10 ms·

Hackathon hustlers who make a living from corporate coding contests

224 points by jatsign 10y ago

minimaxir 10y ago
The subject of the article (Ma) added an additional comment on Facebook: https://facebook.com/groups/759985267390294?view=permalink&id=1559364127452400&ref=m_notif&notif_t=like https://facebook.com/groups/759985267390294?view=permalink&i... > "It was easy to see hackathons with 50k plus prizes 2 years ago. Now days some of them only offer Alexa as prizes. The college kids will do it regardless since they don't have other stuff to do, but once you get a job that is a bit too much work for very little gain." This reminds me a few years back when Greylock hosted a hackathon with an unintentionally ironic prize of a "Hacker Cash-omatic": http://valleywag.gawker.com/hackathon-accidentally-picks-perfect-metaphor-for-its-o-1605503368 http://valleywag.gawker.com/hackathon-accidentally-picks-per... The same hackathon now offers $10k for first place, round trip airfare for second place...and Myo Armbands for 3rd.
- jatsign 10y ago
  I guess by the time the media finds out and publishes an article about an interesting way to make money, it's probably too late to make a lot of money off of it. See: bitcoin
  - dsacco 10y ago
    All things revert to the mean.
    - FabHK 10y ago
      > Things that can't go on forever, don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein
    - eru 10y ago
      Not stock prices, if you trust even the weak efficient market hypothesis. But stock returns sure do.
  - kentt 10y ago
    Ya I feel so stupid for buying I to the Bitcoin hype at $60.
    - jatsign 10y ago
      I bought some at $10. I made money, but I would have made a ton more if I'd bought in at $0.10.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - eru 10y ago
    Not true. You can still make good money working as a software developer, and the media has already discovered it. (But perhaps, it's not interesting?)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ryandrake 10y ago
I hope the article is exaggerated. The way they are described here, these hackathons appear to be little microcosms of everything currently wrong with MVP-obsessed Silicon Valley. Let's round up a bunch of early-twentysomethings, feed them junk food, see what they can cobble together without sleep in 48 hours and reward the shiniest turd that plops out with the leftover pocket change from marketing's budget. Where is the engineering rigor? Where is the quality assurance? Are all the edge cases handled? Security review / penetration testing? What is the performance when you serve 10K users simultaneously? Can one actually build a business out of the "product" of a hackathon, or does it basically need to be thrown away and re-architected properly? Is it even a goal to build something viable, or is it the whole event simply a way to spend corporate marketing money on buzz?
- Klockan 10y ago
  These people wouldn't be living on hackathon prize money if they could actually build viable products in a few days.
  - scardine 10y ago
    The idea of jurors about viability has nothing to do with reality. In fact many unicorns did very poorly at hackathons. I for one would totally bash something like AirBnB: who would lease a bedroom in his house to a complete stranger from the internet, are you crazy?
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > I for one would totally bash something like AirBnB: who would lease a bedroom in his house to a complete stranger from the internet, are you crazy? People were doing that before AirBnB, though, so there was real evidence that people were willing to.
      - scardine 10y ago
        I know! Isn't it a lot easier to be wise after the facts? :-)
komali2 10y ago
Hackathons are great. You don't really see the 50k prizes anymore, but hacking away for a weekend and maybe getting a drone or some API credits is good fun for me. I get another project on my resume, make some new friends, potentially get a win on my resume, and spend the weekend playing with new APIs instead of derping around watching Vikings or some shit.
ploggingdev 10y ago
I came across an article recently (can't find the link), where they talk about these "Hackathon Hustlers" not being welcome to hackathons. The argument companies make is that these people are not the target audience for hackathons and hence are viewed as unwelcome gate crashers.
- smelendez 10y ago
  They should just have a rule that you can't win a prize above a certain level if you've won another hackathon prize in the past N months.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- joeevans1000 10y ago
  I wonder why they would be unwelcome. I'm not being sarcastic here. I mean, what's wrong with more people? I would love to see that article.
  - oculusthrift 10y ago
    i think it's fine for them to go but it kind of spoils the competition in certain cases. imagine having a hackathon with a bunch of inexperienced people trying to learn and then one intense group of professionals comes and just crushes everyone.
squeaky-clean 10y ago
I know a guy who is great at winning hackathons. He doesn't make a living off it, but has definitely made at least 100k in the past few years (divided across his team, however). I entered my first hackathon last year, and it was one he was attending. It was really disappointing. Maybe it was just that specific hackathon? I knew "the pitch" was a big part of winning, but didn't expect it to be 99%. A few teams built some actual cool and functioning things in 24 hours. Ours was the only app with a real demo you could visit/download, rather than it only working locally on the dev's machine. But the only teams that reached the finals were the ones with great speakers and a good idea, even if it wasn't functional at all. The guy I know ended up winning the first prize at that event. His team had an amazing idea and a great pitch, but their "app" was a powerpoint presentation, and a couple static HTML pages that faked a dynamic user flow. It worked as long as you clicked the correct image map area, and entered values into text boxes that matched what was hard-coded into the next page. I had fun with my team and made new friends, but it was really discouraging to lose a "hackathon" mostly because the other team had better speakers and not for technical reasons. I guess I prefer game jams, no qualms about marketability or a pitch with empty promises. Maybe it's because game jams usually don't have financial prizes aside for the exposure?
- j_s 10y ago
  Apparently marketing always wins, even at hackathons! :(
- cbhl 10y ago
  The trick is realizing the sponsors incentives -- they don't actually want the code you wrote in a weekend. If it's recruiting, they're looking for people to hire. If it's devrel, they're looking for people to sell their SaaS to.
  - eridius 10y ago
    They may not want the code, but they do want evidence that you can actually code. Hackathons are meant to find developers, not salespeople. So picking a team that didn't actually build something real as the winner seems like a rather bad idea.
jogjayr 10y ago
Hackathon programmers remind me of tourney knights in the Dunk and Egg novellas by George RR Martin. They serve no lord and don't fight in real battles. Instead, they make their living from prize money earned jousting in tourneys.
imroot 10y ago
I was part of a startup that put on a hackathon with a 10K first prize many, many years ago. We had a group of presenters who had a polished product and were looking to put our API/whatever into their product so that they could be eligible for the prize, and you could tell that this was all that they did. I also know that there's a group of people who attend as many hackathons as possible in the bay area for no other reason than living is expensive, and there is generally free food at the hackathons. Honestly, I'd be a part of one of these again in a heartbeat -- the hours were crazy, but, it was a great way to get your developers, your API consumers, and everyone else in the same room, to validate if it will burst/scale up, and you can solve a lot of really interesting challenges that weekend.
dlhavema 10y ago
I competed in one that EMC posted about 6 years ago. we got 2nd place, because the social voting side of things tipped the scales in favor of the winning team. I still ended up getting a free trip to Las Vegas to their next conference out of it.
clamprecht 10y ago
Who was that TopCoder guy who went to Sun's contest at JavaOne one year and cleaned house? Was his name JonMac? I think it's this guy: http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/College-student-outpaces-rivals-to-win-contest-2056939.php http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/College-stud...
- sah2ed 10y ago
  Wow. A Topcoder powered contest at Sun's JavaOne is indeed a blast from the past. Then came Google CodeJam.
franciscop 10y ago
I didn't know they paid so much to the winners. I won a NASA competition and we got $0!
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  I wanted to make a NASA is broke joke but I like NASA and wish we could fund them a lot more. Kids still dream of being astronauts. Let's make that a priority again.
- Itaxpica 10y ago
  I also once won a NASA-related hackathon (SpaceApps Philly), and my prize was a flight suit, but TBH that's honestly kinda cooler than cash.
  - franciscop 10y ago
    We won SpaceApps global (starting in Valencia, Spain)! We got invited to see a launch (but all expenses were on us). It was quite cool anyway and got to met a lot of amazing people.
andrewfromx 10y ago
this is becoming more like http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/tournaments http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/tournaments every day! Can we agree on the 4 grand slam hackathons and make them January Australian Hackfest, May French Codes, July Wimblehack, Sept the US Code Open.
rmason 10y ago
I've thought for a long time that somehow there was a movie to be made around hackathons. Now I know it has to be the code slinging hackathon pro who falls for the female corporate coder attending her first event and together they win a million dollar prize.
bbarn 10y ago
Incentivize anything and someone will specialize at getting that incentive eventually.
partycoder 10y ago
Hackathons were a thing when they were an engineering event... an engineering holiday to work on something worth working on. Like undoing some technical debt mess or a long standing hack that you cannot fix during a sprint. But now most hackathons are just implementing features with technical debt, which is the kind of engineering nobody likes. Then, cheating in hackathons is incredibly hard to detect. Even if you force everyone to use version control and review what they did over time, there can always be the cooking show trick where suddenly you pull a finished important part from nowhere. That's why I think hackathons should be engineering events, organized by engineers not the regular company hierarchy, and rewards should be given on engineering value not how much a feature can potentially sell.
- ThrowAway145 10y ago
  In my experience, engineering hackathons are uncompensated overtime. usually on Friday nights or through weekends, dressed up as fun and games by management with free food and beer. "well GEE, thanks..." Of course, attendance is mandatory if you like having your job, and complaining about it makes you look like a bad sport. :| We were behind on our launch which was a month away so these hackathons kept happening every week.
  - partycoder 10y ago
    And if you don't want to participate they retaliate.
    - gech 10y ago
      Who's they? Unionize.
mansilladev 10y ago
As a sponsor of hackathons, the "circuit" hackers have their pros and cons -- they do know how to cut to the chase, and not waste the limited time doing things like setting up their dev environment, or getting an instance spun up -- in other words, they're prepared and spend their time building things, rather than setting things up. As for cons -- seeing the same formulaic hack from a developer, but with a different splash page and pitch deck can get tiresome; or having them show up and not collaborate, connect with or help others can be a drag. I've actually awarded prizes to both Peter and Jay on a couple of occasions. One thing to be said about these guys is that they do breath life into an event, often work with others and are damn creative. From a participant point of view -- I still do love a good hackathon, even after years of participating in them (and winning a few along the way, too! https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/07/shower-with-friends-wins-the-disrupt-sf-2014-hackathon-grand-prize-blitz-and-interactive-markdown-are-runners-up/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/07/shower-with-friends-wins-t...
glangdale 10y ago
It all reminds me of a line by (I think) Douglas Coupland, about Gen X. I may be mangling this but it was something about being the first generation to spend most of their careers demonstrating aptitude rather than actually doing work. I seem to recall a moment in graduate school at CMU where I realized that demonstrating aptitude had actually gotten me as far as it was going to get me. I estimate it only took a brief decade or so of sulking before I managed to act on this realization.
blaurenceclark 10y ago
I'm one of the hackers in this article (Brian Clark) ask me any questions you'd like!
- joeevans1000 10y ago
  There are a lot of comments mentioning the powerpoint only teams... how did you strategize around this issue?
  - blaurenceclark 10y ago
    Three steps 1) Also built a great powerpoint/pitch 2) Built a great hack 3) Made sure to demo something real and splashy which gave my pitch an edge. That all being said I've still been burned by pitch only and poor judging rubrics. I could go on and on but one of the main things is ask if you really have to build everything and build to the judges expectations (which they may only want a good pitch), not your own (you may think they want some amazing coded product).
- joeevans1000 10y ago
  Did you tend to work alone, and, if not, how did you choose your team?
  - blaurenceclark 10y ago
    Biggest team I ever did was 3 people, and I always picked my team ahead of time so we could prep (design what we'd build, make the pitch, etc.) anything except the actual coding
joeevans1000 10y ago
The worst thing about hackathons is having to politely interact with the 'advisors' organizers always think will be good to have. These are people from various places who want to be part of the hackathon but aren't participants or judges. Imagine finally getting into coding in earnest, finally deep into it, and up wanders a non-coder who has been told to go around to all the teams and give advice. It's almost always a horrible distraction, but you're aware your interactions with them may be linked to the odds of winning, so you have to politely interact. Of course, the advisor realizes at some point you aren't really interested in the interaction, and they feel awkward as well. My advice to organizers: don't use these people unless the hackathon topic is deeply complex domain knowledge, and in that case make them available for participants to go to, but don't make them go around.
holografix 10y ago
I don't mean to sound too negative but I've attended Startup Weekend twice now and won't be attending a third time. Both times I expected to meet fellow developers who were better than me and to learn something and interact with people that know how to run a product development cycle or design practices. Sadly it ends being just regular guys and girls who can't code at all, or do Wordpress and consider that coding and a bunch of people with "ideas" and no design/product framework or concepts behind them. Not much for me to learn and I just get a bunch of people trying to get me to build their unoriginal idea for them... However occasionally you see or hear something truly different and learn something, even if it's just a new potential market for something really niche. Just not worth the full weekend investment.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  I've gone to quite a few startup weekends and I think this is a typical experience. I still enjoy it, though, but that's because I find enjoyment in the possibility of helping somebody else start their business. I usually find who I believe to be the biggest underdog or team that has the best intentions and do my best to help them. For me that's the reward, and I get to get a dedicated amount of time (forcing myself) to code some product and improve my skills or learn new ones. As you mentioned, lots of non-coders, so depending on your goals you can basically say "hey I want to build an iOS app and I'll do that for you" and then you get to make those decisions and learn what you want. :)
- Tenhundfeld 10y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you, not at all really, but I will offer a defense of Startup Weekend. I've participated in 8 or so Startup Weekends, a few as a regular attendee, a few as a mentor, and a few as a community organizer. So, I'm speaking from a position of some experience but admittedly, only within the events I experienced in the mid-Atlantic area. I've always viewed Startup Weekend as different from a hackathon. IMO, hackathons should be more like what you're describing, developers getting together and hacking on stuff, a fairly technical focus. Whereas I view Startup Weekend as more an entrepreneur networking event. Yes, you're ostensibly there to create a startup in a weekend, but the real point is to meet people outside of your normal circles, other people who have that ambition to create something. At least, that's how I've always pitched it to developers I encouraged to attend. If you want to have a good weekend, put some effort into picking a good team. The startup idea honestly doesn't matter so much, because it's kind of absurd to think you'll build anything real in a weekend. The startup idea will almost certainly be abandoned after the weekend. So, what really matters is finding a team of people who seem like they'd be fun to work with, people you might enjoy spending an entire weekend with, people you might want to maintain a connection with after the weekend. I also think Startup Weekend is a bit more up front about the focus being the business idea and the pitch, not actually executing on the tech during the weekend. Of course, it can be disheartening when a completely unfeasible idea wins, but that really comes down to the judges. I've often been frustrated by the judging. For example, at one event, one judge was an expert in FinTech; so some decent ideas in that space were shot down as unfeasible, which was probably true. But some equally unfeasible machine learning ideas won, simply because none of the judges had the expertise to evaluate them. All of that said, there are definitely diminishing returns. After you've attended one or two Startup Weekends, you've probably expanded your circle plenty – and if not, then attending a third probably won't change that. I attended so many, because I found the energy of the event to be invigorating. It felt good to be around so many people who were putting energy into creating something new – yes, often something silly/bad/unfeasible, but they were trying to do something different. It's similar to how I feel about software conferences. It's good to attend 1 per year, because it's invigorating to be around so many developers who are passionate about technology and the craft of writing software. But as you attend more, there are rapidly diminishing returns. There are only so many ideas you can explore, only so much you can take away. In years I've attended multiple, I often find myself wishing I had just stayed home and spent the 2-4 days doing some other learning activity, e.g., pick an open source tool I use regularly, really dig into it, and try to contribute back.
stuffedBelly 10y ago
I'd say kudos for people who are able to make decent dimes doing hackathons. Back at college my buddies and I used to compete in Topcoder in attempt to earn some bounty prizes. I also saw teams/people who are professional Topcoders and made a living out of competitions. The same goes for Quantopian. If a hackathon doesn't mandate certain level of technicality or a functional product, then having a good presentation that delivers a great idea/pitch is absolutely a fair game. Given 24/36 hours, the best bet is probably to leverage sponsors' APIs, cook up a good presentation (often neglected by developers) and show how promising the end product would be. Hackathons are more about priorities and showmanship and some people understand that. People feel like hackathons are overrun by hustlers because it seems easy to win prizes. There are tons of other highly technical coding competition platforms that you can make a living by demonstrating your engineering/coding skills, Kaggle, Quantopian, Topcoder, just to name a few.

224 points by jatsign 10y ago

The subject of the article (Ma) added an additional comment on Facebook: https://facebook.com/groups/759985267390294?view=permalink&id=1559364127452400&ref=m_notif&notif_t=like https://facebook.com/groups/759985267390294?view=permalink&i... > "It was easy to see hackathons with 50k plus prizes 2 years ago. Now days some of them only offer Alexa as prizes. The college kids will do it regardless since they don't have other stuff to do, but once you get a job that is a bit too much work for very little gain." This reminds me a few years back when Greylock hosted a hackathon with an unintentionally ironic prize of a "Hacker Cash-omatic": http://valleywag.gawker.com/hackathon-accidentally-picks-perfect-metaphor-for-its-o-1605503368 http://valleywag.gawker.com/hackathon-accidentally-picks-per... The same hackathon now offers $10k for first place, round trip airfare for second place...and Myo Armbands for 3rd.

jatsign 10y ago
I guess by the time the media finds out and publishes an article about an interesting way to make money, it's probably too late to make a lot of money off of it. See: bitcoin
- dsacco 10y ago
  All things revert to the mean.
  - FabHK 10y ago
    > Things that can't go on forever, don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein
  - eru 10y ago
    Not stock prices, if you trust even the weak efficient market hypothesis. But stock returns sure do.
- kentt 10y ago
  Ya I feel so stupid for buying I to the Bitcoin hype at $60.
  - jatsign 10y ago
    I bought some at $10. I made money, but I would have made a ton more if I'd bought in at $0.10.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- eru 10y ago
  Not true. You can still make good money working as a software developer, and the media has already discovered it. (But perhaps, it's not interesting?)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

ryandrake 10y ago

I hope the article is exaggerated. The way they are described here, these hackathons appear to be little microcosms of everything currently wrong with MVP-obsessed Silicon Valley. Let's round up a bunch of early-twentysomethings, feed them junk food, see what they can cobble together without sleep in 48 hours and reward the shiniest turd that plops out with the leftover pocket change from marketing's budget. Where is the engineering rigor? Where is the quality assurance? Are all the edge cases handled? Security review / penetration testing? What is the performance when you serve 10K users simultaneously? Can one actually build a business out of the "product" of a hackathon, or does it basically need to be thrown away and re-architected properly? Is it even a goal to build something viable, or is it the whole event simply a way to spend corporate marketing money on buzz?

Klockan 10y ago
These people wouldn't be living on hackathon prize money if they could actually build viable products in a few days.
- scardine 10y ago
  The idea of jurors about viability has nothing to do with reality. In fact many unicorns did very poorly at hackathons. I for one would totally bash something like AirBnB: who would lease a bedroom in his house to a complete stranger from the internet, are you crazy?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I for one would totally bash something like AirBnB: who would lease a bedroom in his house to a complete stranger from the internet, are you crazy? People were doing that before AirBnB, though, so there was real evidence that people were willing to.
    - scardine 10y ago
      I know! Isn't it a lot easier to be wise after the facts? :-)

komali2 10y ago

Hackathons are great. You don't really see the 50k prizes anymore, but hacking away for a weekend and maybe getting a drone or some API credits is good fun for me. I get another project on my resume, make some new friends, potentially get a win on my resume, and spend the weekend playing with new APIs instead of derping around watching Vikings or some shit.

ploggingdev 10y ago

I came across an article recently (can't find the link), where they talk about these "Hackathon Hustlers" not being welcome to hackathons. The argument companies make is that these people are not the target audience for hackathons and hence are viewed as unwelcome gate crashers.

smelendez 10y ago
They should just have a rule that you can't win a prize above a certain level if you've won another hackathon prize in the past N months.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
joeevans1000 10y ago
I wonder why they would be unwelcome. I'm not being sarcastic here. I mean, what's wrong with more people? I would love to see that article.
- oculusthrift 10y ago
  i think it's fine for them to go but it kind of spoils the competition in certain cases. imagine having a hackathon with a bunch of inexperienced people trying to learn and then one intense group of professionals comes and just crushes everyone.

squeaky-clean 10y ago

I know a guy who is great at winning hackathons. He doesn't make a living off it, but has definitely made at least 100k in the past few years (divided across his team, however). I entered my first hackathon last year, and it was one he was attending. It was really disappointing. Maybe it was just that specific hackathon? I knew "the pitch" was a big part of winning, but didn't expect it to be 99%. A few teams built some actual cool and functioning things in 24 hours. Ours was the only app with a real demo you could visit/download, rather than it only working locally on the dev's machine. But the only teams that reached the finals were the ones with great speakers and a good idea, even if it wasn't functional at all. The guy I know ended up winning the first prize at that event. His team had an amazing idea and a great pitch, but their "app" was a powerpoint presentation, and a couple static HTML pages that faked a dynamic user flow. It worked as long as you clicked the correct image map area, and entered values into text boxes that matched what was hard-coded into the next page. I had fun with my team and made new friends, but it was really discouraging to lose a "hackathon" mostly because the other team had better speakers and not for technical reasons. I guess I prefer game jams, no qualms about marketability or a pitch with empty promises. Maybe it's because game jams usually don't have financial prizes aside for the exposure?

j_s 10y ago
Apparently marketing always wins, even at hackathons! :(
cbhl 10y ago
The trick is realizing the sponsors incentives -- they don't actually want the code you wrote in a weekend. If it's recruiting, they're looking for people to hire. If it's devrel, they're looking for people to sell their SaaS to.
- eridius 10y ago
  They may not want the code, but they do want evidence that you can actually code. Hackathons are meant to find developers, not salespeople. So picking a team that didn't actually build something real as the winner seems like a rather bad idea.

jogjayr 10y ago

Hackathon programmers remind me of tourney knights in the Dunk and Egg novellas by George RR Martin. They serve no lord and don't fight in real battles. Instead, they make their living from prize money earned jousting in tourneys.

imroot 10y ago

I was part of a startup that put on a hackathon with a 10K first prize many, many years ago. We had a group of presenters who had a polished product and were looking to put our API/whatever into their product so that they could be eligible for the prize, and you could tell that this was all that they did. I also know that there's a group of people who attend as many hackathons as possible in the bay area for no other reason than living is expensive, and there is generally free food at the hackathons. Honestly, I'd be a part of one of these again in a heartbeat -- the hours were crazy, but, it was a great way to get your developers, your API consumers, and everyone else in the same room, to validate if it will burst/scale up, and you can solve a lot of really interesting challenges that weekend.

dlhavema 10y ago

I competed in one that EMC posted about 6 years ago. we got 2nd place, because the social voting side of things tipped the scales in favor of the winning team. I still ended up getting a free trip to Las Vegas to their next conference out of it.

clamprecht 10y ago

Who was that TopCoder guy who went to Sun's contest at JavaOne one year and cleaned house? Was his name JonMac? I think it's this guy: http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/College-student-outpaces-rivals-to-win-contest-2056939.php http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/College-stud...

sah2ed 10y ago
Wow. A Topcoder powered contest at Sun's JavaOne is indeed a blast from the past. Then came Google CodeJam.

franciscop 10y ago

I didn't know they paid so much to the winners. I won a NASA competition and we got $0!

6stringmerc 10y ago
I wanted to make a NASA is broke joke but I like NASA and wish we could fund them a lot more. Kids still dream of being astronauts. Let's make that a priority again.
Itaxpica 10y ago
I also once won a NASA-related hackathon (SpaceApps Philly), and my prize was a flight suit, but TBH that's honestly kinda cooler than cash.
- franciscop 10y ago
  We won SpaceApps global (starting in Valencia, Spain)! We got invited to see a launch (but all expenses were on us). It was quite cool anyway and got to met a lot of amazing people.

andrewfromx 10y ago

this is becoming more like http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/tournaments http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/tournaments every day! Can we agree on the 4 grand slam hackathons and make them January Australian Hackfest, May French Codes, July Wimblehack, Sept the US Code Open.

rmason 10y ago

I've thought for a long time that somehow there was a movie to be made around hackathons. Now I know it has to be the code slinging hackathon pro who falls for the female corporate coder attending her first event and together they win a million dollar prize.

bbarn 10y ago

Incentivize anything and someone will specialize at getting that incentive eventually.

partycoder 10y ago

Hackathons were a thing when they were an engineering event... an engineering holiday to work on something worth working on. Like undoing some technical debt mess or a long standing hack that you cannot fix during a sprint. But now most hackathons are just implementing features with technical debt, which is the kind of engineering nobody likes. Then, cheating in hackathons is incredibly hard to detect. Even if you force everyone to use version control and review what they did over time, there can always be the cooking show trick where suddenly you pull a finished important part from nowhere. That's why I think hackathons should be engineering events, organized by engineers not the regular company hierarchy, and rewards should be given on engineering value not how much a feature can potentially sell.

ThrowAway145 10y ago
In my experience, engineering hackathons are uncompensated overtime. usually on Friday nights or through weekends, dressed up as fun and games by management with free food and beer. "well GEE, thanks..." Of course, attendance is mandatory if you like having your job, and complaining about it makes you look like a bad sport. :| We were behind on our launch which was a month away so these hackathons kept happening every week.
- partycoder 10y ago
  And if you don't want to participate they retaliate.
  - gech 10y ago
    Who's they? Unionize.

mansilladev 10y ago

As a sponsor of hackathons, the "circuit" hackers have their pros and cons -- they do know how to cut to the chase, and not waste the limited time doing things like setting up their dev environment, or getting an instance spun up -- in other words, they're prepared and spend their time building things, rather than setting things up. As for cons -- seeing the same formulaic hack from a developer, but with a different splash page and pitch deck can get tiresome; or having them show up and not collaborate, connect with or help others can be a drag. I've actually awarded prizes to both Peter and Jay on a couple of occasions. One thing to be said about these guys is that they do breath life into an event, often work with others and are damn creative. From a participant point of view -- I still do love a good hackathon, even after years of participating in them (and winning a few along the way, too! https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/07/shower-with-friends-wins-the-disrupt-sf-2014-hackathon-grand-prize-blitz-and-interactive-markdown-are-runners-up/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/07/shower-with-friends-wins-t...

glangdale 10y ago

It all reminds me of a line by (I think) Douglas Coupland, about Gen X. I may be mangling this but it was something about being the first generation to spend most of their careers demonstrating aptitude rather than actually doing work. I seem to recall a moment in graduate school at CMU where I realized that demonstrating aptitude had actually gotten me as far as it was going to get me. I estimate it only took a brief decade or so of sulking before I managed to act on this realization.

blaurenceclark 10y ago

I'm one of the hackers in this article (Brian Clark) ask me any questions you'd like!

joeevans1000 10y ago
There are a lot of comments mentioning the powerpoint only teams... how did you strategize around this issue?
- blaurenceclark 10y ago
  Three steps 1) Also built a great powerpoint/pitch 2) Built a great hack 3) Made sure to demo something real and splashy which gave my pitch an edge. That all being said I've still been burned by pitch only and poor judging rubrics. I could go on and on but one of the main things is ask if you really have to build everything and build to the judges expectations (which they may only want a good pitch), not your own (you may think they want some amazing coded product).
joeevans1000 10y ago
Did you tend to work alone, and, if not, how did you choose your team?
- blaurenceclark 10y ago
  Biggest team I ever did was 3 people, and I always picked my team ahead of time so we could prep (design what we'd build, make the pitch, etc.) anything except the actual coding

joeevans1000 10y ago

The worst thing about hackathons is having to politely interact with the 'advisors' organizers always think will be good to have. These are people from various places who want to be part of the hackathon but aren't participants or judges. Imagine finally getting into coding in earnest, finally deep into it, and up wanders a non-coder who has been told to go around to all the teams and give advice. It's almost always a horrible distraction, but you're aware your interactions with them may be linked to the odds of winning, so you have to politely interact. Of course, the advisor realizes at some point you aren't really interested in the interaction, and they feel awkward as well. My advice to organizers: don't use these people unless the hackathon topic is deeply complex domain knowledge, and in that case make them available for participants to go to, but don't make them go around.

holografix 10y ago

I don't mean to sound too negative but I've attended Startup Weekend twice now and won't be attending a third time. Both times I expected to meet fellow developers who were better than me and to learn something and interact with people that know how to run a product development cycle or design practices. Sadly it ends being just regular guys and girls who can't code at all, or do Wordpress and consider that coding and a bunch of people with "ideas" and no design/product framework or concepts behind them. Not much for me to learn and I just get a bunch of people trying to get me to build their unoriginal idea for them... However occasionally you see or hear something truly different and learn something, even if it's just a new potential market for something really niche. Just not worth the full weekend investment.

muninn_ 10y ago
I've gone to quite a few startup weekends and I think this is a typical experience. I still enjoy it, though, but that's because I find enjoyment in the possibility of helping somebody else start their business. I usually find who I believe to be the biggest underdog or team that has the best intentions and do my best to help them. For me that's the reward, and I get to get a dedicated amount of time (forcing myself) to code some product and improve my skills or learn new ones. As you mentioned, lots of non-coders, so depending on your goals you can basically say "hey I want to build an iOS app and I'll do that for you" and then you get to make those decisions and learn what you want. :)
Tenhundfeld 10y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you, not at all really, but I will offer a defense of Startup Weekend. I've participated in 8 or so Startup Weekends, a few as a regular attendee, a few as a mentor, and a few as a community organizer. So, I'm speaking from a position of some experience but admittedly, only within the events I experienced in the mid-Atlantic area. I've always viewed Startup Weekend as different from a hackathon. IMO, hackathons should be more like what you're describing, developers getting together and hacking on stuff, a fairly technical focus. Whereas I view Startup Weekend as more an entrepreneur networking event. Yes, you're ostensibly there to create a startup in a weekend, but the real point is to meet people outside of your normal circles, other people who have that ambition to create something. At least, that's how I've always pitched it to developers I encouraged to attend. If you want to have a good weekend, put some effort into picking a good team. The startup idea honestly doesn't matter so much, because it's kind of absurd to think you'll build anything real in a weekend. The startup idea will almost certainly be abandoned after the weekend. So, what really matters is finding a team of people who seem like they'd be fun to work with, people you might enjoy spending an entire weekend with, people you might want to maintain a connection with after the weekend. I also think Startup Weekend is a bit more up front about the focus being the business idea and the pitch, not actually executing on the tech during the weekend. Of course, it can be disheartening when a completely unfeasible idea wins, but that really comes down to the judges. I've often been frustrated by the judging. For example, at one event, one judge was an expert in FinTech; so some decent ideas in that space were shot down as unfeasible, which was probably true. But some equally unfeasible machine learning ideas won, simply because none of the judges had the expertise to evaluate them. All of that said, there are definitely diminishing returns. After you've attended one or two Startup Weekends, you've probably expanded your circle plenty – and if not, then attending a third probably won't change that. I attended so many, because I found the energy of the event to be invigorating. It felt good to be around so many people who were putting energy into creating something new – yes, often something silly/bad/unfeasible, but they were trying to do something different. It's similar to how I feel about software conferences. It's good to attend 1 per year, because it's invigorating to be around so many developers who are passionate about technology and the craft of writing software. But as you attend more, there are rapidly diminishing returns. There are only so many ideas you can explore, only so much you can take away. In years I've attended multiple, I often find myself wishing I had just stayed home and spent the 2-4 days doing some other learning activity, e.g., pick an open source tool I use regularly, really dig into it, and try to contribute back.

stuffedBelly 10y ago

I'd say kudos for people who are able to make decent dimes doing hackathons. Back at college my buddies and I used to compete in Topcoder in attempt to earn some bounty prizes. I also saw teams/people who are professional Topcoders and made a living out of competitions. The same goes for Quantopian. If a hackathon doesn't mandate certain level of technicality or a functional product, then having a good presentation that delivers a great idea/pitch is absolutely a fair game. Given 24/36 hours, the best bet is probably to leverage sponsors' APIs, cook up a good presentation (often neglected by developers) and show how promising the end product would be. Hackathons are more about priorities and showmanship and some people understand that. People feel like hackathons are overrun by hustlers because it seems easy to win prizes. There are tons of other highly technical coding competition platforms that you can make a living by demonstrating your engineering/coding skills, Kaggle, Quantopian, Topcoder, just to name a few.