Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

I am an american CS student that goes to (a lot) of hackathons. The purpose of this post is to get feedback/opinions from people that are outside the "Hackathon Hackers" bubble to determine whether or not my rant is founded and if the issues I am highlighting are characteristic of the tech industry.

It bothers me to see how obsessed with success this generation of "hackers" seems to be. I have met people who were justifying censorship, population control and unfair business practices because they could benefit from them someday. I was expecting a little more regard to civil liberties and ethics from students and so called "hackers".

People win by making "cool" apps (Uber for X) whereas technical hacks are totally ignored.

I am glad that people are motivated to succeed but this lead to some of them taking themselves very seriously. Often to the expense of ethics.

"There is such ignorance in this world about who we are. We are not criminals. We are innovators. We create things. We change the world.[...]"

And this is one example among many other from a guy who has never engineered anything. Weeks are spent planning for their new "great project" with at the end little to no execution.

Students who believe to be 1000x SE because they can stick two APIs together and use bootstrap end-up to be very condescending older engineers.

This "bro"/"my framework is the best"/"Make money fast" culture that stinks a little bit IMO.

Hackathons are great to try out new technologies, meet new people and outreach to demographics that are traditionally under-represented in CS but I don't like where this is headed.

Like HS there is "cool kids" who are "Student Entrepreneur" or "Innovator, UX Artist blah blah", "RoR Genius" etc... and the rest of the world.

My apologies if this post is a little bit ranty, I hope to get other perspectives on this.

The Portland Startup Weekend presented itself as a way to get a new company started, but they were blasting everyone's trade secrets all over facebook and twitter. There was no discussion of taxation, nor how equity would be divided.

If you have the idea, I write the code, and angersock markets the product, how do we divide the equity?

There are some good answers to that question but the Startup Weekend company - a private, for-profit corporation - simply didn't address it, rather they got angry with me when I brought it up.

Honestly? You're hanging out with a bunch of ambitious, entry level devs, probably all college students. This is what you should expect from a crowd like this. Take what you need and leave the rest. For more depth and maturity, go to your favorite language meetups and attend/participate in talks from/with folks with some industry experience under their belt. Kudos for having perspective enough to ask for feedback about this. You'll be fine.

For those unfamiliar with the Hackathon Hackers culture, please see some select samples:

https://twitter.com/shit_hh_said

A hackathon at a school is going to exist to further the adjenda of the school which is fine, but not anything related to "hacker ethos". A hackathon at an actual hackerspace however will be much closer to what you are after.

Some other folks brought up Startup Weekends. We have them in my town and I've never seen them get anything off the ground. Some of the organizers tried to cozy up to our hackerspace which is fine, but we really had nothing in common. The reality is that Startup Weekends are stupid. It's a nice idea to get a bunch of technical people and investors together to build something, but you don't start a business worth pursuing by committee. You have a small number of folks very focused on what they want and that builds momentum until it can draw others in. By the time outsiders are being attracted there's usually a solid idea there that people are contributing towards. A committee is going to water an idea down until it's a shallow frank-n-beans version of the original idea. The other possibility is that they end up making a new "Uber for X" which never goes anywhere.

But someone with their wits about them can use this to networking opportunity with local tallent. Just don't participate in the main project if you can avoid it.