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Comment by gnuvince | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD hackathons are why I'm so bummed by the corporate-sponsored "hackathons" that are often organized at my university: instead of improving a major open source project that is of use to everyone (including people in academia), it's mostly about "please test our API and show us the cool thing we could build with it". I absolutely adore the focus that OpenBSD hackathons have and how they benefit the whole community.

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To take it a step further than "test our API and show us the cool thing we could build with it", I think it's also "you young, bright programmers, show us which of you is willing to work yourselves to death for whatever arbitrary tasks we assign you".

I may be a bit too cynical, but there's some element of that in those sponsored hackathons as well.

Yep. OpenBSD practically invented the concept of a hackathon as a way of bringing together their distributed developer base to work together on OpenBSD in a convivial atmosphere.

Then entryist tech companies co-opted the concept to get programmers to work for free on their platforms, and in some cases to even pay money (in the form of an entry or registration fee) for the privilege of doing so.

Sure, they provide pizza and dangle some prizes in front of the participants, but the judging is seldom objective, and the winners are all too often connected in some way to the event sponsor.

Sun introduced the techcorp use of 'Hackathon' at about the same time as OpenBSD ran theirs (Java One and OpenBSD Hackathon both in June 1999).

It was probably a coincidence, no attempt at co-opting anything.

You have to pay off your student loans somehow -- participating in (and these days, running) a corporate-sponsored hackathon is a nice way to pad a res^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H demonstrate technical and leadership skills if you're looking for a megacorp job.

Not everyone can say they won the Putnam.

It 'pads your resume' by showing a willingness to do unpaid work for for-profit corporations, which potential employers love.

Putnams don't count for much anyway; I guarantee you 99% of tech companies are still going to put you through the same demeaning interview process even if you have one, just because they can.

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