choong pw

In recent years, Hackathon/hack week/hack day has been the driving force behind the innovation of the large company. It also serves multi-purpose. 1) Medium for recruitment to find passionate engineers. 2) Timeout and a change of pace from the usual backlogs. 3) Builds culture and meeting new people.

Traditionally in my current company, hack week has been an engineering activity only. Engineers and the product team will set aside one week of our backlog for this event. The only caveat, unless there is a showstopper blocker, is no backlog items.

Touchwood. Even on a normal day, we rarely see this happen to any of our products. At least to say, the amount of effort the team spent to streamline and finetune our DevOps paid off.

What change

This year, to spice things up a little. We split the event into two stages. 1. Idea stage, 2. Hack week.

The intention is to open up this hack week outside of engineering. The catch is, not everyone is technical. Thus, the idea stage sort of works well here. It reduces the barrier of entry for people to get involved. And subsequently, learn more about the engineering process.

Then comes the day of remote work

Remote work has changed the way how teams work altogether. Cross squad bonding gets rarer nowadays. Something that used to be as simple as going out for lunch together for casual chit-chat is not that simple anymore.

On the flip side, all communication is made through our Workplace App. This makes the communication a whole lot easier and visible to a bigger audience within the company.

We want to encourage members to form new teams outside of their day-to-day team. Even better, it would be outside of the engineering team. To make team formation visible, we went on building a dashboard for people to see it live.

Motivating Results

We have gotten more ideas than we did in our previous hack week. Besides that, there is also a good mix of teams that form from different departments and locations. As an organizer, nothing beats the joy of seeing the intended behavior get achieved.

Finding Sponsor

It has been for years that we already got the buy-in from the company business stakeholder. We get to continue this cultural event in engineering is all thanks to them. In return, every half-a-year, we get to see interesting ideas come out of the hack week.

This time around, we also got the blessing from the Cultural team to give us a helping hand organizing this hack week. We get better branding such as logo, theme, swags, vouchers, and managing the delivery logistic. All this add-up to make the hack week that much more memorable.

Judging

The last piece of the puzzle is Judging. It is something I think we are still trying to learn and do better. As an example, hack week often has a theme around it. How do you encourage ideas and implementation to align with the behavior intended? At the same time, not to break the creativity flow of the team when trying to innovate.

In the end, winning is not everything here. It is the process and the fun of building things that make us engineers. Still, what competition doesn’t have prizes, right?

Prize

We used to give out voucher as prizes because is easy and convenient. With the help from the cultural team, we can step up our game and offer more memorable prizes for the competition.

Voucher vs Good. After hearing and reading the post hack week feedback, I get the sense that people tend to appreciate small goods or token better. Mainly, this kind of item tends to last over time and be more memorable.