Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

Answers are obv: (1) you (2) no - so your skills are not valued at $0.

Case in point:

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

-Mark Zuckerberg in his letter to investors at the FB IPO.

However, I don't think a gross generalization of people who go to hackathons (possibly competitively) is very accurate. A lot of people in the hackathon community are making actually cool things beyond just sticking APIs together, and there are many who can not program at all.

WRT selection for a hackathon. When thousands more apply than spots are available for, there is going to be competition. A lot of the hackathons realized they were not being inclusive enough and began initiatives to change that. That type of responsibility is exactly what they should have done.

I think a hack is worthless if you can't get regular people interested in it, so technical hacks are rightly failing. If you ever start doing indie app dev you'll learn the same thing. It's easy to write esoteric technical tools and apps targeted at developers. It's difficult to write something that will achieve mass adoption and actually get a lot of usage. The latter has a lot more impact on the world as well.

Even in industry the strong preference is for solutions that string two APIs together as you say, rather than difficult technical solutions like you seem to be advocating. Software Engineering advocates using libraries and services over writing more code because it improves various metrics like maintenance, enhancement, defects, etc..

And just think, they make you look all that much better. For all the hype of this industry we really are a conservative pragmatic bunch. We don't fall for the hype too often.