little bit. Mainly because hackers are the only ones pulling hackathons. Sure you might enjoy it to some extent, but should we do it in a commercial environment? This trend over time has created an expectation of hackers and programmers to work like machines. It's everywhere, pulling all-nighters, hacking for ramen noodles, sleeping on the couch, staying until 5am, etc... Whether you want it or not, or like it or not, this sends a signal to everyone else, that the opportunity cost of your time is lower than them because you enjoy what you do, soon enough it becomes the norm, they will take it for granted that you are a hacker and you enjoy what you do and that's all you do. Compare that with the attitude that lawyers have for example, who knows maybe they fucking love their job, but they don't brag about it everywhere and will make sure to never look like they enjoy their job in front of you. No one asks them to say until 4am and hack on legal documents for fun. If they want they can do that too at their own place. They charge you per minute and you wont dare to ask them for 5 extra minutes because hey it's no fun! But god forbid you are a programmer and working on an open-source project. If you don't dedicate your evenings for free to other people you are doing nothing. I feel like we are being taken advantage of because we are constantly talking about hack and fun together.
- paul_milligram 14y ago
  Using peer pressure to encourage others into working all night without pay can be called "pizza parties", "hackathons", or even plain old "exploitation". Tomato, tuhmahto. --- EDIT: Added clarification
brianobush 14y ago
The idea isn't to ship the code from these events, but to test and idea end-to-end without worrying about scalability, code cleanliness, etc. Just see if the idea has legs.

by suresk 14y ago

borplk 14y ago

I have mixed feelings about hackathons. I'm seeing this culture of hack all night and attitude in the industry and it bothers me a little bit. Mainly because hackers are the only ones pulling hackathons. Sure you might enjoy it to some extent, but should we do it in a commercial environment? This trend over time has created an expectation of hackers and programmers to work like machines. It's everywhere, pulling all-nighters, hacking for ramen noodles, sleeping on the couch, staying until 5am, etc... Whether you want it or not, or like it or not, this sends a signal to everyone else, that the opportunity cost of your time is lower than them because you enjoy what you do, soon enough it becomes the norm, they will take it for granted that you are a hacker and you enjoy what you do and that's all you do. Compare that with the attitude that lawyers have for example, who knows maybe they fucking love their job, but they don't brag about it everywhere and will make sure to never look like they enjoy their job in front of you. No one asks them to say until 4am and hack on legal documents for fun. If they want they can do that too at their own place. They charge you per minute and you wont dare to ask them for 5 extra minutes because hey it's no fun! But god forbid you are a programmer and working on an open-source project. If you don't dedicate your evenings for free to other people you are doing nothing. I feel like we are being taken advantage of because we are constantly talking about hack and fun together.

paul_milligram 14y ago
Using peer pressure to encourage others into working all night without pay can be called "pizza parties", "hackathons", or even plain old "exploitation". Tomato, tuhmahto. --- EDIT: Added clarification

brianobush 14y ago

The idea isn't to ship the code from these events, but to test and idea end-to-end without worrying about scalability, code cleanliness, etc. Just see if the idea has legs.