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 som

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.