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Comment by quuxplusone | Hacker News Reader

Recently on HN: "The Gang Has A Mid-Life Crisis"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43860696

Hackathons are fun and productive when what you need to do/learn — something you haven't already done/learned — can be done/learned in a weekend. Once you graduate, there's a lot fewer of those things lying around. Quote:

> We need look no further than the "hackathon," that sad facsimile of the days when we were all learning the basics so fast that the world could be ours with just a day or two of focused effort. Hype up an exciting atmosphere, assemble some folks with so few attachments in life that they have time to spend all weekend at a hackathon, and this ritual will summon up the old gods. The hackathon is the proof that people believe this can work, and it is the proof that it doesn't.

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In my experience, hackathons in larger companies are valves that sometimes release the pressure of things that people wanted to do, had been planning to do and thinking through for months before the hackathon was even scheduled, and finally are allowed to implement. These are binge-programming days/nights when the engineers finally don't need to work on tickets, and don't have to follow the due processes.

Corollary: if your company promises to have a hackathon one day, it's best to get prepared and have a bunch of good ideas well ahead of time.

Game jams (similar to hackathons) are great for applying what you already know but with a new group of people. They're much harder if you _dont_ know what your doing (contrary to what you suggest).

I've found that the group really makes the experience, and find them less fun for the tech and more fun for learning about the people through the work and a team project without the constraints of a corporation.

And generally, it's not just people who aren't tied up in this that will participate, but people who will make time to do something exciting and form an interesting connection.

I think that's because games are an art and highly creative. You're crafting an experience, usually a combination of story and gameplay.

Regular software projects can also be creative, but almost all software is pure CRUD at the heart.

The next issue is the required time for the MVP. For a game, you can validate the base game loop quiet quickly. It's a lot harder to validate wherever regular software is actually viable, because you usually need to basically finish it entirely before the UX can really be validated if a mock-up doesn't suffice

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