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I joined a few corp hackathons before - only to realize the team had been coding even before the hackathon started - rather than hacking during the hackathon period!
He used this event as a PR opportunity and went on the local radio to say we had done a project for NASA.
I'm still embarrassed about that.
Yeah, hackathons were always shit. They're an apparatus for getting essentially free labor out of unsuspecting and gullible nerds.
Could never wrap my head around the idea. They're often framed by employers as perks: Look, we're giving you the chance to come and work overtime for free, isn't that great?
This was further enforced when I drove up to attend Hack the North at U Waterloo with a few friends from Boston. One of the contestants stayed up so late he tore a muscle in his eye and now has a permanent deformity / disability.
As an adult I'd simply never even show up to such an event, if my employer wants to pay me overtime sure - but I'd still say no.
Build cool things, get normal amounts of sleep. It's not about the clout its about improving as an engineer.
They’re so far from the environment where I’m most productive and creative that I’ve always considered them to be performative nonsense at best.
Yeah, hackathons were always shit. They're an apparatus for getting essentially free labor out of unsuspecting and gullible nerds.
Could never wrap my head around the idea. They're often framed by employers as perks: Look, we're giving you the chance to come and work overtime for free, isn't that great?
My company 15 years ago or so did a hackathon with arduinos, where they provided a bunch of arduinos and hardware and food, but the projects we made were completely unrelated to work and served no practical purpose. My team made a Simon says game.
It was just for fun, there was no benefit for the company. I think those are fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43860696
Hackathons are fun and productive when what you need to do/learn — something you haven't already done/learned — can be done/learned in a weekend. Once you graduate, there's a lot fewer of those things lying around. Quote:
> We need look no further than the "hackathon," that sad facsimile of the days when we were all learning the basics so fast that the world could be ours with just a day or two of focused effort. Hype up an exciting atmosphere, assemble some folks with so few attachments in life that they have time to spend all weekend at a hackathon, and this ritual will summon up the old gods. The hackathon is the proof that people believe this can work, and it is the proof that it doesn't.