Hackathons are nonsense

We just had a very successful hackathon where I work. About 10 separate teams coded basically overnight and the results I think surprised everybody. There was something about the energy and, well, slight insanity of staying up all night just to see if we could deliver a full product in under 20 hours...there was definitely something to it. The demo the next morning, where all the teams showed what they had done was pretty dang impressive. A few of the delivered results will likely become real products.

So from my perspective, the energy and "field day" attitude of a hackathon creates an urgency and focus that's feels like the early days of a startup, where sheer adrenaline and excitement creates more productive mental state and team effort I think. It's a thing, I tell you.

I will say that I, as a physics student, mentally crunched the numbers in my head when I saw a recent Wired article. It said:

Consider the action around Apple’s iOS alone: Since its 2007 debut, 500,000 applications have generated $3 billion for developers. (Android’s 400,000 apps have earned around $100 million.) ... It costs $5,000 to throw an event for 100 participants—a tiny investment considering the payoff if a participant creates a blockbuster app that the company can market... At one hackathon hosted by an upstart open source platform, I watched the winning team hoist an oversize novelty check for $10,000.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_hackathons/

If your mental math is good, you'll see those first numbers as 2 x 3000 and 1000 / 4, or $6000 and $250 respectively, in average revenues per app. So, I'd anticipate that Android can't really motivate a hackathon. Also there is some level of bias because really bad ideas might get filtered by the hackathon system, so that perhaps you are automatically in the top 10% of apps and your expected value is instead much higher, $60,000 or so. I doubt that it's quite this high, though.

Do they keep all of the submissions, or just the one that wins the prize? Because it sounded like they had 5-person app teams in this contest, and 100 people could potentially create 20 successful apps. If you got to keep all of them, then that's 20 * $6,000 - $5,000 = $115,000 expected profit before paying the programmers. Giving $10,000 to a single winning team is actually pretty absurdly conservative -- "you do all of the work, we'll keep over 90% of the profits." They can maybe get away with it because we think of ourselves as winners and splitting it up among 5, $2,000 is not bad for two days lost. Then again, assuming that everyone else is as good an app designer as you are, your expected value is only $2,000 / 20, and $100 is actually a pretty pathetic salary for that sort of competition. I mean, I know that you're "doing it for the love" or summat, but still, it sounds like these hackathon hosts have found a way to make programmers work for peanuts.

Unless when they said that the team hoisted "an oversize check", they mean that each member of the team hoisted an oversize check for that same amount. Then the profits are a little closer to 50/50 split (which is still a bit crazy) and the expected profits of your 48 hours of work are $500. Is your overtime rate $10/hour? ;-)

Hackathons aren't always about just making good software. For me, if you're at a hackathon and not pushing your limits, then you're not really getting into the spirit of the entire affair. I have good memories of one in particular where I submitted the awful, horrendous results of me trying to learn computer graphics in just twelve hours. I could have just sat down and made yet another CRUD app, but instead I learned about Three.js, and now that I got over the initial hurdle of just sitting down and tinkering with it, I've been more inclined to just play with the framework.

It's like the proverbial journey that begins with a single step. Sometimes all you need is that first step to force you to go try something out, immediately.

To reiterate your point, Ryan Bates of RailsCasts.com could be considered a Rails "Julia Child."

Every person has a different reason to like them or not. I can speak of my case: I work making software in one of the supposed "right ways" on a daily basis. I also like getting together with buddies or new people, and code something exciting that keeps you up until the wee hours with some good food and drinks.

I don't go with the expectations of having a full blown product ready for market release in 24 hours. I certainly know I might learn something new from experimenting or from others, come out with a good prototype, and simply be back on sunday very happy after doing something really fun.

Also don't underestimate some engineers abilities. I've seen guys crank out things in days that would take months to others.