Why we give our engineers four days every quarter just to play around

At the end of every quarter, our engineering team (and some folks from the Product and Sales teams) spend four days working on new ideas and projects, in what we imaginatively call, the #TessianHackathon.

It’s a chance for people to take a step away from their usual day-to-day activities and responsibilities and work on something new and different. It’s also the opportunity to collaborate with new people to develop a proposal, build a prototype, learn new skills, and pitch ideas. 

Here’s how it works. Everyone in the company is welcome to submit and own an idea. It’s something that even our founders take part in, with both Tim and Ed submitting suggestions (the actual coding, however, is done by the engineering team). This is a level playing field where the idea gets taken forward only when enough people join that idea’s group. 

There is no limit to what technologies you can use. Some will be coding in python because they feel more comfortable doing so, but some others will be interested in learning a new skill and therefore will probably choose something new.

Every team has access to the same level of resources in our AWS staging environment, and they can use any AWS services they would like to work with.As for those ideas, they can be anything that is linked (however tangentially) to the business, including things like:

• Testing the validity of a hypothesis by building a rapid prototype
• Jumpstarting our future product roadmap
• A fancy tool that will be a game-changer for all of our engineers
• A tool to help our salespeople speed up the sales process
• An internal product that would alleviate techops toil
• Something that never made it to the official roadmap although it would bring value to customers
• Solving a problem for any other internal teams

This year, we had an amazing 74 ideas submitted, ranging from phishing simulation labs to a smart Slack-enabled physical gong for remote sales teams. Last year’s winners, meanwhile, were a proof of concept integration between our product and popular messaging platform, and an interactive map showing where in the world attacks were coming from. 

As Tessian is a choice-first company, the Hackathonites can be either remote or in our central London office. Either way, we know engineers need fuel (as well as lots of stickers for plastering laptops). Consequently one of the key ingredients for a successful hackathon is food – either delivered to the office or a delivery budget if remote. 

Hackathon is a time for engineers to hone their existing skills, develop new ones, and teach and learn together. It’s also about having fun. Taking the engineering team ‘off line’ from their regular work for nearly a week every three months is a significant use of resources. But we believe it pays dividends in generating new leaps that improve our products, stimulates our engineers, and ultimately benefit our customers. 

If you’re an engineer or developer looking for a new challenge in a thriving, stable, and supportive organization, we’re hiring! You can see all our open positions here and below. Finally, what’s it like to work at Tessian? Here are 200 reasons why you’ll love it.