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Comment by bjpbakker | Hacker News Reader

Many hackatons are organized around the host company's business goals. They are either organized for recruiting purposes or to get cheap labor (sometimes both)

I love coding and do code a lot in my own time. But I'm not gonna work for free for some company or government (it's your solutions to their problems) just because they market an event as a hackaton.

There might be better events out there but this is my experience.

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> hey are either organized for recruiting purposes or to get cheap labor (sometimes both)

yeah, i'd argue that in many cases the original meaning of the term "hack" has been co-opted by capitalism

these days i mentally find/replace "hack" with "work", for amusing but arguably far more accurate results: e.g. do i want to go along to a 24-hour workathon for the possibility to win prizes or whatever? nope.

Yeah, that is why i don't attend. There is always a motive from a company behind it.. If i just wanna screw around with code it's better to do that from home, with friends, or on lan's imho.

Is cheap labour really a consideration? Are companies seriously basing products off code written at hackathons?

They don't base products off them but it is useful as quick prototyping / hacking together some minimalistic MVPs. Outside of hackaton they would have to actually pay developers to do this sort of prototyping / hacking work but they can get it for free in hackatons.

It's obviously not a major thing but it still irks me, especially when hackatons are over the weekend when you would normally charge double of normal rate for overtime if it was a part of normal work and you agreed to do it for some reason (meeting deadline etc).

The some of the shit that goes to prod man.

Word! Work for free day and night for a whole weekend and give out the IP for the meager pay of some buffet lunch and maybe a tshirt. Are programmers that cheap?

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