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Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

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Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#31

Post by aziaziazi »

Hack the hackathon. My follow-at-your-own-risk pro tip: Find a team not too much into wining and

- connect with others. They’re primarily networking events and are still good for that.

- Don’t bother checking the sponsors boxes too much. Have fun trying technical/product ideas that interest your for any _personal_ reason. Should fit with your team project obviously. If not, keep it for next time and instead:

- peer with others. Peering with a person you don’t know is an incredible social and technical experience, whatever your level difference.

- sleep at night. You want to be rested to have a good and useful time.

- don’t bother too much wining. The podium looks fancy but won’t make much a difference as soon as the doors close. It doesn’t really make a difference for networking, bootstrapping the resume line or having fun. But:

- aim for a MVP or at least something that run and you can show. It’s not fun to tight the last knobs afterwards. Something (anything) functional will make you and your team proud, will assist the resume line and will be fun and memberberries for the future.

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#32

Post by SoftTalker »

cortesoft wrote: post #19
codr7 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I only think this is true if the hackathon is around projects that are part of or similar to the normal work. In those cases, they should be during work hours and treated as work. 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 say…

Yeah that would be like a “golf outing” or something for the sales team.

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#34

Post by kevinsync »

When I was salaried, I never participated in company-sponsored hackathons and actively resisted attending any conferences or anything of the sort. Even back in late 00's / early 2010's it all felt like sponsorship hell, and my point of reference for the activities was nigh-impossible to recreate..

When I was a teenager in the mid-90's, I would go to a monthly Boy Scouts Explorer Post group hosted/sponsored by CompuServe (at their headquarters). My brother and I were a couple years younger than some of the "cool hacker" dudes (it was almost all dudes), like this guy Travis who had already had multiple Dade Murphy-esque run-ins with the feds and would give little talks on why it's not worth it and was honestly really supported by the alpha-nerd adults (not pejorative) who worked for CompuServe who ran the thing and were trying to keep us all from life-changing mischief (while still encouraging safer mischief).

Other attendees would give presentations on MODs (FastTracker / Impulse Tracker), or show off software they wrote (or found) that was cool, that kind of thing, and the only sponsor was CompuServe itself (which gave us all free dialup accounts).

I remember one time we set up a booth at the fairgrounds, like inside of one of those giant, long open-air pavilion buildings that normally would have horse/animal stalls, with a row of computers to demo either their brand new service "WOW!" [0] or maybe it was WorldsAway [1] to the general public. I had no idea what I was doing lol, but it sure did feel important!

Anyways, my rose-tinted vision of what a hackathon should be is some amalgamation of trading rainbow books at Cyberdelia mixed with those monthly CompuServe meetings where elders guided the young through the labyrinth of technology mixed with like a LAN party where instead of games, people get together, code, push boundaries, exchange ideas, and make something cool. Or something.

Not a brutal, forced interaction with your coworkers that wastes time, produces jack shit, and is sponsored by SliceLine Pizza lol

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6BQzd2km58

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/424450/this-old-tech-remembe...

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#35

Post by smelendez »

I haven't been to a hackathon in a long time, but the best ones I remember were explicitly about getting designers and developers to build something concrete but simple for a good cause. I think in some cases just a working prototype was sufficient for the "client," who could then more easily apply for grants to build a more robust or fully featured version.

POV, the PBS documentary series, used to have weekend hackathons in NYC in the early 2010s that paired the filmmakers with designers and coders. They were pretty good—filmmakers would come with an idea for a website they needed to support the film, basically, often a data visualization component or something to collect information from the public about the subject of the film.

The Tribeca Film Institute did something similar a couple of times, too—I went to one at CERN that they ran where scientists worked with designers, developers, musicians, etc. to build projects presenting their research, and another in Detroit.

I remember others like this as well from other organizations. It's still a bit of a weird format because you're basically doing pro bono or minimally paid freelance work on a tight deadline with your client sitting next to you, but they could produce some generally interesting work.

Some hackathons in this category I remember also had a goal of letting non-coders understand how the coding process works, which is hard to balance with actually getting stuff done.

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#39

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I'm old enough to remember MacHack. A 72-hour Mac hackathon in Ann Arbor (late 1980s).

"Kill Dean's Inits!"

Otherwise, hackathons aren't particularly consistent with the way that I work, so I don't do them, anymore. For that reason, I don't really feel that I have any basis to judge them.

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#40

Post by sjtgraham »

hbsbsbsndk wrote: post #10

I organized some grassroots hackathon events 10+ years ago. Turnout was mostly students and die-hard geeks who wanted something to do on the weekend. Even in this small pond we had a local startup sponsor and try to shoe-horn their service into it. When I attended bigger events with bigger sponsors it felt like 90% marketing to pitch your idea. The actual technical side was never that impressive or interesting. One c…

There is nothing wrong with a sponsor if it affords cash to spend on food and refreshments for attendees. I believe there are right and wrong ways to sponsor these events. You have to keep in mind developers are one of the most marketing skeptical audiences extant, but it’s possible for it to be done well.
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