How to celebrate the day of the programmer at work and make everyone happy?

Hello! I would like to share my experience of organizing a holiday in honor of the "programmer's day" (and not only) at work and during working hours. Unlike other holidays, such as New Year, February 23 and March 8, the day of the programmer, few people officially celebrates at work. In the modern world, where there are a lot of IT companies, the work of programmers for the IT world cannot be overestimated. And not only for him. Thanks to [-im-] websites and mobile applications work for us, internal intranet resources, CRM and CMS systems, and much more work.

It is also worth noting that last week, September 9, was also the day of the tester. That is, there are as many as 2 important IT events in the week. In modern life, in a large IT company where the enterprise level code is written, the work of QA department specialists is valued no less than the work of programmers whose result is being tested. The work of testers is on guard of the quality of software products, saves the nerves of users and makes our whole world a little more orderly and logical, and customers happy.

And in July, the day of the system administrator, which is also not all celebrated at the official level.

Problems with organizing events in medium-sized companies

If you are a small company of up to 20 people, then everything is simple with you. They wanted - they gathered, they did not want to - they did not. The beauty of small companies in their family. You yourself can make a small small party, decide how you will celebrate and what to do.
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In large companies, especially the giants of the IT industry, this is all well and good. Processes are established, there are special departments and people who follow the dates, prepare the program, make a corporate newsletter, approve the introduction of holiday changes on websites, order entertainment and organize a holiday for employees.

But in companies with a staff of 100−200 people have already experienced some kind of transition period. On the one hand, it is impossible to assemble as easily as in a small family-type company. Already with so many staff there is such a thing as: “and who is this person and in what department does he work?”. At the same time, such companies already have their own HR department, but he is engaged, first of all, in the selection of personnel, and only in 2 - the organization of events. Usually the company lays budgets for general secular holidays from the new year to March 8, plus a summer corporate party (team building) and the company's birthday (and not always). Everything else somehow passes by. I agree that if all the holidays are celebrated, there will be no time to work. But in our company 50% of the employees are developers. And we make the product, thanks to which the company lives and develops. Therefore, I, with our head of one of the IT departments, could not pass by and decided to organize a holiday for our IT specialists at the official level and during working hours. Actually, I want to tell you what came of it.

How to mark so as not to forget anyone?

We decided that it would be very expensive to celebrate the day of each IT specialist. And in the 2nd week of September there are 2 events at once. As a result, we decided to introduce our own holiday: the day of the IT specialist of our company. Indeed, for good, 10 years ago a person who could install Windows was considered an IT specialist, and today every 8th housewife can do it. And many of our managers and marketers in the past graduated from the faculties, one way or another, associated with programming (for example, there are many employees who graduated from the Moscow State University at Moscow State University). And these people also once wrote the program, albeit not professionally. And these people work every day in the IT sphere and develop our IT products. In general, it has been decided that the celebration of the annual IT-Day, which is celebrated every second Friday of September in our company, has been officially approved. And all this can be very harmoniously timed to the day of the programmer and the day of the tester.

It turns out that everyone is celebrating, but everyone understands that this is his day, the day of the programmer, tester, system administrator, layout designer, web designer ...

If you want to do something - take it and do it.

Do you want to celebrate the day of the programmer / tester / sysadmin at work during working hours? Don't expect someone to do it for you. Take it and do it. The most interesting thing is that you can celebrate on the job and violation of labor discipline.

Sound your proposal on organizing a holiday to your HR director and / or general manager. Explain to them that the holiday is not just a reason to disrupt the working day and take alcohol - but a difficult process of motivating employees, which will increase morale and give positive reinforcement. If employees are doing well and they are good at work, then work efficiency is greatly enhanced. Work is the 2nd house. At work, we spend at least 40 hours a week, and in fact we spend our lives there. And if we are not comfortable - the efficiency will drop dramatically, and this will affect the success of the company. The company, first of all, consists of people, but not of products and services. People are the most valuable resource and asset of the company.

What is the budget?

But here everything is not as scary and complicated as it seems at first glance. Go from solving the problem, not from the budget. If you immediately say that we allocate 40,000 rubles for a holiday, what will it give you and what can you think of? You will not think about organizing an event, but about how to spend money. First come up with a concisse, an event program. Then calculate the costs and after that go to the management of the company to negotiate. Guaranteed to arrange.

And what program?

Just think what you want? I want to come to work and feel the feeling of celebration. Get something nice or a sign of attention. Well, in the evening, after work, I would like to communicate with colleagues in an informal atmosphere. But we are many, and we are different. We can not just sit down at the same table and celebrate. And for intellectual workers it’s boring.

The program of the day should be done in 2 parts:

1. working time
2. after-work time

The working time of 50 programmers is very expensive and cannot be done without benefit, otherwise the business will not be satisfied. Remember this. Rest by rest, and sprint under the schedule. Deadlines have not been canceled. So what needs to be done so that there is a festive atmosphere and relaxation, but the work must be done clearly and on time.

What can be done this during working hours for programmers, so that working idle time is justified? Do something useful. And what can be useful and interesting at the same time? That's right - this is a master class. Yes, and programming. For example, it is very cool to tell the backenders about the frontend and vice versa.

It was decided to develop and conduct 2 master classes on the unusual behavior of programming languages, to discuss together the nuances, and just laugh at the imperfections of the world and the tools with which we work. Intellectually, it is useful, in the spirit of a holiday. As a result, we planned and conducted 2 master classes: Fun. JS and Fun. PHP If it will be interesting - we will make separate articles about it.

What else do good IT people like? That's right - puzzles. To stretch our bio-processors and accelerate the mnemonic activity of the brain, we launched a small quest. The quest was built on the principle - to make quickly, with minimal labor costs. Quest should not take a lot of time (we are still at work). The idea of ​​organizing the quest spied on Habré (http://habrahabr.ru/post/235681/). I really liked the implementation of the "Know the whole URL" principle due to resource intensity. Everything is very simple, implemented quickly. Quest wrote on the "knee" for an hour. It uses 3 questions from start. webolomka.ru, to make it easier to accelerate, but then there were already issues related to the knowledge of web development. If it is interesting, we can lay out separately.

Early warning is the key to success

So that the holiday on Friday was successful and all your 200 employees could plan their time - it is worth taking care of the early notification of the upcoming event. In our company, every Monday we have a common stand-up, at which the heads of departments and product managers (prodtuc owners) talk about business in their areas of control. What happened is good and what is bad. Whether the company is moving towards success or not, sales have fallen or have grown, have we become better, where are we going and so on ...

Here at this stand-up we had an early warning that an event was being prepared. But this is not enough. It is necessary to still duplicate the invitation through the newsletter.

Further, in order to plan the program for after working hours, a survey was made. The questionnaire can be done on any specialized website, the benefit is free tariffs and you do not need to specifically bother, write something your own. The survey is needed to understand the mood of people and estimate how many will come to the event. Although we have become many, we still cultivate family values, so we always have parties with +1 (at least) and even with children. By the way, children fit very well. They play on a par with adults in the mafia, “Bang!” Or “Ticket To Ride”. To avoid unnecessary questions and doubts, the questionnaire asked if you were ready to come with +1. In the end, this gave many people an incentive to stay on Friday after working at work, to communicate with colleagues and with family. They killed 2 birds with one canister.

Based on the information received from the test, the picture was clear how many people would remain after work and what to prepare. Next, we form the program and do the survey again. It is best to do this on Wednesday to help the staff again in choosing to stay or not, to remind of themselves once again unobtrusively. It turns out the effect of advertising and NLP. We, as it were, persuade a person to stay, and not run away quickly home. No matter how good at work, many IT professionals are not very fond of noisy parties and too much communication, and even with colleagues. The survey made it possible to understand who wants to do what.

How to entertain in after working hours?

Yes, in general, all that people like. Even a simple card game can be styled as an event. For example, here are such cards for programmers . You can bring / buy cheap toys on the radio control (helicopters, cars ...) A lot of board games and the game of all times and peoples - "Mafia". Make a cinema with popcorn (you probably have a projector). Play console games (16 bits, 8 bits, modern consoles ...). In general, fantasy and there is no limit. The main thing is to organize - the people will pick up any initiative.

Final program of the day

So, the concept - nostalgia on childhood was formed. IT people, in their stuti, kidalty. At 30 years old, we don’t care like children, but we only build quadcopters and write programs for them. In general, nostalgia is an easy way to evoke positive emotions and, importantly, to give a general topic of conversation. It doesn't matter who you are, manager or programmer - you can discuss how in childhood you played Mortal Kombat. And you will have pleasant memories and a starting theme for consolidating friendships. Consoles can be brought from home, if someone has survived, or buy new ones. They are still sold.
Total that we got:

1. from 8 in the morning (yes, we have a lot of “hot-dogs”) until 11:00 in the office, music played in the style of Chip tunes (music was launched directly from di. fm). This immediately set the tone of the day and uplifted;
2. all day one conversation was occupied by the game room, in which the ottomans were put, there were the SEGA prefixes and 16 bit consoles (retro console Syubor and Dendy including);
3. at 14:00 held a master class on Fun. Js;
4. at 15:00 brought pizza, made a festive dinner;
5. at 15:00 the festive quest started;
6. at 18:00 we conducted a quest analysis and announcement of the winners;
7. at 18:30 held a master class on Fun. PHP;
8. at 19:00 they brought again pizza, pilaf, beer, popcorn and a bunch of nishtyakov;
9. at 19:30 started festive events.

Program for after-work time:

1. bang and mafia games;
2. board games (mainly Ticket to ride);
3. table hockey;
4. table tennis tournament;
5. radio control tank battle;
6. Cinema with popcorn - the first season of the show "The Big Bang Theory";
7. active games with Xbox360 + Kinect;
8. NES games in game consoles (we had a total of 5 consoles, 2 of which were 16 bits).

We decorate the office

To set a festive tone, it was decided to slightly decorate at least the entrance to the reception in the office. For example, you can take motivating posters from the motivate.polivanov.me/archive website and paste over the wall. We have an AXO department (and in companies with such a size, it should already be on any). Therefore, in this department we have a great master Slava. We asked him to make a retro-informational post. The whole thing pasted over these posters. The result was an interesting wall, on the background of which one could be photographed. And it just created an atmosphere of comfort and celebration. They didn’t do anything special to decorate the office, because they don’t need to. Well, not a new year, though ...

Cooking surprises

How can you pull a person to a pleasant experience? It's simple - nostalgia. Recall childhood, share impressions of the first computers and consoles, as parents forbade us to "spoil" TVs and how we did not turn off the Dandy to go through the whole "Felix Cat". And in order to give nostalgia a taste, vintage atypical drinks were chosen: Dr. Pepper, CocaCola Vanilla, Pepsi Cherry, Crush, etc.
Buy all these drinks can be in the online store. There were no problems with the search. The beauty of this simple solution is that they are not typical drinks, and they are associated with the IT sphere and with childhood at the same time.

The night before, we set a can for everyone on the table. In the morning, when he came to work, the person received a pleasant surprise, a charge of vigor and energy (these drinks are caffeine-containing, that is, typical energy (energy is a product based on fast carbohydrates and caffeine, so regular CocaCola is also energy) ).

We need to help self-organize

Often, in a corporate office without a program, people start loitering and do not know what to do. More active begin to form groups for any games. But this takes a lot of time. Help yourself to organize. In advance in the cabinets and negotiations, you will divorce the program of the event and what will be held here. Specify a clear start time. This will allow people to reduce the time for self-organization. Everything is clearly on schedule.

How to organize comfort for sociopaths?

How to make it so that newbies and those who do not like to communicate especially can feel comfortable? IT guys, sometimes like cats. They love to hide in a dark corner and they will be comfortable there. How to socialize such people and make them comfortable? Exit - cinema. This is a room where there is entertainment, but it is dark there. If a person does not want anything, he will watch a movie there with comfort, beer and popcorn. At some point he will grow bolder and go to the others. Therefore, it is a very good solution. Our cinema was empty for the first hour. Then everyone wandered into groups of interests and the cinema was already like a chill out zone. Tired and want to rest? Just go to the cinema and have a rest. It seems that a person does nothing. But he is busy with entertainment. In general, only continuous positive emotions.

Required minimum items

The required minimum things you can and should do is send out. What, why, and at least a letter to congratulate. Even if you did not start any program and do not celebrate the day of IT staff (and not only), but through the newsletter it is worthwhile to convey the importance of working professionals and emphasize their importance. You can talk about achievements and show other departments and employees, but what are these people doing after all? After all, it often happens with us that programmers do not know what marketers are paid for, and those, in turn, are called “computer engineers” for everyone.

Results of the event

But in the end everything turned out better than expected. A lot of employees remained after work, their “halves” and children arrived. And most importantly - all budget. With minimal cost, it turned out to be a full-fledged corporate event, with good organization. Everyone was satisfied. Therefore, do not be afraid to do the holidays and do not be afraid that your working day will break. With proper planning, you do not get a drop in productivity, but its growth. Well, it’s very pleasant to work in a company where you are valued and celebrate your professional holiday. All with the past days of the programmer and tester!

PS: By the way, if someone wants to join us in the company , we have vacancies. We are actively growing and will gladly replenish the ranks of our family with new colleagues.