I appreciate the sentiment greatly, and I'm only in the valley about once a month or so (and not in the startup circles) so I can't speak to how intentional the

I appreciate the sentiment greatly, and I'm only in the valley about once a month or so (and not in the startup circles) so I can't speak to how intentional the exploitation is, but from the other side: At 34, I can hardly be considered the youthful optimist he casts us at. I have a life, and a family, but I really enjoy the occasional hackathon. In fact, I'd suspect that a lot of my best code is done without the distractions of the house and family -- without worrying about whether or not the lawn is getting too high, or needs watering, or if the dogs need feeding, or whether my kid needs help with her homework, or if there's a spider that my wife needs me to kill. Lock me up in a room for a few days and give me root on a server and I'll bang something out, and I'm happy to do so. Working at home is rife with distraction, but working at the office is even worse, but while there are certainly hackathon environments that aren't conducive to productivity, most of them at least free the developers of any responsibility that isn't 'code production'. In short, they're enjoyable if they're done correctly, and they're horrible if they aren't... but I've never felt exploited by them, so either it's unique to the valley or I've just done a good job of avoiding that sort of thon.