Three Types of Harmful Hackathons | Hacker News Reader

Three Types of Harmful Hackathons

blog.rokkincat.com

74 pointsnickgartmann52 comments

I've done Startup Weekend once before and it felt like how the "The Business-A-Thon" was described. My friends and I did not know this would be the case going in and spent all of our time pumping out an MVP (which worked!) while the teams that won largely didn't have ANY code to show for their time. It was all slides and marketing talk. The winner DID have code but it was a <1hr rails app thrown together with no styling just a form to submit data to the backend and I don't even think they got it to process CC's (it was crowd fundraising thing). Ours was well thought out, looked nice, and WORKED yet we were beat out by people who could put together a more appealing keynote presentation.

It was a pretty big letdown and I haven't been back to SW or any hackathons since. I love banging out an MVP in a weekend with friends but not if we are going to be judged on our presentation and not our work. I know, I know that's how the real world works as well but I just expected better from the experience. I also understand that maybe SW is not aimed at being a hackathon but I just wish they could have given more weight to something that worked and was accessible today (also we spend the whole weekend minus about 8hrs total for sleep between 2 nights) vs a lot of marketing/sales talk (who left the venue early and showed up late).

Quick edit: Just wanted to say that I see this more as my failing to understand what SW was instead of me blaming SW for not meeting my incorrect expectations. SW is fine but it's just probably not for me.

I agree it'd be better if different hackathons were clearer about what gets rewarded, but it's possible the real reason the other team won was because they presented (even if they didn't build) something that people wanted.

"Whoah, I want that!" > "Yes, that is functional."

I haven't been to a SW in about 3 years. But the last ones I went to were all people who brought their existing fledgling business they were trying to get started. Did who knows what for the weekend. Then just pitched it on demo day. That was maybe 60% of the groups that participated. Really a big let down.

The group that did that at our SW got eliminated during judging.

Bringing an existing business you've been working on is against the rules. That should have been enforced by whoever was facilitating.

If the rules are well explained and enforced, and you keep an open mind, startup weekend can be pretty cool. If your idea is bad, it will get eliminated right away, and you have to be ready for that. It's also best to team up with people you don't know, and you might meet one or two people that you'll end up becoming friends with.

> I've done Startup Weekend once before and it felt like how the "The Business-A-Thon" was described.

To be fair, SW is meant to be a "Business-A-Thon" and not a hackathon in the traditional sense. This is spelled out in many places, and they make it clear up front that the business plan is key.

> I also understand that maybe SW is not aimed at being a hackathon but I just wish they could have given more weight to something that worked and was accessible today

But that's not what they want to be. I'm not saying you have to like it, but rather that your perceptions going into SW was for it to be something it didn't want to be.

> To be fair, SW is meant to be a "Business-A-Thon" and not a hackathon in the traditional sense. This is spelled out in many places, and they make it clear up front that the business plan is key.

I understand this now, I decided to do SW at the last minute and hadn't done my research. See my edit above, I see this as my fault for not researching more what I was getting into not SW failure to meet my made up requirements to be an enjoyable experience for me.

Well, in reading these comments, it seems you aren't the only one that confuses SW with hackathon. Maybe it's the people I know locally and how they make sure to differentiate their SW and their hackathon, and how they are distinctly different. Maybe other locations just sort of stress a greater emphasis on hacking than the business side.

Regardless, it doesn't seem like you are alone. =)

Especially where I live (Lexington, KY) there are not a plethora of true hackathons to choose from. There are a few smaller language-specific groups that do some event but SW is by far the largest of it's kind in Lexington. So I jumped on SW when I found out about it. It was neat just not really what I was looking for. I get most of my "hackathon"-energy out by just meeting up with friends to work on an idea on a weekend.

So team up with a business / marketing person next time. They can build slides and do market research while you write code. I've judged a few hackathons before, and I've seen teams like yours lose because your MVP doesn't actually serve a market need. The market need doesn't even need to be profitable; but you need to define and communicate the problem your product solves. Many talented engineers can't do that.

This is how the real world works: the business side of things is often more important than the technical implementation. If you fuck up the business side of things and end up making the wrong product, it doesn't matter how clean or well-implemented it is. But if you have the right product-market fit and a good business process around improving it, you can become incredibly successful even if your product is written in PHP (Facebook anyone?)

Oh, if I ever do SW again this is what I will do. I didn't mean to come across as sour grapes just sharing my experience and how SW fell short of my incorrect expectations.

I feel like this is missing the point, as I think the point being made by joshstrange also agrees with.

I don't want to go to hackathons to mimic the real world or simulate business savvy. I want to go there to spend 48hours building something that is technologically fun with likeminded people.

If "appropriate to become a business" is a criterion then it's not a hackathon it's a businessathon.

Put it this way: can I spend 48hrs building a mini hydroponic lab powered by a raspberry pi and arduino? Or should I spend that time making https://www.barkbox.com/ ?

> can I spend 48hrs building a mini hydroponic lab powered by a raspberry pi and arduino?

I don't see why not. Here's your pitch: recreational marijuana has been legalized in 5 states, but commercial sale is only legal in two, while cultivation for personal use is legal in all five. Additionally, if black market sales are included, marijuana is the biggest cash crop in the US with $35 billion annually. So there is BIG money in the market. A rpi/arduino hydroponic system is the first prototype of a product you can sell to consumers so they can grow their own in areas where they can't buy it. It's like Nest, but for growing pot.

Now have some business nerd spend an hour making a few slides and you're done. You have articulated the problem, the size of the market and the product you're creating. You don't actually have to make the product beyond the prototype stage, you just have to pitch it like you could.

Again you're missing my point. I don't care if it's a viable business, I want to hack on something for the sake of hacking.

> You don't actually have to make the product beyond the prototype stage

But I want to, that's the whole point! Obviously you can pitch anything. I don't want to.

What you're describing is as perfectly valid '-thon' but it's not, at least in my mind and the mind of the author, a good hackathon. (For the avoidance of doubt I'm not talking specifically about SW whatever that is, but in general).

I guess what I'm yearning for is a return to the demoscene days :)

Well, a good product person can inform the design of your hack and likely improve it. But I get that engineers get tired of building things the way that other people tell them to.

Recently I have seen a trend of "useless hackathons" where the goal is to produce the coolest and least useful hacks you can think of (like a remote controlled toilet). I think the idea is to free people to just build stuff and not worry about it being useful. These ones tend to be community-organized though, for many of the reasons the original article author mentioned.

> But I get that engineers get tired of building things the way that other people tell them to.

Yeah, it's called my day job :) (In all honesty I'm not a code-monkey at work, I do have input into the future of our product if I didn't I'd probably be working somewhere else) If all that's going to happen is someone different is going to tell me what to build then I'm not interested. But remote controlled toilets? That's something I could get behind haha.

@exelius, i think what @joshstrange wants to say is that a hackathon is a place where people want to build things whether it make sense or no sense at all.

Adding the business stuff is not appealing to hackers. It definitely is good to earn money out of it, but the fun goes away.

@joshstrange, a lot of developers felt the same way as you do. Startup Weekend should have emphasized that it is not a hackathon, but a business learning event. Or if you are dev, and you want to build your own startup, it's a good event to exercise a startup like environment. I have nothing against Startup Weekend. I believe it is helping a lot of people to become entrepreneurs but some of the organizers who are not well-trained might have misinformed the participants the real intention of the event resulting to this confusion.

@exelius, you've mentioned this part: "Now have some business nerd spend an hour making a few slides and you're done. You have articulated the problem, the size of the market and the product you're creating. You don't actually have to make the product beyond the prototype stage, you just have to pitch it like you could."

--->>> That does not define a hackathon. That is a business pitching competition... Remember in a hackathon, you were able to build things, build something. There is a product after the event which you are proud to show & tell whether the audience like it or not... Based on your statement, what you're implying is that a hackathon can be just a pitch deck with an awesome pitch from the presenter, which is totally not what a hackathon is about.

> @exelius, i think what @joshstrange wants to say is that a hackathon is a place where people want to build things whether it make sense or no sense at all.

Agreed, I get that SW is not that but I wish there was something around me that was like that.

> @joshstrange, a lot of developers felt the same way as you do. Startup Weekend should have emphasized that it is not a hackathon, but a business learning event. Or if you are dev, and you want to build your own startup, it's a good event to exercise a startup like environment. I have nothing against Startup Weekend. I believe it is helping a lot of people to become entrepreneurs but some of the organizers who are not well-trained might have misinformed the participants the real intention of the event resulting to this confusion.

Again, I agree 100%. I think that they may do a decent job of telling people that but I missed it. It's a cool thing don't get me wrong, just not what I'm looking for.

No; I agree a hackathon isn't just a business pitch. You should also have to build a prototype that does most of what you claim it to. But most hackathons also make you justify that product's existence.

If you want to build something cool, you don't need a hackathon for that. Just build it. But if you enter a competition where people are judging your creation, then you have to be able to pitch it based on the judgment criteria.

A hackathon is a place where you can build your own thing, a place where you learn new things from others. For info, a hackathon doesn't necessarily mean a competition. It's an event where people come together and build things. People just added the competition factor.

@exelius, you see things only in the perspective of an entrepreneur or business dev. But what you are reading right now are the frustrations of the developers -- the pain points that most developers/engineers feel on how they are being violated with what's happening in these kind of events.

So in a hackathon, for you what should be the judging criteria? 90% can be a viable product based on a presention & 10% execution? Is that what you are saying? If yes, then it should be an idea-thon (not a hackathon), where people present their ideas and whoever has the best idea (which you, as a judge, think is the most viable product based on potential market size and potential usability) wins.

That's the very thing you're presenting though. A viable business model. You're there to present a viable idea, not how well your gorgeous code works.

My team won a startup weekend here in Santa Cruz. And we didn't have working code, just a nicely made HTML page that looked like a fully fledged site. But we presented it in such a way that made sense from a business stand point and we won because of it.

See my edit:

> Quick edit: Just wanted to say that I see this more as my failing to understand what SW was instead of me blaming SW for not meeting my incorrect expectations. SW is fine but it's just probably not for me.

I now understand this to be the case I just didn't know that going in so for me it was a bit of a disappointment but I have no one to blame but myself and thats the only person I do blame. I do not personally like the way SW does it but that doesn't mean I think they are a bad thing just not for me.

I am a software engineer in the Bay Area. Of my friends, few are engineers whom I can geek-out or talk shop with. Hackathons seemed like a potentially good way to do it, but this article highlights the reasons I haven't been attending them: I just want to meet some people, hack on something fun, and maybe make some friends. I don't want to start a business, and I don't care about winning a prize. I don't really want to stay up all night, either - I have a wife, and other things to do.

I thought maybe Weekend Hacker would be fun, but that seems to be full of people looking for help with their startup idea. Most of them aren't engineers. Most of the Meetups I've been to (or hosted) are full of people trying to get me interested in their startup, or recruit me. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't see myself having a beer on the weekend with any of those folks.

So, how do people do it? It's kinda happening slowly over time, through friends and partners of friends, but I wouldn't know how to actively speed it up.

Last Startup Weekend I went to had 7 devs out of 110 people. Definitely an issue.

EDIT: All but one of the 11 teams were tech/programming required startups guys. I'm not talking about "Startup Weekend" as a whole, I'm talking about my experience at the event I went to.

Does Start Up weekend specifies that the start up has to do with tech? Unless you're saying that 103 people were the "idea person" I don't see what's wrong with that

I can't speak for all Startup Weekend events, but at the one I went too, every single project was a tech startup. On the team I was on, the vibe from the "idea person" was definitely "How can I get a developer to help me for free?"

from the blog post:

>Restrict to those who are there to code, design, or build something, not to write a business plan - this gives participants the freedom to work on projects that don't need to have profit potential.

That makes sense, but you know, don't restrict it to tech start ups. And from what I read at the SW website, it DOESN'T have to be tech. How were the projects from that SW you mention?

I went to one in 2012, and a majority of the projects, as well as 2 of the 3 winners were tech.

I've done SW before (see comment above) and not all the ideas were tech-related but most were. There was one group working on vertical farms/fisheries(?) I forget the word they used but it was some sort of AquaPond or something like that. Also IMHO SW does not care about actually producing a working example it only cares about the business idea which was disappointing.

Last one I went to - 2012 - was a whole mess of tech folks. One of the larger teams had... 17(?) people on it, 10-11 of which were 'technical' of some stripe. I walked by and heard 3 folks arguing "less vs sass".

Our team had just 4 people on it, and I was the sole tech person. We came in second place (well, tied for second).

Startup Weekends are not hackathons though.

Edit: Reading through these comments, it surprises me to see that so many people think of Startup Weekend first when they see hackathon. Startup Weekend takes on the format of a traditional hackathon, and shares many elements, but it's not a hackathon. Another commenter hit the nail on the head when they called it a business-a-thon. It just so happens that the culture surrounding it tends to use a lot of tech.

But please, don't equate Startup Weekends with hackathons. They aren't. And that's fine. They are what they are. Confusing them with hackathons however will lead to disappointment.

Just skip these things and write code for people who will pay you, or open source something useful.

I think there's value in writing code for yourself at times. Every other time in life engineers are told by their managers, professors, and anyone else who's overseeing them what to make and do. Doing a hackathon in this format minimizes that pressure and gives people a time and place to gather and just be creative for themselves.

If you're an API provider you can do everything in this post but also say "and by the way, we will give you X free credits to use against our API if you want to build something on top of it." You still might not get as much battle hardening, etc as if it was a hard requirement, but it might totally change the dynamic.

This is why I only attend university hackathons. For the most part, they are still about building cool new tech—not startups. Plus, their increasingly high admissions standards ensure that everyone who attends is either already a developer or eager to learn. Nobody walks away without coding.

One point I disagree with in the article is that cash prizes are harmful. I just don't see evidence of that—prizes at university hackathons have been getting bigger and bigger (tens of thousands of dollars) but it seems like the technical sophistication of hacks continues to rise. So long as you have good judges (ie. hackers, not marketers), large prizes just provide an awesome reward for awesome hacks.

Also, most of the shitty bizathons I've been to actually had relatively small prizes (some API credits, maybe "mentorship") relative to the major hackathons.

> One point I disagree with in the article is that cash prizes are harmful. I just don't see evidence of that—prizes at university hackathons have been getting bigger and bigger (tens of thousands of dollars) but it seems like the technical sophistication of hacks continues to rise. So long as you have good judges (ie. hackers, not marketers), large prizes just provide an awesome reward for awesome hacks.

I think the point of "avoid big cash prizes" rule in the article was to foster inter-team collaboration and minimize competition. It's a good goal. On one hackaton I attended where prizes were cool but not that big (items worth less than $1k each) it was not uncommon to see people spending some time talking to other teams, helping them set up, solve some obstacle they encountered or just playtesting their project.

Competition creates a bad atmosphere and it's better to reduce it to minimum. It's much more fun to care about maximizing the amount of cool projects being created than just fighting for the top spot.

> Competition creates a bad atmosphere and it's better to reduce it to minimum. It's much more fun to care about maximizing the amount of cool projects being created than just fighting for the top spot.

I understand that theoretical viewpoint, but I've never seen it play out that way.

Even at huge hackathons with prizes of thousands of dollars, I see lots of people helping each other across teams. At the end of the day, true hackers will like the money but also like helping out new developers.

I don't like the societal assumption that competition is automatically evil.

> Even at huge hackathons with prizes of thousands of dollars, I see lots of people helping each other across teams. At the end of the day, true hackers will like the money but also like helping out new developers.

Thanks for the data point.

> I don't like the societal assumption that competition is automatically evil.

The societal assumption, at least the one I grew up with, was that competition is Good and Awesome, because it drives the Great Capitalist Economy (as opposed to socialism that ended just around the time I was born). But it seems more and more evident that competition has only very limited applications.

Running a Hackathon costs money.

We can have a hackathon where:

- The costs are split up by the number of participants.

- A bunch of teams participate.

- Everyone builds whatever they want, and they own it.

- There can be multiple show-and-tells, to allow teams to ask / answer questions, get to know each-other, and iterate.

- Everyone walks away having made some wonderful new friends, having learned a thing or two, and also maybe even some useful code.

If someone else is organizing, and you're participating for free, then it will always come with strings attached. Remember, if you're not the customer, then you're the product!

A Hackathon cost less money than you'd think. Typically for a day long event you can rent the place, get 3 meals, drinks and snacks including time spent for 40-50 people for about $2k. Which for a business isn't really all that much.

Disclaimer I help organize the described at the bottom of the article.

Absolutely - the low cost per participant makes hackathons a great channel. $2k paid for by a single entity isn't insignificant. Your hackathons probably offer more to participants than others.

I think it depends where, when and who you are organising it for. I organised a student hackathon in London last year and it cost about £4K/$6K but we had the venue free and some sponsors paying for a meal or two. We had 150 students at the event. If the venue wasn't free we would be looking at another £2K/$3K at the least. The numbers stack up very quickly.

I really think it depends on what you want to get out of a hackathon. At the end of the day you get out what you put in.

After graduating from college I spent some time going to hackathons, some of which were of the type you described. But I didn't care because I just wanted to go somewhere where I could hone my ability to think fast and ship. I got to do just that while also meeting awesome dev evangelists, eating free food, and occasionally going home with some prizes.

I also don't think the following is necessarily the right thing to do:

"Restrict to those who are there to code, design, or build something, not to write a business plan"

especially if the intent is to create "better builders, better collaborators, and better teachers."

Learning to work with the MBA type that a lot of people vilify can be a valuable skill. I think the ability to dilute business speak into features you can program or being able to communicate your complex programming ideas to someone less experienced are super valuable. And that's where I've seen a lot of hackathon pitches fall apart. Someone creates something so technical and awesome, but can't break it down into something that non-technical people or new programmers can understand. And that sucks, but being able to do so is a necessary communication skill.

I also think hackathons are a great place to find future co-founders. Maybe that's another programmer, but maybe it's someone who can help you sell your product and has a more developed business sense. Again, it all depends on why you're at the hackathon in the first place.

The single biggest indicator of the quality of a hackathon is who is organizing it. I've seen countless events where the people putting on the event are doing it for selfish or greedy reasons, and 9 times out of 10 those events look like the 3 kinds the author is describing [1].

That said, there are tons of _good_ hackathons out there that actually do have the developers interests in mind. Specifically, I'd point to all the amazing things that are happening in the student space [2].

Bottom Line: Figure out who's organizing an event and use that as gauge to determine if it's worth your time.

[1] http://theycallmeswift.com/2013/10/25/dont-throw-that-hackat... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/education/edlife/the-hacka...

Looking at going to battlehack (from paypal) this weekend. Wondering how it fits in to the "3 types" from the article - doesn't seem to fit in to any of those 3 specifically.

I've been to many that don't fit into those. But I think it's because the title was 3 harmful types of hackathon. Not "the 3 types of hackathons. The ones you and I have been too were nothing like this and were simply not in the harmful category.

Hi,

I went to BattleHack Austin two years ago (and then to the world finals in San Jose), and really enjoyed it.

I would say that it doesn't fit into any of those categories - it's not a business pitch-a-thon, PayPal doesn't own your code, and it's not a recruiting deal either. BattleHack is still the best hackathon I've ever been to.

They're doing the BattleHack hackathons to raise awareness of their developer programs with coders, for a company like PayPal, it's not a lot of money to spend.

Thanks for the info. I'm a bit concerned about the 'staying up for 30 hours' bit, but we'll see how that goes.

I recently went to a hackathon where participants owned code they wrote, but no mention was made of who ideas belonged to. What category does that fall into?

Since the general HN consensus on such things is "execution > idea" is it all right if a hackathon says "We might use your idea in our products"?

PS. Obviously, it's never OK if they say "We own your idea and you can't use it anymore".

A key detail that seems to be missed by this article: these are three types as a subset of hackathons. Not all have to be that way, and many are not.

My biggest problem with hackathons is that they are usually student-only events, which I feel is a terrible and unnecessary restriction. I have participated in a hackathon several previous times as it was lax with its entry requirements (I was not a student but an alumnus), but their sign-up page now says it is open to undergraduates and high school students with special permission.

I have a BS and MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering and an MBA but my passion for the last few years has been anything and everything related to programming. I’m willing to travel all over the country and the world to attend these events as they are great opportunities for learning, meeting people, working with technologies that aren’t available, and providing a good reason to be in front of a computer for 24 or more hours at a time. I’m willing to pay a non-student entry fee or do whatever else is necessary to help out to offset the additional cost that I would bring. Having a bunch of computer science students working together is great, but the hackathon experience can be greatly enhanced by people who have different backgrounds or industry experience, are entrepreneurial, or have connections to companies, financing, jobs, etc.

Different backgrounds bring different people and thinking together. How would having a marketer, pianist, chemist, or sports therapist change the idea generation process? Industry experience is provided on the tech side by some of the sponsors or organizers, but you will never know what software pharmaceutical companies need unless you have someone with a Doctor of Pharmacy who has been working with pharmaceutical software for several years like my one friend who attended the hackathon. You will never know what huge opportunities are available in the Department of Defense or data architecture fields unless you have someone like myself with years of experience working in those industries. Our mix of two people with industry experience (PharmD in pharmaceutical, MBA/Engineering in DoD), and students in Psychology (med. school ambitions), and traditional computer science can lead to both some wild ideas or practical software that is desired or needed in industry.

Trying to include entrepreneurs and people with business interests are another way to improve hackathons. I was really impressed that there were over 100 submitted projects for this hackathon, an incredible number and an accomplishment for a hackathon that has been growing bigger every semseter. Most of these projects will die and never be developed for in the future. And while that is a good idea for most of the hacks, some are promising for future development. I would love to see some of these hacks turn into businesses, start generating revenue, or start accumulating large user bases. This is often too much of a time/money constraint for a broke student to accommodate amongst the many classes, projects, exams, work, and debt that they have to deal with. Opening hackathons up to non-students can get entrepreneurs, funding, and people who have the time and money resources to take the project to the next level involved.

Bringing in non-students also can bring in connections to companies which can be invaluable to students. This can bring in people who have access to jobs, internships, and exclusive technologies. It also can bring experience to show students how technologies or work flows exist in industry and what to be prepared for as ideas move from one or two person teams into businesses with hundreds or thousands of employees.

I stole this off of my blog, as the concerns I had previously are the same.

http://jbutewicz.com/hackru-fall-2014/

How is equity divided among the members of a team? There are many ways it could be but unless it is discussed - and agreed to - up-front, if a successful business results, or perhaps if lots of debts result, so will lawsuits.

By contrast I greatly enjoyed MacHack. It saddens me that it's not held anymore. Most people work on their own things, as individuals. The prize is an "A-Trap". It's a type of rat trap; the A-Trap was chosen because Mac OS System and Toolbox calls were implement as "A-Line Exceptions", that is, an illegal instruction, the first byte of which was 0xA.

The objective of MacHack was to hack the system in some clever way; it wasn't to start a business. It was to have fun.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com