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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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?

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Hackathons rarely need to deal with such rigor. I've participated in quite a few and the it all boils down to understanding the judging metrics (and personalities), the bite-size tangible demo, and the marketing pitch. If you have a team that does that well, winning becomes an achievable and repeatable end result.

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

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?

> 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.

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

Hackathon projects aren't intended to be production applications. (unless people cheat and do most of the work beforehand, and use the hackathon as a soft launch with exposure)

There's such a thing as a 'prototype' and generally they are are meant to be thrown away. Software Engineering 101. They're meant to explore problem spaces, not be final solutions.

At work we call it "the jquery stage."

>The way they are described here, these hackathons appear to be little microcosms of everything currently wrong with MVP-obsessed Silicon Valley.

They're a direct descendant of that ecosystem, which is designed --at least in part-- to take advantage of youngster's naivete. How many times has SV told us that ideas don't matter, that you need to hustle? These hackathons find those willing to put in the most work for little gain, besides "industry stature".

That said, on an individual level, I quite enjoy the scene.

> Where is the engineering rigor? Where is the quality assurance? Are all the edge cases handled? Security review / penetration testing?

From dictionary.com and merriam-webster.com:

Hack

verb: - to write computer programs for enjoyment

noun: - a usually creative solution to a computer hardware or programming problem or limitation - a piece of code that modifies a computer program in a skillful or clever way

The goal was to code for fun. Then corporations got involved and the goal became to code for a job. Now that money is involved, a goal is to code for money.

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