In 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 artist finish his display, and even saw a sewing project completed.
And to top it off, we charge a nominal $20 for the weekend - with 4 meals, a great deal - and sell out every time.
We're putting together a howto doc to franchise the idea.. just need to finish it. ;)
Another vote for Montreal. This event sounds like a great idea.
(Already spoke with the organizers about this in another thread. I think they need someone who's organized an event of similar scale. That's not me, but I'm very willing to help out anyone who can take a lead role)
That sounds really cool! I tried to sign up but it looks like the form is broken. Is there a way I can sign up to be notified when the next FU Weekend is announced?
The 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.
Hackathons cultivate the opposite of "empathy, perseverance, dedication, and ability to work on large projects".
They make people hypercompetitive and unwilling to collaborate or help just so they can get their `sponsor_api` mixed with `sponsor_api` app done. I'm making a big generalization but IMO sponsored hackathons cultivate some of the worst aspects of our culture.
I think this kind of "worse is better" is actually a very valuable thing to learn. These "crude and fragile apps which leverage most of its work to frameworks" provide a lot of value to people, which is ultimately a lot more important than engineering pride.
My empirical experience is that programmers err too much on the side of doing things right. Most code has a relatively short lifetime; a lot of code simply won't be maintained much, because the first version is used to test a business assumption that often turns out to be false. Stability and maintainability are useful, but rarely as useful as being fast to market.
I'm having trouble finding any numbers that suggest greenfield development is more common than maintenance development. My own experience is that most of my work is done on existing code bases, and I am more productive when the coders before me spent the extra time to make sure the code is adaptable to new situations.
Can you point to some empirical evidence to the contrary?
Edit: I had some more thoughts about this, specifically that there is a survivorship bias to legacy code. Not all projects survive, but when they do that code can live a long life of maintenance. If you are involved in the startup world, it may make more sense to get it done quick & dirty in order to get funding than to write "good" code. That might explain the disparity of our experiences.
> My own experience is that most of my work is done on existing code bases, and I am more productive when the coders before me spent the extra time to make sure the code is adaptable to new situations.
My experience is that efforts by previous developers are often counterproductive (they designed for adaptability, but in the wrong direction), and certainly that designing for adaptability in general is less efficient than designing for specific adaptations for those specific adaptations (and therefore it's more efficient to defer work to the point where you know exactly which adaptations you want to make).
> Can you point to some empirical evidence to the contrary?
No - just my own experience (I was using empirical in a negative sense - contingent is perhaps closer to what I meant).
> Edit: I had some more thoughts about this, specifically that there is a survivorship bias to legacy code. Not all projects survive, but when they do that code can live a long life of maintenance. If you are involved in the startup world, it may make more sense to get it done quick & dirty in order to get funding than to write "good" code. That might explain the disparity of our experiences.
Indeed. My experience is that probably >50% of code dies before ever being used productively, and so any designing for maintenance before the code has been demonstrated to provide business value is premature.
If you find the efforts of previous developers counterproductive then they aren't doing it right. An over engineered application can be as bad as an under engineered one. It takes experience to know how to put the right amount of flexibility to code. YAGNI is a common enough principle.
I think the correct amount of flexibility is zero so overwhelmingly often that it's not even worth trying to figure out whether this time is one of the exceptions. YAGNI is indeed a common principle; I think hackathons are one good way to learn to apply it.
The hackathon that they mention in the post (Mhacks) put up an application process and enforced a 50/50 gender ratio. In the weeks leading up to the event, I overheard many defeated conversations from fellow CS students over anxiety of getting rejected from this hackathon because they were male. The females didn't share the same anxiety, but it definitely made them feel down that they wouldn't be able to participate with their male friends who were rejected/waitlisted. Overall, the fact that things ended up this way made everyone feel very awkward, guilty, and discouraged. Hopefully its success makes up for the hidden fractures that will be felt by our student body for quite a while after.
Mhacks lists the 50/50 gender divide on their site followed by the reasoning: "because it’s about time for a little change in the tech world"
Disclosure: I am a CS-Eng student at this university. I did not plan to attend or care about this hackathon.
Just exploit the identity-political zeitgeist that's overtaken universities lately: claim yourself genderqueer, non-binary presenting as male. With the right incantation, the organizers will fold like a house of cards, lest they suffer the blowback to excluding a "righteous" participant.
It actually turns out that cargo culting the language of social justice works about as well as the sovereign citizen idiots that cargo cult legal jargon -- both of these phenomena exist in a broad, clear social context and it's laughably obvious when someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, like you, attempts an "incantation" with the idea that it's magic words because they don't or can't understand what's actually happening.
I know what's up. That why I made the comment. It's more about what is said than the actual content of the statement itself.
If I did the above, and someone made a stink, I'd hit 'em with "Are you denying my lived experience?" and then reaffirm the validity of my self identity (which is what matters) over what I actually am to observers (which is immaterial and doesn't matter).
I think you overestimate the intelligence and free-thinking ability of bureaucrats and other political-correctness devotees. When a group decrees an arbitrary gender-balancing rule like 50-50, in a field that's 90-10 male, cynical types can absolutely manipulate them to their advantage. In my opinion it's just more proof that the only fair system is a blind meritocracy (or random lottery).
To be fair the American racial categories seem pretty inane to my non-American eyes to begin with.
I understand that there is a lot of cultural baggage to the various categories but I can't count how many times I've been genuinely surprised by Americans identifying as black or Latina/o. The most striking ones I think were Halle Berry and Obama -- it took me a while to process that their recognition was genuinely noteworthy in the US because of their ethnicity. You could have told me Obama were Moroccan or Halle Berry were Indian and I wouldn't have been any more surprised.
For context: I'm German, grew up in the 90s in a city with ~1M residents and am literally colorblind (partially green blind). I'm not sure what part of that makes me unable to properly racially categorize people but I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.
I grew up in Europe and then moved to US. In US, at least in some context (college admissions for example), there is a thing called affirmative action. It seems in order to right a a wrong from the past, or to promote diversity they would sometimes have quotas on how many students from each background to pick. So depending just on race, one could have an easier or much harder way getting accepted. Therefore people would play that card in order to game the system.
I understand that the legislation/culture around race is in part used to correct historical racism (and the present day consequences of it) but I do wonder whether this obsession with racially categorizing oneself is a necessary evil or just evil.
This is insanely problematic. Exploiting marginalized identities is not only rude, but the blow back of pulling a Soul Man is not good for the person pulling the cons future prospects
Pro tip: It is often a good heuristic to identify a sexist by their use of 'male' and 'female' for humans instead of 'men' and 'women', because it sounds dehumanizing. Call them 'women', never females, etc, etc.
That's the dumbest barrier I've heard in a long time to enter a hackathon. Your gender shouldn't prevent you from getting into an event to get work done, it should be based on the merit of what you want to do. Did anyone ask if their rejection would be reconsidered if they chopped their penis off?
Anti-hackathon has been in full swing for a few years now, but I think it makes sense to recognize that for some people it has social - and some times professional - benefit.
It's neither inherently good nor bad, it's a chance to create with some new individuals over a short time period. Yes, it gets co-opted by corporate marketing, yes you eat pizza for a day or so. But these are minor issues if you find other benefit like learning of new processes, tools, technologies, etc.
More than anything, it just seems inherently "uncool" at this point, a proverbial pet rock for developers. Which is a shame, there is value there if you're willing to separate the concept from the aesthetic that surrounds the events themselves.
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 culture and continuous process around engineering autonomy, ownership, and innovation. Instead relying on campy caricatures of basement dwelling Mtn. Dew & pizza fueled "hackers".
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 ...
I 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!
Personally, the main reason I go to these hackathons is just to expose myself to a bigger network and places with stronger CS communities than the one at my really small liberal arts college just to see what I'm missing out on (which is a lot).It seems like a necessary evil and it has worked in a way since I've finally been able to get an internship interview from it.
Otherwise, I agree with his points. Not sleeping for 24+ hours really takes its toll, especially if you need to drive back to where you came from. Food is mostly junk, but this one other hackathon I went to had really well-made food, so there's that. They have been unrewarded since I always lose steam before I get to make an MVP and they do seem to be very commercialized and they're really trying to get groundbreaking stuff from us within a weekend, like the last hackathon had very specific prizes relating to using certain company's API as well has performing "health innovations".
I also like Brian's suggestions to provide more specific hackathons so that I know exactly what to expect from them. These events take up a huge portion of my weekends theI should be using on school, so it seems like a good idea to pick those which seem most useful at the time.
At Khan Academy we've been running ours as "Healthy Hackathons" — we kick people out at 11:45pm to get sleep, bring in healthy food, snacks, and activities, and always include our work week as part of the schedule (not just weekends).
We actually just held our Monday-Friday Healthy Hack Week last week (http://healthyhackathon.khanacademy.org). One of my favorite weeks ever, particularly because we encourage "hacks" of all kinds that don't have to include coding, and the entire company dives in.
They've been internal only so far. Maybe some day we'll open it up.
After a week of hackathon'ing intensely I'll walk in tomorrow more energized than ever (and eager to figure out how to use some of the team's work in upcoming projects). The commitment to staying healthy while hacking feels like it's paying off for us.
Plus it demonstrates our commitment to long-term investment in teammates.
Actually what your so-called "Healthy Hackatons" demonstrates to me is that not a lot of Khan Academy employees are married with kids. I know my wife would be annoyed if I was goofing off at the office until midnight for a week leaving her to feed our kids and put them to bed by herself. But, hey, it's all for the greater good of "disrupting" education!
It's ironic that obviously very few Khan Academy employees have children of their own, but that's probably because it's only a few years since they were children themselves...
Not really worth arguing online with somebody who'd make a statement about the demographics of a company they know nothing about -- but for sake of clarifying your demonstrably false claim: we have lots of parents and family folk at KA, at all levels including senior leadership.
We do not require that anybody stays at our hackathon until 11:45, but we do require that people get sleep. These decisions -- and the decision to not only host over a weekend -- come from our family-aware mindset.
Can't make statements about things we don't know about, so we gotta go by what we read. It feels like this debate may set expectations and shapes culture about things like hackathons everywhere, so maybe this touches a sensitive spot for many.
So I read that your employees actually do have family (which makes the thing about staying late worse), that you don't "require" that people stay until midnight (as if that was a thing you could require), and patronizingly insist that people get sleep.
Maybe I just didn't read that correctly, language barrier and all that but... I don't know, these extra hours, are those paid overtime or is that a further erosion of the 40 hour work week?
> So I read that your employees actually do have family (which makes the thing about staying late worse)
I think you're being overly negative.
Nobody is forcing anyone to go to these things. If you have other stuff to do, fine. If, like some people, you actually enjoy it, you can go. Maybe you even have an understanding husband/wife who understands that once in a while you might be out as late as 11:45pm
This is just it. The goal posts are always being moved. Hiring is a farce at this point, and I get sick of these recruiters / employers pontificating about this "passion" nonsense.
I agree that we shouldn't always be so quick to judge, but my sibling posters have a point. How about the company throws this "hackathon" during company time? That would demonstrate commitment towards whatever the event is supposed to achieve.
You can express your disagreement with staying past office hours without being condescending. Though, the post only indicated no participants were allowed to work past a time, not that everyone must work until that time.
I takes me the better part of six months to build something worthwhile. I know I'm a slow programmer but it's still hard to see that anything but trivialities can be built in a weekend.
Doesn't necessarily mean you're slow, it could mean you have a high threshold for worthwhile.
Seriously, I've seen what some people cobbled together in a week long hackfest and been completely unimpressed, having built something similar, and more robust in a day and a half- I did not consider my efforts (or theirs) worthwhile. To be clear, all efforts that you learn from are worthwhile, but I am meaning (and I think what you mean) worthwhile from the standpoint of, getting something production ready or having completed an idea or concept to the point that we can figure out what the heck to do with it.
I think the best things to come out of any hackathon setting are the ideas. The execution that actually occurs should be more of a fleshing out the feasibility and sparking iterative ideas. Anyone walking out of a hackathon thinking they've got actual usable code is just wrong.
At least for myself and my best friend (we do hackathons together), we like the brainstorming that's borne out of it. We don't need the hackathons to do this, but it seems to have hit on just the right formula for the both of us to come up with some pretty cool project ideas. In fact, we work on our ideas far more often after the hackathons have ended than we do during the X hours of the hackathon.
But I think companies that try to wedge "hackathons" into their employees' schedules as some cool twist on getting more free (or very cheap) work out of them should burn in hell.
> The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts.
Absolutely not. The most brilliant of minds made their marks on history at 30 or younger. Science has shown that, over time, learning becomes more difficult and slower. The whole idea of an older person being more "wise" is more of an old wive's tale more than anything else.
Young people and old people alive can have great ideas. Inversely young and old can be great at simply cranking away at building things. The future mixes the young and old more and more making the young younger for longer and the old far more capable than ever before.
I don't disagree with you - I just mean something else by ambitious projects.
Take politics for instance - can anyone under 30 accomplish anything ambitious in politics? Probably not.
The brilliant minds who've contributed to math/science I imagine oftentimes had great teachers along the way. Not always.
The ambitious projects I have in mind go beyond solving a previously unsolved math problem - I am thinking of something more calculated and long-term like wikipedia.
If we can give a lot of people in the world the best educational materials by the best teachers - that's a massive win.
If we can secure funding for people who show promise and let them affect the real world, not just 'do research' - that's a massive win.
In other words - the problems we're facing are not really science problems, they're philosophical and societal problems that require a willingness of the current ruling class to say ok, this isn't working, let us try something new here.
That'd be nearly unprecedented - another smart kid solving another science riddle, that's cool too :)
> Take politics for instance - can anyone under 30 accomplish anything ambitious in politics? Probably not.
Maybe? It's hard to say considering we have laws preventing the young from getting into politics. President / Vice President have to be 35, 30 to be a senator and 25 for the house of representatives. Most states also have age restrictions for many other political offices that I'm too lazy to look up (some are similar to the federal ones, some are simply 21).
Making it not possible for them to do it doesn't mean they couldn't if given the ability. Many politicians are career politicians. That may not be good but the young folks can't be career politicians, at least not right away.
I would be very curious to see the data if we removed all agent restrictions then let 1-2 generations go by and see if the demographic changes much / some / none.
I'd say moreso than the laws, is just the hierarchies entrenched in every sphere of life are the real mechanisms preventing any real change.
On one hand, stability is good, but at what cost, right?
Something as small as the apple app store - everyone knows it's bad, nothing has been done about it for years.
If Apple tomorrow, came to HackerNews and said hey, we know the app store sucks, we are going to hire a 20 person team of stars to re-build it. We will give you full autonomy, high paycheques, lots of publicity and a full year to do it.
Wouldn't that be an overwhelmingly positive move? Even if a year later, the team failed to deliver, at the very least it'd generate a ton of enthusiasm and new ideas.
This is a small example of big companies not willing to do anything outside the stale old box, even when there is absolutely no downside. It's those old, bored farts earning a paycheque that are the problem every time.
Apple has the money, just not the wisdom to go outside the box every now and again. Politics is 1000x worse I imagine.
"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.
Hmm, sounds like the start of a typical setup-to-fail management philosophy, just needs the other side of the coin to maintain the current balance:
"This should easily be abused to keep untalented old people 'in their place' which the youngsters imagine they get all the power. We're still walking away with the profits.
Have everyone ignore the proposal, then force all to critique it - just ensure both roles are considered equally invaluable. That way no one will get a raise during performance review. And we're still walking away with the profits."
The worst is company hackathons. I will always remember the look on my boss's face when I told him I was quite happy to participate in the (mandatory) 24 hour hackathon, as long as he paid me for my time outside of normal business hours. Turns out it wasn't so mandatory.
I've never been a fan of "hackathons" for long term projects going back a number of years.
That said, the group I am part of, we regularly engage in focused "hackfests", where there is a clear goal, people work together, and a lot gets done in 3-5 days.
Is it always complete, no, but for solving spot problems, short term deep dives can be great.
Generalizing that, as hacktahons try to, there will be some interesting successes, but that won't be the norm.
Your commercial and competitive hackathons are already covered well by TopCoder and similar competitive programming competitions. There are commercial challenges which generally build against some kind of proprietary API. Then there are competitive Single Round Matches (SRM) which are purely data structure and algorithm based.
Grandstanding and networking sound like b-school entrepreneurship competitions. Who can make the best slide deck. Plenty of companies got funding with nothing more than a few presentation slides and some good talk so I agree it's a potentially valuable thing. It just doesn't reward technical prowess so why feature it at all?
Hackathons are a blend of all of this and it doesn't really do any of them well.
My main complaint about hackathons is that they are a poorer recruiting tool than most people want to believe. Corporate sponsors think they'll be able to spot top talent easier. And some participants think hackathons improve their chances of getting hired. In my brief experience, the success rate is very low on both sides. At best, I think a hackathon is a fun, creative, and social collegiate experience for the participants and another avenue for companies to market their brands to impressionable young minds.
Couldn't agree more with so many of the views expressed in this. I felt the same way after participating in the LinkedIn DevelopHer Hackathon last August. I came home and was so physically ill from sleep deprivation, eating nothing but oreos, drinking soda for the caffeine, etc.. that I was out for another 2 days. I don't know if I've ever felt as sick as I did after that hackathon, and it was all elective abuse to my body.
At 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.
the judges—all non technical—took about 30 minutes to decide that it was a 3-way tie.
in GGJ, we worked pretty much non-stop with like 5 hours sleep a day for two days and they decided not to make judges. hell, the GGJ ended around 5pm and we couldn't even check other project because everything was so rushed.
>> Salesmanship is rewarded. The rewards are given strictly based on the presentation
This is not a bad thing. I've won hackathons partly–but not strictly–because we had a team that could present well in front of judges and an audience.
Public speaking, sales, and presenting to others is an important skill in business and entrepreneurship. The author would be wise to convey this to his students. A hacker who can build a product of value AND sell it well is a force to be reckoned with.
Sorry, but I love hackathons as long as they're run somewhat well. If I don't like the food, I'll go eat somewhere else. I'm too old these days to work through the night so I usually get a hotel room and get a good sleep. But college students are already used to studying through the night, so I don't see what the big deal is.
Beyond the intersection of making <-> presenting (see above), I also love that hackathons force you to work within constraints–most notably time.
Its a great way to network–especially if there are corporate sponsors. I've met some great friends at hackathons and I've received job offers from companies I've met. I've even been offered investment in a project.
Yeah, people cheat. Yeah, some hackathons are poorly run. The pros still outweigh the cons for me though.
Is it possible that the value derived from a hackathon depends largely on your age and nothing else? When I was 18 I loved this kind of stuff and would do it for fun, if nothing other to learn and make friends. Now you'd be hard pressed to get me there unless my team was people I know and worked with in the past. And it would be almost irresponsible to see parents there.
Hackathons are a fundamentally unsustainable, bad idea that can only thrive on young people having more energy than they know what to do with.
I imagine they'll continue to drag along, like most conferences, like most people, who just don't know what else to do, so they do something that someone else said was a good idea and isn't intimidating.
I stopped playing CTFs because the crunch time was too much. Burning a weekend reverse engineering and programming is fun, but then I lose the weekend. I'd like to see some casual CTFs / hackathons. Extended timeline, a few weeks to a month, fine if people with jobs play for fun.
I've always wondered how people with chronic disorders/diseases manage themselves at a hackathon. That 24-hour non-stop insanity has always dissuaded me from attending one. Turns out there are people who see the downsides of one.
I'm sure good work comes out of these, but I think it would probably happen anyway. I really don't understand why people are going to these things still.
I've participated in three hackathons involving pizza and sleep deprivation, StrathHACK[1] once and Do You Have The GUTS[2] twice.
It's a great way to have a fun weekend, get job offers from local sponsors and learn new technologies in an environment where you can ask get help from experienced people. It's not about writing realistic, maintainable code - but that isn't really the aim.
On the health side of things: Going to an event and having unhealthy food isn't terrible. It's a short event - having pizza for a day isn't going to kill you, and at these hackathons healthier food (sandwiches, cereal, burritos) was also provided. If you want to sleep, you can, but there's nothing wrong with occasionally working through the night.
"There are a lot of teams who bring their existing projects to the party"
I wonder if this can be approached with rules, such as:
* Provide datasets, interesting hardware, or other things that the participants do not have in advance. Release them only at the start of the hackathon. In the judging criteria, have heavy weighting for how well the teams make use of the provided resources.
* Forbid, on honor code, to bring your startup (or any other project you have started before) to the hackathon.
* Prohibit, on honor code, use of any code written prior to the hackathon unless said code has been under an open source license for 3 months, advertised and available for the public to download, AND your team does not represent the majority of the contributions to said code.
* Define one or more problems to solve, within the scope of the hackathon. Don't release the problems until the start of the hackathon. Require all teams to work on a solution to any of the stated problems.
You can put the rules in - some of your suggestions are already standard in many hackathons, but I doubt it would make much of a difference.
Many hackathons are judged or attended by major investors, so the incentive to cheat is extraordinary. The last hackathon I went to there were several teams that clearly had everything lined up ahead of time and were there to pitch, and I doubt you can get rid of this without getting rid of the investors.
More than that, many hackathons pride themselves on being interesting for investors, so they're incentivized to look the other way so that the presentations are as impressive/fundable as possible.
I don't think I'll be going to another hackathon for a good long while - the combination of people who seem to have no interest in the spirit of hacking on stuff, and the incredibly toxic culture I saw (getting smashed, pounding back energy drinks, flying drones around annoying people, nerf gun fights through the hallways, it was like a goddamn freshman dorm but sweatier and somehow more childish), makes me completely not interested at all.
Where i live i wish we had more of them and that they were more advertised so people are aware of these events. you don't have to go but the one hackathon i went to was a good event. I'd go again. it was small scale, there were few students there mostly people with jobs. half could not code, most were not very good. but it was cool. i impressed a few people with my skills met some interesting international people (who had flown in for this). one of the more memorable experiences of my life. I think the best hackathons are those which mix up the teams. other than that, please bring me more hackathons. people need to spend their free time on something, right?
Although I'd not go if i had to be selected for them. the organisers need to be somewhat grateful for the fact people would like to attend and the atmosphere needs to be friendly rather than uber competitive.
None of the hackathons that I've gone to seemed to have any of these problems. Hac Phi [1] in Philly and Hac Bos [2] in Boston are both fantastic and have been tremendously valuable to my career. Last year Hac Phi started to distance themselves from the more recent connotations of the word "hackathon" and started using the word "exchange" instead. This switch makes me a little sad because I think the portmanteau of "hack" and "marathon" is still very relevant to those events.
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?
Well, the motivations to attend hackathons don't seem to be about winning. Many of us students attend hackathons knowing that the chances of winning something is marginal at best, yet we still regularly attend for the singular reason of fun. It's not every day that you can just spend two days of your life, cut off from the rest of the world, working with your buddies on something you all love. Even for professionals, attending hackathons could be a means to break away from the monotony of normal work.
This highlights a bigger problem over been mulling over.
How does one without free nights and weekends (eg, has kids and a family) get the benefits (network, exposure, etc) without being able to participate?
That sounds entitled. Let's reverse it. How does a company find individuals who have better things to do than code for free all weekend? This is of course based on the assumption that such individuals are valuable.
The only answer I've come up with is coaching little league.
Was at a couple of "internal" hackatons ran by my employer as a part of the offsite all hands meeting.
There was plenty of corporate politics involved with judging, other than that it was time well spent.
The angle was to bring new ideas to the table and build an MVP/POC to demo the idea. Overall was a positive experience other than the politics involved.
The event was voluntary, took place in the hotel with beer in the hotel bar and nice catered lunches.
>If this sounds like advocacy for mediocrity, instead of merit, it is not. Keep in mind the following facts
And then follows up with a bunch of excuses about how they are not measuring merit by any means because traditional presentations and different project timelines are to difficult to compare for merit.
"it sounds like we don't want reward merit, and that's because we don't have the competence to measure it"
The only thing i disagree with in this article is the whole "Everyone participated, everyone gets a prize" thing. Don't get me wrong, I understand these youngsters poured their heart and soul into these projects, but not everyone can win, and people should know this. It creates the young, entitled generation we have now. We dont need more of that running around.
"Despite students pouring out their heart and souls, in the end, the majority do not win a prize. I am a staunch supporter of rewarding participation and effort. If this sounds like advocacy for mediocrity, instead of merit, it is not."
How 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.
Should also add that they are a very different type of events than the ones outlined in this post. Competition is replaced by collaboration. Prizes by internal reward. Junk food by beer drinking.
Going to corperate sponsored hackathons and hacking on your own side project is the way I've really enjoyed myself at a few hackathons. I don't really want to learn $COMPANY's API, so I just hack on whatever and enjoy the atmosphere.
This has certainly been my experience. All the hackathons I've participated in have felt very geared toward corporate shilling, and most of the prizes are for "best use of [company's product]".
I've been organizing Hackathons for the past few years. They have been incredibly successful in a number of ways.
The group that organizes them has recognized a few powerful factors:
- The organizers are diverse and have a wide array of skills
I didnt start the group that I have collaborated with, but I immediately tried to contribute to the best of my ability. We have people who are good at promoting, thinking about diversity, good a logistics, organizing speakers, etc.
- Intentionally diverse groups in gender/skill/background
We spend time to open applications, then manually select the participants who are accepted. From there, we keep a high touch relationship with 100-150 people, so that they are excited even before attending.
- Pre-crafted/well-rounded teams
Based on applications, we make pre-crafted teams that have balanced skill sets. We make these teams based on our understanding of the participants, and their own experiences.
- (most importantly) NO PRIZES
We make our events based on the valued gained from meeting and working with people who are fundamentally interesting. We build the concept of the event based around getting cool people together to work on cool problems.
For the past two years, we have welcomed well over 600+ people in 4 different cities.
- Partner with awesome organizations with strong brand names
We spend significant amount of time to raise sponsorship. We make a point to involve cool organizations in the space, so that the event attracts high quality participants. Even if a great organization that we like cant sponsor money, we try to involve them as a partner in someway, so we can involve their staff. This has always paid off.
I'm curious: how do you market these events? I have literally never in my life encountered a hackathon directly and only know they exist because people talk about them; they are a purely theoretical construct in my world. Through what channels do people discover your events?
By and large. Major League Hacking (the link above) is sort of like the national group "in charge" of hackathons and one of the requirements to be recognized by them is to be a purely under-grad event (though sometimes highschool students are admitted). That said, there are plenty hackathons that aren't sanctioned by MLH and therefore are more open.
It's also possible that my view of hackathons is skewed by the fact that I'm a university student at a school with a very active hackathon culture.
We used journo-tech communities like Hacks/Hackers, college boards, company mailing lists (ie. the post design group), or directly in touch with influencers (ie. NYTimes technical evangelist).
I ask because I feel like I keep up pretty well with tech news, reading multiple news aggregators every day - and yet I am clearly not connected to whatever information channels people are using to promote hackathons, since I never hear about them. I have no idea whether I'd want to participate in them even if I did hear about them, but it makes me aware that there must be some avenues for tech news communication that I am totally missing out on.
You can tell from the examples that these are mainly media related. This industry is pretty tight nit with preexisting networks of meetups/listservs/influencers.
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.
or how to teach early to young new passionate developers that the "norm" is to work long hours for next to no pay, pizza? yeah good enough.
It also vehiculate the idea that code is a just commodity, that anyone can piss some code over few days and build full working apps supposed to impress people.
Well, understand those poor company, they are not sure you can be a good slave, so they need to test you over a week-end: does he/she complain for not being paid? not sleeping? being forced to use this API vs another?
howdy boy, "slap on the back", here your prize, by the way everything you have produced this week-end is owned by whoever organized the hackathon and they can do whatever they want with it while still not paying you, now go away you need to sleep and you stink.
I saw companies organizing hackathon for their own employee, not something open to other developers or involving a public API, no sir, a company week-end event.
They did those hackathon to allow their own employee to work on "what they like" or "what they did not have time to work on during working hours", but still have to be related to the company business, in exchange of beers and pizzas .. oh and if you don't show up we'll know you are a lazy bastard not inline with the company direction.
So yeah maybe not all hackathon are like that, but most of them has this feel of scam where at the end you want to scream "fuck you pay me".
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 artist finish his display, and even saw a sewing project completed.
And to top it off, we charge a nominal $20 for the weekend - with 4 meals, a great deal - and sell out every time.
We're putting together a howto doc to franchise the idea.. just need to finish it. ;)