In my case, it was a regular 8-5 day, it just happened to take place at corporate HQ instead of our local offices.
I’ve known companies to do the “72 hour straight” hackathons, they usually come with a substantial bonus to the top three teams, plus all the free food you want, plus swag like shirts and stuff. Still not sure that’s worth it unless you’re on the winning team and get a 4 figure bonus.
That’s always been my cynical take on it.
But I love this description! 
While it really depends on the company, it’s culture and it’s goals, hackathons absolutely should be totally inclusive.
Experts hardly if ever are, and the main role of hackathons is to address business needs outside of the normal structure. They are intended to not target some meritocracy of the individual but to unblock work on low hanging fruit and the “merit” of measure should be the business value and not tied to an org chart.
IT/Dev and all groups tend to be isolated from the pain points of other segments of the company. And even if they are fully aware of low hanging fruit or 80/20 problems they may lack the power to prioritize those efforts.
Humans in general tend to stick with their existing beliefs, pre-conceptions and biases. We cannot all test the null with every single decision and in theory opening hackathons to a broader audience will help break past those artificial human barriers.
Related to #1. While they may not admit it, a lot of development is cargo culting solutions off stack exchange. While experiencing absolutely has value and merit, the entire process is really being paid to be a professional puzzle/riddle solver. And sometimes it really helps to have someone with a fresh idea come in and unblock you from a rut. While this may sound absurd, I once had an employer who forced me to block reddit and stackexchange at the firewall, because they always saw developers the sites and assumed that it was hurting productivity. But developer progress was destroyed by that action.
As a BA, you know what your pain points are, you are the subject matter expert and it would be counter productive to the effort to exclude you from this intentionally disruptive event.
I actually have never seen hackathons provide much value at any organization that does restrict participation.
As a concrete example, directly working with BA’s at a previous company, we managed a major version upgrade of Oracle EBS in three days. This unblocked critical functionality and accomplished something that had been bid as a 6 month + multi million dollar effort by multiple vendors in the past.
Sure they weren’t decompiling java executives to change hard coded machine names and email addresses, but they were critical in letting us know it was a possibility and their familiarity with the system was critical for testing and even understanding that the effort was possible.
I thought a hackathon was a concerted effort to see if you can hack into other systems, and that maybe could be aimed at the toxic VP. 
I stand corrected – it is more benign than I thought!
People who break into systems are properly referred to as “crackers”. Despite what the popular press would have you believe, there are still people who use the term correctly. For instance, the coursework for Harvard’s intro to computers course had (maybe still has) an optional “hacker edition” for students wanting to dig deeper into the subject.
To be clear, I’m not claiming to have attended Harvard (I haven’t) but I have watched all of the recorded lectures on several of their CS classes.
Did you mean the stackoverflow portion of the stackexchange?
If so, I don’t really understand that action. Why would someone think that accessing stackoverflow would hurt productivity? I find myself quite often finding solutions for programming problems there instead of laboriously rolling my own. Obviously you would check what you get for accuracy, but it certainly aids productivity instead of hindering it.
Or did they think that people were just spending time reading stackoverflow for fun instead of working?
Over the weekend I had an idea that I mulled over. The documentation set that I’ve been assigned to work on is shamefully shitty and I’ve had no luck getting permission (yes, that’s shameful too, that we need permission to improve quality!) to fix things. My idea was that I could take one document and rewrite it the way I think it should be. But then I recalled that the largest roadblock to getting said permission was the toxic VP (who wrote some of it way back when, which is why it’s perfect in his eyes) will find a reason to disqualify it as a hackathon “project”. I’m also not sure how I would demo it at the end. Show before and after pages?
Another idea I had was to take one document and convert it into the Wiki idea that we new people have been harping on. (The toxic VP is all excited about new technology for software engines but not documentation or business processes.) That is easier to demonstrate, but…
Came into work this morning to find the place wallpapered with posters about the hackathon. Which is good because the posters finally have some details. The hackathon is 29 hours. Not sure we can do either of these ideas in that timeframe.
Thanks!
You have the right underlying idea: use the hackathon as political cover to say, do, or demonstrate something that will end up with the Big Boss ordering the toxic VP to sit down & shut up so you can get some useful work done.
If you can pull that off you’ll be a hero to Big Boss and all the peons. If not, you’ll be roadkill under VP’s wheels.
Do ya feel lucky JC? Well do ya?
Seriously, best of luck on the job search you’ve told us you’re working hard at. Your present circumstances sound utterly intolerable, hackathon or no.
A true hackathon can be a magical event where someone offers talented hackers a free space to invent in exchange for fame, glory, money, or satisfaction.
A corporate hackathon is crass attempt to get all the magical things, but the incentive is pizza and no meetings. And the “no meetings” part may be because it’s on Saturday.
As a BA you can’t do much, but I will send you $10 if you start the event by saying “This solution needs to do DevOps. All the other hackathons are doing it.”
If you had an idea which they would support, they would have supported it by now. They may let you do it as an activity during the 29 hours, but then put it on the shelf and not use it.
Save yourself the frustration. Call in sick for two days. You won’t miss a thing.
Way too smelly for me. And our dogs sleep with us.
Thinking on your feet is an entirely different thing. That I like.
Thanks, and yes, I’ve been sending out resumes like crazy over the past few weeks. I’m also ramping up work on my pet supply shop to try to get that profitable. One way or the other, I’ll end up with something better. (I’m 54 with a huge resume (that I crop and tailor per job application, but that leaves gaps between college and recent jobs), so recognize that my age probably makes me corporate poison.)
While I’m here, though, I am sort of walking the fence between disgusted apathy and wanting to see if I can solve problems. I’m very much a solution person, so when I sit back and websurf for days instead of fixing what I clearly see is shit makes me feel like a whiny, useless waste of space. Just for my own sanity, I throw around ideas to try.