Originally published on my blog.
There was a Hackathon by our local government a few days back and the whole situation was insane. They almost bro...
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I agree with you to some extent. But there are some points on which I have a different point of view.
Most hackathons project don't go anywhere- in India sure. But what I learned from that time was invaluable. Sure the burnout was real and I didn't code for 2 weeks after. But don't look at the short term, my experience was very valuable later and I learned somethings on which I reflected on in those 2 weeks.
So this is actually why I proposed a "hackathon" at my company where developers are not to be interrupted for a stretch of time. That allowed them to focus and come up with some really cool prototypes.
If you are referring to 8 hours - I believe you need more time than that to translate an idea to code. In my opinion 24-36 hours are optimum.
I'd be careful with words like toxic. I don't think there's anything wrong with these bursts of work, as long as it's your ow choice to participate, and there's no pressure to enter. (I don't know if this pressure exists when the company you work for organizes a hackathon, for example). I think it can be extremely valuable to take something from idea to completion under a tight time constraint.
I do like the idea of trying to create a form of hackathon that doesn't wreck your sleeping patterns as much. If you could somehow ensure that code doesn't leave the physical room in which the hackathon happens, you could prohibit people from woking outside the hours of 9AM-5PM, but still spread the event over multiple days.
Hackathons may suit for students and who are still young and have much energy (no offense here).
its waste of time for me.
To learn something new, join sharing experience meet-up or short 2-3 hours coding only.
To make some interesting usable or continuable products, even 36 hours is NOT enough.
I prefer going to Gym, hangout, or socializing than burning out all of my energy :D
Agreed.
Thank you, I just came from my first hackathon, I am a 36 yo engineer that works mainly with electronics and programming is my hobby, my team did a really solid job but was not one of the "5 chosen" out of 200 teams. We felt the judging was unfair and mainly unprofessional, not trying to sound like a bad loser here but the main thing I felt was that our time was wasted. Probably because in our case none of the teams had a chance for a pitch time to explain our ideas, only the top 5 based in the very subjective and personal view plus the randomness of the judges as not all judges saw all projects.
It felt like a waste, maybe if it is focused to younger devs on a more even and fair scenario, but the way I lived it was not fun and enjoyable in any way.
I recently entered a hackathon in Europe
My team had a complete working solution
And there were 1-2 other credible ideas but none with working code
The contest had three segments two segments were sponsored by enterprises from country A and one segment from country B
My team took part in the section judged by Country B
As the judging went on we discovered many teams had nothing but a PowerPoint and one team even didn’t have a PowerPoint.... they scratched something on a whiteboard and presented pictures of those drawings. When asked what language one uses for Ethereum smart contracts this team answered Python. This was one of the eventual winning teams !!
Anyway, eventually the country A sections were awarded to teams from country A, and country B prizes went to teams from country B.
The goal of inviting teams from overseas like mine is to make this look like some international event when infact the winners were already predetermined...like I alluded to earlier they could put up a handrawn diagram and still win.
I have unfortunately been to several of these farcical events and would warn foreign teams from traveling to these fake Hackathons and accelerator pitch days which are simply vehicles to award prizes to whichever local company however useless.
care to elaborate on that one?