

The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley - zonotope
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/education/edlife/the-hackathon-fast-track-from-campus-to-silicon-valley.html

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JacobEdelman
Despite the optimistic tone in this article hackathons have definite problems.
They have a contradiction between their party atmosphere and their high
stakes. While they strive to provide an informal, fun event they also offer
extremely large rewards (cash, internships, and even startup-funding are
offered as rewards). Little seems to stand in the way of groups cheating and
judging may seem incredibly subjective. Rumors abound as too how winners built
their projects beforehand (a big no-no) or that the projects don't actually
work. In trying to become both parties and job interviews hackathons are
failing to be what they were meant to be, places to learn and create.

~~~
ditonal
That's because most hackathans can't decide whether they want to be hackathons
or pitchathons. As you have picked up, they really can't be both. Hacking is
experimental, and it's fun, and it definitely is not optimized around
impressing a VC or a journalist in 3 minutes or less. If you wanted to be a
true hackathon, you would ban the investors and journalists and really ban
judging altogether and just have everyone show everyone else their projects.
Even the idea of "fun" is different between the two crowds, with the hacker
crowd expecting the "fun" part to be the cool hacks themselves, and the
journalist/finance crowd expecting the fun part to be the boozing up and
making plans for how you spend your millions after you focused on optimizing a
commercial product (ususally with more emphasis on marketability and
monetization potential than cool tech). If you want to "win" a hackathon i.e.
impress a VC/Angel/CEO/Journalist, of course you should prepare beforehand,
it's extremely difficult to verify cheating and very little real technology
can be built in that timespan and that environment (party wooo!). You should
also focus way more on the design and pitch then on the functionality, since
the judges only have the time to evaluate the design/pitch. The good news is
you can also treat the pitchatons like a hackathon and just ignore the
judging/prizes, they can still be nice networking events regardless and times
to learn some new things/APIs. Or you can try to game the prizes, but either
way I wouldn't take them too seriously. How many hackathon projects turn into
anything real anyway?

The current Hackathon culture is indicative of a general tech and investing
culture of picking "hot" ideas made by charismatic teams over people doing
true technological innovation which takes sustained, serious effort. The real
innovation is what ends up making an impact, but the little prototype parties
can be a good stepping stone into the industry.

~~~
psaintla
If I could give you a high five or a hug over the internet I'd do just that. I
stopped going to hack-a-thons all together because at some point (I can't
pinpoint the exact time) they turned into show-and-tell for existing startups.
I participated in a Real Estate Tech hackathon and the top three finishers
came in with ready made products, spent all of their time networking and did
zero coding. They then pitched their products which were highly polished while
the rest of us sat around looking like people who had coded up some things for
fun and a little competition.

Hack-a-thons need to change so that the objective isn't clear until you walk
in so people have to create something on the spot.

~~~
TimFogarty
Yeah that kinda sucks. It's one of the reasons college hackathons are so
compelling - people aren't there with their startups, it's students looking to
learn. I think sometimes people judge student hackathons based on corporate
hackathons they've been to but they are fundamentally very different.

Jacob is right, big prizes can suck. I'd love to see fewer big prizes at
hackathons. Having some small stuff so people feel accomplished and valued is
nice though. Jon Gottfried has a really good article about this[1].

I go to a lot of student hackathons and generally people are there for
learning - not competition. They're certainly not there for "boozing up"!

And of course hackathon projects amount to nothing 99% of the time. That's not
a problem. That's totally to be expected from 24 hours of hastily put together
code. The value students get is learning about idea generation, working with
others, managing a project, how to use the libraries, frameworks, and APIs,
how to work to a deadline, how to debug, how to do version control, how to
deploy, how to test and improve your work, how to present your work to others,
and much more. And I don't think companies or VCs who attend really expect to
find a next Facebook - they're probably more concerned with just meeting the
kind of students who would rather spend a weekend building stuff instead of
boozing. Furthermore, hackathons don't undermine the value of sustained effort
on hard technical problems - but they can be the first step for students
starting to work on technology outside of their courses.

You're all totally right that large prizes suck and pitchathons suck. Most
student hackathons do a pretty good job of staying away from those (though
some could do better for sure). As Jacob said, "hackathons should be about
coding something cool, not winning, networking, or partying" \- I've honestly
never been to a student hackathon where that wasn't the case. So I'd be
careful about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[1] [http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-
sinc...](http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-since-moldy-
sliced-bread-04-18-2014)

~~~
hkmurakami
Given that student pitch-a-thons (ex: business plan competition type events)
can earn you pretty decent amounts of money, how much longer till hackathons
on college campuses fall the way of corporate hackathons?

As food for thought, there are "Consulting Case Competitions" for business
school students year round, and some students decide to spend their time
optimizing for winning a bunch of these one after another all around the
country. I'm not sure if this is a good, bad, or neutral thing.

~~~
TimFogarty
I go to a lot of student hackathons and I really don't see that happening. And
the large majority of organizers are heavily focused on creating a welcoming
event for building, learning, and having fun.

Student hackathons are and always will be fundamentally different from
corporate hackathons because the motivations of the organizers and attendees
are different. Perhaps we should be careful about offering large prizes for
the reason you state but the focus is very clearly on learning and building
and that's not set to change.

------
birken
> Likewise, students say hackathons are an ideal way to test-drive the
> experience of working at a start-up before committing to a job.

I don't really understand this. Working at a startup is not about sleeping 2
hours a night and/or churning out a new products in 36 hours. It is about
committing to an idea for _years_ and continuing to persevere when everything
goes wrong and things look horrible (which is inevitable).

I'm not saying hackathons are bad, they seem fun. But in terms of recruiting,
I'd much rather work with somebody who spend 1 year working on the same idea,
rather than somebody who has done 20 hackathons on all sorts of different
stuff.

~~~
rjvir
Please suggest a better alternative to simulate the culture and mentality of a
startup, for a typical 18 year old who is not a part of the world of tech.

~~~
untog
Getting together with friends in your spare time to make a web site/app?

~~~
TimFogarty
Hackathons are a pretty good way of starting something like this for a college
student (though obviously not the only way). I know several groups people who
met at hackathons then went on to start a larger project together (often not
the same project they did at the hackathon). That's one of the nice thing
about college hackathons - you get to meet other students who like to build
stuff in their spare time.

------
theyCallMeSwift
If you're a student and are interested in finding a hackathon near you to
participate in, check out [https://mlh.io/events](https://mlh.io/events) for a
list of great events in North America and
[https://mlh.io/eu](https://mlh.io/eu) for events in Europe.

As someone who got their start at student hackathons (I wanted to be a lawyer
before I went to my first one) and as someone who has been to hundreds of
these in my life, I can definitely testify to the importance of this movement
for students everywhere. This is where you learn the hard skills you need to
be a programmer, designer, entrepreneur, or artist - not in the classroom.

~~~
atroyn
I was with you right up until "This is where you learn the hard skills you
need to be a programmer, designer, entrepreneur, or artist - not in the
classroom.".

If you want to have fun and really wring out your skillset as any of those
things, Hackathons are a great place to do it. If you want to experience
something new, if you want to meet interesting people, sure, hackathons are
great. But a hackathon is a terrible environment to learn programming and
entrepreneurship.

Hackathons won't help you learn, or improve at programming. At a hackathon
you're slapping APIs together and writing code that just barely works well
enough for a demo. You have 24-48 hours, you don't have time to learn how to
do things well, that can only come with experience and often, yes, in the
classroom.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, and I mean really execute on a product,
talk to users, find the right niche, iterate on an idea and figure out a real
business model, you won't do it at a hackathon. You're most interested in
making something that will be entertaining for the audience there on that day.

I'm not a designer or artist, so I can't speak for them, but I'm sure the
situation is similar. I've been to at least half a dozen hackathons of various
stripes in the last few years, and while they're tremendous fun, they don't
replace learning.

~~~
theyCallMeSwift
I think the thing that you have to remember is that there are a lot of
different types of learners out there. From the sound of it, the hackathon
environment is not conducive to your particular learning style (which is
totally fine). Hackathons are great for the kinds of people who learn by doing
or who need lots of real-world practice to master skills.

The other thing I'll point out is that a lot of "hard skills" that you need to
be successful at those things are not necessarily technical. Examples:
learning to work on a team, learning to deal with things going wrong on a
deadline, learning to explain your work to other people. So, don't forget
about those benefits too!

~~~
windust
I disagree, I think the hard skills for being a successful software developer
are picked up by honing your craft daily working on the same project.
Hackathons are too contrived since the goal is to have a finished product in
24 ~ 48 hours. Every time I have done one I throw away all the "Danger, Bad
practice" signals from my sub conscience and work towards finishing the
product/idea. Things that are important like maintainability (even if your
hack is successful, and get investor funding you want to re-write it
properly), coupling, testing, documentation, API, Memory profiling, Logging,
performance optimizations, design patterns are thrown out the window to get
that idyllic prototype out. Even working as a team, there is very little you
gain from spending 48 hours with (mostly unknown) individuals than it is for
your peers in a job where you actually have a favor economy.

And I don't mean that there isn't any value on hack-a-thons. I think you're
right on dealing with deadline pressures and the ability of working yourself
out of a problem in a pinch are valuable skills. I just don't think that's
where the "hard" skills needed to become a successful software developer are
learned.

------
shithhsaid
Obligatory plug with select examples from the Hackathon culture:

[https://twitter.com/shit_hh_said](https://twitter.com/shit_hh_said)

Relevant discussion: "Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205177)

~~~
raverbashing
"Students who believe to be 1000x SE because they can stick two APIs together
and use bootstrap end-up to be very condescending older engineers."

Nope, reality catches up to them. Fast.

------
thoughtchrome
We have company sponsored hackathons for internal projects. At first I dug it,
but beginning to think this mainly serves to squeeze a weekend of work out of
devs and to get something done fast, sometimes fast !=
good/sustainable/performant/well tested. But hey, free tshirt and unlimited
diet coke, so that is something :-/

~~~
theyCallMeSwift
Company run hackathons != student hackathons.
[http://theycallmeswift.com/2013/10/25/dont-throw-that-
hackat...](http://theycallmeswift.com/2013/10/25/dont-throw-that-hackathon/)

------
pnathan
The wheel turns: it used to be programming competitions, now it's hackathons.
What will be the next fad offering for glory and jobs that isn't doing the
grind work of hitting the books?

~~~
TimFogarty
The people who do well at hackathons and programming competitions are often
excellent students. And extra-curricular activities as a way of learning more
and improving yourself are generally considered good for students, right?
That's one reason universities support programming competitions, hackathons,
CS clubs, etc. I'd go so far as to say the best students are the ones who love
their subject so much they do it in their spare time too.

------
peter303
Mature software companies dont produce good software in this fashion. Most
such apps, if they ever get published, end up in the unsold depths of App
stores.

