Several companies I’ve worked over the years have had something like a Hackweek. It’s an occasion where essentially all (or at least most) of engineering shuts down for a week so people can pursue projects unrelated to their day-to-day job. Sometimes it’s quarterly; other times, annual. One thing is certain: everything grinds to a halt. So the real questions are: “what is it really for?” and “is it worth it?”
What is it really for?
The biggest source of disagreement, to me, is what the point of something like a Hackweek even ought to be. Is it for innovation? Is it a stay-cation for developers? Is it team building? Is it a political maneuvering tool to free up developer time for project managers that want to experiment?
Honestly, in the absence of someone at the top saying “The reason we do this is for X,” the answer is it’s probably all of them—and it does all of them poorly.
Is it worth it?
So is it worth it if it does a bunch of things poorly? I think the only circumstance in which it’s worth it is it you have a shared value of “innovation for innovation’s sake,” and vanishingly few companies actually believe this. I’ll come back to this later.
If you’re doing it as a pseudo-staycation as in “recharge time to do something fun and exciting” you’d be better off having a mandatory minimum vacation policy. Hacking is fun, but it’s not rest. I can’t shout this point loudly enough: projects you work on or projects your employer gives you are both projects and are work. It’s good for people to take time off and not think about work. Only rest is rest.1
If it’s supposed to be team building it’s only going to work for smaller companies and even then it’s not really worth it. The larger the corporate structure, the more the composition of hackweek teams will mimic the larger organization. People naturally gravitate to starting mini projects with people they know and trust- and that means the people they interact with on a daily basis. You can fight this with better organization and up-front planning but then it starts looking like any other company project and you start asking… “why though?” If the goal is to get folks to meet people outside of their bubble then cheaper more intentional options abound.
The fun one: what if it’s a political maneuvering tool? I have definitely seen this one and I have no special advice. In all likelihood you have a leadership vacuum and people are looking for ways to operate outside the system to get things done. Rebranding “Hackweek” as “Fix it week” is the technical version of this. Teams can’t get the headroom to budget time to address technical debt so what if we just, y’know, block off just one week so we can all focus on that stuff.
Innovation and the lens of “value”
So what if it’s about “innovation?”
If the key requirement behind the innovation is that it has “value” then Hackweek makes the least sense. You’re already part of a company- likely a legal entity with shareholders in furtherance of a mission statement to maximize value. Assuming that the leadership is executing their fiduciary responsibility, then your day job is already the greatest maximization of this goal.2 So, really it’s about “what if there’s something related to our core mission we just aren’t seeing?” If that’s the case you would be better off with something like Google’s (often mythical)3 “20% time.” Building the overhead into the calendar all year long provides better flexibility, allows people time to think and plan, and lets groups form and reform as they want. As a system it’s also much more tolerant of surprise when things need to change. If someone needs to abandon it one week for “reasons” they know they’ll have it the following week or even double it up. It also provides breathing room for plans to change in response to new information.
So, at last, we come to the possibility you believe in “innovation for innovation’s sake.” Every once in a while you believe that people should just experiment. The differentiator here is that projects don’t need to have a connection to “value.” Just stretching what’s possible. Maybe the project is seeing which cereals in the micro kitchen combine well together and making a chart. Who knows. If this is true, then Hackweek might actually make sense. Just turn everyone loose and see what happens! The bigger point I want to underscore here is if you believe:
- experimentation time is “earned” and a “privilege”
- should always be value-focused
- is a “as long as everything is working well with no competing interests”
- at management’s discretion
Your company doesn’t actually believe this. You would almost certainly be better off doing something else.
