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Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

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Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#51

Post by jrumbut »

repomies69 wrote: post #4

This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.

The few I went to 10ish years ago had something of a party atmosphere. Free beer and pizza, and the winner was the one with funniest presentation.

Imagine my surprise when they started showing up on new graduates' resumes, eventually I learned that they were more like all night working sessions now.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#52

Post by skinnymuch »

heyparkerj wrote: post #10
dexwiz wrote: post #2

Sad but true. Hackdays should be called Sketchdays. Judging is often very short, and can be easily constrained to happy path. My experience as a developer is that UI work is worth way more than backend for winning a hackday. Work is so UI skewed, that it's probably better to do an Invision mockup.

My organization's most recent hack day was won by the UX team signing up for a free demo of a chat bot service and demoing it - not a single line of code. We haven't had one since, nor do we use chat bots anywhere in our org a few years later.

How could that win? Others are saying slides were presented. Demoing a SaaS chat bot is nothing!

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#53

Post by peruvian »

repomies69 wrote: post #4

This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.

Hackathons are networking events. I know a lot of people in college that went and participated in them got internships or leads into them.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#54

Post by spicybright »

kcb wrote: post #34
jjoonathan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 had this exact experience. We had a successful hackathon led by the engineering team where we just built cool things that somewhat aligned with the business. The "Innovation" team decided we were pushing into their turf and took it over. Then it was decided that requiring actual development wasn't inclusive enough. The next "hackathon" was just a parade of PowerPoint presentations.

Gross...

In this situation, did you have to sign away rights to participate? If you don't sign anything I'd imagine you retain rights to whatever you build, no?

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#55

Post by zemo »

this assumes a lot about what type of hackathon you're going to and why you're going to a hackathon. If you're going to a hackathon that's a judged competition with prizes for the specific purposes of trying to win a prize, this is accurate, but what you're really doing when you attend hackathons like that with those goals is working for the hackathon organizer without a contract, hoping that you'll get paid, knowing that most of you won't. That's not play, that's work. Is that worth it? Maybe. If it's your only opportunity to potentially get paid or you would have nothing to do otherwise or you're really motivated by competition (and not learning/fun/socialization), sure, that can be worth it.

If you're going to a hackathon with the intention of learning/fun/socialization this post is terrible advice. I went to hackathons for years. I never went with the intention of winning. I always enjoyed myself and always got what I wanted out of it. I've never placed first in a hackathon, but I met several friends at hackathons that I am still friends with years later, learned many technologies through attending hackathons, built lots of fun little projects that I'm proud of, and met my wife at a hackathon.

And to all those people saying "that's not really a hackathon", that ship sailed long ago.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#56

Post by jjoonathan »

mrweasel wrote: post #25

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 o…

Idea guys always thought they were important. One in a hundred actually is -- but not because of the ideas.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#57

Post by jjoonathan »

spicybright wrote: post #54
kcb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this exact experience. We had a successful hackathon led by the engineering team where we just built cool things that somewhat aligned with the business. The "Innovation" team decided we were pushing into their turf and took it over. Then it was decided that requiring actual development wasn't inclusive enough. The next "hackathon" was just a parade of PowerPoint presentations.

Gross... In this situation, did you have to sign away rights to participate? If you don't sign anything I'd imagine you retain rights to whatever you build, no?

I think the winning strat here is "run."

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#58

Post by mohanmcgeek »

sbarre wrote: post #37

We've restarted doing 2-day hackathons at my work, and in the spirit of being as inclusive as possible for all team members, we don't require teams to submit code at the end. Some still do though, but in the end we want teams to play to their individual strengths and deliver anything they want that fits the theme. We do pick themes that are relevant to the business, but there are no other requirements, and we do it o…

A success of a hackathon isn't determined by participation rate but by the number of prototypes your usual roadmap wouldn't have produced.

These pitchathons and deck-athons don't really need 2 days to make.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#59

Post by jghn »

jjoonathan wrote: post #27
repomies69 wrote: post #4

This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.

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.

This happened at a place I worked. There was an internal hackathon where people built things. It was well received and expanded to all employees. The problem was, developers were about 10% of the population there. It became an idea-a-thon, which chased the developers away even more.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#60

Post by ravenstine »

jjoonathan wrote: post #27
repomies69 wrote: post #4

This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.

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.

Though I know what you mean, I also kind of saw it as a rite of passage. At some point in your career some guy selling merch under his jacket will come to you with a "great idea" where you will do all the work and he'll be the "idea guy".

It does suck though that hackathons may have devolved into being just that. I haven't been to a hackathon since 2015 and if they've become either dominated by idea-guys or about only making nice looking frontends then that's kind of sad.

EDIT: Oh, I guess I forgot a hackathon I went to in 2017, if you could even call it that. I arrived thinking that we'd be, you know, making actual apps. It turned out I may have been the only person in the entire venue doing actual work. Everyone on my team dicked around the whole time. We were one of 2 teams that actually had something that worked. All the other teams had fake as f*k "prototypes" in programs like Figma and no actually working code. The other team that had working code was just making a Twilio API call. The winner and all the others got attention because their apps looked good. My app might have been ugly but it successfully implemented nonstandard behavior (something you can't just rip off Stack Overflow) and even had authentication.

Now I remember why I haven't been back to a hackathon since.

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