I won a hackathon with a couple of friends at university, the company sponsoring the hackathon let us work for them while writing the masters thesis (carefully

I won a hackathon with a couple of friends at university, the company sponsoring the hackathon let us work for them while writing the masters thesis (carefully splitting us up, to see if one of us was just coasting on the others' work) and we all got an offer 6 months later.