Three Types of Harmful Hackathons (opens in new tab)

I've done Startup Weekend once before and it felt like how the "The Business-A-Thon" was described. My friends and I did not know this would be the case going in and spent all of our time pumping out an MVP (which worked!) while the teams that won largely didn't have ANY code to show for their time. It was all slides and marketing talk. The winner DID have code but it was a <1hr rails app thrown together with no styling just a form to submit data to the backend and I don't even think they got it to process CC's (it was crowd fundraising thing). Ours was well thought out, looked nice, and WORKED yet we were beat out by people who could put together a more appealing keynote presentation.

It was a pretty big letdown and I haven't been back to SW or any hackathons since. I love banging out an MVP in a weekend with friends but not if we are going to be judged on our presentation and not our work. I know, I know that's how the real world works as well but I just expected better from the experience. I also understand that maybe SW is not aimed at being a hackathon but I just wish they could have given more weight to something that worked and was accessible today (also we spend the whole weekend minus about 8hrs total for sleep between 2 nights) vs a lot of marketing/sales talk (who left the venue early and showed up late).

Quick edit: Just wanted to say that I see this more as my failing to understand what SW was instead of me blaming SW for not meeting my incorrect expectations. SW is fine but it's just probably not for me.

I am a software engineer in the Bay Area. Of my friends, few are engineers whom I can geek-out or talk shop with. Hackathons seemed like a potentially good way to do it, but this article highlights the reasons I haven't been attending them: I just want to meet some people, hack on something fun, and maybe make some friends. I don't want to start a business, and I don't care about winning a prize. I don't really want to stay up all night, either - I have a wife, and other things to do.

I thought maybe Weekend Hacker would be fun, but that seems to be full of people looking for help with their startup idea. Most of them aren't engineers. Most of the Meetups I've been to (or hosted) are full of people trying to get me interested in their startup, or recruit me. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't see myself having a beer on the weekend with any of those folks.

So, how do people do it? It's kinda happening slowly over time, through friends and partners of friends, but I wouldn't know how to actively speed it up.

Last Startup Weekend I went to had 7 devs out of 110 people. Definitely an issue.

EDIT: All but one of the 11 teams were tech/programming required startups guys. I'm not talking about "Startup Weekend" as a whole, I'm talking about my experience at the event I went to.

Just skip these things and write code for people who will pay you, or open source something useful.

If you're an API provider you can do everything in this post but also say "and by the way, we will give you X free credits to use against our API if you want to build something on top of it." You still might not get as much battle hardening, etc as if it was a hard requirement, but it might totally change the dynamic.

This is why I only attend university hackathons. For the most part, they are still about building cool new tech—not startups. Plus, their increasingly high admissions standards ensure that everyone who attends is either already a developer or eager to learn. Nobody walks away without coding.

One point I disagree with in the article is that cash prizes are harmful. I just don't see evidence of that—prizes at university hackathons have been getting bigger and bigger (tens of thousands of dollars) but it seems like the technical sophistication of hacks continues to rise. So long as you have good judges (ie. hackers, not marketers), large prizes just provide an awesome reward for awesome hacks.

Also, most of the shitty bizathons I've been to actually had relatively small prizes (some API credits, maybe "mentorship") relative to the major hackathons.

Running a Hackathon costs money.

We can have a hackathon where:

- The costs are split up by the number of participants.

- A bunch of teams participate.

- Everyone builds whatever they want, and they own it.

- There can be multiple show-and-tells, to allow teams to ask / answer questions, get to know each-other, and iterate.

- Everyone walks away having made some wonderful new friends, having learned a thing or two, and also maybe even some useful code.

If someone else is organizing, and you're participating for free, then it will always come with strings attached. Remember, if you're not the customer, then you're the product!

I really think it depends on what you want to get out of a hackathon. At the end of the day you get out what you put in.

After graduating from college I spent some time going to hackathons, some of which were of the type you described. But I didn't care because I just wanted to go somewhere where I could hone my ability to think fast and ship. I got to do just that while also meeting awesome dev evangelists, eating free food, and occasionally going home with some prizes.

I also don't think the following is necessarily the right thing to do:

"Restrict to those who are there to code, design, or build something, not to write a business plan"

especially if the intent is to create "better builders, better collaborators, and better teachers."

Learning to work with the MBA type that a lot of people vilify can be a valuable skill. I think the ability to dilute business speak into features you can program or being able to communicate your complex programming ideas to someone less experienced are super valuable. And that's where I've seen a lot of hackathon pitches fall apart. Someone creates something so technical and awesome, but can't break it down into something that non-technical people or new programmers can understand. And that sucks, but being able to do so is a necessary communication skill.

I also think hackathons are a great place to find future co-founders. Maybe that's another programmer, but maybe it's someone who can help you sell your product and has a more developed business sense. Again, it all depends on why you're at the hackathon in the first place.

The single biggest indicator of the quality of a hackathon is who is organizing it. I've seen countless events where the people putting on the event are doing it for selfish or greedy reasons, and 9 times out of 10 those events look like the 3 kinds the author is describing [1].

That said, there are tons of _good_ hackathons out there that actually do have the developers interests in mind. Specifically, I'd point to all the amazing things that are happening in the student space [2].

Bottom Line: Figure out who's organizing an event and use that as gauge to determine if it's worth your time.

[1] http://theycallmeswift.com/2013/10/25/dont-throw-that-hackat... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/education/edlife/the-hacka...

Looking at going to battlehack (from paypal) this weekend. Wondering how it fits in to the "3 types" from the article - doesn't seem to fit in to any of those 3 specifically.

I recently went to a hackathon where participants owned code they wrote, but no mention was made of who ideas belonged to. What category does that fall into?

Since the general HN consensus on such things is "execution > idea" is it all right if a hackathon says "We might use your idea in our products"?

PS. Obviously, it's never OK if they say "We own your idea and you can't use it anymore".

A key detail that seems to be missed by this article: these are three types as a subset of hackathons. Not all have to be that way, and many are not.

My biggest problem with hackathons is that they are usually student-only events, which I feel is a terrible and unnecessary restriction. I have participated in a hackathon several previous times as it was lax with its entry requirements (I was not a student but an alumnus), but their sign-up page now says it is open to undergraduates and high school students with special permission.

I have a BS and MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering and an MBA but my passion for the last few years has been anything and everything related to programming. I’m willing to travel all over the country and the world to attend these events as they are great opportunities for learning, meeting people, working with technologies that aren’t available, and providing a good reason to be in front of a computer for 24 or more hours at a time. I’m willing to pay a non-student entry fee or do whatever else is necessary to help out to offset the additional cost that I would bring. Having a bunch of computer science students working together is great, but the hackathon experience can be greatly enhanced by people who have different backgrounds or industry experience, are entrepreneurial, or have connections to companies, financing, jobs, etc.

Different backgrounds bring different people and thinking together. How would having a marketer, pianist, chemist, or sports therapist change the idea generation process? Industry experience is provided on the tech side by some of the sponsors or organizers, but you will never know what software pharmaceutical companies need unless you have someone with a Doctor of Pharmacy who has been working with pharmaceutical software for several years like my one friend who attended the hackathon. You will never know what huge opportunities are available in the Department of Defense or data architecture fields unless you have someone like myself with years of experience working in those industries. Our mix of two people with industry experience (PharmD in pharmaceutical, MBA/Engineering in DoD), and students in Psychology (med. school ambitions), and traditional computer science can lead to both some wild ideas or practical software that is desired or needed in industry.

Trying to include entrepreneurs and people with business interests are another way to improve hackathons. I was really impressed that there were over 100 submitted projects for this hackathon, an incredible number and an accomplishment for a hackathon that has been growing bigger every semseter. Most of these projects will die and never be developed for in the future. And while that is a good idea for most of the hacks, some are promising for future development. I would love to see some of these hacks turn into businesses, start generating revenue, or start accumulating large user bases. This is often too much of a time/money constraint for a broke student to accommodate amongst the many classes, projects, exams, work, and debt that they have to deal with. Opening hackathons up to non-students can get entrepreneurs, funding, and people who have the time and money resources to take the project to the next level involved.

Bringing in non-students also can bring in connections to companies which can be invaluable to students. This can bring in people who have access to jobs, internships, and exclusive technologies. It also can bring experience to show students how technologies or work flows exist in industry and what to be prepared for as ideas move from one or two person teams into businesses with hundreds or thousands of employees.

I stole this off of my blog, as the concerns I had previously are the same.

http://jbutewicz.com/hackru-fall-2014/

How is equity divided among the members of a team? There are many ways it could be but unless it is discussed - and agreed to - up-front, if a successful business results, or perhaps if lots of debts result, so will lawsuits.

By contrast I greatly enjoyed MacHack. It saddens me that it's not held anymore. Most people work on their own things, as individuals. The prize is an "A-Trap". It's a type of rat trap; the A-Trap was chosen because Mac OS System and Toolbox calls were implement as "A-Line Exceptions", that is, an illegal instruction, the first byte of which was 0xA.

The objective of MacHack was to hack the system in some clever way; it wasn't to start a business. It was to have fun.