Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

213 pointssepidy128 comments

Been going to a bunch of hackathons in SF lately and honestly, everything feels fake. There are like 20 sponsors handing out credits for their tools that all do the same thing. Half the time, they can’t even explain what they’re for. They’re just hoping someone uses them so they can count it as adoption. Everyone jams these into projects to check a box, and what gets built is mostly BS with zero innovation. Was it always like this and I'm noticing it now, or has something changed?

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When I was in college (over 20 years ago now), what we called “hackathons” was a bunch of us (4-6 max) holing up in an apartment for the weekend, and working on our personal projects while ordering pizza and sleeping on couches.

It was really nice having a group of people you could demo what you were working on/ask for help or feedback within immediate range at all times. There was also something really peaceful about coding at 5a on Sunday while everyone else was fast asleep.

When I moved to SF, I was so surprised to find out that there were “professional” hackathons. I went to a couple and came to the same conclusion as you.

I do miss the vibe of the OG hackathons I did with my friends, but I was 19 and we had no commitments back then. Nowadays the best way for me to be productive is to have regular meal, disciplined working hours, and good nights of sleep - so no more sleeping on couches with half empty boxes of pizza by my side.

> There was also something really peaceful about coding at 5a on Sunday while everyone else was fast asleep

Great times

I still do this occasionally, but I instead go to bed super early and wake up at 4:30-5 AM. You get the serenity of coding at the break of dawn but with none of the grogginess of the all nighter.

I think those times are past us now. It's interesting how you usually only see what made some place and time special once it's no longer possible. Live in the now is the lesson, I guess!

I... I'm about to hit 40 in a couple of years, and I still pull all nighters on the couch when I'm deep into my weekend hobby projects.

Not to be overly sentimental, but for me the 5am feeling is still the same if not better with family and pets around and the sunrise view I created for myself.

I find that I still can do the all nighters but much like the festive overconsumption of alcohol, the recovery time tripled and made the whole thing very much not worth it (except maybe on very rare occasions).

Sure I can stay up all night but it really just ruins the entire next week.

I swore them off after my last one. Mid 40s. All nighters used to be a source of joy though to get what felt like days worth of work done in a single sitting enabled by the absence of distractions

It's anecdotal, but several nasty bugs involved code committed (according to git blame) between 11pm and 6am. Sometimes I hardly recognized the code as mine.

Write drunk, edit sober

Twain or something

Early-40s here who still does all-nighters. How long is recovery time for you? What does it entails -ie what doesn't work as much as it should / takes longer while you recover?

Early 40's too lets jam together

I'm very tired a mildly stupid and my body has no idea at all when it should be asleep for about a week at which point i'm mostly but not entirely better. then again I always had trouble with keeping a regular sleep schedule

I have long since learned how to maintain a healthy sleep schedule when the system is not disturbed by stupid decisions, my techniques just don't work as quickly as they used to. (the most impactful technique is "don't stay up all night, idiot")

Mid 40s and I'll still do all-nighters on occasion when necessary. Recovering from sleep is no problem, recovering from an angry wife after sleeping well into the afternoon is trickier! ;D

This lol. At least she’s keeping you healthy by preventing you from wrecking your sleep schedule :-)

At 37, it always seems like I’m still fine after several days of this, but then randomly I’ll suddenly be so sick that I need days to recover.

I’m guessing this means that the longer it goes on, the worse of an idea it will be.

come over for pizza and lets work on a project together :3

Why would you sleep on the couch?

probably to avoid waking up his wife/kids if he's going to sleep at 5am

Because it is one of the best sleeps when work/code/game until you pass out.

I'm much the same. For me, though, the best all-nighters have come from when insomnia hits and I can't stop thinking about a bug. Then I cave in, get out of bed, and hack away.

It's essential to have a flexible employer though.

I hit 40 this year. I have definitely noticed a slowdown even in the last few years. Before 30 I could pull 2-3 all-nighters a week without really feeling any ill effects.

Then, maybe early-to-mid 30's I could only handle one per week, assuming I'd slept well otherwise. The sleep debt would be too high still and the next day I'd get headaches, feel extremely tired and unmotivated. Or I could sustain 2-4hrs of sleep a night for like 3-4 days, but again I'd pay for it if I didn't catch up (pretty sure I'm paying for it long-term anyways).

Here at the end of my 30's I can't really do a full 40-hours straight without sleep anymore (16hr day, 8hr night, 16hr day, then sleep). If I don't get at least 2hrs overnight then that second day is mostly wasted, maybe I get 4hrs out of the 16.

I've always known that sufficient sleep is important for your health, and I've tried to balance times of all-nighters with crashes to catch-up, but the allure of using the night as uninterrupted focus time is so strong when you work in modern corporate "open-plan" environments where always-on Slack/Teams presence is expected during business hours.

I mostly agree with the premise, but to point out something kinda funny: these complaints are basically identical to the ones I remember from a time I personally remember as the "heyday" of hackathons (early/mid 2010s).

I think:

- they've had this degree of fakeness for almost the entirety of their existence (as long as they've needed "sponsorship" / been 6+ figure events)

- at its best, there also was a scene/subculture _surrounding_ hackathons that did care about building genuinely "cool" / "impressive" things, had an earnest interest in actually starting something longer term (there are some really successful founders that "incubated" in the hackathon scene). these folks frequented hackathons, and eventually moved on as the scene saturated with careerism / they "grew up" professionally

I have never heard the term "Hackathon" used in any context other than a recruiting/sales event targeted at early-career types.

Meatspace get-togethers focused on hacking, either for a specific project or for a clique, never used the term "Hackathon". At least in my circles. Those were just "get togethers" or maybe "hacking weekends". But with small caps. I.e., not "Hacking Weekends" or "Hackathons", but "a weekend we're scheduling the purpose of which is to hack on something; i.e., a hacking weekend".

Less of an "event for the public" and more like "a group of friends planning a weekend get-away". I think for one of them we managed to get a few thousand or something from someone's employer to cover some costs. But "sponsorship" would be a strong word.

I've never lived in SF so maybe it was more of a thing there.

The term was used by OpenBSD starting in 1999 for a group of devs getting together for a few days or a week and hacking on specific projects together in person. Not sure about earlier than that but that’s what I still associate the term back to.

https://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html

I went to a hackathon for teenage girls in an SF library once. No corporate presence.

Same experience: hackathon for bike enthusiasts in Belgium and the sponsor only quickly showed up to give prizes. There wasn’t any mini pizzas or coke but i genuinely don’t mind.

Most of the Hackathons I've seen have been company internal events. Usually two days set off for projects, with demos of the results in the end. Come to think of it, that's probably been the only kind of Hackathon I've ever perticipated.

> I've never lived in SF so maybe it was more of a thing there.

Yeah it's definitely more of an SF/SV thing for sure, if they're even still happening. Seattle had some hackathons and Dubhacks is still a thing (I think?), but they fizzled out by 2019 and Covid ended whatever was left. NYC had some as well, iirc, but they went away too along the same timeline.

The last one I attended was one Pager Duty ran in 2019 it was well attended, with ~20+ teams of 6

I organized some grassroots hackathon events 10+ years ago. Turnout was mostly students and die-hard geeks who wanted something to do on the weekend. Even in this small pond we had a local startup sponsor and try to shoe-horn their service into it.

When I attended bigger events with bigger sponsors it felt like 90% marketing to pitch your idea. The actual technical side was never that impressive or interesting.

One community that kicks ass at this are InfoSec people, I've done a lot of terrific volunteer-run CTFs.

There is nothing wrong with a sponsor if it affords cash to spend on food and refreshments for attendees. I believe there are right and wrong ways to sponsor these events. You have to keep in mind developers are one of the most marketing skeptical audiences extant, but it’s possible for it to be done well.

The issue is if that sponsor becomes too pushy, which a lot of them did become after a short amount of time.

Yeah CTFs are definitely a big part of our culture in security. We’re blessed with unending material in the form of vulnerabilities and mis configurations :)

I will say (as someone that runs, organises and builds CTFs) organising meaningful CTFs is becoming slightly challenging though, a lot of challenges are highly treaded ground where one very mature team just comes along and clears the table.

That and generative AI can solve a lot of CTF problems with enough prodding if it’s at all derivative.

Hack the hackathon. My follow-at-your-own-risk pro tip: Find a team not too much into wining and

- connect with others. They’re primarily networking events and are still good for that.

- Don’t bother checking the sponsors boxes too much. Have fun trying technical/product ideas that interest your for any _personal_ reason. Should fit with your team project obviously. If not, keep it for next time and instead:

- peer with others. Peering with a person you don’t know is an incredible social and technical experience, whatever your level difference.

- sleep at night. You want to be rested to have a good and useful time.

- don’t bother too much wining. The podium looks fancy but won’t make much a difference as soon as the doors close. It doesn’t really make a difference for networking, bootstrapping the resume line or having fun. But:

- aim for a MVP or at least something that run and you can show. It’s not fun to tight the last knobs afterwards. Something (anything) functional will make you and your team proud, will assist the resume line and will be fun and memberberries for the future.

I think you meant pairing instead of peering

Unless you're making a joke about geeks not being overly social, "peering" works fine in this context. Basically, "connect with those on your level."

Actually I don’t know the difference between those words and instinctively (I’m not native) use peer for dev context and pair for anything else. I’ll check that out.

Love this. "Be the change you wish to see in the world." I don't mind the sponsors too much. Sponsored events aren't usually at someone's apartment / dorm and somebody's got to pay money for the venue, cleaning staff, food & drinks, etc.

this, agree 100%

Hackathons are about meeting like-minded folks, and building stuff.

Learning how to get stuff done in a tight timescale is a skill worth learning. Having something that vaguely works at the end is a great feeling.

All the sponsorship and bullshit that goes around it can be safely ignored

Now, did you mean memberberries? Like famous actor Rich Evans (as seen on Ellen) says?

I can't remember if he says rememberberries and I'm laying down and don't have grep on my phone.

I know it from south park but didn’t intent the sarcastic tone: an anchor to a past moment you had fun and want to remember. I don’t know Rich but might have missed his reference in the sitcom if he predates it. Is it good?

Based on my experience, Hackathons are meant as networking events where you might put together some simple prototype. Usually people oversell whatever it is that they built, and they're using existing skills to rebuild some small part of a larger thing which they've already studied extensively outside of the event.

If a company is a big sponsor and they're offering an extra prize for using their tool then people will figure out a way to jam it into their project, but it's rarely the optimal choice. I think it has always been like this.

But if you really want to build something and there's a sponsor at the event you should ask them for lots of free credits or for some contact info in order to establish a longer-term sponsorship.

One company I worked for had a culture of semi-regular hackathons and are they were often a lot of fun. As an old, I got to work with some non-jaded wide-eyed interns from U of Waterloo who worked their asses off on inspired hackathon projects as well as doing some solid work for our team. Interns had plenty of motivation to make a splash (and to take chances) and working with them was often a breath of fresh air.

On our larger team, we'd have week long hackathons where the theme was the elimination of jank/cruft/hazards/annoyances across code, infrastructure, and process. We'd split into 2-4 person teams and do our work, and at the end there'd be presentations and war stories, celebrations and the occasional defeat. Somebody would win a prize, and we'd do it again in 6 months.

Corporate Hackathons have been a net positive for me, but I've also seen them implemented poorly, where you were still expected to shovel a full load of story points that sprint.

These sound pretty productive, which is nice. I’d love for me team to have hackathons weeks to fix annoying stuff.

My company puts on an internal hackathons, but it feels fake. Looking at the winners, it seemed like a team had been working on the project for months, and the hackathon was the company’s way of marketing it internally before launch.

There is precedence for this kind of action, which is why I’m skeptical of the legitimacy of the hackathons. There was a video contest and the top 3 were shown at a town hall. My team was one of the top 3. I had never seen the video and had no idea about this contest, nor had my boss (Sr Dir), nor had his boss (VP). As far as we could tell, some video production team was tapped to hack together a video in 30 minutes, they threw our name on it, and shipped it. I don’t trust much after that.

It sounds like there is a department of propaganda at your company. CARTHAGO DELENDA EST.

It's worth noting that this was a bottom-up initiative, and management got on board after it was shown to be successful and morale boosting. ICs can lead themselves sometimes.

When I was salaried, I never participated in company-sponsored hackathons and actively resisted attending any conferences or anything of the sort. Even back in late 00's / early 2010's it all felt like sponsorship hell, and my point of reference for the activities was nigh-impossible to recreate..

When I was a teenager in the mid-90's, I would go to a monthly Boy Scouts Explorer Post group hosted/sponsored by CompuServe (at their headquarters). My brother and I were a couple years younger than some of the "cool hacker" dudes (it was almost all dudes), like this guy Travis who had already had multiple Dade Murphy-esque run-ins with the feds and would give little talks on why it's not worth it and was honestly really supported by the alpha-nerd adults (not pejorative) who worked for CompuServe who ran the thing and were trying to keep us all from life-changing mischief (while still encouraging safer mischief).

Other attendees would give presentations on MODs (FastTracker / Impulse Tracker), or show off software they wrote (or found) that was cool, that kind of thing, and the only sponsor was CompuServe itself (which gave us all free dialup accounts).

I remember one time we set up a booth at the fairgrounds, like inside of one of those giant, long open-air pavilion buildings that normally would have horse/animal stalls, with a row of computers to demo either their brand new service "WOW!" [0] or maybe it was WorldsAway [1] to the general public. I had no idea what I was doing lol, but it sure did feel important!

Anyways, my rose-tinted vision of what a hackathon should be is some amalgamation of trading rainbow books at Cyberdelia mixed with those monthly CompuServe meetings where elders guided the young through the labyrinth of technology mixed with like a LAN party where instead of games, people get together, code, push boundaries, exchange ideas, and make something cool. Or something.

Not a brutal, forced interaction with your coworkers that wastes time, produces jack shit, and is sponsored by SliceLine Pizza lol

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6BQzd2km58

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/424450/this-old-tech-remembe...

How do I upvote you multiple times.

"hackathons" were lame once they got a name. They became lame because it wasn't exploring what interested you, pushing frontiers but had a define goal that wasn't yours. You have to fit into someone else's plan for the "hackathon", and what the outcomes would be.

How on earth is there anything "hackerish" if you're diligently fitting into someone else's plan? Lame.

LOL totally felt the vibes from your description, could even hear the dial-up sound in my head! XD

> participated in company-sponsored hackathons

Company sponsored hackathons are better if you have a large one that works on diverse fields and products.

Usually org-wide hackathons within a company are plain nonsense and soul sucking. Participation will be voluntary but "strongly recommended". Collecting "ideas" is mostly picking off stories from JIRA.

We just call it a two/three day sprint.

Game jams are less fake and quite numerous.

The reason is simply because there is very little money in indie video games. But still a ton of passion. If you want authentic nerd dev time, it's still there.

Just don't expect it to be catered.

It's because they truly are fake.

I've been to several of them in Toronto, this year and last. Teams nowadays just `git clone` some repo, put in some crappy logo and then say "I made this", and they mean it.

This is a general trend I've observed to be prevalent with zoomers (but not Gen Alpha), they just lie to others as if it was nothing. No idea what are the social cues that led them to this, but I would find that interesting to study. I don't think they're ill intentioned, I think they don't consider lying to be bad and it's some sort of way of going through life.

Not long ago I was having dinner w/ some scammers (one of them is on the latest YC batch, btw) and this guy was telling everybody that you need to lie to get ahead, "if you don't lie to your investors they will invest in someone else who is lying to them". This guy was somewhere between milennial and zoomer by age, but with a mien and mind more akin to that of a zoomer (TikTok, etc...).

Very vulgar individual. That's SOTA these days.

That's sad, and it's even more sad because I can completely observe where this is coming from and what causes this -_-

Things are way different in IRL SF than what I used to observe from distance.

I haven't been to a hackathon in a long time, but the best ones I remember were explicitly about getting designers and developers to build something concrete but simple for a good cause. I think in some cases just a working prototype was sufficient for the "client," who could then more easily apply for grants to build a more robust or fully featured version.

POV, the PBS documentary series, used to have weekend hackathons in NYC in the early 2010s that paired the filmmakers with designers and coders. They were pretty good—filmmakers would come with an idea for a website they needed to support the film, basically, often a data visualization component or something to collect information from the public about the subject of the film.

The Tribeca Film Institute did something similar a couple of times, too—I went to one at CERN that they ran where scientists worked with designers, developers, musicians, etc. to build projects presenting their research, and another in Detroit.

I remember others like this as well from other organizations. It's still a bit of a weird format because you're basically doing pro bono or minimally paid freelance work on a tight deadline with your client sitting next to you, but they could produce some generally interesting work.

Some hackathons in this category I remember also had a goal of letting non-coders understand how the coding process works, which is hard to balance with actually getting stuff done.

The hackathons I attended were focused on solving/addressing the Washington, DC budget (I know, very weirdly specific, but I'm a major policy wonk) and social services.

To the latter, the benefit for me was to have tech folks help the policy folks ask and answer the right questions. Later, specific projects were started to help social service orgs implement some thing.

Have to say, both events (and I attended several of each) were exciting. . . they challenged me in a way I was unfortunately not used to (except in high school and college) and showed that others were actually interested and part of the solution.

The major plus of the budget hackathons was that we got to see students (middle schoolers, IIRC) who were doing whatever it was they were doing and having a blast. As a child advocate (lobbyist on kids issues), this made me very, very happy.

I’m not really sure they ever made much sense. Going back 15-20 years ago, they were always poorly executed and was not for the devs.

The only exception was one I went to put on by Atlassian a long time ago which was a hardcore geek-vs-geek live coding night with lots of drinking and real prizes. This was before they went public and didn’t care about offending.

That Atlassian thing sounds so cool

“Hackathons are how marketing guys wish software were made.” - http://scripting.com/stories/2012/02/19/hackathonsAreNonsens...

As discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3609912

The company I work for has hackathons. Come up with a good idea and spend a lot of time (after hours) on the project. In the old days that was called a job and you got paid.

Towards the beginning of my career, my boss asked me to go with him to a [partially] NASA-sponsored hackathon. Being more junior, I wasn't really in a position to say no and not surrender my Saturday (or so I thought at the time). He didn't really do any programming at the Hackathon. I did some pointless space-themed web UI work. It didn't result in anything worth talking about.

He used this event as a PR opportunity and went on the local radio to say we had done a project for NASA.

I'm still embarrassed about that.

Recently on HN: "The Gang Has A Mid-Life Crisis"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43860696

Hackathons are fun and productive when what you need to do/learn — something you haven't already done/learned — can be done/learned in a weekend. Once you graduate, there's a lot fewer of those things lying around. Quote:

> We need look no further than the "hackathon," that sad facsimile of the days when we were all learning the basics so fast that the world could be ours with just a day or two of focused effort. Hype up an exciting atmosphere, assemble some folks with so few attachments in life that they have time to spend all weekend at a hackathon, and this ritual will summon up the old gods. The hackathon is the proof that people believe this can work, and it is the proof that it doesn't.

In my experience, hackathons in larger companies are valves that sometimes release the pressure of things that people wanted to do, had been planning to do and thinking through for months before the hackathon was even scheduled, and finally are allowed to implement. These are binge-programming days/nights when the engineers finally don't need to work on tickets, and don't have to follow the due processes.

Corollary: if your company promises to have a hackathon one day, it's best to get prepared and have a bunch of good ideas well ahead of time.

Game jams (similar to hackathons) are great for applying what you already know but with a new group of people. They're much harder if you _dont_ know what your doing (contrary to what you suggest).

I've found that the group really makes the experience, and find them less fun for the tech and more fun for learning about the people through the work and a team project without the constraints of a corporation.

And generally, it's not just people who aren't tied up in this that will participate, but people who will make time to do something exciting and form an interesting connection.

I think that's because games are an art and highly creative. You're crafting an experience, usually a combination of story and gameplay.

Regular software projects can also be creative, but almost all software is pure CRUD at the heart.

The next issue is the required time for the MVP. For a game, you can validate the base game loop quiet quickly. It's a lot harder to validate wherever regular software is actually viable, because you usually need to basically finish it entirely before the UX can really be validated if a mock-up doesn't suffice

All the stuff you can do just with software? It was done years ago.

The easy stuff was done and the teams got acquired/acquihired.

The hard stuff was done by VC backed companies.

All the stuff that’s not done is even harder than that.

Hackathon in 2025 is late to the party. But it’s still fun to spend a weekend making whatever you want and be fed - food and credits! - by VC-backed companies trying to juice numbers.

Plus a hackathon is the perfect amount of time to vibecode something cool.

So what’s left for those who didn’t get in on the ground floor? A swift kick in the arse?

A weekend building whatever you want and getting fed food and credits by sponsors.

Pretty good deal to me!

IME hackathons have always been a farce. Maybe I saw too many win with a nice UI and mocked data. Form over substance seems to be even more in vogue nowadays. Maybe I need a nap…

I've seen some cool hackathons run internally at some companies I've worked for. It was during work hours (paid) and managers set time aside for people who wanted to participate. Often it was something like, "we have all this data, what could we use it for?" and teams would often come up with some pretty cool projects based on the data.

At the end there was a big presentation that anyone in the company could attend and each team would present what they came up with.

Some of them eventually became products directly, or at least set the groundwork for future products.

So in a sense it was basically just "work", but it was driven by the individual contributors and not a top-down directive.

This is where they still feel good. Anything “sponsored” has turned into a sleazy marketing push.

The best hackathons are community driven, like the annual Ludum Dare or the advent of code. If you're going to a highrise office building for a hackathon then yeah, it's going to be overly commercial.

I don't think advent of code meets most peoples definition of a hackathon.

Yes most hackathons are crap but I will say one I attend (or at least try to mostly due to how I work) is the HL7 FHIR Connectathons. Its for an altruistic purpose (making healthcare data easier to exchange) and there are always a slew of topics, vendors, visionaries, and options. You will have these 1-2 day sessions where people are trying out things hitting each others servers or clients. Its a worldwide consortium thing with both online and in person meetups. Its worth it if you are into the field.

I think there's a natural process similar to gentrification in which as technology matures the hackathons promoting it transition into marketing-led events. I got into hackathons in the early 2010s when IoT was the hot new thing and saw the crowds change from hardcore technologists to mostly students and idea people. The fact is the same thing that what drew me in is what attracted them - opportunity and optimism. Sponsors expect ROI and once a technology is no longer experimental, the same tired projects tend to win because they are tried and true.

I've been to a couple of good hackathons lately but they are more focused on vibe coding and tend to only run for 8-12 hours. These let you try out an idea or framework with little commitment but lack the depth of multi-day events. I've been attending an XR hackathon for almost a decade which still embodies the ethos, but it is a labor of love carried out by volunteers. These longer, challenging and intentional events can teach you more about teamwork and product in one weekend than a year of churning through tickets.

For a very short timespan they felt organic. But very quickly became something where companies could get value for free or very low cost.

Ten years ago they were fake. Everyone that won basically prepped their system and worked on their own presentation.

My company does a lot of hackathons and we support a decent number of hackathons in quantum computing throughout the world. And I have had the same sentiment in the quantum computing space as well and thinking through the reason for it, my sense is that 24-48 hours is not enough time to build something meaningful. This is not to say that absolutely cannot be done, but the chances of something cool being made are generally low. My guess is that this idea might hold in general, anything that can be built really quickly tends not to be too impressive and all impressive things tend to take longer. I have gotten to a point where, if I see something impressive, I have this nagging feeling, Was this completed here? or were you working on this for a decent amount of time and just took this opportunity to showcase it?

Fame, money are fickle but many people seem to go to great lengths to get them. Hackathons give those 2 and these people game the system to get them.

I joined a few corp hackathons before - only to realize the team had been coding even before the hackathon started - rather than hacking during the hackathon period!

Seeing some good comments and will add to the pile.

IMO it's not a "now" thing. There's a natural ad-hoc, close proximity vibe that some gatherings have. They often come with everything else, including flow and good (best of this kind) memories.

I imagine some of these were called hackathons and some LAN parties, etc. Nevertheless it's not a straightforward thing to recreate artificially. Unfortunately most public / large "hackathons" I went to were failed attempts.

I've had the great experience of growing up in eastern Europe in 90s and 00s and so in highschool if you qualified for the higher stages of CS olympiads you were allowed to skip classes and spend time in the "lab" with the other "olympics". That was the first "hackathon", basically sometimes a few weeks in a row of coding with everyone else from 8AM till whenever you were in trouble if you didn't get home. Sometimes playing Doom, sometimes with the teachers, but most times coding. It was ... "electric" - unfortunately I don't have writing skills to make justice to it. Then there were the LAN parties and those were very good too, and so on.

I've actually been through a few hackathons at work that were pretty good.

Every time they are with the people you know well and few more (1-2) degrees of separation, but always with a shared goal and nothing else but the pure shared goal of the hackatahon. Everyone is already fluent and will hit the ground running, etc. Otherwise it's bunch of people that never worked together, not "style" cohhesion, etc. fucking around trying to figure out stuff that should already be in place for a proper hackathon.

I could go on and think I'd probably have a few good things to add here, but wouldn't be sure that it's a "solution", just some facts from my own experience.

But man, those days in the "lab" doing CS problems, they gave me the "high" for what coding can be like for the rest of my life. I don't need more than 15s of that to want to GO, haha :)

> Been going to a bunch of hackathons in SF lately and honestly, everything feels fake.

SF software scene exuding the hacker aesthetic while killing the ethos? You don't say.

> Was it always like this and I'm noticing it now, or has something changed?

I can't speak to absolute numbers, but cold corporate hackathons have always existed. In my experience the majority of ones you hear about. The makeup might be changing, but what is also changing is the vibe of attending. It's one thing to attend a thinly-veiled marketing event and have fun anyway during the early 2010's excitement of the software possibility space, and another in the bleakness of what big tech has wrought.

That has been the case since about 2017 for me. MLH took over a ton of college level hackathons and made them into a psuedo e-sports competition. And most of their prizes were for best uses of sponsored APIs and services - like "best use of AWS Lambda(TM)" or something. And then all the other events followed suit. That behavior ruined the original ideas and incentives behind hackathons: networking and building cool stuff. Because why build something actually cool and sustainable when you have all those sponsors shoving free API credits in your face all the time you're at the event?

I agree. As a sponsor, we don’t also do it any longer. The incentives are fake. You want people to be excited about using your tool, not using it in some contrived way to win a few bucks. When the use is real, the feedback is real. Otherwise, it’s the blind leading the blind.

The hackathons I remember as a college student were different. They were much more free form. You were asked to create something around a broad topic: eg graphics, operating systems, modeling a neuron. You were allowed and encouraged to go outside the box.

Getting the prize was fun, but a working artifact was much more satisfying. That’s why we did it.

So, yes, it’s too commercial these days.

Even in college they always seemed like a waste of time. Cool to meet new people, but to "build" something and win was always a fools errand.

This was further enforced when I drove up to attend Hack the North at U Waterloo with a few friends from Boston. One of the contestants stayed up so late he tore a muscle in his eye and now has a permanent deformity / disability.

As an adult I'd simply never even show up to such an event, if my employer wants to pay me overtime sure - but I'd still say no.

Build cool things, get normal amounts of sleep. It's not about the clout its about improving as an engineer.

Every commercial hackathon I've ever seen was basically been that.

The only good ones have ironically been government run. Like you need to use open data or a new government API or something but the rest is up to you.

I haven't attended one in a while, but I signed up for some on devpost and so far it seems on point. Also -- lots and lots of AI, which I guess is to be expected.

I remember attending a hackathon many years ago in my university's comp sci department. It was just a random weeknight, a smallish group of people coding and talking. Anyway, like 5 pizzas came, and I asked who I should give money to. I was told "don't worry, Google buys them". It was the first and last time I heard the company mentioned that night.

It was cool.

These have felt fake to me since college, so, for 20 years or so?

They’re so far from the environment where I’m most productive and creative that I’ve always considered them to be performative nonsense at best.

I feel like hackathons are super polarizing. Some people love them, some people hate them. I don't get the appeal, either, but I have friends who love them.

same as hardware hacking on "conferences" - they make you go with them on 2 hour journey of unlocking something, just for you to realize after doing some of it by yourself, that they can just download firmware update from manufacturer and run BINWALK utility on it, it will spit out filesystems, which you just mount, and read from that how is everything configured, how things work, what version of linux kernel they use.... so it is just hacking of YOU. it is advertisement, marketing story. XD

Try a game jam, I've never been to one with a sponsor and they were much more interpersonal and social with the participants than you describe.

From my experience, I find most of the time the best part about hackathons is not what you create, but who you get to meet/network with. It may just be my uni/age cohort, but most projects I saw at the last hackathon I went to were less "MVP" type/semi-complete projects and more just "we have a concept of a plan."

Those who remember the start of eternal September have similar sentiments about the decline of the Internet experience as well.

The first time I went to a hackathon early in my career, the team that won doesn't even have a working product. It's just a screenshots of a multiple websites that was stitched together to visualize what the product will be. Kinda bullshit but the presenter was very well spoken.

I've never been to a hackathon ever since then.

Always has been.

I have always thought of these as networking events for early career/junior SWEs. It’s almost never about “building something” but rather learning and connecting with people of various skillsets. "Winning" doesn’t matter, it’s the equivalent of a participation trophy in the real world.

I'm old enough to remember MacHack. A 72-hour Mac hackathon in Ann Arbor (late 1980s).

"Kill Dean's Inits!"

Otherwise, hackathons aren't particularly consistent with the way that I work, so I don't do them, anymore. For that reason, I don't really feel that I have any basis to judge them.

I haven't been to one in the last 6-7 years, but in the times I did, it was quite fake. The corporate ones were definitely fake to the bone (max. cringe), the external ones so and so. Nowadays I have zero expectations, its just some event to spend some time and socialize.

Not for nothing but... What event DOESN'T feel fake these days? SXSW? Burning Man? DEFCON? It's all corporate and lame. I look around and all I see is lameness. Grifters everywhere.

Try a game jam instead. Although those are littered with the "we're gonna make the next big hit!" types

The few I saw had terms of participation that gave the organisers IP first rights to everything and anything done during them and every IP release was at their discretion. Even the naive soon got wind of that.

I run a nonprofit called Hack Club that helps organize most of the hackathons for high schoolers in the USA.

We’ve been trying to make high school hackathons much more around building fun projects you’re proud of than building something “impressive” - and it’s working!

You may like this video of Hack Club Scrapyard, our hackathon where you had to build stupid projects. We had 3,000 high schoolers come to the 61 locations: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8iM1W8kXrQA

What makes Hack Club events different is:

1) You must actually ship a project with a live, deployed URL and open source code, or it doesn’t count

2) They are peer-judged, instead of judged by clueless “experts” who can’t tell if a project is fake or not

3) They are organized by high schoolers, for high schoolers so there is a heavy emphasize on friendship-building and helping people go on adventures

One cool project from Scrapyard was “Desktop Circus”, where your home screen gets invaded by a circus cast that messes with your mouse, moves windows on your screen, etc. It’s inspired by Desktop Goose, which was built by another Hack Clubber.

https://bucketfish.itch.io/desktop-circus

It’s funny, when you have those 3 constraints suddenly everything feels less like “college application” and much more about building cool stuff to show your friends. All the ChatGPT wrappers rank poorly.

It’s really important that we as a society encourage young people to have fun with technology.

I was the only programmer in the 5-person team on a hackaton and due to juniority, time management and communication problems I didn't deliver anything that worked. We won.

I’ve participated in many hackathons in recent years and they’ve all been great. I’ve not heard of anything like what you described (though I’m also not anywhere near CA).

Corporate hackathons are like stadium concerts, not quite as good as dive bar gigs.

Was always like this. Did my first one over a decade ago and the vibe was exactly the same.

It felt fake and not innovative to me in the late 00s, so I'd say yes, it may have always been the way.

They've always felt fake to me.

To be fair, what innovative projects would you expect to be even half-completed in a weekend or a few days?

It's been like this for years and years. Haven't seen SF though.

An easy way to avoid this is not going to corporate-sponsored hackathons.

worse is when its a giant brain rape. Anything you make at the hackathon is property of <insert> sponsor. This is why I don't do them anymore. Same with game jams.

I participated in a competitive university hackathon recently. It was sponsored by some B2B cloud company peddling an "agentic platform" and an ill-defined (but also AI oriented) Google program.

Shockingly, all the cases demanded SaaS chatbot wrappers. I spent a good chunk of time commiserating with one of the other undergraduate teams about how cosmically lame this was, especially when contrasted with the "innovation" rhetoric espoused by the organizers.

To quote one girl: "Bro, my backend is just stateless Ollama calls and prompt templates. I could one-shot this garbage while hammered."

So, yes, they do feel fake. There's no challenge. The focus is on churning out box-checking slop rather than taking some kernel (a theme, perhaps, instead of precisely specified cases) and building something novel around it.

Honorable mention must go out to the OpenBSD team who have been running hackathons for 20+ years now. The difference is that they are invitation only and tend to zoom in on a specific area, eg this week we will all show up in Prague and hack on routing protocols, or whatever. I can't imagine what deraadt@ would have to say about one of those Major League Hacking type events with a big corporate sponsor and influencer wannabe types floating around eveywhere.

The tl;dr is that hacking, like discussion on the Internet, is into the dark forest model now.

The only hackathons I've been part of were internal ones at a single job. Complete waste of time as the shit executives had already decided who the winners should be. So disheartening to see people deliberately misunderstanding our presentations so that they could vote for the team they wanted to win for political reasons. The final hackathon I did there ended with some execs saying "this is exactly how we will build software going forward" after my presentation.

Of course this was totally forgotten about mere hours after they said it.

I'm in the UK, so don't know what it's like elsewhere, but I get the impression it's pretty much the same thing.

time for some grassroots hacking? ditch the glitzy establishment & form a hacking commune?

They felt fake 10 years ago. Some good still came from them but except the one I did at Facebook, they all felt dominated by BS. FB at least had a separate room for people actually coding who didn't want a constant stream of interruptions from advertisers, announcers, etc.

Feel the same

Over 20 years too late on this observation

There are weeks where every workday feels like a hackaton, honestly.

good

Yeah, hackathons were always shit. They're an apparatus for getting essentially free labor out of unsuspecting and gullible nerds.

Could never wrap my head around the idea.

They're often framed by employers as perks: Look, we're giving you the chance to come and work overtime for free, isn't that great?

I’ve never heard of a company encouraging their employees to participate in a hackathon that they sponsored. Are you thinking of internal “hack week” periods where employees get a chance to build something “for fun” at work?

Lucky you, I've experienced several variations on that theme in my own career.

Often sold as team building and way to level up in competence/skill, with an undertone of proving your loyalty to the company.

I only think this is true if the hackathon is around projects that are part of or similar to the normal work. In those cases, they should be during work hours and treated as work.

My company 15 years ago or so did a hackathon with arduinos, where they provided a bunch of arduinos and hardware and food, but the projects we made were completely unrelated to work and served no practical purpose. My team made a Simon says game.

It was just for fun, there was no benefit for the company. I think those are fine.

Yeah that would be like a “golf outing” or something for the sales team.

Sure, hacking during normal work hours is a completely different deal.

It’s not free, you get pizzas!

A recent boss mandated that people come on weekends. Everyone’s contract said you have to, except mine. I pointed out to the boss that even though he can ask people to work on weekends, there are laws that prevent how much (you need more and longer breaks, and you can’t do it every weekend.)

He got cold feet and cancelled the event. But he forgot to tell people. The most junior developer had spent 2+ hours on the commute.

These are not real hackathons.

They’re corporate knockoffs.

Come on, everyone knows that computer nerds live on pizza.

Says a thing or two about the typical manager world view...

They have suspicions, they just do it anyway.

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