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Comment by peterkelly | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those important events in life where you realise that sometimes those who hold seniority over you aren't necessarily as smart as you are. This experience will help you to cultivate a healthy disrespect for authority. We all go through something like this at some point.

The best thing to do is to find some sort of constructive way to channel your experience. One path I would suggest is to consider launching your own rival competition, where the judges are volunteers from industry, and the prize is an internship at a company or something like that. This would not only provide your peers with a great opportunity to get quality feedback, but also serve as a really useful experience that would help you in your future career. What have you got to lose?

Perhaps you could even get GitHub to sponsor it :)

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You're putting it mildly.

Hey kids (and everyone else) if you're even remotely familiar with tech and you don't stay completely siloed in one space - very extremely frequently you will encounter people "above you" in the chain who are comparatively complete idiots re tech.

You will have to think carefully about how to proceed when you discover this, it's going to be a constant and consistent question of -- "at this stage, is it worth it for me to press this?"

Try not to get discouraged.

I like this approach and is one reason I’m cynical about organizations that run these types of events where the staff have no practical knowledge. There’s an industry of consultants who run challenges and hackathons and I’ve been surprised when organizations spend $100k on consultants to give our $1k in prizes or something.

The fact that this challenge doesn’t have a decision maker who knows that GitHub can host as well as template sites and differentiate between the two is a good sign of incompetence.

It’s so cool that kids are doing these challenges and I wish they didn’t have to get cynical and review the challenge before participating. One thing I look for is who is on the review committee or board. If it’s people with good backgrounds, that’s a good sign. If it’s faceless or people with no background in the topic, then I advise avoiding.

> There’s an industry of consultants who run challenges and hackathons and I’ve been surprised when organizations spend $100k on consultants to give our $1k in prizes or something.

Ah yes the "Thanks for the record breaking quarter everyone, enjoy these 4 $5 Hot n Ready pizzas and two bottles of Coke" event.

That is a super good idea, some of our posts have taken off and we have even been contacted by the vp of developer relations for github. I'll contact the rest of the group and see what they think. Although, I do happen to know that fbla has a similar type contest to TSA so we might just move to that next year.

>> The best thing to do is to find some sort of constructive way to channel your experience. One path I would suggest is to consider launching your own rival competition, where the judges are volunteers from industry, and the prize is an internship at a company or something like that. This would not only provide your peers with a great opportunity to get quality feedback, but also serve as a really useful experience that would help you in your future career. What have you got to lose?

Reading the replies to this comment saying "rules are rules" is honestly heart breaking. Where has the real spirit of innovation gone? The hacker ethics [0]?

> Although, I do happen to know that fbla has a similar type contest to TSA so we might just move to that next year.

It's your decision, but I say build your own. You've built an audience, already have outreach into the community and a good story.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

> Reading the replies to this comment saying "rules are rules" is honestly heart breaking

Yeah that was sad to see :(

I like the attitude that if you don't like the rules, go and make your own thing where you can choose your own rules and not be constrained by those of other people. That's basically the origin story for a lot of successful entrepreneurs.

If you do go ahead with this, I'd be willing to act as a judge and help out generally with advice. My contact details are in my profile.

yourusername at myusername dot se

Maybe the lesson is just that competitions tends to have arbitrary rules and limitations. If you think the rules are stupid, don't participate in the competition.

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