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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

#31

Post by MarcScott »

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…

I took a group of 14 year-olds to the MLH Launch Hack in London and they loved the experience. For them, they were able to see how the coding skills they were developing in the classroom could be used to develop real products - no matter how small or insignificant.

Maybe it was because it was a student focused event - but I saw no evidence of cheating and the prizes were so small that it would have not been worth pre-building apps beforehand anyway.

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

#32

Post by birken »

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.

This isn't necessarily an alternative, but a good compliment would be finding an open source project you like and make a few different contributions to it. You'll learn a bunch of skills that are entirely independent of things you'd learn at a hackathon, but are very useful:

- How to read other people's code

- How to write code that wont be immediately thrown away (a problem generally at school)

- How to interface with project maintainers and get your changes accepted into the project

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

#33

Post by TimFogarty »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #29
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…

There's http://www.hackathonwatch.com/

Also checking out eventbrite is a good idea.

Non-student hackathons can be a pretty mixed bag so be careful which ones you choose to go to.

Battlehack is a pretty fun hackathon that's not just for students: http://battlehack.net/

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

#34

Post by hkmurakami »

TimFogarty wrote: post #19
psaintla wrote: post #13

Earlier 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…

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 fee…

Given that student pitch-a-thons (ex: business plan competition type events) can earn you pretty decent amounts of money, how much longer till hackathons on college campuses fall the way of corporate hackathons?

As food for thought, there are "Consulting Case Competitions" for business school students year round, and some students decide to spend their time optimizing for winning a bunch of these one after another all around the country. I'm not sure if this is a good, bad, or neutral thing.

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

TimFogarty wrote: post #19
psaintla wrote: post #13

Earlier 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…

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 fee…

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by brettneese »

MarcScott wrote: post #31
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…

I took a group of 14 year-olds to the MLH Launch Hack in London and they loved the experience. For them, they were able to see how the coding skills they were developing in the classroom could be used to develop real products - no matter how small or insignificant. Maybe it was because it was a student focused event - but I saw no evidence of cheating and the prizes were so small that it would have not been worth pre…

The more and more people I talk to, the more the conversation sounds like this.

There was a period of time -- and I hope we're over it, for the most part -- where "biggest, best, craziest, and most expensive" was the motto. It doesn't work; I've personally been to a couple of those huge hackathons and was really frustrated by the experience.

I work for an org that runs a nationwide (in the US) series of events called CodeDays that are somewhat similar in format to traditional collegiate hackathons and those are exactly the kinds of experiences we're trying to create, so we have a pretty strict limit on prize size, we only allow 100 students per city, we market to younger students, etc.

That's worked out incredibly well for us. A couple of the people profiled in this article actually got their start at a CodeDay.

(Interesting, CodeDay is also much much cheaper than these huge hackathons and we engage more students, just distributed across 30 cities.)

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

#37

Post by majadizhar »

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…

So true. That's why I like the concept of Startup Weekend (http://startupweekend.org) There is no prize money, just pure action. I always go to one of their locally organized events, to simply enjoy and just feel young again :)

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

#38

Post by clay_to_n »

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…

I think the best solution for hackathons is to stop focusing on the prizes. When you have a "grand prize" worth many of thousands of dollars, people are going to compete for it. I think a better idea is to go with just a top 6 / 8 /10, and a lot of sponsor prizes. At Treehacks (the one in this article), there were what felt like 25+ sponsor prizes - and that is cool, because a lot of those are going to kids who are too inexperienced to land in the top 10 at something with 600 students.

But remove the Grand Prize, because it makes the whole thing feel like a competition to people, and cheating / pre-building projects is unavoidable. Even the grand prize winners at Treehacks (built the robot arm, mentioned in the article) partially faked it - they were asked by the judges how much of the hardware they built before the hackathon, and they said they built all of the hardware beforehand. How much of the software had they already tinkered with / sketched out / built? Who knows.

So remove the idea that pre-building is cheating, and instead of 3 big prizes give out 50 small ones.

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

#39

Post by clay_to_n »

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).…

This is valid, but in the college CS world, doing hackathons is a very good predictor that you're also building your own stuff outside of them.

It also shows you're experienced enough to not be afraid. The best part of hackathons is going from 0 - X on some new technology, in a much faster way than if you had picked it up on your own, in the evenings. You know you're going to learn for a good 36 hours and try to build a real thing with it, so you won't give up after the first tutorial. Not every hackathon hacker uses a technology that's new to them, but a large amount do.

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

#40

Post by clay_to_n »

atroyn wrote: post #4
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…

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…

One of the target audiences for college hackathons are college students who have very little experience. I think they are a great learning experience, at least your first few - they give you the confidence to sit down with a team and an idea and actually build it. When someone goes from never having built a mobile app to having a working iOS app they designed and built themselves with the help of a team and maybe a mentor, the hackathon was worth it.

These are the weekends that will motivate them to decide to work on a startup with a friend, or realize they can be both programmer + designer at the same time.

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