*Post header illustration by @gelabert.art 🙇🏻♂️
Why Hackathons are bad for you
I hate Hackathons 💔. That's a bit ironic because as a developer I have participated in quite a few: a Game Jam for beginners, CodinGame (which I still love 💖 nevertheless), teaming up with a friend… but there was always something about the concept that didn't agree with me 🤔.
If you think about it, it has nothing to do with the way teams 👪 construct a modern software product in most companies. For example, in such a short time, you cannot implement a real Agile Methodology for your project 🧮.
I think Hackathons generally proclaim a big myth in our global dev community: "a good programmer should just ignore their need to rest and just code all night, drinking enormous amounts of coffee ☕, in order to be able to finish a product worthy of the public attention 🤘🏼". I believe this is more intense in the game development industry 🏭, where indies and employees are usually "crunching" to meet impossible deadlines 📅.
Why is crunch bad?
It excludes people with healthy sleep routines 😪 from tech jobs
It even excludes people with children 👶🏿 or old people 👵🏻 at their care who doesn't have so much free time ⏳
A big portion of those excluded people are women and people older than 40 years, those who traditionally take care of other family members 👩👧👦. Those two groups are still minorities in our software industry, while for example in the case of women 👩🏽, they actually are half of the global population. I think we'll agree that men 👨🏻 should be included in this "caring responsibility" but I don't think diversity will be accomplished meanwhile companies in Software Development 🏭 keep expecting people to work overtime every week and code all weekend in a Hackathon "to have fun" 🥱.
- Crunch damages the physical and mental health of the ones that experience it 😢. Mental health is one of the bigger health problems on the rise in modern societies: and our industrial-age-old paradigms 🏭 about how to produce are just making it worse.
But Hackathons…!
I understand the main counterpoint: Hackathons allow people to focus on a single task and motivates them to do things they normally would be too distracted to even try. But, is that really true? 🕵️♀️
I have known a lot of many developers in my career. And mostly all of them have told me a story about having an impossible-to-fix bug 🐛 or a feature too hard to design. But, after a good night's sleep or maybe just a peaceful walk, they had a breakthrough idea and fixed their issue in no time at all 💪.
They actually saved time having proper rest. They just needed to escape from the Cognitive Tunneling trap 🕳.
This kind of creativity 💭 that the mind can access when wandering off or by organizing thoughts and memories while sleeping is just not present in a Hackathon. There's too much rush and stress.
That pressure is cool when your goal is clear and your task monotonous, but a lot of Hackathon's themes are only decided inside the time limitation of 24-48 hours ⏰...
There's a good documentary 📺 named Take Your Pills about how our modern society is obsessed with being productive at all times.
Is there a way to design better Hackathons?
Yes, indeed. There's a very good example in the "Unity" and "Games for Change" Cross-Cultural Impact Jam. They decided to make the Jam one week long 📆, so students from different parts of the world could team up and participate while keeping up with their studies 👨🏿🎓.
Closing time
So, yeah, I believe that's all I had to say about Hackathons 🤐. I cannot assure you that I myself won't be participating in any new Hackathon someday, but I'm sure in the future we will all out-grow this kind of practice as a global community, making Software Development a more inclusive and healthy environment 🌅.
Have pros or cons to add about Hackathons? Show them to me in the comments 😉