The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

The Hackathon Fast Track: From Campus to Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

75 pointszonotope39 comments

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.

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.)

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 :)

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.

> Likewise, students say hackathons are an ideal way to test-drive the experience of working at a start-up before committing to a job.

I don't really understand this. Working at a startup is not about sleeping 2 hours a night and/or churning out a new products in 36 hours. It is about committing to an idea for years and continuing to persevere when everything goes wrong and things look horrible (which is inevitable).

I'm not saying hackathons are bad, they seem fun. But in terms of recruiting, I'd much rather work with somebody who spend 1 year working on the same idea, rather than somebody who has done 20 hackathons on all sorts of different stuff.

One thing that the author missed, but might shed some light on your point, is that many of the top student hackers in this movement actually do specialize in a single tool or technique across many events. Great example: Shariq Hashme (the first person mentioned in the article) has a long, successful track record of making amazing Oculus Rift and constructed hardware hacks. So while the projects themselves might be different, the students do often demonstrate that commitment to mastery that you're looking for.

Please suggest a better alternative to simulate the culture and mentality of a startup, for a typical 18 year old who is not a part of the world of tech.

Getting together with friends in your spare time to make a web site/app?

Hackathons are a pretty good way of starting something like this for a college student (though obviously not the only way). I know several groups people who met at hackathons then went on to start a larger project together (often not the same project they did at the hackathon). That's one of the nice thing about college hackathons - you get to meet other students who like to build stuff in their spare time.

This isn't necessarily an alternative, but a good compliment would be finding an open source project you like and make a few different contributions to it. You'll learn a bunch of skills that are entirely independent of things you'd learn at a hackathon, but are very useful:

- How to read other people's code

- How to write code that wont be immediately thrown away (a problem generally at school)

- How to interface with project maintainers and get your changes accepted into the project

Ship something and iterate.

The thing that makes me crazy about hackathons is that they reinforce the school mentality of "I am going to do a thing for a small amount of time, get some approval, and then ignore it forever." For people doing anything real, it's poisonous.

I would much rather see people commit to a semester of weekly demos with the understanding that they were supposed to ship to real users by week 4 at the latest. Then the goals would all be about improvement. More users, better service, more polished product. That's the essence of startup life.

If people really want to do a weekend thing, I'd much prefer something like Lean Startup Machine, an event I occasionally mentor at. There the weekend isn't about building, it's about iteratively testing customer and product hypotheses. It basically ignores the tech side of tech startups and is mainly about customer development.

I think that's a great choice for novices to understand startup mentality because it teaches you that a) you know nothing until you have proof from your customers, b) your notions about your business are probably wrong, and that c) the best way to deal with that is to find out as soon as possible so you can get better notions.

This is valid, but in the college CS world, doing hackathons is a very good predictor that you're also building your own stuff outside of them.

It also shows you're experienced enough to not be afraid. The best part of hackathons is going from 0 - X on some new technology, in a much faster way than if you had picked it up on your own, in the evenings. You know you're going to learn for a good 36 hours and try to build a real thing with it, so you won't give up after the first tutorial. Not every hackathon hacker uses a technology that's new to them, but a large amount do.

If you're a student and are interested in finding a hackathon near you to participate in, check out https://mlh.io/events for a list of great events in North America and https://mlh.io/eu for events in Europe.

As someone who got their start at student hackathons (I wanted to be a lawyer before I went to my first one) and as someone who has been to hundreds of these in my life, I can definitely testify to the importance of this movement for students everywhere. This is where you learn the hard skills you need to be a programmer, designer, entrepreneur, or artist - not in the classroom.

I was with you right up until "This is where you learn the hard skills you need to be a programmer, designer, entrepreneur, or artist - not in the classroom.".

If you want to have fun and really wring out your skillset as any of those things, Hackathons are a great place to do it. If you want to experience something new, if you want to meet interesting people, sure, hackathons are great. But a hackathon is a terrible environment to learn programming and entrepreneurship.

Hackathons won't help you learn, or improve at programming. At a hackathon you're slapping APIs together and writing code that just barely works well enough for a demo. You have 24-48 hours, you don't have time to learn how to do things well, that can only come with experience and often, yes, in the classroom.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, and I mean really execute on a product, talk to users, find the right niche, iterate on an idea and figure out a real business model, you won't do it at a hackathon. You're most interested in making something that will be entertaining for the audience there on that day.

I'm not a designer or artist, so I can't speak for them, but I'm sure the situation is similar. I've been to at least half a dozen hackathons of various stripes in the last few years, and while they're tremendous fun, they don't replace learning.

I think the thing that you have to remember is that there are a lot of different types of learners out there. From the sound of it, the hackathon environment is not conducive to your particular learning style (which is totally fine). Hackathons are great for the kinds of people who learn by doing or who need lots of real-world practice to master skills.

The other thing I'll point out is that a lot of "hard skills" that you need to be successful at those things are not necessarily technical. Examples: learning to work on a team, learning to deal with things going wrong on a deadline, learning to explain your work to other people. So, don't forget about those benefits too!

I disagree, I think the hard skills for being a successful software developer are picked up by honing your craft daily working on the same project. Hackathons are too contrived since the goal is to have a finished product in 24 ~ 48 hours. Every time I have done one I throw away all the "Danger, Bad practice" signals from my sub conscience and work towards finishing the product/idea. Things that are important like maintainability (even if your hack is successful, and get investor funding you want to re-write it properly), coupling, testing, documentation, API, Memory profiling, Logging, performance optimizations, design patterns are thrown out the window to get that idyllic prototype out. Even working as a team, there is very little you gain from spending 48 hours with (mostly unknown) individuals than it is for your peers in a job where you actually have a favor economy.

And I don't mean that there isn't any value on hack-a-thons. I think you're right on dealing with deadline pressures and the ability of working yourself out of a problem in a pinch are valuable skills. I just don't think that's where the "hard" skills needed to become a successful software developer are learned.

One of the target audiences for college hackathons are college students who have very little experience. I think they are a great learning experience, at least your first few - they give you the confidence to sit down with a team and an idea and actually build it. When someone goes from never having built a mobile app to having a working iOS app they designed and built themselves with the help of a team and maybe a mentor, the hackathon was worth it.

These are the weekends that will motivate them to decide to work on a startup with a friend, or realize they can be both programmer + designer at the same time.

This kind of environment bears no relation to the workforce. Further, a lot of people learned their programming skills in the classroom and then went on to succeed at work without any hackathons.

Are there any resources like this for non-students? I used to enter programming tournaments a lot as a student, and wish I had the courage at the time to attend a hackathon. They seem very fun, but I am not really good at finding them.

A few friends and I often have our own weekend hackathons, where we'll spend 48 hours intensely hammering out the basics for either an idea we've had, or one that we decide to come up with on the spot, but I'd love to try it out in a more social, competitive setting.

I work at a startup already, it's not the learning "hard skills" part that interests me. I'd just like to meet more people who are interested in coding fun tools/toys.

There's http://www.hackathonwatch.com/

Also checking out eventbrite is a good idea.

Non-student hackathons can be a pretty mixed bag so be careful which ones you choose to go to.

Battlehack is a pretty fun hackathon that's not just for students: http://battlehack.net/

Obligatory plug with select examples from the Hackathon culture:

https://twitter.com/shit_hh_said

Relevant discussion: "Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205177

"Students who believe to be 1000x SE because they can stick two APIs together and use bootstrap end-up to be very condescending older engineers."

Nope, reality catches up to them. Fast.

We have company sponsored hackathons for internal projects. At first I dug it, but beginning to think this mainly serves to squeeze a weekend of work out of devs and to get something done fast, sometimes fast != good/sustainable/performant/well tested. But hey, free tshirt and unlimited diet coke, so that is something :-/

Company run hackathons != student hackathons. http://theycallmeswift.com/2013/10/25/dont-throw-that-hackat...

The wheel turns: it used to be programming competitions, now it's hackathons. What will be the next fad offering for glory and jobs that isn't doing the grind work of hitting the books?

Programming competitions actually require deep algorithmic knowledge and lots of training

The people who do well at hackathons and programming competitions are often excellent students. And extra-curricular activities as a way of learning more and improving yourself are generally considered good for students, right? That's one reason universities support programming competitions, hackathons, CS clubs, etc. I'd go so far as to say the best students are the ones who love their subject so much they do it in their spare time too.

Mature software companies dont produce good software in this fashion. Most such apps, if they ever get published, end up in the unsold depths of App stores.

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