I hate Hackathons | Hacker News Reader

I hate Hackathons

pgpt.substack.com

87 pointsprakhar89764 comments

IME with hackathons, they are kind of like a hibachi grill. The first and second hackathon was really exciting, then it wore down as I realized most of the products were fancy ML / crypto presentations without much substance, the "competition" was broken (because those ML / crypto projects always won even vs some genuinely original and creative ideas), and you can't really build something interesting in a couple days (unless maybe you have a one-in-a-million eureka moment). There are exceptions: if you have a particularly great idea, or if the hackathon has a particularly great social experience. But 24-48 hours is simultaneously too much and not enough time, and trying to build a commercially-viable product in 24/48 hours of crunch while also spending 24/48 hours partying is often not actually that fun or productive.

The "Internal Corporate Hackathons" the author hates though...these are something else. These are not hackathons:

> ...the Management has already decided what you'll build. They give you a pre-selected pool of ideas to give you an illusion of choice. Then, they expect you to have their experimental projects fully built in just one day. Also, participation is "encouraged"...

> “My company just sent out an email about Hackathon where you spend two weeks crunching to solve complex problems for the company. Followed by a two week Hackathon where we're supposed to test/bugfix the software built during the Hackathon.....”

I have to say, I was a bit disappointed how quickly you abandoned the grill analogy, I was ready for more comparisons

I've also experienced that.

It would be better if the presentations at the end had to be based on the things developed during the hackathon. -- It does not have to be anything groundbreaking, and it can be a shoestring "hacked together" concept/implementation. For example, I developed basic integration between our product and another, and their team worked on displaying/incorporating that integration.

This kind of hackathons outlined by the OP indeed sounds like trouble. In the current company I work at, we have every 6 weeks, 2 full days to hack on whatever we want. Zero expectations.

This has been really cool because: - it’s during normal working hours. 9 to 5. No weekends or all nighters. - you are entitled to cancel all your meetings - you can work on product-related ideas or experiment with a new language. It’s 100% up to you. No expectations or strings attached.

A few cool features in our app eventually started out from days like that, but so far it has been more like a side-effect than a requirement per se.

I see a lot of positive things coming out of this. And the company for sure gets benefits. So far it has been a win-win from my POV.

Does it have to be work related? Also, do you end up showing off whatever you did during that time, or is it really a "do whatever" day where you could just do nothing?

It needs to be something that helps you to level-up somehow. But it does not force you into specifics, so it’s up to you to choose.

At the end of the second day, there is usually a little show-off session where folks that got something interesting at the end and want to share, they can. But you are not forced to.

It’s still normal working hours, so you are expected to do something.

I kinda dislike the "level-up" corporate jargon but I understand what you mean.

At the company I work for hack days can even be used for you to read technical literature, so if you'd like to take these 2 days to grok through a technical book you haven't found the time for you can do so. Is that encouraged where you work or does one need to "build" something out of these hack days?

That is right on. Same situation here.

Enjoy it while it lasts. It sounds pessimistic of me to say but once the company catches wind of you enjoying yourself it'll be taken away. They'll realize after some careful spreadsheet analysis that participation in this hackathon is an all time high. You know it's because you guys can do what you want. They don't. They just see the distilled numbers. So, the C-levels will order everyone to instead work on a work-related project with a mandatory demo (for "fun" time constraints!) and everyone will be miserable. Participation will drop, and then it will become a routine where they get all the engineers to do a song and dance once a year for them. That's all "demos" are, anyway. Of course that'll be sold as "giving the engineers an opportunity to improve their speaking skills for conferences" or some trite bullshit typical of sub-zero IQ C-levels.

I dont participate in any kind of hackathon or after work in-office "fun" event because they almost always turn into extra work hours. If you want to hang out you can find me at the bar.

That would be a bit depressing if this eventually happen. But I do understand where you come from.

I would also not accept if I had to do this during off hours. And it's also very different from hackathons where you have a company agenda. Hopefully this does not change, but we never know.

Do you work 5 days a week during those 6 weeks? If yes, 2 days off is nice - but not generously nice. There are companies (but not FAANG) that by default have a 4-day week, so there you'd have in 6 weeks essentially 6 days off.

4 day week totalling 40 or 32 hours, under the assumption that a 5 day work week is 40 hours?

You misunderstood it. These are not days off. They are meant for you to learn, experiment and level-up.

I’m tired of hating. Let’s all be chill and like something

I like your comment

Better title: "How I personally think hackathons can be done right" but that's really not as catchy. Hate and outrage drives clicks.

I dont really think that accurately summarizes the article. The article doesn't really suggest improvements, just talk about things the author dislikes.

I personally don't think there is anything wrong with that. Can't find solutions if you don't understand the problem.

Sounds like you're hating on hating.

I love both your comments.

But to dig further, compared to the article, op's comment not only comes off as laid back, as opposed to aggressive and anxiety-inducing, but it also provides an alternative all in the same sentence.

To add some praise on this topic, I like (in no particular order): - having dedicated no-meeting days to work on stuff I'm paid to build - being able to talk vision with my PMs (and be listened) - having a budget for software maintenance and developer QoL - not having to do all the software testing on my own - run live experiments with users to test out new ideas

I'm tired of criticisms on tone in place of discussions on substance.

I'm worried about the author. Who forced them?

When I went to some hackathons 10-12 years ago they were essentially parties with networking and light coding, from time to time someone might get into an idea and actually make something but it was mostly a social event and the goal was (a very peculiar type of) fun.

Eventually they started to appear on resumes and I thought "what a strange choice, listing the times you were given beer and pizza by various tech companies." Then I went to one more recently and it was like the worst work shift I ever experienced, at least I get why they're on resumes now.

I love hackathons. But what is described in the article indeed sounds horrible.

At my job, we have a hackathon once a year. You are free to decide if you want to join. It is during work-hours and you can work on anything you want, provided it is somewhat company related. That, however, is a very wide umbrella. Like, someone made a "lego-gun" for automatically plugging USBs in and out. It also helps that we're hardware company, so the ideas can be a bit more high-flying sometimes. Snacks and drinks are served during the day.

After work-hours, there would be a lightning round of presentations to management, and we would vote for different categories. After that, pizza and beer.

Now, it's expanded a bit, and people said they didn't like sticking around after working hours. So it's one day of building and one day of presentations. Both are completely voluntary, but are usually a lot of fun.

I'd never do it on a weekend, and I'd only stick around after hours for a social event.

I work in a company which does hackatons without any goals. You can do something cool on the product, or you can attend some course or if you really want, you can keep working on features (there's no pressure to do so). It's essentially just 4 weeks in a year when you're free to choose your work. There are also some small prizes which for me do nothing, but for somebody might bring extra motivation.

I think it's great in non-obvious ways. People often choose to improve product in small ways which would be otherwise hard to justify to prioritize in the product backlog. Small quality of life (either user or developer) improvements, platforms improvements, refactorings, optimizations of the CI jobs etc.

Hackatons are often marketed as something for the employees to enjoy, perhaps for the organization to be healthy, to produce new ideas, but I also see tremendous value for the long term technical health of the product as well.

While it's great that it's working out, it does feel like a smell about our ability as an industry to prioritize. I feel similarly about "bug bashes".

I get what you're saying. Hackatons shouldn't be time when technical debt is being paid, and fortunately in my organizations it's not the case. We do get enough time to refactor etc. but it's still kind of hassle to go through that process of defining the task, bringing this up, putting it on the product backlog, discussing it and only then doing it.

Hackaton inverts this and gets rid of all the process - do whatever you want without talking to anybody and only if it works out, we can discuss it, merge it etc.

If your boss wants you to do a corporate hackathon why not have a little fun with it? We all know how marathons work, you need months and months of training doing shorter runs, cardio training etc. So for the 6 months before the hackathon completely stop your day job and just pound out leetcode style problems (at this point coincidentally, your weirdly well prepared to go interview somewhere else). Then once the marathon begins, start coding very slowly, It's important you pace yourself for the hackathon. Also ensure that your boss tells you exactly what do - marathons don't just let you pick your own route, you have to follow the exact route correctly. Once the hackathon is finished, take a week or two off to recover.

If you really want to push the boat out, insist on wearing a funny costume for it and go around your coworkers asking them for donations too.

When I used to do more data viz and front end work, I went to a few hackathons that went well where they prebuilt teams for basically storytelling projects. Tribeca Film Institute did a couple of great ones, including one at CERN where they made teams that each had a scientist looking to share their work in innovative ways working with artists, designers and coders. POV, which is a PBS-affiliated documentary project, did a hackathon series where coders and interaction designers worked with documentary makers who had an idea for an online or app component to their documentary.

Nobody got paid much, but the projects were well scoped and I think most people had positive experiences. The output generally actually got published. I think a key was that the products were generally standalone static web apps that didn’t need long term support.

In those cases I’m thinking of, I think it helped a lot that the “clients” were scientists or film directors: two professions that are quite used to running projects that rely on other skilled people translating their vision using tools they themselves can’t use as effectively.

I agree that bad hackathons are just undercompensated sprints toward arbitrary deadlines with a manager awkwardly sitting next to you at a cafeteria table.

Hackathons are generally an excuse to get more work for less pay. No different than pagerduty or any number of other scams the technocracy has devised to drive wages down. People would be happy to do them if they'd get paid.

However, there's another problem. No one wants to work on "regular everyday" stuff for even a 9-5 M-F hackathon. I and many other people just call this "doing our job".

Sometimes there are fringe benefits where a company may allow engineers to actually work on something they enjoy. Maybe it's a new language, or a prototype, or anything. The key is it doesn't have to be related to company work. Unfortunately, as it has been my experience several times now, this benefit is the first to go and replaced instead with tyrannical PMs and sales people cracking the whip over the engineers to get a "fun hackathon project" done.

None of this would happen but software engineers do not identify themselves as laborers being exploited. Software engineers are, honestly, some of the smartest and absolute braindead people I've ever met. I can think of no other industry where someone could be convinced to do literally 5-figure level free work in exchange for 3 pizzas and a 6 pack.

Programmers need to stop working for free and stop aiding the normalization of free work.

No other profession works for free. On the rare occasions they do, they expect and receive massive social status boosts.

Hackathons are not work. If you play esports for work not every time you play a video game it is work.

Internal corporate hackathons are the exact opposite of free work. You are getting paid and you get to make something fun instead of something needed for business reasons.

I must say, I have encountered free-form hackathons (category 3) at companies with no ideas provided by management, and no expectations. It happened at a team-building event at some nearby lake, only half of the people who were there even participated, and that was fine. People made games, stupid hacks, only one team came up with some cool tool that we kept around and used internally.

> It happened at a team-building event at some nearby lake

Given the choice of

1) Being shipped off to a nice location where managers will demonstrate their authority by requiring you to perform suspiciously work-like fake recreation with other employees

2) Actual time off

I am pretty sure which one I'd pick, most of the time at least.

What if 1 is paid and 2 is unpaid?

"Here at Craptech we are all about team building. We love to treat our employees to lavish company retreats - after which we'll go back into crunch mode for the rest of the year."

Paid is better, but tbh I'd probably take unpaid time off in many cases. I'd actually prefer to work half time as long as it worked financially.

Any team building event i have been to has always been paid work. Why would anyone do that for free?

Now some of them were fun nice breaks from the normal day to day while others sucked and i wish i was doing normal work instead, but either way i was on the job and being paid.

My main gripe with hackathons is they cheapen IT work.

If you let yourself be subjected to crunching out bad quality code while eating pizza and being hyped by loud music - which is basically the equivalent of a child's birthday party at an indoor playground - management will see you as children and thus treat you as such.

I tried to organize a corporate hackathon at one point in my career. My initial idea was to make it freeform. However after talking to people who wanted to participate, I found that nobody really had any ideas and just wanted to join and hack on somebody else's idea.

My (possibly incorrect) take away - people with great ideas will build them themselves without a hackathon.

I still love the idea of hackathons, I just don't know the right way to organize them.

That might be a good sign. All the tech debt paid down and opportunities to play with your idea in normal work time, so nothing left for the hackathon.

Like similar to not having anything to say in 1-1s might be a sign of good communication in realtime.

Yeah this view is extremely negative. I think it depends a lot on the culture when you organize a company internal hackathon. I had good and bad hackathons so far. It depends a lot on the stress that is created. If the stress is too much it gets really quick really bad, but if there is just enough stress to make something and you can leave whenever you want, it's really beneficial.

When I was much younger, I loved Hackathons. I never won anything substantial but it was usually (i) the best designed app in a Hackathon or (ii) idea that can spawn a product/startup/company.

The best part, I made life-long friends. Well, a good friend, then a hackathon friend became my neighbor (he has his own company now). He knows how to "hack" a hackathon and every time I see him, he won either the first or the second.

I was so much into hackathons that I bought a hot domain during the 2008-crash recovery (2010-11-ish) and was running tiny hackathons. I ended up selling the domain for a not-so-bad enough sum.

Recently I was the "external judge" for a company hackathon and the common theme of the comment from the participant were "you are different." I love that.

Anyone running a hackathon and want me to judge, I'm here (online or in Bangalore, India). I can speak design, tech, and business in the same breath. ;-)

When I was younger, I loved hackathons. I could spend multiple days in a row coding without interruptions, or meetings. Great time.

Now I'm older and I still love hackathons. Now I can have a few days where I can take it easy, tinker with some new interesting tech, chat with colleagues about how good/bad the tech is. Still a great time.

Of the three hackathons that have been arranged in my current job over the span of three years none of them have had any bearing on direction, design, requirements, or processes. It's been pointless.

This isn't because what was researched and created wasn't relevant or valuable, it was because (mis)management just discarded the results immediately.

Every hackathon entry could have either saved months of work or prevented the shitshow of broken and bug ridden software we have now (again, a result of mismanagement but hey we're Agile© so everything must be good). It's beyond frustrating seeing the management hand-wringing over issues that would have been fixed by now. None of the devs are empowered to use the results and research at all. Absolutely pointless and entirely lip services to the devs.

It's put me off ever getting involved in any future ones here.

Very true - few people who won hackathons went on to achieve big things because its a marathon not a 48 hour race. If they did 1 to 2 week competitions I'd be more interested

> few people who won hackathons went on to achieve big things because its a marathon not a 48 hour race

It's not just that. It's also because hackathons often favor the flashy over the feasible.

The one time I joined a hackathon, we came up with a solution that was low tech, cheap and easy to implement and added an analysis of the potential cost benefits. The winners said 'add a GPS beacon to everything and track it that way'. Which wasn't at all feasible, but it did sound cool and their demo looked cool.

I'm not surprised we didn't win, but the fact we lost from a flashy demo that would never be implemented was disappointing. Especially because it was an explicit requirement to be feasible.

I love hackathons and before having kids I use to do them quite often. I usually placed in the top three and from my experience at least you are a 100% right!

Personally I love building things and seeing people use them, but then I get bored really quickly and tend to let them die out. It’s something I am actively working on because I do want to do another startup at some point in my career.

If you feel like you thrive under such extreme time limit and that it's a great way to be productive, try game jams. Game jams are usually "the good kind" of hackathon where you spend your time on hacking and artistic expression, and what matters is whether your game seems fun instead of how many buzzwords you included in your slides.

Also, look up how ADHD manifests itself in adults. May be relevant.

Makes perfect sense.

The trick is attending hackathons, munching on free food and trying tech you're interested in with your friends. Don't think about winning, half ass everything.

For company ones, hey work your normal schedule and at least it's a change of scenery and not the usual crap.

That said the crazy schedule doesn't cut it for me anymore, I need proper sleep and I have no time nor friends.

“” Marathon" means to run slowly for a long time.”

This quote is factually false. Marathon is a place in Greece where a big battle against the Persian Empire took place. A running competition is named after it due to a legend about a soldier that had to run from Marathon to Athens to report the result of the battle.

I feel hackathons should not have constrained problem statements but mostly open. It can have open source contributions or any tool/product devs want to build. And principal/staff engineers should code along with junior devs. I can be fun once in a while. And if possible, it should be done at a different location, not in office.

Was this article written with AI? Felt a bit like at least assisted. Don’t know why when reading it triggered the assumption.

It's hard to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised, given "I've created an extension to overcome ChatGPT's limitations. Do check it out." at the top.

I asked ChatGPT which parts were most likely AI assisted:

> The parts that were most likely written with help from ChatGPT are the definitions of the three types of hackathons, the explanation of the hidden agendas in external corporate hackathons, and the description of the negative consequences of hackathons for management and developers. The language and tone in these sections are more neutral and informative, compared to the more opinionated and critical tone used in the rest of the article. This suggests that the writer may have asked ChatGPT for definitions and explanations, but expressed their own opinions and experiences in the rest of the article.

I don't want to read AI generated stuff that is cloaked as personal opinion or thoughts of an individual. In this case "I hate Hackathons" infers human emotion. Getting then presented a mostly AI article doesn't sit right with me.

To answer the author's remark about the name, while it's true that marathons are long, paced races, the term Hackathon probably comes from Dance-a-thon which is an overnight dance party to see who's still standing in the morning. See also music marathon, movie marathon, telethon.

Just like anything in life, the outcome and enjoyment of a hackathon (or a game jam) largely depend on your attitude and expectations.

If you approach it with a chilled and positive mindset, you're more likely to have a satisfying experience.

> Escape Velocity

I like that alternative name. The velocity makes you want to escape the job.

Also see "game jams."

I dunno, game jams often produce great ideas that later can be (and historically have been) expanded to good full game.

Hackathons also create great ideas that later turn into fully-fledged projects. Game dev is just programming + art/design which is somehow something people feel entitled to for free even more than programming by itself.

To me there is a distinction.

Creating games is a more creative activity than programming (especially for programming in a hackathon).

Game jams is more similar to an essay competition than a hackathon, IMHO.

Because art/design is fun

I did a couple of game jams when I was a teen. They were incredibly humbling experiences that showed me the value of planning and communication, especially for a project with a tight deadline

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