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

Hello! I would like to share my experience in 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, few people officially celebrate the programmer's day at work. In today's world, where there are a lot of IT companies, the work of programmers for the IT world is hard to overestimate. And not only for him. Thanks [-im-] we have websites and mobile applications, internal intranet resources, CRM and CMS systems, and much more.

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

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

Problems organizing events in medium-sized companies

If you are a small company with up to 20 people, then everything is simple. Wanted - gathered, did not want to - did not gather. The charm of small companies in their family. You yourself can make a small brawl, decide how you will celebrate and what to do.

In large companies, especially the giants of the IT industry, this is all right. The processes are established, there are special departments and people who follow the dates, prepare the program, do corporate mailing, approve the introduction of holiday changes on the sites, order entertainment and organize a holiday for employees.

But in companies with personnel of 100-200 people there is already some kind of transition period. On the one hand, you can’t get together as simply as in a small family-type company. Already with so many staff there is such a thing as: “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 primarily involved in the selection of personnel and only in the 2nd - organization of events. Typically, a company lays budgets for general social holidays from the new year to March 8, plus a summer corporate party (team building) and the company's birthday (and not always that). Everything else somehow passes by. I agree that if you celebrate all the holidays, there will be no time to work. But in our company, 50% of the employees are developers. And we make a product thanks to which the company lives and develops. And therefore I, with our head of one of the IT departments, we 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 celebrating the day of each IT specialist would be very expensive. And in the 2nd week of September 2 events turn out right away. As a result, we decided to introduce our own holiday: the IT specialist day of our company. Indeed, for good, 10 years ago, an IT person was a person who could install Windows, and today every 8th housewife can do it. And many of our managers and marketers in the past graduated from faculties, one way or another, related to programming (for example, there are many employees who graduated from VMiK at Moscow State University). And these people also once wrote programs, albeit not professionally. And these people work in the IT field every day and develop our IT products. In general, it was decided - they officially approved the celebration of the annual IT-Tishnik day, which is celebrated every second Friday of September in our company.

It turns out that everyone celebrates, 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 / system administrator at work during working hours? Do not expect someone to do this for you. Take and do. The most interesting thing is that you can celebrate without interruption from production and violation of labor discipline.

Sound your proposal for organizing the holiday to your HR director and / or general manager. Explain to them that a holiday is not just an excuse to break off a working day and take alcohol - it’s a complicated process of motivating employees to increase morale and provide positive reinforcement. If employees are doing well and they are doing well at work, then work efficiency is greatly improved. Work is the 2nd house. At work, we spend at least 40 hours a week, but in fact we spend our lives there. And if it will not be comfortable for us, then the efficiency will drop dramatically, and this will affect the success of the company. A company primarily consists of people, not products and services. People are the company's most valuable resource and asset.

What is the budget?

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

What program?

Just think what you want? I want to come to work and feel the feeling of a holiday. Get something nice or a sign of attention. Well, in the evening, after work, I would like to communicate with colleagues in an informal setting. But there are many of us, and we are different. We cannot just sit at one table and celebrate. And for intellectual workers, this is boring.

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

1. working time
2. after working hours

The working hours of 50 programmers are very expensive and cannot be spent without benefit, otherwise the business will not be satisfied. Remember this. Rest rest, and sprint on 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 during working hours for programmers to justify downtime? This is to 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’s very cool to tell backenders about the frontend and vice versa.

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

What else do good IT people love? 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 do quickly, with minimal labor. The quest should not be time-consuming (we are still at work). The idea of ​​organizing the quest was spied on a habr (http://habrahabr.ru/post/235681/). I really liked the implementation of the principle “Find out the whole URL” because of resource consumption. Everything is very simple, it is implemented quickly. The quest was written on the “knee” in an hour. It uses 3 questions from start. webolomka.ru, to make it easier to accelerate, but there were already questions related to knowledge of web development. If it is interesting - we can lay it out separately.

Early warning is the key to success

In order for the holiday on Friday to be successful and all your 200 employees to be able to plan their time, you should take care of early notification of the upcoming event. At our company, every Monday there is a common stand-up at which department heads and product-owners (prodtuc owners) talk about affairs in their controlled areas. What happened is good and what is bad. Whether the company is moving towards success or not, sales have fallen or increased, have we become better, where are we moving, and so on ...

Here at such a stand-up, we conducted an early warning that an event was being prepared. But this is not enough. It is also necessary to 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 site, since there are free tariffs and you don’t need to bother or write something your own. The survey is needed to understand the mood of people and figure out how much will come to the event. Although there are many of us, we still cultivate family values, so we can always go to parties with +1 (at least) and even with children. By the way, children fit very well. They play with the adults in the mafia, “Bbeng!” or "Ticket To Ride." In order to avoid unnecessary questions and doubts, the questionnaire had a question, are you ready to come with +1. As a result, this gave an incentive to many to stay on Friday after work at work, to communicate with colleagues and family. They killed 2 birds with one stone.

Based on the information received from the test, the picture was clear how many people will remain after work and what to cook. Next, we form the program and do the survey again. It’s best to do this on Wednesday to again help employees choose whether to stay or not, once again unobtrusively remind themselves. It turns out the effect of advertising and NLP. We, as it were, persuade a person to stay, and not to run home quickly. No matter how good it is at work, yet many IT people do not really like noisy parties and excessive communication, and even with colleagues. The survey made it clear who wants to do what.

How to entertain in after working hours?

Yes, in general, everything that people like. Even a simple game of cards can be styled as an event. For example, here are such cards for programmers . You can bring / purchase inexpensive toys for radio control (helicopters, cars ...) A bunch of board games and a game of all time - “Mafia”. Make a movie theater with popcorn (you probably have a projector). Play console games (16 bits, 8 bits, modern consoles ...). In general, fantasy has no limit. The main thing is to organize - people will pick up any initiative.

The final program of the day

So, a concept has formed - nostalgia for childhood. IT people, by their very nature, are scammers. At the age of 30, we are all the same as children, but we only build quadrocopters and write programs for them. In general, nostalgia is an easy way to arouse positive emotions and, importantly, give a common topic for conversation. It doesn’t matter who you are, a manager or a programmer - you can discuss how you played Mortal Kombat as a child. And you will have pleasant memories and a starting theme for rallying friendships. Consoles can be brought from home, if someone has survived, or buy new ones. They are still for sale.
Total that we got:

1. from 8 a.m. (yes, we have a lot of "zhovorninks") until 11:00, music in the style of Chip tunes played in the office (music was played directly from the resource di. fm). It immediately set the tone for the day and cheered up;
2. throughout the day, one meeting room was occupied by a game room in which ottomans were placed, there were SEGA consoles and 16 bit consoles (retro consoles of Sibor and Dendy including);
3. at 14:00 we had a master class in Fun. JS;
4. at 15:00 brought pizza, made a festive dinner;
5. at 15:00 the holiday quest started;
6. at 18:00 they reviewed the quest and announced the winners;
7. at 18:30 we had a master class in Fun. PHP
8. at 19:00 they brought again pizza, pilaf, beer, popcorn and a bunch of nishtyakov;
9. at 19:30 festive events started.

After-hours program:

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

Decorate the office

To set a festive tone, it was decided to decorate at least the entrance at the reception in the office. For example, you can take motivating posters from motivate.polivanov.me/archive and glue the wall over. We have an AXO department (and in companies with this size it should already be any). Therefore, in this department we have a class master Glory. We asked him to make a retro information post. The whole thing is pasted over with these posters. It turned out an interesting wall, against which it was possible to take pictures. And it just created an atmosphere of comfort and celebration. They didn’t do anything special to decorate the office, because it was not necessary. Well, not a new year, though ...

Cooking surprises

How can a person be pulled into pleasant experiences? Everything is simple - nostalgia. Recall childhood, share impressions of the first computers and consoles, how our parents forbade us to “spoil” TVs and how we did not turn off Dandy to get through the whole “Cat Felix”. And to give nostalgia a taste, vintage atypical drinks were chosen: Dr. Pepper, vanilla CocaCola, cherry Pepsi, Crush, etc.
You can buy all these drinks in the online store. No problems were found with the search. The beauty of this simple solution is that it’s atypical drinks, and they are associated with IT and childhood at the same time.

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

It is necessary to help self-organize

Often on the created corporate party without a program, people begin to stick around and do not know what to do. More active begin to form groups for some games. But it takes a lot of time. Help organize yourself. In advance, in the offices and meeting rooms, you will spread the program of the event and what will be held here. Indicate a clear start time. This will allow people to reduce time for self-organization. Everything is clear on schedule.

How to organize comfort for sociopaths?

How to make it so that beginners and those who do not like to communicate very much can feel comfortable? IT people, 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? The output is a movie theater. 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 dare and go to others. Therefore, this is a very good solution. Our cinema was empty for the first hour. Then everyone scattered into interest groups and the cinema was already like a chillout zone. Tired and want some rest? Just go to the cinema and relax. It seems that a person does nothing. But he is busy with entertainment. In general, one continuous positive emotions.

Mandatory minimum things

Mandatory minimum things that you can and should do is mailing. Why what, but at least a letter should be congratulated. Even if you did not start any program and do not celebrate the day of IT employees (and not only), but through the newsletter it is worthwhile to convey the importance of working specialists and emphasize their importance. You can talk about achievements and show other departments and employees, but what do these people do. Indeed, it often happens with us that programmers don’t know what marketers get their salaries for, and they, in turn, call everyone “laptops."

Event Summary

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 - everything is budgetary. With minimal cost, we got a full-fledged corporate party, with a good organization. Everyone was satisfied. Therefore, do not be afraid to make holidays and do not be afraid that your work day will break. With proper planning, you get not a decline in productivity, but its growth. Well, working in a company where you are valued and celebrate your professional holiday is very pleasant. All with the past days of the programmer and tester!

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