Hackathons done wrong

The designers have been fighting this battle for years. It is time for the rest of us to join in.

Not everyone lives in the US, meaning not everyone knows that you can simply build a product, get money for it, and have it grow. I learned this at a Hackathon. I attended a mini seedcamp because of a Hackathon, and they made sure none of the attendee judges would steal anything.

Yes, there are bad VCs, but for example in Germany, you grow up learning that you will never do well unless you get your degree in the university and then go work for Airbus, Intel, you name it. In fact most of my co-students went that exact path and they were utterly surprised when I told them I wasn't a student worker anywhere, but an experienced engineer helping startups grow their companies.

Long story short, Hackathons can be empowering. They can get you great jobs, startups, co-founders, etc. And yes 48 hours of coding is not good. But you never code 48 hours. It won't even be close to 48 hours, and chances are even if you have something nice at the end of it you might have to ditch it and rewrite from scratch.

Not dismissing any of the points, merely amending. He's right on almost every regard imho.

Generally speaking, most hackathons now don't try to make intellectual property claims on entrants' work. I'm sure some still do, but that's just a bad idea for everyone involved, and I do agree with you that those should be avoided. Whether or not VC's are interested in the pitches is really up to the teams involved - they're certainly not obligated to take VC's money.

24 hour hackathons are completely different from spec-work - you're in a room with other developers, the scope of the work is limited to just 24 hours, and the best use of them is simply to stretch your legs as a developer.

To go back to the writer's ideal hackathon, BattleHack has multiple companies involved, along with PayPal, although PayPal is the main sponsor. You can sleep or not sleep at BattleHack - I slept during both BattleHack Austin and the BattleHack world finals when I attended last year. Every hackathon I've ever been to has been relatively friendly when it comes to helping others, even with prizes on the line.

You can have hackathons without big prizes (for instance, most civic hackathons), or even without coding competitions/pitches (for instance, Hacker Olympics).

Disclaimer: I won BattleHack Austin last year, went to the BattleHack world finals to compete there, and won several vendor prizes at each. I've also competed and mentored in many other hackathons.