4 ms·

Hackathons turned into “nice ui with mock data”-athons. Whoever got the best ui person on their team won. I benefitted from this a few times!

by le-mark 4mo ago

j45 4mo ago
I thought I was the only one wondering why people are preparing in advanced with polish and not much to build the day of.
glitchc 4mo ago
Judges are managers with typical mediocre technicality
giancarlostoro 4mo ago
It's all about the pitch the other half.
aaron695 4mo ago
[dead]
yieldcrv 4mo ago
I’ve seen powerpoint presentations win, and that was my last hackathon
- pelagicAustral 4mo ago
  I did a 3-month bootcamp back in the day and the top assessed final presentations were a powerpoint and some bs JS "game" that indeed was a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code. This was a Rails bootcamp, not a powerpoint one, not a js one...
  - makapuf 4mo ago
    "a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code" does sum up quite a bit of the videogame industry, including GTA VI ...
aprilthird2021 4mo ago
When did this happen? I remember judges at hackathons used to be very forgiving about lackluster UIs as long as the idea was cool and at least functional by the presentation time
- Gigachad 4mo ago
  Reminds me of the inconsistency of take home interview tests where you have no idea if the person reviewing cares that the UI is shiny or not or if they want you to write a novel in the readme and make it look like a real project.
- jayd16 4mo ago
  It's more about unconscious bias. The slick smoke and mirror will simply show better.
- odo1242 4mo ago
  It depends a lot on the hackathon/what the judges are looking for. A few are run by technical people who pick the coolest technical architectures, a few are run by casual users who pick the best looking result. The majority of the ones I’ve been in have tended to be run by people who judge based on their notion of how useful the app will be societally, with the tie breaking factor being the UI/architectural design.
- hobofan 4mo ago
  10+ years ago, when most "grassroots" (and some of the better startup) hackathons were displaced by enterprise-sponsored hackathons. I can mostly talk about the Berlin hackathon scene, but as far as I understand it the same thing happened in SF/London as well around the same time. Presentation-first judging has been a thing for a long time, and unless there is a organizing party that explicitly makes code reviews a part of the scoring, and the organizers ensure attendance quotas for different personas (engineer vs. product vs. designer) it will always drift that way.
Teknoman117 4mo ago
It’s been like that for at least a decade.
torginus 4mo ago
Yes, I ran into this during an internal company hackathon. This was before LLMs. We took a problem, designed an internal tool for it, and put some Bootstrap UI on top with some fancy CSS animations. After wiring up the mock data, it looked convincigly real. We did win, got congratulated by upper management, and were immediately asked if we could get this into production in a week, or do we need 2?
- biglyburrito 4mo ago
  That last bit is why I'll never do one again. Hackatons are commonly used as a way to take credit for & reap the benefits of another person or team's work, without attribution or compensation. And oftentimes, a promising hackathon idea will be "improved" by management & added to the creator's workload with tight deadlines (because the hard part is already done!) -- even if they don't necessarily agree with the "improvements".
  - hilariously 4mo ago
    Yep, a way to get free work by pretending its fun, most corpos immediately turn around and do this. It's also funny to me because of how they try to show its a treat to the engineering staff, and then railroad them as soon as they can to implement the half baked idea. The truth is that most management don't ever get beyond half baked ideas and so trying to push you to make low quality crap is often their only move.
  - Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
    Same scummy move as streamers / online personalities having a "contest" for a t-shirt design or logo design, which the streamer will sell for their personal profit while offering nothing but "exposure" to the creator.
  - torginus 4mo ago
    I dunno, I think I got more out of it than I put in, but it was mostly due to happenstance and knock on events, and my name sounding more familiar to some important people, but this wasn't really in the cards. Imo if you don't do stuff others dont you wont end up in places others dont, which might be good or bad. I mean, one of the biggest raises I got was when I brought my dog to the company cookout, and it turned out my boss's boss was a huge dog person, and we bonded over that, and he decided I was a good guy, which was kinda ironic as I was working my arse off to little benefit at that time.
iLoveOncall 4mo ago
This has pretty much always been the case. You've never been able to build production-level software in 2 days (not even in the age of AI, no), so it's always been about having a UI with mocked data. I did a lot of hackathons when I was in school more than 10 years ago and that's how they all were and what every team did.
- tripledry 4mo ago
  Had a "project" course in university for CS. Implemented a working SaaS app for hosting ML models (before AI). Winner in our category had a powerpoint and a poster, no one even looked at the implementation. I learned something that day.
  - Silamoth 4mo ago
    I had a similar experience in my undergrad software engineering course. One group literally took a JS facial recognition library and wrapped a halfway decent UI around it. That’s it, that was their entire project. But the grad student teaching the class and a lot of the other students were very impressed.
- necovek 4mo ago
  You'd be surprised about how much production level software was built in two days — the fact that organizations are usually unable to do that is what gave rise to the agile movement, though it falls apart as soon as management asks for agile coaches and for agile teams to document their processes for others to use.
KMnO4 4mo ago
I did a hackathon many years ago (before LLMs) where I spent a serious amount of effort training a conventional machine learning algorithm and integrating it into a react native app. I had a genuinely impressive team to make this possible given it was 2016. The winning team bought a bootstrap theme for $35 and made a landing page for a nonexistent app.

Hackathons turned into “nice ui with mock data”-athons. Whoever got the best ui person on their team won. I benefitted from this a few times!

by le-mark 4mo ago

Hackathons turned into “nice ui with mock data”-athons. Whoever got the best ui person on their team won. I benefitted from this a few times!

j45 4mo ago

I thought I was the only one wondering why people are preparing in advanced with polish and not much to build the day of.

glitchc 4mo ago

Judges are managers with typical mediocre technicality

giancarlostoro 4mo ago

It's all about the pitch the other half.

aaron695 4mo ago

[dead]

yieldcrv 4mo ago

I’ve seen powerpoint presentations win, and that was my last hackathon

pelagicAustral 4mo ago
I did a 3-month bootcamp back in the day and the top assessed final presentations were a powerpoint and some bs JS "game" that indeed was a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code. This was a Rails bootcamp, not a powerpoint one, not a js one...
- makapuf 4mo ago
  "a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code" does sum up quite a bit of the videogame industry, including GTA VI ...

aprilthird2021 4mo ago

When did this happen? I remember judges at hackathons used to be very forgiving about lackluster UIs as long as the idea was cool and at least functional by the presentation time

Gigachad 4mo ago
Reminds me of the inconsistency of take home interview tests where you have no idea if the person reviewing cares that the UI is shiny or not or if they want you to write a novel in the readme and make it look like a real project.
jayd16 4mo ago
It's more about unconscious bias. The slick smoke and mirror will simply show better.
odo1242 4mo ago
It depends a lot on the hackathon/what the judges are looking for. A few are run by technical people who pick the coolest technical architectures, a few are run by casual users who pick the best looking result. The majority of the ones I’ve been in have tended to be run by people who judge based on their notion of how useful the app will be societally, with the tie breaking factor being the UI/architectural design.
hobofan 4mo ago
10+ years ago, when most "grassroots" (and some of the better startup) hackathons were displaced by enterprise-sponsored hackathons. I can mostly talk about the Berlin hackathon scene, but as far as I understand it the same thing happened in SF/London as well around the same time. Presentation-first judging has been a thing for a long time, and unless there is a organizing party that explicitly makes code reviews a part of the scoring, and the organizers ensure attendance quotas for different personas (engineer vs. product vs. designer) it will always drift that way.

Teknoman117 4mo ago

It’s been like that for at least a decade.

torginus 4mo ago

Yes, I ran into this during an internal company hackathon. This was before LLMs. We took a problem, designed an internal tool for it, and put some Bootstrap UI on top with some fancy CSS animations. After wiring up the mock data, it looked convincigly real. We did win, got congratulated by upper management, and were immediately asked if we could get this into production in a week, or do we need 2?

biglyburrito 4mo ago
That last bit is why I'll never do one again. Hackatons are commonly used as a way to take credit for & reap the benefits of another person or team's work, without attribution or compensation. And oftentimes, a promising hackathon idea will be "improved" by management & added to the creator's workload with tight deadlines (because the hard part is already done!) -- even if they don't necessarily agree with the "improvements".
- hilariously 4mo ago
  Yep, a way to get free work by pretending its fun, most corpos immediately turn around and do this. It's also funny to me because of how they try to show its a treat to the engineering staff, and then railroad them as soon as they can to implement the half baked idea. The truth is that most management don't ever get beyond half baked ideas and so trying to push you to make low quality crap is often their only move.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
  Same scummy move as streamers / online personalities having a "contest" for a t-shirt design or logo design, which the streamer will sell for their personal profit while offering nothing but "exposure" to the creator.
- torginus 4mo ago
  I dunno, I think I got more out of it than I put in, but it was mostly due to happenstance and knock on events, and my name sounding more familiar to some important people, but this wasn't really in the cards. Imo if you don't do stuff others dont you wont end up in places others dont, which might be good or bad. I mean, one of the biggest raises I got was when I brought my dog to the company cookout, and it turned out my boss's boss was a huge dog person, and we bonded over that, and he decided I was a good guy, which was kinda ironic as I was working my arse off to little benefit at that time.

iLoveOncall 4mo ago

This has pretty much always been the case. You've never been able to build production-level software in 2 days (not even in the age of AI, no), so it's always been about having a UI with mocked data. I did a lot of hackathons when I was in school more than 10 years ago and that's how they all were and what every team did.

tripledry 4mo ago
Had a "project" course in university for CS. Implemented a working SaaS app for hosting ML models (before AI). Winner in our category had a powerpoint and a poster, no one even looked at the implementation. I learned something that day.
- Silamoth 4mo ago
  I had a similar experience in my undergrad software engineering course. One group literally took a JS facial recognition library and wrapped a halfway decent UI around it. That’s it, that was their entire project. But the grad student teaching the class and a lot of the other students were very impressed.
necovek 4mo ago
You'd be surprised about how much production level software was built in two days — the fact that organizations are usually unable to do that is what gave rise to the agile movement, though it falls apart as soon as management asks for agile coaches and for agile teams to document their processes for others to use.

KMnO4 4mo ago

I did a hackathon many years ago (before LLMs) where I spent a serious amount of effort training a conventional machine learning algorithm and integrating it into a react native app. I had a genuinely impressive team to make this possible given it was 2016. The winning team bought a bootstrap theme for $35 and made a landing page for a nonexistent app.