The Hackathon Experience Is a Hack | Hacker News Reader

The Hackathon Experience Is a Hack

tomordonez.com

77 pointstomordonez59 comments

The Hackathon in question is apparently BattleHack Miami, hosted by PayPal:

http://miamiherald.typepad.com/the-starting-gate/2013/08/bat...

The winner in question was YellowPepper, who at the very least share their name with a startup also involved in mobile banking (http://www.yellowpepper.com/#/homeId/homeCB/page/home.html) and have issued a press release from Miami (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/yellowpepper-and-fun...).

(I'm not involved, I just saw this through Tom's Twitter.)

I was at the BattleHack in Berlin. The event itself was absolutely fantastic. It was definitely the best organized hackathon I've ever been part of.

Still, the final results felt similarly weird. The winner was a (non-technical) dude who had been pitching his startup for months already and found himself an amazingly talented developer at the hackathon. They made use of most of the sponsor APIs and added PayPal as a payment option for the already existing service. To me it felt like the guy was just going to random hackathons so he could get work done on his website for free. Even though the developer seemed to be exceptionally good, it seemed like he was just being taken advantage of by a guy who couldn't get his startup to have more traction.

There were definitely much more impressive hacks out there. (Mine honestly wasn't one of them, so it's not just jealousy talking). In addition, the theme of the hackathon was 'solving local problems'. Now if not having a platform to get product X in city Y is a local problem, it might fit. For me though, the interpretation was more 'making the world a better place' and not 'building a purely profit-oriented application to sell stuff using PayPal'.

I think they simply chose the most monetizable product that was in the competition. Made the whole event, which, I repeat, was about the best organized and executed hackathon I've ever seen, suddenly feel cheap.

Thing is most of us didn't come there for the prize. Personally I already had an idea in the back of my head, just went in to do an MVP(which I did) and in the process maybe meet some new people. But then ... the cleanberlin guy wins. Felt like ikea winning a furniture design and quality competition. Also... wasn't it a bit weird how the guy had his wife and his kid just "around"? If I came in with his "idea", I wouldn't expect to win so I wouldn't bring in my wife and kid to witness it.

I agree that the BattleHack is a very well organized event. It even had massage chairs, tons of food, drinks. I have organized some events but never at this level. At the end all of that means nothing when there is not a fair game. I might as well go to a hackathon where I have to pay for my own lunch and there is a real chance of winning.

Hell yeah, nothing says hardcore hacking like massage chairs.

Have been there too, had the exact same feeling.

It is a running business, he pitched his company, that he has thousands of customers already. I heard the guy did the same at other hackathons in Berlin.

The Technical guy was a professional who knew from the beginning what he had to do, we spent half the time developing a concept.

They not only share their name with the existing startup, they are that startup:

    The winning app makes it easy for consumers to find places to withdraw 
    small amounts of cash at a low cost, using businesses in their own 
    neighborhood and a PayPal technology that is very secure, said Alexander 
    Sjögren, who developed the app with Jose Pimienta and Osniel Gonzalez. 
    Sjögren is with the Miami company YellowPepper, which offers mobile 
    banking and payment solutions in Latin America. Pimienta and Gonzalez 
    co-founded Vinylfy, a startup catering to vinyl-record enthusiasts. [1]

YellowPepper is:

    About YellowPepper
    YellowPepper Mobile Financial Solutions provides products and services 
    that enable mobile financial transactions between financial institutions 
    (banks), businesses, and consumers in Latin America. With 1.5 million 
    users, YellowPepper operates in Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala, 
    Peru, and Panama as a service provider for more than 50 financial and 
    non-financial institutions. For more information, log on to 
    www.yellowpepper.com. [2]

1. http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/08/25/3585797/hackers-emerge...

2. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/yellowpepper-and-fun...

I've seen this before. I was involved in one where the winning team had been working for months beforehand (their website was registered > 6mo before the event), had prepared presentation materials far before the event including design mockups, and presented with nothing more than a pre-cooked video that was looked manipulated to show "working" code. None of us knew for sure, but it looked like they had just built static HTML pages and transitioned between them.

For those of us who had built working products, it felt more than a bit cheap. We saw some great code and very little of it was recognized.

I believe the issue is one of expectations and marketing for these events. They are pitched as "hackathons" and try very hard to attract engineers, as you simply can't have the event without coders. Therefore, engineers reasonably expect an event where the best code wins. After all, it's called a "hackathon", not a "meet & greet with investors" or even a "startup weekend". In the end, it just felt like the judges were putting themselves into the mindset of investors, and in that case, obviously the team that has prepared for months beforehand will win. But to the coders, we felt cheated, and that they had completely missed the point.

I wonder if it's down to the lack of other places for these pre-cooked startups to pitch? They just want the audience. (Though this happens in Silicon Valley, for sure, where one certainly can't argue there aren't any pitch soapboxes.)

Perhaps two judging categories could help. Best technical feat this weekend, and best business concept. Bonus points for the business concept that actually built some kind of MVP this weekend.

There's a grey area between new hacks that use existing APIs/tech from a startup (vs. publicly available tech) and completely new projects. Not sure how that should be handled, perhaps just a case-by-case basis (is this a feature for the startup, or is it a brand new project that happens to leverage existing knowledge?)

I am starting to see this trend where hackathons are more about investors bringing an undercover team to pretend they formed a team and code for 2 days, while in reality. The team was formed a while ago, product was pre-cooked, actually more like ready to be served. And just need it an event to get some PR. Hackathons should have a (literally) Code of Honor. Judges should be hackers and they need to make sure there is no code before the event and do a code review before the judging.

So, did anyone complain at the event? Or even after the event? How did the judges and organisers respond to the complaints?

There wasn't much that could be done. According to the rules, all's fair so long as the code wasn't written until the hackathon itself, which is pretty much impossible to prove or disprove anyway. You can prepare as long as you want. There is a section about a "code review" but I doubt that was really done; IIRC we didn't even submit our code, we just did a demo & video.

The strongest complaint we could make was that it was strongly against the spirit of a hackathon, which is a difficult argument to win.

The strongest complaint you can make is presumably "I wouldn't have come if I knew a team like this could enter and even win, and I won't come to your next one, and I will be sure to let others know that I won't come and why". Saying it publicly with all the other entrants around lets others join in if this is something that is widely regarded as unpopular and lets the organisers know that there is some serious resentment. Not complaining at all is certainly one way to make sure nothing will be done.

I mean, nobody here can even say "wow, I won't go to their next one!" because you haven't even named them.

You're right, and I wish we had. Instead we were just sort of stunned by the underwhelming ending and the crowd filtered out very quickly (there was no "drinkathon", we were all too tired). It was Angelhack - I suppose, by the name, we should have known that investability comes first, hacking second.

Our team was tired out after all-night coding and really didn't possess the mental finesse at the time to walk the fine line between arguing "the results don't fit the spirit of the event" and "we are sore losers".

Is it not normal to have a team made before the hackathon? We're registered for a few hackathons and a lot of them ask us to join a team ahead of time or join one when we get there but they do ask that teams put down their idea. The rule we adhered to was no prior coding or design work before the hackathon so build everything there but feel free to discuss the idea we want to go in with.

Yeah, forming teams is pretty normal - I think ssafejava is talking about something well in excess of simply forming a team and talking about ideas.

I was at Angelhack NYC last time it was held, and was disappointed in that way also. The winner, and indeed a lot of contestants, had code or designs that were impossible to generate in a 48 period.

There was a "code review" clause in the rules, but I did not see it ever enforced. Some of the high-ranking (the ones that made it into the final round of judging anyways) projects had clearly pre-cooked designs and mockups (this wasn't against Angelhack's rules), and obviously little to no working code. Many presentations were slide decks. Disappointingly few showed the core idea working.

I've always thought that the spirit of a hackathon was to get together with some crazy smart people and see what useful and worthwhile things you can bang out in a limited time. Precooking 95% of your project beforehand seems rather against the spirit of this.

Personally I've resolved to stop going to corporate-sponsored hackathons, or hackathons where investors are waiting at the sidelines. There's a tremendous misalignment of incentives and it encourages a rather ruthless atmosphere. It's no longer about good clean fun and all about attracting investor attention.

Question: anyone in NYC know about low-key hackathons where it actually fits the spirit of a hackathon?

Hey Potato, that's sad you don't want to go to hacks anymore. Code reviews are either done in private before we announce the winner or within 7 days after the event.

The slide deck thing is a persistent problem and one we're not happy with. I think that kills it for everyone and its disappointing when judges are impressed by them. To change this, starting this Fall we'll be the first hackathon to disallow power point presentations and require teams to demo if they'd like to win.

YES "no prior coding or design" although this is not followed. There is no transparency in the process and also not regulated. There are no code reviews or not way of knowing if somebody came with a "ready to serve" product. Even a less a code of honor.

You might need to fake it and that's ok.

Given that the hackaton might be 2 days, unless your idea is 'simple' enough to have a MVP in 1 day (never seen it happen), the second day will be all preparation for the presentation because this is what will win a jury.

It seems there is a lot of "startup weekend" events masquerading as Hackathons. A Hackathon shouldn't be about business, or funding; no one should be leaving that room with investors interested in funding their 24 hour hackathon idea. It's for fun, collaboration and learning. When one of the judges took to stage at Hacked.io in London and banned business pitches, there was a small cheer.

Hi,

I'm the founder of AngelHack, we organize large hackathons around the world and I can tell you this article doesn't hold true for us (though I can't speak for other events). We operate independently of companies and choose winners based on hour things-- Completeness, Impactfulness, Technical difficulty, and viability. We had some issues in our early days with pre-done code, so now all winning teams are subject to code reviews after winning (and in the case where the review shows previous work has been done, we contact the second place winner and invite them to our finals event instead. We do this discretely as to not shame the initial winner who sometimes may not have understood the rules). I'd say this happens 5% of the time, so this is very much the exception and not the rule.

I started AngelHack so that people could have a shot of getting exposure for their ideas and support in taking them to the next level. We welcome everyone to our events, startups who want a good environment to team build and work on new things to indie-devs looking for an outlet from their typically work week. Normally, great coders win and great ideas come out of it. Our mission from there to provide support and mentorship, so top teams have a fighting chance at turning their hack into a startup. Many companies raise funding after they win our events and we're proud of that. They literally start at our events and now they are in YC, TechStars, AngelPad, and you name it. That's cool. With 35 cities happening concurrently, sometimes the quality of what judges pick can vary, where even I myself have had WTF moments on who won, but the majority of our judges pick solid winners and if I see something was really awesome, I'll still invite that team into our finals, regardless of what the judges choose.

My take on corporate hackathons -- most award winners based on who has spent the most time digging into the API and asking good questions to the company -- these would be teams who helped them improve their product and teams that they'd like to believe will finish their product so they can showcase it on their app-store// dev-site. Again, I can't speak for everyone, but that's the trend I see.

And for Startup Weekend, they don't throw hackathons. They do a business plan event, where they don't really care what comes in or comes out. It's about uniting the community and doing customer development on ideas. They judge based on who they feel has improved and who makes the the crowd happy. It's not really a competition.

All this said, I'm curious what people think hackathons should be judged on. Imagine you were giving away $10,000 -- how would you decide? Would you do it on what's cool, based solely on the tech, based on what could make revenue, based on the teams passion for what they are doing? Solve that, and AngelHack would gladly integrate it in with our events worldwide. Again, currently we judge based on Completeness, Impactfulness, Technical difficulty, and viability.

The term hack and its derivatives are trite. People use them because they perk ears. In Dallas, I've attended events where first place won with a 'business plan' consisting of buzzword-laden management-speak and a clever whiteboard diagram. This is a product of the community; the culture here is business-oriented.

A solution is to set expectations on having a good time and socializing, or not to attend. Instead, you may more satisfaction from working on real projects that survive the weekend. At a hackathon, or any event in general, you serve the host's purpose. Their game, their rules.

The culture in Dallas is very sadly business oriented :/

I went to my first hackathon a few weeks ago and it was very skeevy with all the idea people floating around looking for folks to build their idea for free while they watch.

Hackathons would be fun if it was all about everyone building what ever and having a good time instead a lot of them seem building a business focused.

"Or startup weekends"

Having been to a couple startup weekends, I feel like this behavior would be pretty atypical?

I am aware of how Zaarly was started - Ashton Kutcher was a 'surprise' judge, happened to be a good friend of a co-founder, and subsequent investor. Both founders were Startup Weekend board members. It seemed like a staged event for a company launch.

http://startupweekend.org/2011/03/09/from-zero-to-1mil-in-3-...

Aside from that, have there been others?

Startup weekends have been suspicious too. Not all of them but some. I have met a lot of awesome people at those events. Some are close friends now. But the whole thing at the end feels like finding out my girlfriend was cheating on me with my best friend.

You can get a sense of that from the first night though. Some I've been to have been full of random ideas, others have been "Hi, I'm the cofounder of X and we're going to add Y feature to the site this weekend!". Sets the tone immediately.

Sorry, but if you are going to a SW to try and win, you are missing the point of SW. I appreciate that for some winning and losing might be the point, but it's been impressed upon me by everyone involved with SW that I've met that if you look at winning as the goal, you're going to have a bad time.

Hackathons and Startup Weekends are all about meeting new people, trying new things, and possibly making new friends. It's about trying to accomplish something and sharing it. At SW, it's about getting help in moving that idea forward, in qualifying the idea.

If you treat it like a win/lose scenario, you are going to lose regardless of the outcome.

If winning is not the point, then why is a win state defined?

Same reason you give trophies to Little League participants - to provide context for the competition. To add something fun that hopefully underscores what is effectively a networking/show-off event.

That's a very good question, and one I wish more hackathons would consider. I've seen one hackathon give prizes at the end totally at random, and some that don't do prizes at all.

You don't define a win state. The event handlers do. Your goals will be different from the event handlers goals. And that's fine. You should have different goals.

What does exploiting a situation to aid a launch have to do with winning/losing? I led a team at one and coached at another and couldn't agree more with your reasons for doing it.

My stance is in this case, by turning it into a publicity stunt it detracted from all the good stuff you mentioned. I'm sure no one cared too much as they got to meet Ashton/Demi and the saw all the glitter of a hot startup being launched.

Off-topic: The blog title is a perfect example to demonstrate why to never use line-height in the place of margin.

thanks for the feedback. I didn't have time to put effort on design but more on content. I will fix it when I have the chance. Thanks

One of the judges at Startup Weekend crapped on every team. The weekend had been a lot of fun, but that ruined it for me. Other judges at least had constructive criticism. I have to admit this pulled the steam out of my sails and I'm not all that interested in the startup scene anymore. I felt slightly cheated at another event where the winners had obviously been 'playing the circuit' with their startup, but I still came away from it pretty positive.

I'm active in our area's Startup Weekend community, and we try to stamp out the pre-fab work ahead of time. We've never had a funded project come through before, but I know we wouldn't allow it.

I'm also the organizer of a local civic hackathon, where we have one caveat: Feel free to continue work on the project you started at our last hackathon. I'm curious how many will, or how many will start from scratch.

Hackathons are events where ideas are born and are quickly laid to rest. I'm glad there's some encouragement to work on existing projects, especially on projects that have a civic focus.

It's a shame too. We get all sorts of sponsors and spend a lot of time promoting an event that supposedly benefits the community, but did we really accomplish anything if we just let it drop? Maybe the idea wasn't the most greatest in the world, but now that you've had a few months to think about what you could have done better... pivot.

I just wanted to sound a note of caution not to tar all Hackathons with the same brush. "Hackathons" is a lose word which can mean many different things to many different people.

A lot of the time I see Hackathons criticised, I read the argument and the person has set up one definition of a Hackathon then demolished it - a Straw Man, basically. And often it's deserved - there is some really shit behavior at some hackathons and it's right that it is called out. This post fits that mould pretty perfectly.

But there are also some really great Hackathons. Try and find the style of Hackathon you like, go and have fun!

I agree and emphasize on "some" hackathons. I went to hackathons where the winner is well-deserved and there is code of honor. Fair game on judging. It makes me feel that the most over-produced over-sponsored over the top hackathons are the ones that have suspicious behavior.

I'm glad to hear you agree, but to be honest when I read you article I didn't pick up the emphasis's on "some" at all. You seemed pretty harsh on all Hackathons.

Hackathons are a lot of fun if your goal is not only about winning. You meet a lot of people. Sometimes future employees/founders/CTOs or sometimes friends. You learn a lot if you really put yourself to the challenge and pair program with others. I usually go to hackathons to have fun. Most of the times I cannot stay all day so I go to meet people and make friends. I even help other teams brainstorming, refine their idea, testing. But when you see suspicious crap it is unmotivated for everybody. Besides having fun all teams have a goal of winning. When they realize nobody had a chance, it is disheartening.

I would suggest, for anybody considering attending a hackathon to not let this totally discourage you.

Not all hackathons are equal. My first was at Launch Fest 2013. It was a great experience and I think the judging was as fair as could be expected. There were a lot of talented people who honestly hacked awesome projects together in such a short time. You can see the 5 finalist starting at 23:30 in http://youtu.be/HPSnsxN4lEs

Also, consider http://openhack.github.io

Well duh, didn't you get the memo: the Hackathon is a marketing hack to attract talented developers who will then work on your startup projects for free! Amazing. May the best marketer win!

Deleted comment

Whenever there's a significant monetary incentive to win any competition, there will always be participants who will do anything to win.

"Instead you spend your technical efforts going to meetups and helping others."

Do this indeed. One of the best ways to get better and encounter interesting people is to go to meet ups, user groups and "fun" hack events. You will encounter peers, newbies, gurus, recruiters, investors and all sorts of interesting people with ideas, needs and possibly money.

I've been to these hackathons. They are a hack. It's more of investors looking for investment ideas than engineers hacking codes and building products. One event a team won by doing a Powerpoint presentation because the judges (all investors) thought the idea could monetize the most, while the losing teams had built more complete and more impressive prototypes.

I worked at quite a few hackathon's at my previous job. Judging always had some ulterior motive.

We'd see people walk into 48 hr hackathons at the very end and pitch their pre-built app they always took around. They could walk off with a macbook pro no problem...not bad for a few hours of work.

It's sad, but most of them seem to run this way.

No problem if the walk off with a new macbook. Yes problem if the walk off with a chance to win $100K at a national event with investors.

Where and how did that happen? What was the name of the startup? Who organized the event?

Happened to me at two Microsoft events in Boston for Windows 8 and another one for Windows Phone 8.

hackers shouldn't go to a hackathons .. they should go to hack club.

the first rule of hack club is, you do not spea ...oh crap.

If it's your first time at hack club, you have to hack.

only two hackers in pair programming

don't go to hackathons if you just want to win

That's not the point. I'm sure OP would've been fine loosing, as long as it was in fair competition.

The darkest cynic in me says, competing fairly is for losers. Literally, not figuratively.

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