Asana's CEO explains why the company runs different kinds of hackathons: overnight events for night owls, but also daytime and multi-day versions so parents and early risers can join. Occasional intense bonding matters, but all-nighters shouldn't be the default.
And for our hackathons, we've been pretty thoughtful about this. And yeah, the younger employees at Asana, they want to stay up all night and do that. So once a year we'll try and have a hackathon that's more oriented around that. But other times during the year, we'll have a hackathon that takes place during the day or maybe across multiple days to give people a chance to participate in that creative process who can't necessarily stay up all night. Maybe they have a family or maybe they just get tired at night. And so really creating that environment for multiple people, but it's not really an either or thing for me. You can still have those intense experiences where you bond, but they just shouldn't be the norm. No, we want to have a great environment, but again, it's in service of optimal productivity. So if you're keeping people till 8:30 or 9, yeah, I would argue that's actually shooting yourself in the foot even though you're getting more face time.
