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The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

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Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

#21

Post by rjvir »

birken wrote: post #5

> Likewise, students say hackathons are an ideal way to test-drive the experience of working at a start-up before committing to a job. I don't really understand this. Working at a startup is not about sleeping 2 hours a night and/or churning out a new products in 36 hours. It is about committing to an idea for years and continuing to persevere when everything goes wrong and things look horrible (which is inevitable).…

Please suggest a better alternative to simulate the culture and mentality of a startup, for a typical 18 year old who is not a part of the world of tech.

Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

#22

Post by untog »

ditonal wrote: post #12
JacobEdelman wrote: post #3

Despite 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…

Agreed. It took me a long time to realise this, too. I'd go to hackathons and put together a working demo that lacked polish, then lose to people who basically put together a pitch deck with some HTML mockups attached.

Maybe it's just getting old, but the idea of exhausting myself over a weekend in order to create something I'll likely never use again has lost it's appeal. Every now and then I'll be disciplined and tell myself I'm having a "hack weekend" where I'm relatively anti-social, stay at home and work on a project. It's a lot more fulfilling.

Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

#23

Post by untog »

rjvir wrote: post #21
birken wrote: post #5

> Likewise, students say hackathons are an ideal way to test-drive the experience of working at a start-up before committing to a job. I don't really understand this. Working at a startup is not about sleeping 2 hours a night and/or churning out a new products in 36 hours. It is about committing to an idea for years and continuing to persevere when everything goes wrong and things look horrible (which is inevitable).…

Please suggest a better alternative to simulate the culture and mentality of a startup, for a typical 18 year old who is not a part of the world of tech.

Getting together with friends in your spare time to make a web site/app?

Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

#24

Post by TimFogarty »

untog wrote: post #23
rjvir wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please suggest a better alternative to simulate the culture and mentality of a startup, for a typical 18 year old who is not a part of the world of tech.

Getting together with friends in your spare time to make a web site/app?

Hackathons are a pretty good way of starting something like this for a college student (though obviously not the only way). I know several groups people who met at hackathons then went on to start a larger project together (often not the same project they did at the hackathon). That's one of the nice thing about college hackathons - you get to meet other students who like to build stuff in their spare time.

Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

#25

Post by TimFogarty »

pnathan wrote: post #18

The 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?

The people who do well at hackathons and programming competitions are often excellent students. And extra-curricular activities as a way of learning more and improving yourself are generally considered good for students, right? That's one reason universities support programming competitions, hackathons, CS clubs, etc. I'd go so far as to say the best students are the ones who love their subject so much they do it in their spare time too.

Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

#26

Post by windust »

theyCallMeSwift wrote: post #6
atroyn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you right up until "This is where you learn the hard skills you need to be a programmer, designer, entrepreneur, or artist - not in the classroom.". If you want to have fun and really wring out your skillset as any of those things, Hackathons are a great place to do it. If you want to experience something new, if you want to meet interesting people, sure, hackathons are great. But a hackathon is a terrible…

I think the thing that you have to remember is that there are a lot of different types of learners out there. From the sound of it, the hackathon environment is not conducive to your particular learning style (which is totally fine). Hackathons are great for the kinds of people who learn by doing or who need lots of real-world practice to master skills. The other thing I'll point out is that a lot of "hard skills" th…

I disagree, I think the hard skills for being a successful software developer are picked up by honing your craft daily working on the same project. Hackathons are too contrived since the goal is to have a finished product in 24 ~ 48 hours. Every time I have done one I throw away all the "Danger, Bad practice" signals from my sub conscience and work towards finishing the product/idea. Things that are important like maintainability (even if your hack is successful, and get investor funding you want to re-write it properly), coupling, testing, documentation, API, Memory profiling, Logging, performance optimizations, design patterns are thrown out the window to get that idyllic prototype out. Even working as a team, there is very little you gain from spending 48 hours with (mostly unknown) individuals than it is for your peers in a job where you actually have a favor economy.

And I don't mean that there isn't any value on hack-a-thons. I think you're right on dealing with deadline pressures and the ability of working yourself out of a problem in a pinch are valuable skills. I just don't think that's where the "hard" skills needed to become a successful software developer are learned.

Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

#27

Post by raverbashing »

shithhsaid wrote: post #11

Obligatory plug with select examples from the Hackathon culture: https://twitter.com/shit_hh_said Relevant discussion: "Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205177

"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."

Nope, reality catches up to them. Fast.

Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

#28

Post by mathattack »

ditonal wrote: post #12
JacobEdelman wrote: post #3

Despite 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…

You've made two very astute observations.

1 That's because most hackathans can't decide whether they want to be hackathons or pitchathons.

and

2 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.

My sense is that the market needs these type of pitch events with some type of filter. One filter is letting a group of experts at an incubator pick who you see. Another filter is having folks savvy enough to appreciate what can be gained from gaming hackathons.

One way to view this is, "If you want them out of hackathons, how do you pay for hackathons and attract the right people, and where should the pitch-masters go?"

I'm not sure ditching recruiters and VCs is the right answer. Perhaps having very technical keynote speakers helps? Or making the objective to be code reviews from famous engineers? (Instead of Google paying for expenses and a dozen recruiters, Google sends a couple very good engineers to peer review code. This is more expensive, but perhaps brings them better benefits too.) If there's no product pitch and PR, and a better alternative elsewhere, perhaps the pitch-masters will stay home?

So what to do with the pitch-masters, when there's only so many presentation slots at TC and seats at YC? I don't have a good answer for this, but it sounds like a market opportunity for someone.

Re: The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

#29

Post by squeaky-clean »

theyCallMeSwift wrote: post #2

If 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…

Are there any resources like this for non-students? I used to enter programming tournaments a lot as a student, and wish I had the courage at the time to attend a hackathon. They seem very fun, but I am not really good at finding them.

A few friends and I often have our own weekend hackathons, where we'll spend 48 hours intensely hammering out the basics for either an idea we've had, or one that we decide to come up with on the spot, but I'd love to try it out in a more social, competitive setting.

I work at a startup already, it's not the learning "hard skills" part that interests me. I'd just like to meet more people who are interested in coding fun tools/toys.

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