What is a Hacky Hour?

In Australia, Hacky Hours were originally started by (I believe) Damien Irving at Uni of Melbourne. The idea is that there’s little support for your day-to-day computational problems in an academic environment: You want to run an analysis in R or Python for your PhD, but your supervisor team has no computational skills. There are no support structures for this very common issue at most universities: students and early-career researchers (ECRs) are left to fend for themselves. The result is poor code, or analyses not being carried out that would’ve greatly support the research. Thus Hacky Hour: every time you have a computational problem, chances are someone on campus somewhere has already solved this problem.

I started a Hacky Hour at the University of Western Australia (UWA) February 2017, at least that’s when I made the Twitter account. Every Tuesday, 2pm to 4pm, 99% of weeks. I believe it’s the longest-running Hacky Hour now. First we were in the library, then we moved to Hackett Cafe so we could be louder. The largest Hacky Hour had about 18 attendants, the smallest had just me. The average attendant number is probably 3 or 4. Most attendants were PhD students with some ECR postdocs, and practically zero mid-career to late-career researchers. Just a Twitter-account, a little table-sign from OfficeWorks, and decalitres of coffee. No sign-up, no tracking, no tickets, just come and say hi.

Some wonderful issues

Organising the Hacky Hour has exposed me to some wonderful problems and niches that I would’ve never touched in my academic career: gut microbiome analysis. Clustering archaeological measurements. Quantitative psych studies evaluations. There’s a beautiful universe of wonderful science out there I wouldn’t have gotten to see in my academic railroad track.

It has also been a venue for ‘alternative’ PhD supervision: I can’t count how often a stressed-out PhD student appeared who has been told by their supervisor to run a fancy, complicated analysis with a floppy disk’s worth of data (of which half was NA). Usually the supervisor had never run that kind of analysis, they just found it in a paper. In these cases I told these poor students that it’s my opinion that the analysis is not feasible with that data and to have their supervisor email me if they think differently. I have never received an email.

A panacea for loneliness

An academic career is a lonely one. You always have to be the ’leader’ on a paper. Your typical academic spends years in a building without knowing what their office neighbour does. At the end of my early career research phase I had my own office and on some days, spoke to no-one. Part of Hacky Hour was my desire to not be so lonely any more, and in that, it has been a great success.

It also helped with my imposter syndrome: Most of the time, research makes me feel like an idiot. I start the day with nothing working and end the day with nothing working, but in a different way. It was always a boon to come to Hacky Hour and help a beginner with some ggplot2-graphs; fixing common beginners’ bugs and suddenly I didn’t feel so dumb anymore!

A generational turning point

As the years went on, I realised that Hacky Hour plugged a specific generational gap. The current generation of research is computational with practically all papers the result of complex code. PhD-students and ECRs need to code. But here’s the problem: the senior professors, the only sources of learning for the PhDs and ECRs, have never developed these necessary skills. They never needed to, the research they drove was done in the field with minimal computation. There’s a need to learn from the bottom with very little teaching from the top. That’s the gap that Hacky Hour, inadvertently, started to bridge. But 1 or 2 hours a week can’t solve a complete lack of computational learning and mentoring infrastructure.

A waste of time?

To academia’s incentive structures, running something like Hacky Hour is a waste of time. Does it produce papers? Does it produce grants? No and no (it did start some collaborations though). The time spent on Hacky Hour I could’ve spent on writing papers. It sounds ’nice’ to have run this community and to some people, sometimes, it was a bonus on my CV, but grant bodies never cared. Getting first-author papers or grants out of Hacky Hour was never the goal, but it explains why there are so few Hacky Hours left: running these events slightly hurts your academic career. It might have even hurt the perception of people of me: ‘he’s not serious about academia, he wastes time running this’. I have no way of telling but I have heard senior academics express these similar sentiments about others.

High churn in academia

Most ‘regulars’ you’d expect at computationally heavy events have left academia. I’ve written about parts of the reasons before (see here). This means that there’s no steady pool of attendants from which to draw. Couple that with the relatively short duration of a PhD (3 1/2 years max in Australia), the overall time-poverty in academia (‘you should be writing papers, not drinking coffees in a cafe’) means a high turn-over in attendants. That also means that it’s very hard to build a consistent community of practice. I’ve seen funded CoPs fall apart for similar reasons.

There’s just no position within the academic system that supports such institutions, mostly due to the fact academia gets evaluated, again: papers and grants. A CoP does not (directly) produce papers and grants, it just very loosely leads to research outputs. These connections between CoPs and research output are so strenuous that they’re hard to measure, so nobody ‘upstairs’ sees the value.

Other universities had their own Hacky Hours, but once the ‘main’ person moves on, they just stop. We see that in most social self-organising structures, your church group or children’s playgroup is very similar: there’s usually one organiser, and once that organiser moves on, the structure falls.

Where next?

Since I’ve left academia, I’ve got less and less time with meetings filling up my days. I’ve got the OK to keep running Hacky Hour, but for how long? In the last few months I had to skip several Hacky Hours due to important meetings. I highly doubt there will be six more years.

I’d like to thank all the ‘regulars’ who’ve made Hacky Hour at UWA possible over the years! Your contributions are highly valued. I’ve learned beautiful things and you have all been enormous help for students and ECRs who’ve been failed by their supervision systems.