Three Types of Harmful Hackathons

My biggest problem with hackathons is that they are usually student-only events, which I feel is a terrible and unnecessary restriction. I have participated in a hackathon several previous times as it was lax with its entry requirements (I was not a student but an alumnus), but their sign-up page now says it is open to undergraduates and high school students with special permission.

I have a BS and MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering and an MBA but my passion for the last few years has been anything and everything related to programming. I’m willing to travel all over the country and the world to attend these events as they are great opportunities for learning, meeting people, working with technologies that aren’t available, and providing a good reason to be in front of a computer for 24 or more hours at a time. I’m willing to pay a non-student entry fee or do whatever else is necessary to help out to offset the additional cost that I would bring. Having a bunch of computer science students working together is great, but the hackathon experience can be greatly enhanced by people who have different backgrounds or industry experience, are entrepreneurial, or have connections to companies, financing, jobs, etc.

Different backgrounds bring different people and thinking together. How would having a marketer, pianist, chemist, or sports therapist change the idea generation process? Industry experience is provided on the tech side by some of the sponsors or organizers, but you will never know what software pharmaceutical companies need unless you have someone with a Doctor of Pharmacy who has been working with pharmaceutical software for several years like my one friend who attended the hackathon. You will never know what huge opportunities are available in the Department of Defense or data architecture fields unless you have someone like myself with years of experience working in those industries. Our mix of two people with industry experience (PharmD in pharmaceutical, MBA/Engineering in DoD), and students in Psychology (med. school ambitions), and traditional computer science can lead to both some wild ideas or practical software that is desired or needed in industry.

Trying to include entrepreneurs and people with business interests are another way to improve hackathons. I was really impressed that there were over 100 submitted projects for this hackathon, an incredible number and an accomplishment for a hackathon that has been growing bigger every semseter. Most of these projects will die and never be developed for in the future. And while that is a good idea for most of the hacks, some are promising for future development. I would love to see some of these hacks turn into businesses, start generating revenue, or start accumulating large user bases. This is often too much of a time/money constraint for a broke student to accommodate amongst the many classes, projects, exams, work, and debt that they have to deal with. Opening hackathons up to non-students can get entrepreneurs, funding, and people who have the time and money resources to take the project to the next level involved.

Bringing in non-students also can bring in connections to companies which can be invaluable to students. This can bring in people who have access to jobs, internships, and exclusive technologies. It also can bring experience to show students how technologies or work flows exist in industry and what to be prepared for as ideas move from one or two person teams into businesses with hundreds or thousands of employees.

I stole this off of my blog, as the concerns I had previously are the same.

http://jbutewicz.com/hackru-fall-2014/

> One point I disagree with in the article is that cash prizes are harmful. I just don't see evidence of that—prizes at university hackathons have been getting bigger and bigger (tens of thousands of dollars) but it seems like the technical sophistication of hacks continues to rise. So long as you have good judges (ie. hackers, not marketers), large prizes just provide an awesome reward for awesome hacks.

I think the point of "avoid big cash prizes" rule in the article was to foster inter-team collaboration and minimize competition. It's a good goal. On one hackaton I attended where prizes were cool but not that big (items worth less than $1k each) it was not uncommon to see people spending some time talking to other teams, helping them set up, solve some obstacle they encountered or just playtesting their project.

Competition creates a bad atmosphere and it's better to reduce it to minimum. It's much more fun to care about maximizing the amount of cool projects being created than just fighting for the top spot.

@exelius, i think what @joshstrange wants to say is that a hackathon is a place where people want to build things whether it make sense or no sense at all.

Adding the business stuff is not appealing to hackers. It definitely is good to earn money out of it, but the fun goes away.

@joshstrange, a lot of developers felt the same way as you do. Startup Weekend should have emphasized that it is not a hackathon, but a business learning event. Or if you are dev, and you want to build your own startup, it's a good event to exercise a startup like environment. I have nothing against Startup Weekend. I believe it is helping a lot of people to become entrepreneurs but some of the organizers who are not well-trained might have misinformed the participants the real intention of the event resulting to this confusion.

@exelius, you've mentioned this part: "Now have some business nerd spend an hour making a few slides and you're done. You have articulated the problem, the size of the market and the product you're creating. You don't actually have to make the product beyond the prototype stage, you just have to pitch it like you could."

--->>> That does not define a hackathon. That is a business pitching competition... Remember in a hackathon, you were able to build things, build something. There is a product after the event which you are proud to show & tell whether the audience like it or not... Based on your statement, what you're implying is that a hackathon can be just a pitch deck with an awesome pitch from the presenter, which is totally not what a hackathon is about.

> @exelius, i think what @joshstrange wants to say is that a hackathon is a place where people want to build things whether it make sense or no sense at all.

Agreed, I get that SW is not that but I wish there was something around me that was like that.

> @joshstrange, a lot of developers felt the same way as you do. Startup Weekend should have emphasized that it is not a hackathon, but a business learning event. Or if you are dev, and you want to build your own startup, it's a good event to exercise a startup like environment. I have nothing against Startup Weekend. I believe it is helping a lot of people to become entrepreneurs but some of the organizers who are not well-trained might have misinformed the participants the real intention of the event resulting to this confusion.

Again, I agree 100%. I think that they may do a decent job of telling people that but I missed it. It's a cool thing don't get me wrong, just not what I'm looking for.

No; I agree a hackathon isn't just a business pitch. You should also have to build a prototype that does most of what you claim it to. But most hackathons also make you justify that product's existence.

If you want to build something cool, you don't need a hackathon for that. Just build it. But if you enter a competition where people are judging your creation, then you have to be able to pitch it based on the judgment criteria.