I don't care about trophies, certificate, gift cards, etc. What sounds most positive to me about your internal hack days is your effort to productionize the efforts. That means you actually realize that all those smart, ambitious people you hire might actually have good ideas.
I recently left an NYC ed-tech startup that would have 'hack days', but during the hack days there were games, distractions, and once even a live band. Now I like parties, but it indicated to me that the non-technical CEO was allowing the hack day because Facebook did it, and he viewed it more as a recruiting effort than something he took seriously. I won one of the categories once and received no followup whatsoever, and the impression that I got was that if I wanted to work on it nights and weekends after the fact, then maybe it would be considered. Lots of people did do 'real work' during hack day, and most of the projects were fluff or things that were obviously going to be on the product roadmap anyway. To me, the entire thing was a waste of time, which is unfortunate, because I really wish more companies looked for creativity out of their engineers. Many companies (especially NYC ones) will begrudgingly pay you for your coding skills, but then put you at the whim of a product manager with no experience building anything. I always say that if you think about why designers/coders learned these skillsets, it's often because they are extremely interested in the end-products and that's what motivated them to learn to build products in the first place, and so to totally ignore their input and put them in pure heads-down coding roles is really unfortunate. This blog post indicates to me that you're not that type of company.
As for external hackathons, to me they are a waste of time as a coder because nobody actually checks that your implementation works. And worse, they hire people like journalists to judge (looking at you Angelhack). What that means is that the 'hackathon' really turns into a 'pitchathon', and the winners go to the best designers (which I can at least respect), or slide decks and charismatic pitches (which I don't). Getting the judging right so that time spent actually coding is valued is really difficult, but something more hackathon organizers should consider.
I recently left an NYC ed-tech startup that would have 'hack days', but during the hack days there were games, distractions, and once even a live band. Now I like parties, but it indicated to me that the non-technical CEO was allowing the hack day because Facebook did it, and he viewed it more as a recruiting effort than something he took seriously. I won one of the categories once and received no followup whatsoever, and the impression that I got was that if I wanted to work on it nights and weekends after the fact, then maybe it would be considered. Lots of people did do 'real work' during hack day, and most of the projects were fluff or things that were obviously going to be on the product roadmap anyway. To me, the entire thing was a waste of time, which is unfortunate, because I really wish more companies looked for creativity out of their engineers. Many companies (especially NYC ones) will begrudgingly pay you for your coding skills, but then put you at the whim of a product manager with no experience building anything. I always say that if you think about why designers/coders learned these skillsets, it's often because they are extremely interested in the end-products and that's what motivated them to learn to build products in the first place, and so to totally ignore their input and put them in pure heads-down coding roles is really unfortunate. This blog post indicates to me that you're not that type of company.
As for external hackathons, to me they are a waste of time as a coder because nobody actually checks that your implementation works. And worse, they hire people like journalists to judge (looking at you Angelhack). What that means is that the 'hackathon' really turns into a 'pitchathon', and the winners go to the best designers (which I can at least respect), or slide decks and charismatic pitches (which I don't). Getting the judging right so that time spent actually coding is valued is really difficult, but something more hackathon organizers should consider.