Can Developers Really Be Bought Off To Build At Hackathons?

I attended a hackathon a little while ago that had an interesting cash arrangement (I'm not naming names as I signed an NDA, and in all honesty I am not sure what I can and cannot say). It was an invite-only event, and each team attending was paid $5,000. The winning team was paid $15,000. The company holding the hackathon owned the rights to any work done.

I think this is a great arrangement. Developers get paid a reasonable sum for a weekend's worth of work, and the company holding the hackathon gets 7 or 8 app concepts pitched to them at the end of 48 hours. It probably costs them a lot less than getting one concept the traditional way. Cutting out the middleman, I suppose.

To answer the post itself: I think it's all about visibility. I have discovered APIs through hackathon sponsors before that I have consequently used later on. Maybe one week later, maybe one year later. But it means they are on my radar.

Twilio's twice-monthly hackathons were explained to me thusly: how much money would you pay annually for someone to scrounge up 300 good use cases and 100 really excellent use cases for your API product? It turns out $24k is cheap for this kind of data.

It's not about buying developers off and chaining them to your platform (in their case, anyway), it's more about evaluating the boundaries of their product in service of making it better.

"Will people continue to use the Mobli API once this hackathon is over? ... Will anyone build anything meaningful on Mobli that lives on for more than a week or two?

I guess the real question is whether developers can be bought off to build at hackathons and if this is a worthwhile route for companies to take or just a waste of money?"

That's a good question, but I feel that there's more ways to measure the value in having a hackathon than just whether developers will continue to use the platform afterwards. Having real people try to make actual applications out of your platform and be creative with it could lead to greater innovation within the company when the powers that be see some of the interesting ways it can be used. Plus, having a hackathon can be great dev karma and raise your profile in the hacker community and the wider community.

Maybe a price can steer devs towards a specific tech but in general I participate in hackathons because it's a relaxed and easy way to learn new coders. You build something together and it's fun, much more fun than having some small talk at the usual networking events.

>It’s a great thing for both companies and developers.

I disagree. People in the real world look to these events to get an idea of what platforms and frameworks are out there that they should use for their next projects (that's why Mobli is willing to offer this prize). It is not good for developers if that perception gets skewed by which platform has the most cash behind it rather than which platform is actually the best choice.

People come to hackathons for many reasons. Prize money for an api at a hackathon is just one way to spend your marketing dollars as a company. On the receiving end, some people try to make a living of winning prizes at hackathons, or at least some serious beer money.

It's less buying them off and more of an investment and recruitment activity.