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Comment by JacobEdelman | Hacker News Reader

Despite the optimistic tone in this article hackathons have definite problems. They have a contradiction between their party atmosphere and their high stakes. While they strive to provide an informal, fun event they also offer extremely large rewards (cash, internships, and even startup-funding are offered as rewards). Little seems to stand in the way of groups cheating and judging may seem incredibly subjective. Rumors abound as too how winners built their projects beforehand (a big no-no) or that the projects don't actually work. In trying to become both parties and job interviews hackathons are failing to be what they were meant to be, places to learn and create.

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That's because most hackathans can't decide whether they want to be hackathons or pitchathons. As you have picked up, they really can't be both. Hacking is experimental, and it's fun, and it definitely is not optimized around impressing a VC or a journalist in 3 minutes or less. If you wanted to be a true hackathon, you would ban the investors and journalists and really ban judging altogether and just have everyone show everyone else their projects. Even the idea of "fun" is different between the two crowds, with the hacker crowd expecting the "fun" part to be the cool hacks themselves, and the journalist/finance crowd expecting the fun part to be the boozing up and making plans for how you spend your millions after you focused on optimizing a commercial product (ususally with more emphasis on marketability and monetization potential than cool tech). If you want to "win" a hackathon i.e. impress a VC/Angel/CEO/Journalist, of course you should prepare beforehand, it's extremely difficult to verify cheating and very little real technology can be built in that timespan and that environment (party wooo!). You should also focus way more on the design and pitch then on the functionality, since the judges only have the time to evaluate the design/pitch. The good news is you can also treat the pitchatons like a hackathon and just ignore the judging/prizes, they can still be nice networking events regardless and times to learn some new things/APIs. Or you can try to game the prizes, but either way I wouldn't take them too seriously. How many hackathon projects turn into anything real anyway?

The current Hackathon culture is indicative of a general tech and investing culture of picking "hot" ideas made by charismatic teams over people doing true technological innovation which takes sustained, serious effort. The real innovation is what ends up making an impact, but the little prototype parties can be a good stepping stone into the industry.

If I could give you a high five or a hug over the internet I'd do just that. I stopped going to hack-a-thons all together because at some point (I can't pinpoint the exact time) they turned into show-and-tell for existing startups. I participated in a Real Estate Tech hackathon and the top three finishers came in with ready made products, spent all of their time networking and did zero coding. They then pitched their products which were highly polished while the rest of us sat around looking like people who had coded up some things for fun and a little competition.

Hack-a-thons need to change so that the objective isn't clear until you walk in so people have to create something on the spot.

I think rather than have a surprise objective they should remove the prizes, intense competition, and networking. Hackathons should be about coding something cool, not winning, networking, or partying.

Or make the prizes reasonable. I won an RC helicopter and got a few t-shirts at a hackathon a couple years ago. I wasn't there contingent on the prize, but it was still a nice incentive.

Yeah that kinda sucks. It's one of the reasons college hackathons are so compelling - people aren't there with their startups, it's students looking to learn. I think sometimes people judge student hackathons based on corporate hackathons they've been to but they are fundamentally very different.

Jacob is right, big prizes can suck. I'd love to see fewer big prizes at hackathons. Having some small stuff so people feel accomplished and valued is nice though. Jon Gottfried has a really good article about this[1].

I go to a lot of student hackathons and generally people are there for learning - not competition. They're certainly not there for "boozing up"!

And of course hackathon projects amount to nothing 99% of the time. That's not a problem. That's totally to be expected from 24 hours of hastily put together code. The value students get is learning about idea generation, working with others, managing a project, how to use the libraries, frameworks, and APIs, how to work to a deadline, how to debug, how to do version control, how to deploy, how to test and improve your work, how to present your work to others, and much more. And I don't think companies or VCs who attend really expect to find a next Facebook - they're probably more concerned with just meeting the kind of students who would rather spend a weekend building stuff instead of boozing. Furthermore, hackathons don't undermine the value of sustained effort on hard technical problems - but they can be the first step for students starting to work on technology outside of their courses.

You're all totally right that large prizes suck and pitchathons suck. Most student hackathons do a pretty good job of staying away from those (though some could do better for sure). As Jacob said, "hackathons should be about coding something cool, not winning, networking, or partying" - I've honestly never been to a student hackathon where that wasn't the case. So I'd be careful about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[1] http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-sinc...

Given that student pitch-a-thons (ex: business plan competition type events) can earn you pretty decent amounts of money, how much longer till hackathons on college campuses fall the way of corporate hackathons?

As food for thought, there are "Consulting Case Competitions" for business school students year round, and some students decide to spend their time optimizing for winning a bunch of these one after another all around the country. I'm not sure if this is a good, bad, or neutral thing.

I go to a lot of student hackathons and I really don't see that happening. And the large majority of organizers are heavily focused on creating a welcoming event for building, learning, and having fun.

Student hackathons are and always will be fundamentally different from corporate hackathons because the motivations of the organizers and attendees are different. Perhaps we should be careful about offering large prizes for the reason you state but the focus is very clearly on learning and building and that's not set to change.

+1 - this is an excellent comment.

Agreed. It took me a long time to realise this, too. I'd go to hackathons and put together a working demo that lacked polish, then lose to people who basically put together a pitch deck with some HTML mockups attached.

Maybe it's just getting old, but the idea of exhausting myself over a weekend in order to create something I'll likely never use again has lost it's appeal. Every now and then I'll be disciplined and tell myself I'm having a "hack weekend" where I'm relatively anti-social, stay at home and work on a project. It's a lot more fulfilling.

You've made two very astute observations.

1 That's because most hackathans can't decide whether they want to be hackathons or pitchathons.

and

2 The current Hackathon culture is indicative of a general tech and investing culture of picking "hot" ideas made by charismatic teams over people doing true technological innovation which takes sustained, serious effort. The real innovation is what ends up making an impact, but the little prototype parties can be a good stepping stone into the industry.

My sense is that the market needs these type of pitch events with some type of filter. One filter is letting a group of experts at an incubator pick who you see. Another filter is having folks savvy enough to appreciate what can be gained from gaming hackathons.

One way to view this is, "If you want them out of hackathons, how do you pay for hackathons and attract the right people, and where should the pitch-masters go?"

I'm not sure ditching recruiters and VCs is the right answer. Perhaps having very technical keynote speakers helps? Or making the objective to be code reviews from famous engineers? (Instead of Google paying for expenses and a dozen recruiters, Google sends a couple very good engineers to peer review code. This is more expensive, but perhaps brings them better benefits too.) If there's no product pitch and PR, and a better alternative elsewhere, perhaps the pitch-masters will stay home?

So what to do with the pitch-masters, when there's only so many presentation slots at TC and seats at YC? I don't have a good answer for this, but it sounds like a market opportunity for someone.

I took a group of 14 year-olds to the MLH Launch Hack in London and they loved the experience. For them, they were able to see how the coding skills they were developing in the classroom could be used to develop real products - no matter how small or insignificant.

Maybe it was because it was a student focused event - but I saw no evidence of cheating and the prizes were so small that it would have not been worth pre-building apps beforehand anyway.

The more and more people I talk to, the more the conversation sounds like this.

There was a period of time -- and I hope we're over it, for the most part -- where "biggest, best, craziest, and most expensive" was the motto. It doesn't work; I've personally been to a couple of those huge hackathons and was really frustrated by the experience.

I work for an org that runs a nationwide (in the US) series of events called CodeDays that are somewhat similar in format to traditional collegiate hackathons and those are exactly the kinds of experiences we're trying to create, so we have a pretty strict limit on prize size, we only allow 100 students per city, we market to younger students, etc.

That's worked out incredibly well for us. A couple of the people profiled in this article actually got their start at a CodeDay.

(Interesting, CodeDay is also much much cheaper than these huge hackathons and we engage more students, just distributed across 30 cities.)

I think the best solution for hackathons is to stop focusing on the prizes. When you have a "grand prize" worth many of thousands of dollars, people are going to compete for it. I think a better idea is to go with just a top 6 / 8 /10, and a lot of sponsor prizes. At Treehacks (the one in this article), there were what felt like 25+ sponsor prizes - and that is cool, because a lot of those are going to kids who are too inexperienced to land in the top 10 at something with 600 students.

But remove the Grand Prize, because it makes the whole thing feel like a competition to people, and cheating / pre-building projects is unavoidable. Even the grand prize winners at Treehacks (built the robot arm, mentioned in the article) partially faked it - they were asked by the judges how much of the hardware they built before the hackathon, and they said they built all of the hardware beforehand. How much of the software had they already tinkered with / sketched out / built? Who knows.

So remove the idea that pre-building is cheating, and instead of 3 big prizes give out 50 small ones.

So true. That's why I like the concept of Startup Weekend (http://startupweekend.org) There is no prize money, just pure action. I always go to one of their locally organized events, to simply enjoy and just feel young again :)

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