Much of the research on hackathons has focused on success defined solely in terms of product impact, for example, the number of hackathon projects that lead to new features. But hackathons can also be an important turning point for people. A place where developers can safely experiment with new identities and new ways of working together.
In this Lightning Talk, I’d like to share a successful internal hackathon at Pluralsight and how it impacts the developer experience. We present evidence from our original research studies. There, we used pre- and post-measurements from behavioral science to find quantitative evidence of the benefits of hackathons with 64 participants using rigorous survey measures of anxiety and impostor syndrome. Importantly, teammate behavior during hackathons is an important means of reducing people’s stress, anxiety, and impostor syndrome, and a positive hackathon experience can only lead to positive results from a single hackathon. What we discovered is that we can also predict the likelihood that people will participate in a hackathon or a new hackathon. The rest is technical work.
Hackathons are not only suitable for team building at this time. Our research found that hackathons serve as a microcosm for engineering teams in general, working in similarly high-stress and time-constrained environments. One of the key takeaways from our story is that leadership investments in small but powerful novel learning opportunities outside of people’s normal work, such as hackathons, are important for developer growth and engagement within the organization. This means it can have a long-term impact on your sense of belonging. organization. This talk will help managers run successful hackathons, promote a culture of team belonging and learning, and reduce the effects of workplace anxiety and impostor syndrome that disproportionately impact employees with underrepresented identities. We provide practical, science-backed recommendations on how to do it.
