Vivek Siva

Research shows that almost 60 percent of the companies expect to kiss goodbye to more than 20 percent of their revenues within five years because of disruptive innovation. Unless they change the way they operate, that is.

Understanding that a bleak future lies ahead unless they obey the innovation imperative, organizations world over are trying to align innovation and business strategy, take up open innovation, and “out-innovate” their competitors. Innovation entails identifying challenges, ideating to find solutions, implementing the most promising ones, and managing the process to sustain the winning outcomes.

Hackathons, which are a quick route for idea generation, have been surging in popularity for various reasons in recent years. A hackathon is defined as an event where teams of experts and advisers come together to collaboratively build and launch new ideas. No longer are they confined to the IT sector. More than the lure of awards, participants are excited by the chance to learn and the collaborate, be recognized by peers, enable social change, and network extensively.

With focused intensity, hackathons aim to spur innovation through various creativity initiatives and sustain the successful outcomes via careful management practices. Hackathons are much more than prototyping exercises—they are fun, engaging events that can help companies from becoming disruptors and not disruptees. Conducting a hackathon is often thought of as “starting up within a corporation.”

Being in the business of hackathons, we knew that a detailed analysis of global events would bring questions and insights that would indisputably help in strategic decision making across sectors and geographies.

We analyzed nearly 1000 hackathons across 75 countries in the world during a two-year period (from 2015 onward) and put together a Global Hackathon Report. Overall, we discern a common trend—hackathons everywhere are helping organizations battle talent scarcity, acquisition, and retention while fueling innovation across domains and functions.

From ideation to execution, we see hackathons upending traditional business models and rewiring the competitive landscape. In this report, we discuss the hackathon format and culture and its exciting possibilities to help people adapt to the future.

The list of countries and cities where most hackathons were conducted has some surprising names emerging as incubators of innovation and new businesses. It is time global companies and governments take notice of these new ecosystems with their talented citizens and creativity-focused organizations. These areas can be certainly earmarked for growth and future investment.

Governments and NPOs fall behind private firms in terms of the number of hackathons hosted. Corporates have been harvesting the benefits of hackfests—employee engagement, recruitment, branding, API adoption, innovation, beta testing—for a while now, and the interest hasn’t petered out yet. Still, we notice that open hackathons with more non-developers than ever before are catching on as a reliable means to drive social change. With so many hackathons coming back year after year, it wouldn’t be presumptuous to claim that hackathons are certainly living up to their potential.

Creating gender-inclusive environments doesn’t seem to be happening at the pace one would hope for. Unfortunately, this seems to be true in the case of hackathons as well, with women-only events being just too few to be considered significant. In a time where diversity and inclusion are key goals for any agency, this finding only reinforces the fact that hackathons continue to be male-dominated.

Predictably, universities and high schools prefer to attract students to hackathons for the immense learning on offer. In the report, you’ll see that the most popular rewards for the winners are rarely cash prizes.

Over the years, the power of hackathons has been cleverly leveraged in other industries, aside from IT. Intensive collaboration in a short period of time to arrive at novel solutions seems to be working for the financial, communication, media, high-tech, and automotive industries equally well. From our data, we could conclude that hackathons are being increasingly conducted to accelerate the pace of digital transformation.

Hackathons are clearly helping companies go from idea to action. To know what hackathons are, how these problem-solving exercises are being used to create an impact, and why people are turning to external partners and platforms to navigate the mercurial landscape of innovation, download our full report.

Download the complete Global Hackathon Report here

Trying to find an example of the “walking a thin line” idiom is easy. Think of HR managers who have to align company goals and employee satisfaction!

HR leaders no longer just stick to legal and compliance issues; they are now strategic business partners with a key role to play in shaping the company’s culture and taking the company closer to realizing its vision.

The talent management and performance review processes are certainly not what we’d refer to as all in a day’s work. To add to their cup of woes, they have “mundane” tasks—finding top quality hires, retaining them, ensuring there are no pains areas in employee engagement, staving off all kinds of legal hassles—which require them to be the go-to person while being innovative, proactive, and brimming with energy.

Apparently, this is possible.

Thanks to the digital era, the market is now flooded with tools, apps, and processes to help HR pros kick back and relax. For instance, HR innovation was the theme of the successful “Hack the Experience” hackathon sponsored by Brilliant Ink. The event held in San Francisco in 2014 drew over100 professionals collaborated to come up with solutions to improve employee engagement.

Hackathons—an underrated tool

Hackathons can give you the vision. You can create employee experiences that are compelling and fun. These high-energy events are much more than people working collaboratively on a brilliant idea using software and hardware to solve a problem. Let’s see how.

80% of Fortune 100 companies use hackathons to drive innovation. You too can! Learn how

Expect the unexpected

Who hasn’t been guilty of failing to recognize talent right under the nose? It happens.

You can fix this. Conduct an internal hackathon to assess your company’s existing employee pool. You will be amazed at the “hacks” your employees can come up with.

Tech companies benefit greatly from holding hackathons for its developers where they have to think outside the box and prove their mettle under time and problem constraints.

“It can also provide good clues on design sensibilities, presentation skills and team collaboration ability of the engineer,” says Ravi Gururaj, chairman of the Nasscom Product Council.

And how right he is.

HR managers should advise team leads to gauge the competency of their team members before putting in requests for urgent hires.

“If you’re inside a company and convinced you have the best thing and if only you could get visibility in front of your CTO—then an internal hackathon is a great way of enticing the internal developers to skip to the top of the list, get an exclusive peak of data or even incubation,” says Delyn Simmons from Mashery.

People can get all fired-up when they realize they aren’t going to be putting the company at risk by implementing avant-garde ideas in their everyday projects. At an internal hackathon, employees are encouraged to come up with actionable solutions. Give them a carte blanche.

Like Sabeen Ali, founder of AngelHack, says, “They (employees) get to lower their typical boundaries, typical restriction, and build something that they think isn’t part of their immediate role or immediate responsibility. There’s a freedom to it.”

It is a chance for you to tap into potential talent without having to spend time and money looking for skills outside the organization. Say goodbye to a pile of résumés, and say hello to some vacation days.

Get your company to adopt it as a business practice.

Wipro held an internal hackathon for its employees in June 2014.

Wipro CEO T K Kurien said, “We intend to do one hackathon every month. You realize people’s competency once you go through a hackathon. You find that competency sometimes doesn’t reside at the top of the pyramid; it lies right at the bottom.”

Be ready for unprecedented employee engagement

You want engaged employees, people who are passionate about their work and enjoy a sense of belonging in the company. Engaged employees believe in innovation and helping the organization go forward. The not-so-engaged employees will go through motions, but they won’t do much more. The actively disengaged employees undermine team accomplishments, showing their unhappiness every chance they get. Gallup says that businesses in the U.S. lose $350 billion every year because of disengaged employees!

HR managers can unleash the phenomenal power of engaged workers by ensuring employee commitment, making them go the extra mile for the company only because they want to. They can use hackathons as tools to bring about meaningful change. Through hackathons, HR leaders drive engagement by focusing on self-directed and dynamic learning, a diverse and flexible work environment, encouraging empowered teams and transparency and honesty by the management, facilitating talent mobility, and ensuring a culture of recognition.

Using tools such as hackathons, HR can help build camaraderie and cohesiveness. Along with getting rid of organizational silos and fostering innovation, such hackathons set the scene for employee recognition and other employee-focused initiatives such as enhancing employee engagement for better productivity and overall profitability.

Pi Wen Looi, the president of Novacrea, a California-based business management consulting firm, and the head judge of “Hack the Experience,”said, “Employee engagement is a complex problem. There’s more than one thing that feeds into whether or not a person is engaged. A hackathon like this gets a lot of people thinking about the problem in different ways. You’re kind of attacking it from different angles.”

Companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook are also using hackathons to tackle low levels of employee engagement. In the LinkedIn HR hackathons, “interns with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and disciplines” from the Silicon Valley compete to come up with innovative solutions to help HR execute its priorities successfully.

So, what’s stopping you from doing one for your company? Disrupt HR!

You could take a leaf out of CISCO’s notebook and reconfigure the HR function.

Build innovative tangible products

In the hackathon lingo, the word innovation is perhaps the most hackneyed. But there really isn’t another term that quite crystallizes what these events embody. Here are a few examples of what the coming together of enthusiastic minds can achieve. Products may not be fully fleshed out but the promise they hold is immense.

At HackerEarth internal hackathons have become de rigeur to break everyday monotony and unlock excellence. Held every quarter, the company had 10 so far. Five ideas shortlisted from every hackathon go into production. Over 50 products have been rolled out, either to customers or internal teams. Code Monk, Wordsworth, Flash, and Optimus. No, they aren’t names of Transformers! These are some of the wildly successful products HackerEarth’s teams created at internal hackathons. Code Monk is an app for learning programming on the go; it’s been downloaded 88,000 times in six months. Wordsworth is an internal grammar and guideline checking tool. Flash is a caching system that decreases the page load time, thereby enhancing customer experience and improving page ranking. BlackOps is an in-house mail engine which saves more than $3500 per annum, and Optimus is a bot which monitors, reports, and resolves issues in the infrastructure saving us countless man hours. What you need to know is that none of these tools were a part of the plan or roadmap. They wouldn’t have come about without internal hackathons.

Madhusudhan Anand, Engineering Manager at HackerEarth, said, “The coming together of teams boosts morale when everyone ideates together to solve a problem and having fun while doing so greatly improves engagement. Then the camaraderie that comes from people working across different parts of the organization has always been a great way to strengthen communication and foster a sense of collaboration, community, and innovation that comes with being a part of the HackerEarth Family.”

Watch your company culture get upvoted

As an HR manager, if you can’t come up with ideas to boost the sagging spirits, why not ask the employees to identify ways to address the pain points? At Big Spaceship, the overnight hackathon Hack the Spaceship was about finding creative ways to improve company culture.

You can teach the employees what the company is about.

One of the best examples of reinforcing company values through internal hackathons is by doing what Atlassian, a Sydney-based enterprise software company, does. The employees wait for the ShipIt days. The challenge embodies the company’s values: be the change you seek, play as a team, and build with heart and balance. People don’t take them too seriously or get too competitive. They have 24 hours of fun, enjoying fantastic interdepartmental collaboration, and reaping rewards of many kinds.

You only need look at what Facebook’s hackathons did for its culture.

In Pedram Keyani’s words: Hackathons organically encourage culture-building and collaboration within the company without any top-down guidance. Employees, both new and old, work together quickly and efficiently, improvising and brainstorming, failing and winning, and achieving new levels of interpersonal harmony.

At hackathons, employees are likely to make a couple of lasting friendships, and they come to depend on each other in positive ways. The chances these employees will recommend the company to people outside are quite high.

Talent retention becomes easier; disgruntled employees become fewer.

Hiring becomes the easiest part of the job

If you are talking external hackathons, then HR managers responsible for recruitment already know what this is about.

Finding game changers within the organization could happen with internal hackathons. But if it doesn’t, then you need to look elsewhere. As an HR manager, you can get the management to host or attend hackathons to capture the right talent.

Community building and entrepreneurship are not the only focus areas of hackathons now. They are routinely used to recruit people with the right skills and attitudes.

HR can network with the organizers to get access to interesting profiles. When you attend events, building rapport can’t hurt. Understand what the hackathons are about, and find out why the participants are attending them.

Scout for tech talent at relevant hackathons, and you’ll meet your target before you know it.

Don’t wait for the flip side. There isn’t one.

People love to hate HR, but you don’t need to give them reasons.

HR doesn’t have to be the bearer of bad tidings always. And there are enough hours in a workday to get everything done.

You can do more than “slapping bandages on problems.”

Getting people strategies and business needs to be looking at the same end goals requires more than a little nudge in the right direction.

Whether you are tasked with protecting company culture, getting the brightest minds, retaining talent, or upping employee engagement rates this quarter, there’s help.

You just need to look in the right places.

Looking to conduct online coding tests to hire developers for your organization? Try HackerEarth Recruit free for 14 days to start creating tests for your candidates right away.

Who is a full stack developer?

A good full stack developer is like one of those celebrities who can do it all. They can act, sing, be a DJ, host a show, even direct, and produce! They may not have won an Oscar or a Grammy, but they still have the breadth of experience.They are capable of developing full-fledged applications (Web, mobile, or desktop). They understand both the front-end and back-end and know their way around servers, databases, APIs, MVC, and hosting environments among others. (Also read - Top skills a full stack developer should have)

A good full stack developer is always in demand. There are over 10,000 open positions available on Indeed alone. However, they may not be the best option in all cases.

When to hire a full stack developer

The demand for a full stack engineer is often driven by the requirements of the role. Hiring a full stack developer is a good idea in the following instances:

1. When you need an MVP

   When your operation is lean and the company’s aim is to validate ideas by building a minimum viable product, then full stack developers are your best bet. If there is an ideal role for a full stack developer, it would be to take an idea or feature and turn into a fully-functional prototype.

2. When you need Product Managers

   Full stack developers can make excellent product managers. They understand the business requirements and, at the same time, they are aware of the engineering capabilities. When decisions have to be made by taking all the parameters into account, they are an extremely valuable resource.

3. When cost is a constraint

   When you cannot afford to hire a specialist for each layer of the development process, full stack developers are your saviors. That being said, good full stack developers don’t come cheap. Nevertheless, instead of spending $70,000 each for a front-end, back-end, and network engineer, it is better to opt for one $100,000 full stack developer. (Also read - How to recruit on a shoestring budget)

4. When you need a CTO/Co-founder

   “I have an idea for a brilliant app, but I just need someone to build it”. This is a common infuriating phrase that developers often hear. When you are looking for a CTO or co-founder for a truly symbiotic relationship that involves combining their technical expertise with a shared vision for the business, full stack developers can make great CTOs or co-founders.

When not to hire a full stack developer

Do not hire a full stack developer, when you cannot see a clear value-add. For example, a full stack engineer can be a valuable asset when you are trying to optimize your application for 20,000 users. However, when you have reached a scale where you have millions of active users every day, you will definitely need a specialist or a team for each layer such as a data and infrastructure team. In such cases, a full stack developer will not add as much value as a specialist will.

How to hire a full stack developer

When hiring a full-stack developer, you should look for certain qualities and technical skills.

Qualities of a full-stack developer

With reference to qualities, look for someone who:

• Is interested and passionate about learning new things
• Understands not only the stacks but also different technologies
• Can point you in the right direction for a solution even if they cannot solve it
• Is aware of the latest trends and developments
• Can see the big picture, the vision of the business, and understands the customer’s requirements

Technical skills to look for in a full stack developer

They should have the knowledge and skills across all the layers. For example, if you are hiring a full stack developer for a web application, then these are ideally the technical skills that you should look for:

• HTML, CSS, and Javascript (it is pretty much mandatory!)
• Programming languages (back end)
• Databases
• Version control
• Deployment and hosting
• Third-party APIs/services

(To read more about the top skills a full stack developer should have, go here.)

Things to look for in a resume

Reduce the dependency on a resume as much a possible. When it comes to technical skills, resumes are usually not a true indicator of the technical skills of a developer. The role of a resume ends with the sourcing of candidates. While scanning a resume don’t just look for relevant experience.Also look for other indicators of a good programmer such as contribution to open source, exposure to various technologies and previous projects. If you have an alternative mechanism for sourcing candidates like sourcing from Github, it is much better.

Technical assessment

This is the most crucial step in your hiring process. How you assess the candidates determines the quality of the hire.Conducting a generic algorithmic test as a mechanism for assessing a full stack developer is a total waste of your time.Instead, give them a real-life problem, which will allow you to assess the technical skills and knowledge across all stacks. Here is a sample problem that would give a better idea of how to use a real-life business problem for technical assessment.

Things to assess in the interview

Once you have a handful of candidates who you know to be technically qualified for the job, look for these two things in the interview:

• Ability to deal with uncertainty
• Interest and passion for learning

Apart from gauging their technical skills, give the candidates a problem that they are not familiar with. Don’t just look for a successful output, also look for candidates who are ready to try irrespective of the outcome.So when you hire your next full-stack developer, ensure that you:

• Look for inherent qualities
• Make technical assessment mandatory
• Choose an appropriate mechanism to assess the technical skills

Now that you have a good idea about how to go about hiring a consummate developer, try HackerEarth developer assessment software to make candidate assessment easy, effective, and efficient.

1. How to hire a data scientist
2. The complete guide to hiring a data scientist
3. 8 ways to hire a developer [Actionable tips]

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The war for tech talent is on. Are you prepared?

"If you hire a single one of these people that means war."

Wrote Steve Jobs to Sergey Brin when Google allegedly tried to poach members of Apple's Safari team. The tech talent war has always existed. Now, it has intensified and is about to get worse.

Hey! I am not a tech company. Why should I be worried? If this is what you’re thinking, well, think again.

The world leader in mobile payments is neither Apple nor Samsung. It is Starbucks! Yes, Starbucks, the coffeehouse chain. According to Mckinsey, today's cars have 100 million lines of programming codes. A startup that delivers medical marijuana is a buzzing startup in the Silicon Valley.

What does it take to win the digital war?

If you are a boy scout at heart and want to be prepared, then your first step should be to equip yourself with the right tech team. If the enemy’s army is standing at your gates, shouldn’t you have started building your army a long time ago? Like 6 months ago.

If digital revolution is a war, then your kickass tech team is your anti-aircraft defense.

It does not matter whether you sell coffee, cars, or medical marijuana. You are either digitally connected to customers or you are losing to someone else. The scary part is that you may not even know who your competitor is!

If you concur with this notion, then this article has served its purpose. If you are still not sure about how hiring a tech team will help your company, you may want to continue reading.

I am still skeptical, how did the world's largest coffeehouse chain become the world leader in mobile payments beating all the tech titans? There are two parts to this story, the well-known story and the one that was orchestrated behind the scenes.

The well-known story

In 2013, Q3 earnings conference, Howard Schultz (Chairman and CEO, Starbucks) said,

“No single competency is enabling us to elevate the Starbucks brand more than our global leadership in mobile, digital, and loyalty. Starbucks is a clear leader in mobile payments and we are encouraged by how consumers have embraced mobile apps as a way to pay.”

In 2009, Starbucks rolled out its first mobile card app in 16 stores in Seattle. This app allowed its customers find the nearest stores, order online, pay via mobile, and collect reward points. It was an instant hit. Soon Starbucks rolled the app out in other states, nationwide in the US, and now in many countries around the world.

In 2016, 21% of all the Starbucks orders were made via mobile resulting in an increase in the revenue by 12% to roughly $5.4 billion. Starbucks has invested $300 million in digital initiatives in 2016, up from $145 million last year.

There are over 2 million apps available in various app stores and every single one of them is competing to make it among one of the top 50 apps on your mobile. While some like Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp have cemented their respective positions, how did MyStarbucks break in especially being a closed loop payment app?

What happens behind the scenes?

Starbucks hired a small Portland-based tech team called the Small Society and they developed an app that was pretty darn great. Small Society just did not replicate the website of Starbucks. They designed an app that had great design, functionality and best of all, they understood the customers of Starbucks. In early 2009, most of the iPhone users were early adopters. Small society provided them a smart and sophisticated app that saved them time and effort. It seamlessly weaved loyalty programs and incentives. Getting free products for accumulating reward points proved to be very successful. In short, Small Society developed a great app for Starbucks.

Small Society

Small society is not a one-hit wonder and they are a proof that a talented tech team can do wonders for your company. Time and time again they have proved their expertise in the IOS app arena. In 2008, Raven Zachary and his team developed an IOS app for the Democratic Party—’Obama for America’. The app was a first-of-its-kind in the political arena and helped the party at the grass-roots level and eventually Small Society was formed. Since then they have worked with Amazon, Zipcar, Whole Foods, and many other brands. Four years later in 2012, Walmart acquired Small Society and 3 years later Zachary went on to work with Microsoft Hololens.

The number of companies that are seeking Small Society’s developer expertise is a testament to the importance of having that talented tech team, which can change your future!

Attracting and hiring the right tech talent

While we are aware of the latest developments in technology and initiatives by pioneering companies, the tech talent war that happens behind the scenes often goes unnoticed.

We do not realize the importance of attracting tech talent until we struggle to fill a crucial open position or accomplish a challenging task with a mediocre team.

It’s not just Starbucks. You’ve heard about the connected car wave that hit the automobile industry. The world's leading automobile makers are competing with each other. These companies made efforts to equip themselves well before this wave hit. They anticipated the change.

Toyota hired everyone from an MIT-based startup Jaybridge Robotics. The 16-member MIT team that included software engineers, AI, and robotics experts is now a part of the Toyota Research Institute and powers the connected cars revolution.

Similarly, Renault and Nissan are hiring 1000+ developers to compete in the connected car revolution.

Medical marijuana

Eaze, a medical marijuana delivery startup in San Francisco, recently received $13 million in funding. Technically, Eaze is a logistics company that delivers marijuana. However, when you go all digital, even the tiniest digital feature determines the success of the company. A recent review of Eaze by TechCrunch pointed out that not having the online and mobile payment option as the major drawback for the company.

It is not a surprise, the startup is actively looking to hire more developers. Here is a snapshot of their Careers section.

Process innovation

In today’s digital age, a talented tech team is vital for process innovation. When you are in a business where you neither have a proprietary product nor groundbreaking technology, the only way to stay ahead of your competition is by innovating the process and offering your customers the "wow" experience.

The word coffee entered the English language in the 15th century. Benz patented the first automobile in 1886 and the earliest written record for the use of Marijuana dates back to 2737 B.C in China.

If you notice, neither of these three companies invented the product they sell nor are they the only ones to sell these products. Although Starbucks comes up with new beverage-related products, like their to-die-for Caramel Waffle Cone frappuccino, it is not exactly a leap from the ice factory to the refrigerator in terms of product innovation.

There is nothing preventing from others doing what they do. Their products are still the same. The only difference is in how it is being offered and how the company connects with its customers.

To connect digitally, you need the right tech talent who can enable you to do just that and innovate the processes that you have been following for years.

Key resources and partners

In a business model, the key resources and partners are the enablers. They enable you to offer the value proposition to your customers. In this case, the digital and tech talent are your key resources.

Behind every great technology is an insanely strong technical team—a technical team composed of engineers, programmers, designers. This is the team that is always out of the limelight, anxiously waiting backstage while the product is being launched, hoping that everything goes as planned.

The question is do you have such a team yet?

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