The
pandemic has brought in a lot of changes to the workplace. Prior to the
pandemic, people would come to a workplace, talk to each other during lunch or chit
chat over coffee. People from other projects would interact on various topics.
The folks joining the company either as laterals or fresh from college, would
get embedded in the culture as they collaborated with others and formed groups
of likeminded people.
Since March
2020, when the pandemic forced us to work from home, this camaraderie seemed to
have faded to some extent. It was particularly hard for the new joiners to form
relationships beyond their project partners. To address some of these issues,
we came up with the idea of a Hackathon.
We asked
the people to come together and form a team of maximum 5 people. However, we
had one condition. It was, one of the team members would have to be someone who
joined in fresh from college in the past 12 months. We were in for a pleasant
surprise when we saw participation from 8 teams. It meant 50% participation
from the company! And this sure paved the way for more enthusiasm. The best
part was, we not only had individuals from Development, QA, DevOps and System
Admin teams, but also from the HR and Admin teams.
We ran the
Hackathon over 9 days, where the teams had to work on and provide a solution to
one of the four problems which were related to the following:
- Social Media
- Blockchain
- Voice Enablement
- Fintech
The solutions
were judged by an imminent panel including Aniruddha Paranjape, Ujjwal Bhattacharyya and Prasad Rajadnya.
The results
were markedly close between four teams. Finally, the team that donned the crown
of victory was ‘Quick Fix Daemons’, while the second position was bagged by ‘Free
Thinkers’.
We would
like to thank all the participants for their enthusiastic participation, and we
look forward to an even more exciting Second Edition next year.
