Hackathons at Bench.
At Bench, we get together every 3 months to hack.
For us, a Hackathon is where we think about solving any Bench-related problem:
What bugs you?
Where do you see possibilities to make a difference in the lives of our clients? In the life of an engineer?
We put ourselves in the shoes of the people important to us, and think about problems they face and the opportunities in front of them.
We get passionate about both technology and helping people.
The steps we follow are:
Before the Hackathon:
- Everyone is given the opportunity to put ideas into the hat
- Multiple ideas submitted per person is totally cool
- The person providing the idea doesn’t have to join the team
- The folks with ideas present them with a pitch a few days prior to the hackathon
- People sign up for one or more teams to expose interest ahead of time
During the Hackathon:
- People self-organize into teams and we coalesce the ideas. Some ideas with be chosen, others won’t
- Teams get a day and a half of exploration, learning more about the problem and the potential solutions, prototyping, writing code, preparing a presentation to teach others of what they learned and why it’s important
- At the end of the hackathon, teams present their results to the entire organization, including our CEO
- We all vote for the awards
After the Hackathon:
- We look at how each result will (or will not) influence our organization into the future, and we align these on our strategy
Intentionally, we don’t want to push into production — this is experimental. If the idea has legs, we’ll get it into our proper channel for productization. If our engineers think it’s going into production, they’ll spend too much time on the solution. We want this to be a really fast iteration of learning.
We give out 4 awards, recognizing teams for a spectrum of thinking:
- The Asphalt Award for the project most likely to be in our roadmap
- The Sputnik Award for the biggest moonshot. Who tries the weirdest / hardest thing (you don’t have to complete/succeed to win this)
- The Sweet Caroline Award for best crowd pleaser (there’s always something that doesn’t really fit—Bench may not do it, but it’s cool)
- The whole enchilada — the overall winning idea
Riddle me this, Batman: Why hug your inner hacker?
Why spend the energy on a Hackathon?
We do this because we want to achieve the following goals:
- Reinforce our culture — both our corporate Cultural Values (specifically: Keep It Human, Get Scrappy), and our Engineering Technology Principles (Create Value, Foster Growth)
- Create a deep sense of community. This is critical — the people we surround ourselves with influence our growth and who we are. We want to be challenged, we want to challenge others, and we want to keep it human throughout with laughter and joy.
- Empower everyone to be curious, observing and investigating problems and opportunities that they are passionate about. Going beyond technology, and learning about the problem, and most importantly, the people experiencing it.
- Enable and reinforce innovation, and the long term value of trying something out even if:
a. It’s a bit “out there”
b. Nothing directly tangible comes from that effort—especially that we openly embrace trying, failing, and learning from that experience
And at the end of the day, it’s just fun.
After all, we are engineers, and really, what does every engineer want?
To learn new things and solve meaningful problems that make a difference in the world.
Written by Collin Roth, Engineer 6 at Bench.
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Want to learn more about Technology at Bench?
- We Built A Tool To Help Us Foster Growth In Our Engineers
- Breaking Good — Having A Blameless Engineering Culture
- Three Unexpected Benefits of Career Development Tracks in Engineering
- Measuring Agility
- Don’t Optimize For Tenure
If you are interested in learning more about Bench Accounting or a career with our Engineering team, apply here: https://bench.co/careers/
