Go ahead, stage a hackathon. But pray it doesn't work too well

Re: Hackaton ideas - sure, hackaton code - no thanks

"Instead of discarding it and rewriting it from scratch they attempt to sanitize and productize it."

Its been happening for a very, very long time, and didn't suddenly start with hackathons. Coming from an extremely LARGE closed source shop, I can tell you that you just described how a LOT of commercial closed source code escaped into the wild. It also results in a good chunk of the security defects, crashes, etc etc etc, and its not actually engineering's fault (typically). Product Marketing after seeing the PoC demo will say "it works doesn't it?" Your response: "Yes, but its quickly slapped together code solely for this demo". Product Marketing's response? "From what I've seen here, it works fine, the main customer wanting this will love it. You are a perfectionist who is just being too cautious, SHIPIT!" Weeks/Months later, customer defects start rolling in and the same idiot who told you to ship, is now on your case for the high bug counts and the bad metrics are going against your performance review... *sigh* (oh yeah, and that guy got a bonus for having the feature out early while you lose your year end due to the bad review resulting from from high bug counts...

Moral of the story, have all objections documented in emails, Product Marketing long ago has replaced Lawyers in my "who's going up against the wall when the revolution comes" list

Re: "Hacking as a scheduled event".

Spontaneity needs proper planning in advance. Now, put on your nonconformist's uniform and get cracking, we are on a schedule here. And don't forget to fill out the informality tracking forms this time.

Re: Kerbal

And surgeon simulator too if memory serves (that's why the controls are notoriously difficult.)

The vaguest of points

"I witnessed something illegal happen once, but, probably for legal reasons, I'm not going to tell you what it was.

Don't do illegal things, like this unspecified illegal thing."

I read it as...

way out of garden variety bullshit, and into more agile bullshit and it made some sense. Then, after coffee, I read it again and was lost.

The point?

Something something hackathon... Something something complete.

Re: Uhm...

When Uber started up, it was not immediately clear what laws Uber was not respecting.

If Uber had been respectful and paid its taxes, it just might have gotten away with it, but the condescending, then insulting attitude of its management just incensed the wrong people (along with the seemingly endless list of in-house shenanigans), and now the law is very much being enforced.

On the other hand, there does need to be a bit of breathing space for innovations to appear and prove their usefulness. If the law cracked immediately down on everything that wasn't crystal clear, many things we have today would not exist (i.e. aspartame - which may or may not have been a good thing).