This seems like a strange critique because hackathons are so opt-in. Yes there are often problems but no one I know goes expecting to win any prizes. Who cares about the prize? If you're going to try to win something, don't go. There are people who earn their income gaming hackathons with big prizes, and you won't compete with them.
Hackathon Be Gone
31–40 of 143 posts
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#32In Austin, we started running an event called "Finish Up Weekend" or FU Weekend - http://fuweekend.com/ ;) We have some simple rules: * you can't start anything new; * you have to celebrate something being done - usually with a round of applause; * there are no prizes - only the satisfaction of being done. While there is plenty of coding, we've had designers finish their portfolios, screenwriters finish pilots, an ar…
That sounds amazing! I went to Austin once for a tech conference and the vibe was really amazing.
I could really use something like this, though I feel like 20$ of your food is a lot better than 20$ of our food (I'm in Montreal).
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#33How about a hackathon sponsored by an open source project? Where everyone spends the allotted time contributing some improvement to that project. Seems like fun, something I would participate in, and the sponsor potentially gets a lot of benefit for cheap/free.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#34 In addition to all the provided stimulants, hackers are
encouraged to work through the night. Sure there may be
reminders that you should sleep when tired, but why a 24-
hour event instead of a 12-hour one then?
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#35At my previous company, we had a hackathon where the theme was, more or less, bringing the company more together through technology. ~12 of us made 3 separate teams, came up with ideas, and worked like 12 hours on a Saturday hoping to be declared the winner.
When all was said and done, the judges—all non technical—took about 30 minutes to decide that it was a 3-way tie. If you're going to make something a competition, just pick a winner.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#36The worst thing I feel about hackathon is that it instills a bad culture of software development into young programmers. People spend a weekend writing crappy code and wiring APIs together, expecting to get money and fame. In the real world, we don't need more crude and fragile apps which leverage most of its work to frameworks. We need more solid, performant, well-designed apps. Sadly, none of these points are priorities at hackathons. We also need more programmers with empathy, perseverance, dedication, and ability to work on large projects without burning themselves out physically and mentally. Hackathon doesn't seem to cultivate these traits either. I hope instead of going to hackathons, more people can try building semester-long, meaningful projects and take time to maintain them, or try contributing to open source software.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#37How about a hackathon sponsored by an open source project? Where everyone spends the allotted time contributing some improvement to that project. Seems like fun, something I would participate in, and the sponsor potentially gets a lot of benefit for cheap/free.
OpenBSD hackathons have been held at least once per year for ~17 years [1].
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#38I really dislike the corporate hackathon format. It can be great fun as an informal community gathering of developers to work on random pet projects, but the reality of the corporate hackathon trends toward being company sponsored and promoted technical debt creation. It often seems like the corporate hackathon is the clearest distillation of the "business" people not understanding how to create a mature, healthy cul…
I'm with you. Where I work Hackathons happen because someone in management has heard it's a cool thing to do. Practically nothing that happens in those ever is shipped and nothing is learnt from the experience. It's just a way of wasting people's time and appearing to be cool.
When I was younger I used to work through the night with friends on stuff we wanted to do. It was fun and social. There was no commercial motivation or value. We just had a lot of time on our hands being geeks with no social life and we enjoyed building things. In a corporate setting this is maybe similar to Google's 20% time which as far as I hear isn't really working any more either. The closest thing to this in my day job world is people taking some time to just do whatever they want to do without giving a damn what management thinks. If you can do a little of that in your workplace then you're basically getting the "true" hackathon effect ...
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#39I think for Hackathons to be a positive experience it depends one two things.
First it has to have an end goal where, even if you don't come in first place, you still leave with something that will be useful. From an incredible learning experience to something that could make you money.
Second it shouldn't cost you anything directly except for time. Working extra hours for your own company? That's costing you more than time because it's becoming a requirement ("Look at Johnny over there, he's gone to all our hackathons and now look at him in a more senior position. Do you not want to move ahead?").
For instance I just finished participating in Launch's Hackathon this weekend. Other than the costs I paid for my travel I paid nothing but time (they provided all food, drinks and not all of it was unhealthy) and in the end, even though I didn't win a prize, I left with the start of a really cool product (if I do say so myself) where, realistically, I think I'm about a week from delivering a decent, beta experience. I even created a Twitter account just so I could post my fun experience as I went: @heysimex
TL;DR: hackathons that cost money, that don't provide you with SOMETHING useful even if you don't win or that are run by your own company are rarely good experiences (unless you win). Hackathons that cost you nothing but time and you have something at the end of the thing? Awesome. I love it!
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Point is to get something done, force you to make choice, have a deadline, etc. -- not something else, like production ready code.
The older you get - the less patience you have for tight deadlines and 'forcing yourself to make a choice'. That's just having more energy than you know what to do with. The tragedy is young people have lots of energy and are scatterbrained and old people are sometimes wise but too tired. The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts.…
"The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts."
That's generally the past and present as well. With some notable exceptions I think that's how the world has pretty much worked through most of human history.