Hacker News Reader

Comment by repomies69 | Hacker News Reader

This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.

View on HN

I got baited into going to one of those once. I was promised the prospect of spending a dozen hours with friends building something cool, but halfway through I realized we were just doing free labor for one of Latin America's biggest banks and just left.

I'm still longing for events where my friends and I can gather to build something cool, and game jams are the closest I ever got to that.

+1 had a fun Node Knockout experience many years ago making a game with 3 friends. We had a game artist / sound designer, and two engineers with chops on the front-end and back-end.

Node knockout and rails rumble before that. :)

In which the Judges have to actually try out the submission instead of listening to people go through a slide deck on a video.

I think most of the creative energy of building things quickly rightly goes into game jams because they offer the potential of UX creativity, rapid iteration and a joyous product at the end. Coding up a web app can be fun but the output product is almost always business-y and I'd much rather play a dozen games in order to vote, than blank-slate setup a bunch of web apps.

Yep, "hackathon" got co-opted into "free labor" the moment business types sniffed it out. Hackers caught on, left, and now "hackathon" means "business types hyping each other over demo sketches" -- which is fine, but not my cup of tea, and about as far as it is possible to be from the original spirit of hacking.

I had this exact experience. We had a successful hackathon led by the engineering team where we just built cool things that somewhat aligned with the business.

The "Innovation" team decided we were pushing into their turf and took it over. Then it was decided that requiring actual development wasn't inclusive enough. The next "hackathon" was just a parade of PowerPoint presentations.

Gross...

In this situation, did you have to sign away rights to participate? If you don't sign anything I'd imagine you retain rights to whatever you build, no?

I think the winning strat here is "run."

Though I know what you mean, I also kind of saw it as a rite of passage. At some point in your career some guy selling merch under his jacket will come to you with a "great idea" where you will do all the work and he'll be the "idea guy".

It does suck though that hackathons may have devolved into being just that. I haven't been to a hackathon since 2015 and if they've become either dominated by idea-guys or about only making nice looking frontends then that's kind of sad.

EDIT: Oh, I guess I forgot a hackathon I went to in 2017, if you could even call it that. I arrived thinking that we'd be, you know, making actual apps. It turned out I may have been the only person in the entire venue doing actual work. Everyone on my team dicked around the whole time. We were one of 2 teams that actually had something that worked. All the other teams had fake as f*k "prototypes" in programs like Figma and no actually working code. The other team that had working code was just making a Twilio API call. The winner and all the others got attention because their apps looked good. My app might have been ugly but it successfully implemented nonstandard behavior (something you can't just rip off Stack Overflow) and even had authentication.

Now I remember why I haven't been back to a hackathon since.

This happened at a place I worked. There was an internal hackathon where people built things. It was well received and expanded to all employees. The problem was, developers were about 10% of the population there. It became an idea-a-thon, which chased the developers away even more.

Yeah this is for "startup lite" hackathons where the goal is to sell an idea and possibly your team to investors. I had a blast doing hackathons where the goal was just to make the coolest thing possible in 24 (or whatever) hours.

I did one in 2013 where a PhD student researching CFD wrote a full fluid simulation in pure javascript and used it for a music visualizer. It was incredible.

EDIT: I actually found the demo I was thinking of! Still holds up: https://vimeo.com/79272443

Yes, it's sad to see how those have taken over the term so much

"The main goal of the startup hackathons (or any other) is to validate the idea in a limited time that the product you build is needed by the people in the room."

The main goal is to have fun and build something that brings you joy.

Business-driven hackathon doesn't bring joy. Better remove it from my life.

The few I went to 10ish years ago had something of a party atmosphere. Free beer and pizza, and the winner was the one with funniest presentation.

Imagine my surprise when they started showing up on new graduates' resumes, eventually I learned that they were more like all night working sessions now.

This is why I participated in only two hackathons, but several dozens of game jams in my life - the "hacking party atmosphere" survived much longer and can (well, could before the pandemic) still be found there. All you had to do is to avoid those jams with official jury panels and non-symbolic prizes, although at times even the presence of jury and prizes wasn't enough to ruin it.

I had a manager offer to put on a work hackathon. It was going to be 24 hours of design and code. I figured it would be fun, even if we were building something for the company, free reign micro project would be cool.. We ended up spending the time building something management wanted, and then playing poker. (I don't gamble so I was rather miffed) In the end, I think we spent about 4 hours coding up something the bosses wanted.

Hackathons are networking events. I know a lot of people in college that went and participated in them got internships or leads into them.

When it comes down to a 4 minute demo the engineering is irrelevant. Instead spend the time to pick the right words and tell a story with pretty pictures.

That's simultaneously true and entirely missing the point.

Missing the point how? It sounds like you are looking for some form of agreement that is not implied.

Missing the point of what was making people want to participate in old-school hackathons and what made these events fun in the first place. It is true that these days most hackathons are reduced to a pitching contest you describe, and that's exactly what's wrong with them (along some other things).

Not that there isn't a place for pitching contests or people who still find them fun, but GP was talking about how the term "hackathon" was taken over and doesn't mean what it used to anymore.

You are suggesting an opinion I never implied. You injected a straw man to make some point to battle against.

BTW, I agree that marketing driven 4 minute hackathon demos are stupid.

> BTW, I agree that marketing driven 4 minute hackathon demos are stupid.

That's what I said. I'm not so sure on who's injecting a straw man here :)

So, what point did I miss?

4 minute pitch decks are missing the point of hackathons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com