How to attend a hackathon

He lost me when he started talking about Startup Weekend. Some people may find that kind of thing fun, but sorry that's not a hackathon.

I went to one a few weeks ago, and bailed when I realized business school students and hustlers out-numbered engineers 4 to 1. Entire teams of 7-8 people formed that didn't have a single technical person on them. I checked back with a friend afterwards, and apparently none of the top winning teams actually built anything -- they just presented business plans. Unless you want to work on a business plan for 48 hours, stay away...

Depends on the city and the makeup of the attendees but in NYC (where I organize them) we usually have an even split between devs and business (slightly fewer designers as well).

Yeah, I'm not going to an XXX domain at work. The idea is terrible and not worth whatever benefit was in mind.

I had the exact same experience. I basically had to join up with 4 B-School students and work my ass off on their ideas which weren't interesting (and I couldn't play with anything technologically interesting since I didn't really have the time). By the end of saturday I realized I was burning myself out on something that I had no interest in and told them I quit (for fear of burning myself out for my actual job). It turns out they didn't even really need me because as you said, everyone presented business ideas with at most landing pages developed.

I think SW might be more successful if the process isn't so ad-hoc on the first night.. maybe a web site that goes up the week before that lets people decide what they want to work on and start some initial planning. I'd also like to be sure I'm matched up with developers that I'd like to work with because the main reason I went there was to learn from other developers; Instead I was the only one on the team and felt like an unpaid laborer. Also, developers and designers should be better incentivized to attend by e.g. having much lower entrance fees than biz dev folks, and perhaps also by having separate prizes for best code/design.

I've only been to one hackathon (Angelhack NYC), but I've heard that other ones have a similar problem - short demos. If you are evaluating a project in 2 minutes, you aren't evaluating anything except a team's ability to pitch. Granted, pitching is a useful skill, but maybe it should be called a Pitchathon because those of us who code all night get resentful of well-rested biz devs with a slide deck being in a 'hackathon'.

I know judging time tends to get limited, but one easy solution would have been to either split the judges up or use staff/volunteers to have some sort of preliminary round where you get 10-15 minutes to do a full working demo that shows all your work, not just a concept. The second added benefit is then you have a shorter 'final round' where only the best projects get demoed for everyone. The only downside is that not everyone gets to do a 'real demo' in front of the judges but maybe it's a good thing if it needs to be earned. I personally would have felt much better getting knocked out in an early round after actually showing all the work I put in rather than feeling like 90% of my work was irrelevant as far as the demo went because I didn't have time to show it.