Obligatory plug with select examples from the Hackathon culture:
https://twitter.com/shit_hh_said
Relevant discussion: "Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture"
The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#12Despite the optimistic tone in this article hackathons have definite problems. They have a contradiction between their party atmosphere and their high stakes. While they strive to provide an informal, fun event they also offer extremely large rewards (cash, internships, and even startup-funding are offered as rewards). Little seems to stand in the way of groups cheating and judging may seem incredibly subjective. Rum…
That's because most hackathans can't decide whether they want to be hackathons or pitchathons. As you have picked up, they really can't be both. Hacking is experimental, and it's fun, and it definitely is not optimized around impressing a VC or a journalist in 3 minutes or less. If you wanted to be a true hackathon, you would ban the investors and journalists and really ban judging altogether and just have everyone show everyone else their projects. Even the idea of "fun" is different between the two crowds, with the hacker crowd expecting the "fun" part to be the cool hacks themselves, and the journalist/finance crowd expecting the fun part to be the boozing up and making plans for how you spend your millions after you focused on optimizing a commercial product (ususally with more emphasis on marketability and monetization potential than cool tech). If you want to "win" a hackathon i.e. impress a VC/Angel/CEO/Journalist, of course you should prepare beforehand, it's extremely difficult to verify cheating and very little real technology can be built in that timespan and that environment (party wooo!). You should also focus way more on the design and pitch then on the functionality, since the judges only have the time to evaluate the design/pitch. The good news is you can also treat the pitchatons like a hackathon and just ignore the judging/prizes, they can still be nice networking events regardless and times to learn some new things/APIs. Or you can try to game the prizes, but either way I wouldn't take them too seriously. How many hackathon projects turn into anything real anyway?
The current Hackathon culture is indicative of a general tech and investing culture of picking "hot" ideas made by charismatic teams over people doing true technological innovation which takes sustained, serious effort. The real innovation is what ends up making an impact, but the little prototype parties can be a good stepping stone into the industry.
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#13Despite the optimistic tone in this article hackathons have definite problems. They have a contradiction between their party atmosphere and their high stakes. While they strive to provide an informal, fun event they also offer extremely large rewards (cash, internships, and even startup-funding are offered as rewards). Little seems to stand in the way of groups cheating and judging may seem incredibly subjective. Rum…
That's because most hackathans can't decide whether they want to be hackathons or pitchathons. As you have picked up, they really can't be both. Hacking is experimental, and it's fun, and it definitely is not optimized around impressing a VC or a journalist in 3 minutes or less. If you wanted to be a true hackathon, you would ban the investors and journalists and really ban judging altogether and just have everyone s…
If I could give you a high five or a hug over the internet I'd do just that. I stopped going to hack-a-thons all together because at some point (I can't pinpoint the exact time) they turned into show-and-tell for existing startups. I participated in a Real Estate Tech hackathon and the top three finishers came in with ready made products, spent all of their time networking and did zero coding. They then pitched their products which were highly polished while the rest of us sat around looking like people who had coded up some things for fun and a little competition.
Hack-a-thons need to change so that the objective isn't clear until you walk in so people have to create something on the spot.
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because most hackathans can't decide whether they want to be hackathons or pitchathons. As you have picked up, they really can't be both. Hacking is experimental, and it's fun, and it definitely is not optimized around impressing a VC or a journalist in 3 minutes or less. If you wanted to be a true hackathon, you would ban the investors and journalists and really ban judging altogether and just have everyone s…
If I could give you a high five or a hug over the internet I'd do just that. I stopped going to hack-a-thons all together because at some point (I can't pinpoint the exact time) they turned into show-and-tell for existing startups. I participated in a Real Estate Tech hackathon and the top three finishers came in with ready made products, spent all of their time networking and did zero coding. They then pitched their…
I think rather than have a surprise objective they should remove the prizes, intense competition, and networking. Hackathons should be about coding something cool, not winning, networking, or partying.
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#15If you're a student and are interested in finding a hackathon near you to participate in, check out https://mlh.io/events for a list of great events in North America and https://mlh.io/eu for events in Europe. As someone who got their start at student hackathons (I wanted to be a lawyer before I went to my first one) and as someone who has been to hundreds of these in my life, I can definitely testify to the importan…
This kind of environment bears no relation to the workforce. Further, a lot of people learned their programming skills in the classroom and then went on to succeed at work without any hackathons.
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I could give you a high five or a hug over the internet I'd do just that. I stopped going to hack-a-thons all together because at some point (I can't pinpoint the exact time) they turned into show-and-tell for existing startups. I participated in a Real Estate Tech hackathon and the top three finishers came in with ready made products, spent all of their time networking and did zero coding. They then pitched their…
I think rather than have a surprise objective they should remove the prizes, intense competition, and networking. Hackathons should be about coding something cool, not winning, networking, or partying.
Or make the prizes reasonable. I won an RC helicopter and got a few t-shirts at a hackathon a couple years ago. I wasn't there contingent on the prize, but it was still a nice incentive.
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#17Despite the optimistic tone in this article hackathons have definite problems. They have a contradiction between their party atmosphere and their high stakes. While they strive to provide an informal, fun event they also offer extremely large rewards (cash, internships, and even startup-funding are offered as rewards). Little seems to stand in the way of groups cheating and judging may seem incredibly subjective. Rum…
That's because most hackathans can't decide whether they want to be hackathons or pitchathons. As you have picked up, they really can't be both. Hacking is experimental, and it's fun, and it definitely is not optimized around impressing a VC or a journalist in 3 minutes or less. If you wanted to be a true hackathon, you would ban the investors and journalists and really ban judging altogether and just have everyone s…
+1 - this is an excellent comment.
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#18The wheel turns: it used to be programming competitions, now it's hackathons. What will be the next fad offering for glory and jobs that isn't doing the grind work of hitting the books?
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because most hackathans can't decide whether they want to be hackathons or pitchathons. As you have picked up, they really can't be both. Hacking is experimental, and it's fun, and it definitely is not optimized around impressing a VC or a journalist in 3 minutes or less. If you wanted to be a true hackathon, you would ban the investors and journalists and really ban judging altogether and just have everyone s…
If I could give you a high five or a hug over the internet I'd do just that. I stopped going to hack-a-thons all together because at some point (I can't pinpoint the exact time) they turned into show-and-tell for existing startups. I participated in a Real Estate Tech hackathon and the top three finishers came in with ready made products, spent all of their time networking and did zero coding. They then pitched their…
Yeah that kinda sucks. It's one of the reasons college hackathons are so compelling - people aren't there with their startups, it's students looking to learn. I think sometimes people judge student hackathons based on corporate hackathons they've been to but they are fundamentally very different.
Jacob is right, big prizes can suck. I'd love to see fewer big prizes at hackathons. Having some small stuff so people feel accomplished and valued is nice though. Jon Gottfried has a really good article about this[1].
I go to a lot of student hackathons and generally people are there for learning - not competition. They're certainly not there for "boozing up"!
And of course hackathon projects amount to nothing 99% of the time. That's not a problem. That's totally to be expected from 24 hours of hastily put together code. The value students get is learning about idea generation, working with others, managing a project, how to use the libraries, frameworks, and APIs, how to work to a deadline, how to debug, how to do version control, how to deploy, how to test and improve your work, how to present your work to others, and much more. And I don't think companies or VCs who attend really expect to find a next Facebook - they're probably more concerned with just meeting the kind of students who would rather spend a weekend building stuff instead of boozing. Furthermore, hackathons don't undermine the value of sustained effort on hard technical problems - but they can be the first step for students starting to work on technology outside of their courses.
You're all totally right that large prizes suck and pitchathons suck. Most student hackathons do a pretty good job of staying away from those (though some could do better for sure). As Jacob said, "hackathons should be about coding something cool, not winning, networking, or partying" - I've honestly never been to a student hackathon where that wasn't the case. So I'd be careful about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
[1] http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-sinc...
Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley
#20The wheel turns: it used to be programming competitions, now it's hackathons. What will be the next fad offering for glory and jobs that isn't doing the grind work of hitting the books?
Programming competitions actually require deep algorithmic knowledge and lots of training