
Hackathon hustlers who make a living from corporate coding contests - jatsign
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-04/these-hackathon-hustlers-make-their-living-from-corporate-coding-contests
======
squeaky-clean
I know a guy who is great at winning hackathons. He doesn't make a living off
it, but has definitely made at least 100k in the past few years (divided
across his team, however). I entered my first hackathon last year, and it was
one he was attending.

It was really disappointing. Maybe it was just that specific hackathon? I knew
"the pitch" was a big part of winning, but didn't expect it to be 99%. A few
teams built some actual cool and functioning things in 24 hours. Ours was the
only app with a real demo you could visit/download, rather than it only
working locally on the dev's machine. But the only teams that reached the
finals were the ones with great speakers and a good idea, even if it wasn't
functional at all.

The guy I know ended up winning the first prize at that event. His team had an
amazing idea and a great pitch, but their "app" was a powerpoint presentation,
and a couple static HTML pages that faked a dynamic user flow. It worked as
long as you clicked the correct image map area, and entered values into text
boxes that matched what was hard-coded into the next page.

I had fun with my team and made new friends, but it was really discouraging to
lose a "hackathon" mostly because the other team had better speakers and not
for technical reasons. I guess I prefer game jams, no qualms about
marketability or a pitch with empty promises. Maybe it's because game jams
usually don't have financial prizes aside for the exposure?

~~~
Lukas_Skywalker
I participated in a hackathon a few years ago. The task was to create a
finance app using the first Pebble (remember: three (or four?) buttons,
black/white no-touch display).

We thought hard about an actually useful finance app on this very limited
smart watch, discarding any accounting or similar beacause input using three
buttons is too cumbersome if you have a mobile phone in your pocket a few
inches away.

We ended up creating a watch app that showed you the route to the next ATM on
a map, along with a description of the route. Technically pretty challenging
since we had to generate map tiles on a remote server and load them onto the
watch. Also, each image had to be sent in two chunks since the transfer buffer
was smaller than the screen...

Another group just assumed the Pebble had a camera, color display and a
microphone and had no demo, just a power point presentation. They ended up as
winners...

~~~
nikcub
Sounds like perfect prep for a career as a developer

~~~
pawadu
This is basically every sales guy I have ever met.

------
ryandrake
I hope the article is exaggerated. The way they are described here, these
hackathons appear to be little microcosms of everything currently wrong with
MVP-obsessed Silicon Valley. Let's round up a bunch of early-twentysomethings,
feed them junk food, see what they can cobble together without sleep in 48
hours and reward the shiniest turd that plops out with the leftover pocket
change from marketing's budget.

Where is the engineering rigor? Where is the quality assurance? Are all the
edge cases handled? Security review / penetration testing? What is the
performance when you serve 10K users simultaneously? Can one actually build a
business out of the "product" of a hackathon, or does it basically need to be
thrown away and re-architected properly? Is it even a goal to build something
viable, or is it the whole event simply a way to spend corporate marketing
money on buzz?

~~~
Klockan
These people wouldn't be living on hackathon prize money if they could
actually build viable products in a few days.

~~~
scardine
The idea of jurors about viability has nothing to do with reality. In fact
many unicorns did very poorly at hackathons.

I for one would totally bash something like AirBnB: who would lease a bedroom
in his house to a complete stranger from the internet, are you crazy?

~~~
dragonwriter
> I for one would totally bash something like AirBnB: who would lease a
> bedroom in his house to a complete stranger from the internet, are you
> crazy?

People were doing that before AirBnB, though, so there was real evidence that
people were willing to.

~~~
scardine
I know! Isn't it a lot easier to be wise after the facts? :-)

------
minimaxir
The subject of the article (Ma) added an additional comment on Facebook:
[https://facebook.com/groups/759985267390294?view=permalink&i...](https://facebook.com/groups/759985267390294?view=permalink&id=1559364127452400&ref=m_notif&notif_t=like)

> "It was easy to see hackathons with 50k plus prizes 2 years ago. Now days
> some of them only offer Alexa as prizes. The college kids will do it
> regardless since they don't have other stuff to do, but once you get a job
> that is a bit too much work for very little gain."

This reminds me a few years back when Greylock hosted a hackathon with an
unintentionally ironic prize of a "Hacker Cash-omatic":
[http://valleywag.gawker.com/hackathon-accidentally-picks-
per...](http://valleywag.gawker.com/hackathon-accidentally-picks-perfect-
metaphor-for-its-o-1605503368)

The same hackathon now offers $10k for first place, round trip airfare for
second place...and Myo Armbands for 3rd.

~~~
jatsign
I guess by the time the media finds out and publishes an article about an
interesting way to make money, it's probably too late to make a lot of money
off of it.

See: bitcoin

~~~
dsacco
All things revert to the mean.

~~~
FabHK
> Things that can't go on forever, don't.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein)

------
glangdale
It all reminds me of a line by (I think) Douglas Coupland, about Gen X. I may
be mangling this but it was something about being the first generation to
spend most of their careers _demonstrating aptitude_ rather than actually
doing work.

I seem to recall a moment in graduate school at CMU where I realized that
demonstrating aptitude had actually gotten me as far as it was going to get
me. I estimate it only took a brief decade or so of sulking before I managed
to act on this realization.

------
imroot
I was part of a startup that put on a hackathon with a 10K first prize many,
many years ago. We had a group of presenters who had a polished product and
were looking to put our API/whatever into their product so that they could be
eligible for the prize, and you could tell that this was all that they did.

I also know that there's a group of people who attend as many hackathons as
possible in the bay area for no other reason than living is expensive, and
there is generally free food at the hackathons.

Honestly, I'd be a part of one of these again in a heartbeat -- the hours were
crazy, but, it was a great way to get your developers, your API consumers, and
everyone else in the same room, to validate if it will burst/scale up, and you
can solve a lot of really interesting challenges that weekend.

------
jogjayr
Hackathon programmers remind me of tourney knights in the Dunk and Egg
novellas by George RR Martin. They serve no lord and don't fight in real
battles. Instead, they make their living from prize money earned jousting in
tourneys.

------
partycoder
Hackathons were a thing when they were an engineering event... an engineering
holiday to work on something worth working on. Like undoing some technical
debt mess or a long standing hack that you cannot fix during a sprint.

But now most hackathons are just implementing features with technical debt,
which is the kind of engineering nobody likes.

Then, cheating in hackathons is incredibly hard to detect. Even if you force
everyone to use version control and review what they did over time, there can
always be the cooking show trick where suddenly you pull a finished important
part from nowhere.

That's why I think hackathons should be engineering events, organized by
engineers not the regular company hierarchy, and rewards should be given on
engineering value not how much a feature can potentially sell.

~~~
ThrowAway145
In my experience, engineering hackathons are uncompensated overtime. usually
on Friday nights or through weekends, dressed up as fun and games by
management with free food and beer.

"well GEE, thanks..."

Of course, attendance is mandatory if you like having your job, and
complaining about it makes you look like a bad sport. :|

We were behind on our launch which was a month away so these hackathons kept
happening every week.

~~~
partycoder
And if you don't want to participate they retaliate.

~~~
gech
Who's they? Unionize.

------
joeevans1000
The worst thing about hackathons is having to politely interact with the
'advisors' organizers always think will be good to have. These are people from
various places who want to be part of the hackathon but aren't participants or
judges. Imagine finally getting into coding in earnest, finally deep into it,
and up wanders a non-coder who has been told to go around to all the teams and
give advice. It's almost always a horrible distraction, but you're aware your
interactions with them may be linked to the odds of winning, so you have to
politely interact. Of course, the advisor realizes at some point you aren't
really interested in the interaction, and they feel awkward as well. My advice
to organizers: don't use these people unless the hackathon topic is deeply
complex domain knowledge, and in that case make them available for
participants to go to, but don't make them go around.

------
komali2
Hackathons are great. You don't really see the 50k prizes anymore, but
hacking​ away for a weekend and maybe getting a drone or some API credits is
good fun for me. I get another project on my resume, make some new friends,
potentially get a win on my resume, and spend the weekend playing with new
APIs instead of derping around watching Vikings or some shit.

------
clamprecht
Who was that TopCoder guy who went to Sun's contest at JavaOne one year and
cleaned house? Was his name JonMac? I think it's this guy:

[http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/College-
stud...](http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/College-student-
outpaces-rivals-to-win-contest-2056939.php)

~~~
sah2ed
Wow. A Topcoder powered contest at Sun's JavaOne is indeed a blast from the
past. Then came Google CodeJam.

------
holografix
I don't mean to sound too negative but I've attended Startup Weekend twice now
and won't be attending a third time.

Both times I expected to meet fellow developers who were better than me and to
learn something and interact with people that know how to run a product
development cycle or design practices.

Sadly it ends being just regular guys and girls who can't code at all, or do
Wordpress and consider that coding and a bunch of people with "ideas" and no
design/product framework or concepts behind them.

Not much for me to learn and I just get a bunch of people trying to get me to
build their unoriginal idea for them...

However occasionally you see or hear something truly different and learn
something, even if it's just a new potential market for something really
niche. Just not worth the full weekend investment.

~~~
muninn_
I've gone to quite a few startup weekends and I think this is a typical
experience. I still enjoy it, though, but that's because I find enjoyment in
the possibility of helping somebody else start their business. I usually find
who I believe to be the biggest underdog or team that has the best intentions
and do my best to help them. For me that's the reward, and I get to get a
dedicated amount of time (forcing myself) to code some product and improve my
skills or learn new ones. As you mentioned, lots of non-coders, so depending
on your goals you can basically say "hey I want to build an iOS app and I'll
do that for you" and then you get to make those decisions and learn what you
want.

:)

------
ploggingdev
I came across an article recently (can't find the link), where they talk about
these "Hackathon Hustlers" not being welcome to hackathons. The argument
companies make is that these people are not the target audience for hackathons
and hence are viewed as unwelcome gate crashers.

~~~
joeevans1000
I wonder why they would be unwelcome. I'm not being sarcastic here. I mean,
what's wrong with more people? I would love to see that article.

~~~
oculusthrift
i think it's fine for them to go but it kind of spoils the competition in
certain cases. imagine having a hackathon with a bunch of inexperienced people
trying to learn and then one intense group of professionals comes and just
crushes everyone.

------
blaurenceclark
I'm one of the hackers in this article (Brian Clark) ask me any questions
you'd like!

~~~
joeevans1000
There are a lot of comments mentioning the powerpoint only teams... how did
you strategize around this issue?

~~~
blaurenceclark
Three steps 1) Also built a great powerpoint/pitch 2) Built a great hack 3)
Made sure to demo something real and splashy which gave my pitch an edge.

That all being said I've still been burned by pitch only and poor judging
rubrics. I could go on and on but one of the main things is ask if you really
have to build everything and build to the judges expectations (which they may
only want a good pitch), not your own (you may think they want some amazing
coded product).

------
mansilladev
As a sponsor of hackathons, the "circuit" hackers have their pros and cons --
they do know how to cut to the chase, and not waste the limited time doing
things like setting up their dev environment, or getting an instance spun up
-- in other words, they're prepared and spend their time building things,
rather than setting things up. As for cons -- seeing the same formulaic hack
from a developer, but with a different splash page and pitch deck can get
tiresome; or having them show up and not collaborate, connect with or help
others can be a drag.

I've actually awarded prizes to both Peter and Jay on a couple of occasions.
One thing to be said about these guys is that they do breath life into an
event, often work with others and are damn creative.

From a participant point of view -- I still do love a good hackathon, even
after years of participating in them (and winning a few along the way, too!

[https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/07/shower-with-friends-
wins-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/07/shower-with-friends-wins-the-
disrupt-sf-2014-hackathon-grand-prize-blitz-and-interactive-markdown-are-
runners-up/)

------
stuffedBelly
I'd say kudos for people who are able to make decent dimes doing hackathons.
Back at college my buddies and I used to compete in Topcoder in attempt to
earn some bounty prizes. I also saw teams/people who are professional
Topcoders and made a living out of competitions. The same goes for Quantopian.

If a hackathon doesn't mandate certain level of technicality or a functional
product, then having a good presentation that delivers a great idea/pitch is
absolutely a fair game. Given 24/36 hours, the best bet is probably to
leverage sponsors' APIs, cook up a good presentation (often neglected by
developers) and show how promising the end product would be. Hackathons are
more about priorities and showmanship and some people understand that.

People feel like hackathons are overrun by hustlers because it seems easy to
win prizes. There are tons of other highly technical coding competition
platforms that you can make a living by demonstrating your engineering/coding
skills, Kaggle, Quantopian, Topcoder, just to name a few.

------
bbarn
Incentivize anything and someone will specialize at getting that incentive
eventually.

------
rmason
I've thought for a long time that somehow there was a movie to be made around
hackathons. Now I know it has to be the code slinging hackathon pro who falls
for the female corporate coder attending her first event and together they win
a million dollar prize.

------
dlhavema
I competed in one that EMC posted about 6 years ago. we got 2nd place, because
the social voting side of things tipped the scales in favor of the winning
team. I still ended up getting a free trip to Las Vegas to their next
conference out of it.

------
andrewfromx
this is becoming more like
[http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/tournaments](http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/tournaments)
every day! Can we agree on the 4 grand slam hackathons and make them January
Australian Hackfest, May French Codes, July Wimblehack, Sept the US Code Open.

------
franciscop
I didn't know they paid so much to the winners. I won a NASA competition and
we got $0!

~~~
Itaxpica
I also once won a NASA-related hackathon (SpaceApps Philly), and my prize was
a flight suit, but TBH that's honestly kinda cooler than cash.

~~~
franciscop
We won SpaceApps global (starting in Valencia, Spain)! We got invited to see a
launch (but all expenses were on us). It was quite cool anyway and got to met
a lot of amazing people.

