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I will say that I, as a physics student, mentally crunched the numbers in my head when I saw a recent Wired article. It said: Consider the action around Apple’s iOS alone: Since its 2007 debut, 500,000 applications have generated $3 billion for developers. (Android’s 400,000 apps have earned around $100 million.) ... It costs $5,000 to throw an event for 100 participants—a tiny investment considering the payoff if a participant creates a blockbuster app that the company can market... At one hackathon hosted by an upstart open source platform, I watched the winning team hoist an oversize novelty check for $10,000. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_hackathons/ If your mental math is good, you'll see those first numbers as 2 x 3000 and 1000 / 4, or $6000 and $250 respectively, in average revenues per app. So, I'd anticipate that Android can't really motivate a hackathon. Also there is some level of bias because really bad ideas might get filtered by the hackathon system, so that perhaps you are automatically in the top 10% of apps and your expected value is instead much higher, $60,000 or so. I doubt that it's quite this high, though. Do they keep all of the submissions, or just the one that wins the prize? Because it sounded like they had 5-person app teams in this contest, and 100 people could potentially create 20 successful apps. If you got to keep all of them, then that's 20 * $6,000 - $5,000 = $115,000 expected profit before paying the programmers. Giving $10,000 to a single winning team is actually pretty absurdly conservative -- "you do all of the work, we'll keep over 90% of the profits." They can maybe get away with it because we think of ourselves as winners and splitting it up among 5, $2,000 is not bad for two days lost. Then again, assuming that everyone else is as good an app designer as you are, your expected value is only $2,000 / 20, and $100 is actually a pretty pathetic salary for that sort of competition. I mean, I know that you're "doing it for the love" or summat, but still, it sounds like these hackathon hosts have found a way to make programmers work for peanuts. Unless when they said that the team hoisted "an oversize check", they mean that each member of the team hoisted an oversize check for that same amount. Then the profits are a little closer to 50/50 split (which is still a bit crazy) and the expected profits of your 48 hours of work are $500. Is your overtime rate $10/hour? ;-) |
I've never actually been to any hackday where they kept the submissions. The only one I've been to that was really organised by a particular tech company, they obviously tried to get you to use their platform but said you didn't have to (some didn't and it was fine). Is this common?