Transcript: Jay Fichialos on Hack Days

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1618/jay-fichialos-on-hack-days

Guest: Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Host: Kiruba Shankar - PodTech

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
Hello and welcome back to another edition of the Kiruba Show, a show where we get to speak with leading newsmakers from the Indian IT Industry. Hack Days seems to be the in-thing amongst software developers these days. The 24-hour coding challenge has caught the fancy of the tech community which is constantly looking for various ways to make work interesting. In this interview, I get to speak with Jay Fichialos from Sabre Labs. He was recently in India to help coordinate the Hack Day at their Bangalore office. I asked him a lot of questions about Hack Days. Let's get the answers from Jay.

Jay, thanks for coming on to the show.

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Hey! Good to be here.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
Yeah. Tell us what a Hack Day is?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Hack Days are 24 hours where the development staff of a company get to work on, whatever they want to work on, they get to develop in, at least in my company, they get to develop whatever their heart desires, whatever code they want to do.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
It necessarily -- it does not have anything to do with the work, right?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Right, and that's something we have to kind of remind our management staff that they want to -- they have certain problems that they want to get solved, and it's great, and we'd love if people work on that, but don't tell them that. They should already know what's important for the company, and if it's important to them as well, they'll probably work on it. If it isn't, well, then we need to let them work on what they're passionate about.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
Right. Passion is really the keyword, right. That's what I like about Google's 20% and most of the project, successful ones that come out of Google are borne out of the 20% project, right. So, in essence what people work on Hack Days or something that people are passionate about, right?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Right. I think that's the key, and we often say, when I talk to people about Hack Day, it's -50-50. It's 50% about getting the building them around, building the teams, the development staff and really making people excited about, this is a great place to work, and then 50% about great ideas that come out of it. It's sort of a fifty-fifty's play. But it's definitely weighted more toward that first fifty of getting people excited and you can do that unless they're working on things that are important to them, that they think are valuable. As a company letting them do that, you're in a way supporting that saying, "if it's important to you then it's important to us," and that is an employee on a difficult, a tough market to try to find people, -- quality people that goes a long way in keeping those people happy and employed with you for a long term.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
Right. You're coming down from the US to Bangalore to help coordinate Hack Day in your Bangalore office, right.

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Right.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
What is the key thing that you aim to achieve out of a Hack Day?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Well, it's -- I really want to try to get the development staff here, excited about the possibility. I want also to show the executives of the company. Sabre Holdings is a large worldwide company that have -- we have offices all over the world. But, our executives in the US, they want to know what's going on in Bangalore, what are they working on? I want to give their developers here an opportunity of voice to say, "this is what we think is important to us." Here are some projects that we think are valuable.

Sometimes people work on tools that are just helpful to them in their daily job, but more often than not, there are things that we've got somebody over in our London office that sees it and says, "you know what, I was thinking that would be important too," and so it makes connections, it builds connections within a company and you start to get developers who are working in different parts of the company talking to one another which is that -- the difficult problem with a large corporation. You've got duplication of effort and people just don't know what others -- people in a company their skills, what are their interests? So, that's another tangible benefit, an outcome from Hack Day is that -- just awareness of what's going on...

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
Is this open for people coming from outside or is this only for the employees?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Right now, we're doing Internal Hack Days. Yahoo! Did the first public Hack Day in September of this year and we're definitely looking toward doing a public Hack Day as well. One of the prerequisites to that is having a good base of APIs that people can play with. It serves Yahoo!'s purpose to help promote those APIs, but it also show the hackers have an ability to get in front of the executives of Yahoo! and other major companies and show off what they can do. So, it helps everybody. So, for us to do a public Hack Day, we feel it's important that we have some of our data publicly available as well in order so...

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
You're perfectly okay with letting that open in the -- with the developers, right?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Absolutely, that's one of the projects my colleague, Taylor Calvin (ph) is working on, it's called Open Content and we're making huge efforts in trying to get both our hotel and car and activities for travelers, getting that content publicly available on Open APIs.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
Doing public Hack Days is also great way to identify talent, isn't it?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
It is, it's fantastic. Being as an outsider Yahoo!'s Hack Day, I was there observing and working with the team on some hacks and just kind of taking it all in. One of the takeaways was, wow there're a lot of college students who have traveled here to Yahoo! to show off what they can do with Yahoo's APIs. As well as other companies, there were companies that were third party using Yahoo!'s content and they wanted to show, 'hey, we've got something that Yahoo! might be interested in.'

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
And hopefully buy.

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
And hopefully buy, absolutely. So, it works that way too for companies as well as individuals. These public Hack Days are great PR tool as well. So, I think that doesn't hurt us.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
Right. Just like how BarCamp is happening in a company called ThoughtWorks and they're getting some fantastic mileage, right.

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Yeah, and I think that's the way the Web is moving. We don't explicit advertising, we're all growing a little tired of that. You work in a -- and live in a world where you're constantly bombarded with media messages. You get to identify advertising really quickly and you start to just zone it out and lose track of it. So, I think companies, the smart companies are looking at new ways for people to identify with their company and see that I don't always have to push my content, it's more of a relationship. As I build the relationship with people, they're going to think of me first when they need to purchase something.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
It makes a company look cool, right?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Yeah.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
It's done at almost no cost.

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Yeah, very low cost and it's great when companies start to spread out through sponsorship and we've some great sponsors here at BarCamp who help to promote the T-shirts, bring in the food, it's good for everybody.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
Just walk us through a typical Hack Day, at what time does it start and are there any set of rules that you tell people to play by?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Well, there are some basic rules -- some things that often come up is questions about, "how much work can I do before Hack Day?" Hack Day is 24 hours, it's a day, literally. Usually, we start at noon and end at noon and then we'll have a couple hours to get prepared for an award ceremony. So, we'll get everything organized and try to get just everything staged and it also gives hackers time to kind of clean up after 24 hours of working. But, how much work can you do beforehand. We don't like to tell people that they can't work on it, if they're excited about something and they want to work on it, who am I to tell you not to work on it.

But, what we like to say as you stage things. So, if you need to get -- if you're using a server, or if you're using some components, you may want to get those ready to go beforehand, test things out. You'd hate to spend part of your 24 hours trying to get a server connection, it's just a waste of time. You should be working on the application itself. So, test those things out, make sure they're working, do all the staging, get your pieces build. But, don't necessarily come in with 25000 lines of code because we're going to know that you didn't do that in 24 hours and you're presenting this in front of your colleagues. So, they're going to call you on it.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
That's like cheating, right. It's like running a marathon and you are you know...

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Everyone will know and there are no real awards, there's no winners.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
This is not a competition.

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
It's not a competition and often as we present these Hack Days, people want, the executives think 'oh, could we give them some money and can we get more results out of this if we pour some money into it, and if we make some big prizes

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
It doesn't work.

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
It doesn't work. You can't pour money on it. It doesn't grow fast if you pour money on it. You tap into peoples what they're passionate about, money is not going to make a difference. Don't make it into a competition, the awards are usually sort of Tongue-in-Cheek fun awards. Best use of a particular type of API, or the funniest hack or whatever makes sense culturally. Each of our offices, we let the organizing staff in that office decide what makes sense for your culture. What we think is funny in the States, the Indian office doesn't think is funny. So, we let them come up with things that are culturally specific to their...

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
So, when is the Hack Day in your Bangalore office taking place?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
It's going to happen Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. So, that's the 5th and 6th of December. So, we'll start at noon on Wednesday, end at the noon on Thursday.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
This is the first time it's happening for your office, right...?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
In Bangalore.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
...are people exited?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Yeah. The people are crazy excited. I was there on Friday and we had an informational lunch where I just answered questions hackers had and people are really excited about it, excited both in what they're going to develop and also the chance, the opportunity to show this directly to executives in the company.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
How many people are expected to be a part of it?

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
We last count on Friday, we have 45 different team members participating. So, I think that's going to go up even higher. We've done these in other offices both in the US and Dallas and also in our Krakow office in Poland and each time they get more and more enthusiasm, more and more excitement. I think is this as the Hack Day idea and this movement moves out into other companies. We're going to see continuing to grow in the adoption of the idea as people going to refer it to Yahoo! and say, "Yahoo! has done this," and if had successful then "Sabre has done this, IBM is doing it." It's easier for a small company to say, "well, if these big companies are doing it then maybe there's something too, maybe we should give it a try."

So, part of my effort in the coming year is both to get Sabre to have a public Hack Day where anyone can be involved, and also to create a space where people can share ideas about Hack Day. Calling on resources from Chad Dickerson at Yahoo!, the folks at IBM and Sabre, let's pull our resources. What works, what doesn't work, do we have documentation that helps to make things clear, do we have little tools that we use for presenting? You try to pull that all together so that other companies can jump right in just like BarCamp and kind of host their own.

Kiruba Shankar - PodTech
Great. Jay, it's fantastic listening to you about Hack Day. I can see that passion flow through, so here's wishing you the very best for the one that you're going to conduct and for the public ones as well.

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Fantastic! Thank you.

Jay Fichialos - Sabre Labs
Thank you.

You were listening to Jay Fichialos of Sabre Labs talk about Hack Days. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.