Why we hack
Almost every tech company in our industry holds regular hackathons. For example, at Meetup, we do about three hackathons a year that are each two days long. Hackathons are such a standard that companies talk about them as being core to company culture and a big part of engineering recruiting and retention.
Since we’re constantly changing our company for the better, before our latest hackathon we asked ourselves, “Why do we hack?” We wanted anyone at the company to be able to answer the question, “Why do we spend our precious time hacking multiple times a year?” I searched the internet for things written about why other tech companies hold regular hackathons and found surprisingly little out there. So, I’m writing our own story.
As we do with every complicated question or decision we have to make, we used our company values to ground us in answering this question. We asked ourselves: How does hacking help us always go for maximum impact on lives (our first company value)?
I solicited feedback from people on different teams across the company and worked closely with our CEO and Head of Employee Experience . As we kicked off our latest hackathon this past week, I presented “Why we hack” to the whole company as a way to answer that question in the right way for Meetup, our mission, and our values.
Our core hackathon principal is that the things we do during hackathons are things that all teams need to constantly do in order to reach our ambitious company goals and mission. They include:
- Teams need to constantly be experimenting bravely and boldly. Hackathons give us the creative space to experiment and be really brave and bold with ideas, train ourselves to try new things, and think big.
- We must continuously develop into stronger problem-solving teams. Hackathons give us the permission to work with new people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills and train our problem-solving muscles to become even stronger.
- We always need to be launching things that will empower Meetup and our members forward. Hackathon projects are by their nature ambitious and stretch their creators. We make things that will propel Meetup, the team, or the individual forward.
I think talking about why we hack aligned and inspired people to experiment even more boldly and really push one another. What the teams demoed this time sparked more potential new product and engineering infrastructure ideas than ever before. Happy hacking to all!
