I like public hackathons, I like the energy, I like meeting people, I like seeing how other people do things.
I worked at one place that had an internal "hackathon" where the CEO wanted us to deliver something small in two hours. My immediate take was: "it takes 20 minutes to build our system (I knew because I just did it) so we have at most 6 trial-and-error cycles, a realistic plan takes that into account". The engineering manager said "no way it takes that long", I said, "let's go ahead and I'll time it with my stopwatch", and it took 18 minutes.
In that sense it was representative of how well we were planning in general. I felt I learned something from it, I'm not sure that management did.
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I like public hackathons, I like the energy, I like meeting people, I like seeing how other people do things.
I worked at one place that had an internal "hackathon" where the CEO wanted us to deliver something small in two hours. My immediate take was: "it takes 20 minutes to build our system (I knew because I just did it) so we have at most 6 trial-and-error cycles, a realistic plan takes that into account". The engineering manager said "no way it takes that long", I said, "let's go ahead and I'll time it with my stopwatch", and it took 18 minutes.
In that sense it was representative of how well we were planning in general. I felt I learned something from it, I'm not sure that management did.