I know a guy who is great at winning hackathons. He doesn't make a living off it, but has definitely made at least 100k in the past few years (divided across his team, however). I entered my first hackathon last year, and it was one he was attending.
It was really disappointing. Maybe it was just that specific hackathon? I knew "the pitch" was a big part of winning, but didn't expect it to be 99%. A few teams built some actual cool and functioning things in 24 hours. Ours was the only app with a real demo you could visit/download, rather than it only working locally on the dev's machine. But the only teams that reached the finals were the ones with great speakers and a good idea, even if it wasn't functional at all.
The guy I know ended up winning the first prize at that event. His team had an amazing idea and a great pitch, but their "app" was a powerpoint presentation, and a couple static HTML pages that faked a dynamic user flow. It worked as long as you clicked the correct image map area, and entered values into text boxes that matched what was hard-coded into the next page.
I had fun with my team and made new friends, but it was really discouraging to lose a "hackathon" mostly because the other team had better speakers and not for technical reasons. I guess I prefer game jams, no qualms about marketability or a pitch with empty promises. Maybe it's because game jams usually don't have financial prizes aside for the exposure?
I participated in a hackathon a few years ago. The task was to create a finance app using the first Pebble (remember: three (or four?) buttons, black/white no-touch display).
We thought hard about an actually useful finance app on this very limited smart watch, discarding any accounting or similar beacause input using three buttons is too cumbersome if you have a mobile phone in your pocket a few inches away.
We ended up creating a watch app that showed you the route to the next ATM on a map, along with a description of the route. Technically pretty challenging since we had to generate map tiles on a remote server and load them onto the watch. Also, each image had to be sent in two chunks since the transfer buffer was smaller than the screen...
Another group just assumed the Pebble had a camera, color display and a microphone and had no demo, just a power point presentation. They ended up as winners...
I've helped organizing the last two editions of the FIESP Hackathon in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It is a big event for Latin America standards: 3 days, 40 teams of 5 hackers (200 contestants total).
My pet peeve was always make the event more about "the hacker experience" and less about "the best PPT wins".
Things we did:
* PPT-free event: a team must show something working.
* Startup teams trying to pitch an already working product were kicked out.
* Each team must name one PR member, mentors and other staff should not interrupt anyone except this PR guy.
* Ingenuity and implementation completeness were the main criteria (the least mockups the better).
* Zero tolerance for antisocial behavior.
We strive a lot do make sure "the best hack" wins.
The trick is realizing the sponsors incentives -- they don't actually want the code you wrote in a weekend. If it's recruiting, they're looking for people to hire. If it's devrel, they're looking for people to sell their SaaS to.
They may not want the code, but they do want evidence that you can actually code. Hackathons are meant to find developers, not salespeople. So picking a team that didn't actually build something real as the winner seems like a rather bad idea.
1. A team winning a few very significant awards (including second place) for pitching an app that allows you to take picture of your food bowl and tell you the nutritional content breakdown. Of course no demo was provided, and the guys fessed up that they "didn't know anything about machine learning until two days ago, but learned everything needed to make it work in that time period." No one questioned authenticity or whether it was actually a possible thing to make.
2. Another group of 10 people who ONLY made a powerpoint talking about some app that mixed traveling and tinder. When asked by judges whether they had something besides powerpoint, they said that they "are not coders, but idea-people", and that it took 10 of them to make that powerpoint.
It isn't just on feasibility grounds, it is on the grounds that they showed nothing but a powerpoint and other questionable things they said. Feasibility is just icing on top.
In NYC, there was a hackathon I attended a few years ago where everyone got the same problems (forget what it was called - comedy hackathon maybe?). It was about who could solve it fastest (or at all). Each problem was time-boxed, to be done in a short session, and as a team. They even had games (like Golden Eye) and other crazy social stuff (go out to 5 strangers at lunch time and make them say a binary string on video). We need more pure-tech fun hackathons like that IMHO.
Ugh. My first Hackathon we built a little app that we thought was pretty cool. Nothing world-changing but it was something we were proud of for three freshmen. Then they sat us down in front of a judge who was some corporate shmuck that looked at us like we had three heads because we didn't have a "pitch".
I've had similar experiences at some hackathon events. The local Startup Weekend event a few years ago was similar, but in some ways that is more predictably skewed to who can give the best pitch, so that one didn't rub me quite so bad.
Along the same lines, there were a few local meetups where people were going to plan some ideas for innovative uses for public data sets, and what kind of data we should try and get released from the city & county. The whole thing ended up getting de-railed by non-tech "thought leader in a turtleneck" consultant types giving their personal pitches to market their brand, and nothing solid came out of that. Those who were interested in building something formed a separate group and went their own way.
At the risk of sounding like a delicate snowflake, I would really enjoy more "tech events for people who really want to get their hands dirty".
It could be a two-parter: first round is no-pitch, just POC. Second round is pitchers who choose one of the first round projects to pitch. The two teams involved in the winner split the prize.
I guess hackathons stopped being fun the moment that too many people that are not really "hackers" got involved. Unfortunately it's the typical thing that happens when something becomes too popular.
I think the big difference can be seen across two types of hackathons: ones that are corporate-sponsered, with corporations offering massive prizes and startup funding for people with "fresh, hip disruptive ideas leveraging their cool web tech", versus small ones that are about creating something neat and showing it to others. Of course, this is a gradient, and things are not black-and-white here.
A lot of small local game jams fall closer to the second category there. I think you are right that financial stakes affects the attitude of the hackathon.
At my first hackathon I had entirely opposite experience. Though it was not less disappointing.
Most of the teams came with something pre-made and tried to fit it to the theme of the event. And one team was pitching their startup. Of course all of them were good at pitching, but implementation-wise they were ahead of "hackers" too even not touching their keyboards...
Reminds me of my friends' nightmare experience at the SF girls-only hackathon.
My friends are both pretty darn good software engineers, and went to pick up some other floaters to build a team there. They got a project manager, who they tasked with finding them more engineers. Project manager comes back.... with 2 more project managers. So with their team of 2 engineers and 3 project managers they got very little product done.
I think events like this shouldn't be called "Hackathons." Maybe "Pitch Events" or something. If you can win without writing a single line of code (which I have seen at two SF "hackathons") it should not be a hackathon.
> Project manager comes back.... with 2 more project managers. So with their team of 2 engineers and 3 project managers they got very little product done.
Why? Just ignore the PM and get work done, just like normal.
PMs are great at hackathons for getting your drinks, talking to other teams, talking to judges and organisers about stuff they are looking for, getting the presentation ready.
Well, two engineers vs teams of 5 engineers is a pretty distinct disadvantage. Furthermore, the PMs weren't doing their assigned tasks, like setting up the PPT and shit, so my friends had to do all that as well.
So really the problem is the 3 other people on their team were just straight up incompetent / unmotivated, not so much that they were of X_Y_Z career.
Instead of being discouraged, another takeaway from your experience is that presentation skills are extremely important. You'll need them to sell your ideas to your boss, investors, customers, and coworkers. Expecting them to figure out your ideas for themselves is rarely going to work.
"Build it and they will come" is a Hollywood myth.
It seems like there’s a spectrum between “pitch competition” (best idea wins) and “coding challenge” (best implementation wins). Hackathons are somewhere in the middle, but given the zeitgeist behind the “hacker” movement, I am not surprised that they are leaning more towards the pitch side. After all, corporations are looking for implementable ideas rather than cool bits of tech someone hacked out in 24 hours. Transparency in the process and clear expectations help here.
That's disappointing to hear. I was considering attending some hackathons locally and was looking forward to the technical aspect of it all. I suppose the prize money incentivizes people who are more focused on "playing the game" for a profit.
At a company hackathon, we had a outside company sponsoring the hackathon, including a prize they would award to the best user of their API. It was kind of a clunky API, and their product didn't really fit what we did, so my teammate and I decided to use it - hoping that we'd be the only ones to use the API, and therefore winners by default.
We didn't win. Obviously, I'm biased, but I think our product was more promising both in terms of realistic use of the technology, and in terms of the possibility of going to market quickly. But our demo wasn't as shiny, we were from a remote office so people didn't really know who we were, and neither of us were particularly charismatic presenters.
Presentation matters. This has been impressed on us repeatedly; the joke is now that whoever manages to snag the UI/UX person first for their team is going to win.
This is interesting in a world where all I ever hear is "ideas are meaningless, execution is everything."
I get the same feeling often when reading papers. It feels like the abstract and first few paragraphs hold great promise and then you get down to what the authors really did and it's like "are you kidding?" So often there is a big hype/substance mismatch.
The idea that hackathons can favor style over substance rings true with me. Sometimes people get unfairly screwed by a bad judging panel. This is particularly true when evaluating technical merit : I've literally seen judges swoon over cool looking Axure / Pidoco presentations.
However, it goes deeper than that as not even all developers (myself included) are always as good at evaluating technical merit as we think we are - particularly if the solution involves a lot of math.
The sad story is that the pitch is actually that important. There's always people that can build and code. But not so many people that can come up with something people actually want.
yeah that was my experience with a few hackathons too, it wasn't at all what I expected. And a powerpoint presentation with static HTML pages got a prize in that one as well.
I usually go to get in the zone with some new technologies around like minded people, and not really about the theme of the hackathon itself. A lot of hackathons have tons of tertiary prizes and networking opportunities.
Unlike other places with a tech scene, Silicon Valley has an industry that caters to unskilled and wannabe programmers that aren't currently into programming at all. Hackathons, Meetups and the coding schools are at the center of that. So you shouldn't expect actual deep technology discussions at those particular things, you will be underwhelmed.
I hope the article is exaggerated. The way they are described here, these hackathons appear to be little microcosms of everything currently wrong with MVP-obsessed Silicon Valley. Let's round up a bunch of early-twentysomethings, feed them junk food, see what they can cobble together without sleep in 48 hours and reward the shiniest turd that plops out with the leftover pocket change from marketing's budget.
Where is the engineering rigor? Where is the quality assurance? Are all the edge cases handled? Security review / penetration testing? What is the performance when you serve 10K users simultaneously? Can one actually build a business out of the "product" of a hackathon, or does it basically need to be thrown away and re-architected properly? Is it even a goal to build something viable, or is it the whole event simply a way to spend corporate marketing money on buzz?
Hackathons rarely need to deal with such rigor. I've participated in quite a few and the it all boils down to understanding the judging metrics (and personalities), the bite-size tangible demo, and the marketing pitch. If you have a team that does that well, winning becomes an achievable and repeatable end result.
Hackathon projects aren't intended to be production applications. (unless people cheat and do most of the work beforehand, and use the hackathon as a soft launch with exposure)
There's such a thing as a 'prototype' and generally they are are meant to be thrown away. Software Engineering 101. They're meant to explore problem spaces, not be final solutions.
>The way they are described here, these hackathons appear to be little microcosms of everything currently wrong with MVP-obsessed Silicon Valley.
They're a direct descendant of that ecosystem, which is designed --at least in part-- to take advantage of youngster's naivete. How many times has SV told us that ideas don't matter, that you need to hustle? These hackathons find those willing to put in the most work for little gain, besides "industry stature".
That said, on an individual level, I quite enjoy the scene.
> Where is the engineering rigor? Where is the quality assurance? Are all the edge cases handled? Security review / penetration testing?
From dictionary.com and merriam-webster.com:
Hack
verb:
- to write computer programs for enjoyment
noun:
- a usually creative solution to a computer hardware or programming problem or limitation
- a piece of code that modifies a computer program in a skillful or clever way
The goal was to code for fun. Then corporations got involved and the goal became to code for a job. Now that money is involved, a goal is to code for money.
> "It was easy to see hackathons with 50k plus prizes 2 years ago. Now days some of them only offer Alexa as prizes. The college kids will do it regardless since they don't have other stuff to do, but once you get a job that is a bit too much work for very little gain."
I guess by the time the media finds out and publishes an article about an interesting way to make money, it's probably too late to make a lot of money off of it.
It all reminds me of a line by (I think) Douglas Coupland, about Gen X. I may be mangling this but it was something about being the first generation to spend most of their careers demonstrating aptitude rather than actually doing work.
I seem to recall a moment in graduate school at CMU where I realized that demonstrating aptitude had actually gotten me as far as it was going to get me. I estimate it only took a brief decade or so of sulking before I managed to act on this realization.
I was part of a startup that put on a hackathon with a 10K first prize many, many years ago. We had a group of presenters who had a polished product and were looking to put our API/whatever into their product so that they could be eligible for the prize, and you could tell that this was all that they did.
I also know that there's a group of people who attend as many hackathons as possible in the bay area for no other reason than living is expensive, and there is generally free food at the hackathons.
Honestly, I'd be a part of one of these again in a heartbeat -- the hours were crazy, but, it was a great way to get your developers, your API consumers, and everyone else in the same room, to validate if it will burst/scale up, and you can solve a lot of really interesting challenges that weekend.
Hackathon programmers remind me of tourney knights in the Dunk and Egg novellas by George RR Martin. They serve no lord and don't fight in real battles. Instead, they make their living from prize money earned jousting in tourneys.
Hackathons were a thing when they were an engineering event... an engineering holiday to work on something worth working on. Like undoing some technical debt mess or a long standing hack that you cannot fix during a sprint.
But now most hackathons are just implementing features with technical debt, which is the kind of engineering nobody likes.
Then, cheating in hackathons is incredibly hard to detect. Even if you force everyone to use version control and review what they did over time, there can always be the cooking show trick where suddenly you pull a finished important part from nowhere.
That's why I think hackathons should be engineering events, organized by engineers not the regular company hierarchy, and rewards should be given on engineering value not how much a feature can potentially sell.
In my experience, engineering hackathons are uncompensated overtime. usually on Friday nights or through weekends, dressed up as fun and games by management with free food and beer.
"well GEE, thanks..."
Of course, attendance is mandatory if you like having your job, and complaining about it makes you look like a bad sport. :|
We were behind on our launch which was a month away so these hackathons kept happening every week.
The worst thing about hackathons is having to politely interact with the 'advisors' organizers always think will be good to have. These are people from various places who want to be part of the hackathon but aren't participants or judges. Imagine finally getting into coding in earnest, finally deep into it, and up wanders a non-coder who has been told to go around to all the teams and give advice. It's almost always a horrible distraction, but you're aware your interactions with them may be linked to the odds of winning, so you have to politely interact. Of course, the advisor realizes at some point you aren't really interested in the interaction, and they feel awkward as well. My advice to organizers: don't use these people unless the hackathon topic is deeply complex domain knowledge, and in that case make them available for participants to go to, but don't make them go around.
Hackathons are great. You don't really see the 50k prizes anymore, but hacking away for a weekend and maybe getting a drone or some API credits is good fun for me. I get another project on my resume, make some new friends, potentially get a win on my resume, and spend the weekend playing with new APIs instead of derping around watching Vikings or some shit.
I don't mean to sound too negative but I've attended Startup Weekend twice now and won't be attending a third time.
Both times I expected to meet fellow developers who were better than me and to learn something and interact with people that know how to run a product development cycle or design practices.
Sadly it ends being just regular guys and girls who can't code at all, or do Wordpress and consider that coding and a bunch of people with "ideas" and no design/product framework or concepts behind them.
Not much for me to learn and I just get a bunch of people trying to get me to build their unoriginal idea for them...
However occasionally you see or hear something truly different and learn something, even if it's just a new potential market for something really niche. Just not worth the full weekend investment.
I've gone to quite a few startup weekends and I think this is a typical experience. I still enjoy it, though, but that's because I find enjoyment in the possibility of helping somebody else start their business. I usually find who I believe to be the biggest underdog or team that has the best intentions and do my best to help them. For me that's the reward, and I get to get a dedicated amount of time (forcing myself) to code some product and improve my skills or learn new ones. As you mentioned, lots of non-coders, so depending on your goals you can basically say "hey I want to build an iOS app and I'll do that for you" and then you get to make those decisions and learn what you want.
I'm not disagreeing with you, not at all really, but I will offer a defense of Startup Weekend.
I've participated in 8 or so Startup Weekends, a few as a regular attendee, a few as a mentor, and a few as a community organizer. So, I'm speaking from a position of some experience but admittedly, only within the events I experienced in the mid-Atlantic area.
I've always viewed Startup Weekend as different from a hackathon. IMO, hackathons should be more like what you're describing, developers getting together and hacking on stuff, a fairly technical focus. Whereas I view Startup Weekend as more an entrepreneur networking event. Yes, you're ostensibly there to create a startup in a weekend, but the real point is to meet people outside of your normal circles, other people who have that ambition to create something.
At least, that's how I've always pitched it to developers I encouraged to attend. If you want to have a good weekend, put some effort into picking a good team. The startup idea honestly doesn't matter so much, because it's kind of absurd to think you'll build anything real in a weekend. The startup idea will almost certainly be abandoned after the weekend. So, what really matters is finding a team of people who seem like they'd be fun to work with, people you might enjoy spending an entire weekend with, people you might want to maintain a connection with after the weekend.
I also think Startup Weekend is a bit more up front about the focus being the business idea and the pitch, not actually executing on the tech during the weekend. Of course, it can be disheartening when a completely unfeasible idea wins, but that really comes down to the judges. I've often been frustrated by the judging. For example, at one event, one judge was an expert in FinTech; so some decent ideas in that space were shot down as unfeasible, which was probably true. But some equally unfeasible machine learning ideas won, simply because none of the judges had the expertise to evaluate them.
All of that said, there are definitely diminishing returns. After you've attended one or two Startup Weekends, you've probably expanded your circle plenty – and if not, then attending a third probably won't change that. I attended so many, because I found the energy of the event to be invigorating. It felt good to be around so many people who were putting energy into creating something new – yes, often something silly/bad/unfeasible, but they were trying to do something different.
It's similar to how I feel about software conferences. It's good to attend 1 per year, because it's invigorating to be around so many developers who are passionate about technology and the craft of writing software. But as you attend more, there are rapidly diminishing returns. There are only so many ideas you can explore, only so much you can take away. In years I've attended multiple, I often find myself wishing I had just stayed home and spent the 2-4 days doing some other learning activity, e.g., pick an open source tool I use regularly, really dig into it, and try to contribute back.
I came across an article recently (can't find the link), where they talk about these "Hackathon Hustlers" not being welcome to hackathons. The argument companies make is that these people are not the target audience for hackathons and hence are viewed as unwelcome gate crashers.
i think it's fine for them to go but it kind of spoils the competition in certain cases. imagine having a hackathon with a bunch of inexperienced people trying to learn and then one intense group of professionals comes and just crushes everyone.
Three steps
1) Also built a great powerpoint/pitch
2) Built a great hack
3) Made sure to demo something real and splashy which gave my pitch an edge.
That all being said I've still been burned by pitch only and poor judging rubrics. I could go on and on but one of the main things is ask if you really have to build everything and build to the judges expectations (which they may only want a good pitch), not your own (you may think they want some amazing coded product).
Biggest team I ever did was 3 people, and I always picked my team ahead of time so we could prep (design what we'd build, make the pitch, etc.) anything except the actual coding
As a sponsor of hackathons, the "circuit" hackers have their pros and cons -- they do know how to cut to the chase, and not waste the limited time doing things like setting up their dev environment, or getting an instance spun up -- in other words, they're prepared and spend their time building things, rather than setting things up. As for cons -- seeing the same formulaic hack from a developer, but with a different splash page and pitch deck can get tiresome; or having them show up and not collaborate, connect with or help others can be a drag.
I've actually awarded prizes to both Peter and Jay on a couple of occasions. One thing to be said about these guys is that they do breath life into an event, often work with others and are damn creative.
From a participant point of view -- I still do love a good hackathon, even after years of participating in them (and winning a few along the way, too!
I'd say kudos for people who are able to make decent dimes doing hackathons. Back at college my buddies and I used to compete in Topcoder in attempt to earn some bounty prizes. I also saw teams/people who are professional Topcoders and made a living out of competitions. The same goes for Quantopian.
If a hackathon doesn't mandate certain level of technicality or a functional product, then having a good presentation that delivers a great idea/pitch is absolutely a fair game. Given 24/36 hours, the best bet is probably to leverage sponsors' APIs, cook up a good presentation (often neglected by developers) and show how promising the end product would be. Hackathons are more about priorities and showmanship and some people understand that.
People feel like hackathons are overrun by hustlers because it seems easy to win prizes. There are tons of other highly technical coding competition platforms that you can make a living by demonstrating your engineering/coding skills, Kaggle, Quantopian, Topcoder, just to name a few.
I've thought for a long time that somehow there was a movie to be made around hackathons. Now I know it has to be the code slinging hackathon pro who falls for the female corporate coder attending her first event and together they win a million dollar prize.
I competed in one that EMC posted about 6 years ago. we got 2nd place, because the social voting side of things tipped the scales in favor of the winning team. I still ended up getting a free trip to Las Vegas to their next conference out of it.
this is becoming more like http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/tournaments every day! Can we agree on the 4 grand slam hackathons and make them January Australian Hackfest, May French Codes, July Wimblehack, Sept the US Code Open.
We won SpaceApps global (starting in Valencia, Spain)! We got invited to see a launch (but all expenses were on us). It was quite cool anyway and got to met a lot of amazing people.
I wanted to make a NASA is broke joke but I like NASA and wish we could fund them a lot more. Kids still dream of being astronauts. Let's make that a priority again.
It was really disappointing. Maybe it was just that specific hackathon? I knew "the pitch" was a big part of winning, but didn't expect it to be 99%. A few teams built some actual cool and functioning things in 24 hours. Ours was the only app with a real demo you could visit/download, rather than it only working locally on the dev's machine. But the only teams that reached the finals were the ones with great speakers and a good idea, even if it wasn't functional at all.
The guy I know ended up winning the first prize at that event. His team had an amazing idea and a great pitch, but their "app" was a powerpoint presentation, and a couple static HTML pages that faked a dynamic user flow. It worked as long as you clicked the correct image map area, and entered values into text boxes that matched what was hard-coded into the next page.
I had fun with my team and made new friends, but it was really discouraging to lose a "hackathon" mostly because the other team had better speakers and not for technical reasons. I guess I prefer game jams, no qualms about marketability or a pitch with empty promises. Maybe it's because game jams usually don't have financial prizes aside for the exposure?