Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

This exact thing happened to me. I was the backend guy on a winning hackathon team and decided it was pointless to build a real server for the proposed idea. It was essentially a single page app, v nicely designed etc, kind of a half-baked concept but kind of fine. Definitely aligned with the business. It won with the entire backend being mocked. It didn't really matter if there there was actual business logic underneath. I just advised on API design and made sure the idea hung together technically speaking.

It beat some much cooler, technically innovative concepts. It made me not want to participate in another hackathon though. All the fun, nerdiness and actual hacking were replaced by basically building a sensible product demo.

Yeah this is for "startup lite" hackathons where the goal is to sell an idea and possibly your team to investors. I had a blast doing hackathons where the goal was just to make the coolest thing possible in 24 (or whatever) hours.

I did one in 2013 where a PhD student researching CFD wrote a full fluid simulation in pure javascript and used it for a music visualizer. It was incredible.

EDIT: I actually found the demo I was thinking of! Still holds up: https://vimeo.com/79272443

That's a little depressing. The hackathons around here are just people getting together to work on what ever they feel like. There's no jury, no contest, just hacking on fun little projects, helping others.

The observation might be correct in the circle where to author travels, but it does remind me of the dotcom days. You always had this guy: The Idea Guy. He couldn't actually do anything. He just had "ideas", and others just had to write code to make it work. The important part is that the ideas where the thing that matters, coding was something anyone could do... except the idea guy, apparently (much too busy I guess). The plan was always the same thing, the idea guy would come up with business ideas, and a team would code them up, while the idea guy sat in his office, dreaming up the next big product.

Back then those people where basically a joke, but now I guess they're important.

Yep, "hackathon" got co-opted into "free labor" the moment business types sniffed it out. Hackers caught on, left, and now "hackathon" means "business types hyping each other over demo sketches" -- which is fine, but not my cup of tea, and about as far as it is possible to be from the original spirit of hacking.

I’ve personally seen hackathons won by backend-ish things, such as a recommendation engine and a command line tool.

The author’s idea of a hackathon is Shark Tank. There’s more to hackathons (execution) than the idea and visual at the end.