Corporate "hackatons" are often a mess. We have anything from a truly novel ideas clearly invented right at the hackaton (as was originally intended) which are rough and very unpolished and buggy or even broken, to teams brazenly bringing up developments which clearly were ongoing for months, not even hiding that and showing weeks or months of test and dev results in the eventual presentation. The latter teams won of course every time. I kinda get the business benefits, but the spirit of the contest goes out of the window.
Oh, and don't get me started on the fact that a lot of developers get two relaxed fun days while with catering, networking and basically paid for self-improvement workdays, while QA, supports and other teams are expected to work as usual AND cheer for those participating and watch presentations (thankfully that last is optional).
> but the spirit of the contest goes out of the window.
"-thons" aren't contests, at least not in the traditional sense, they are activities where participants test the limits of their endurance. A marathon, for example, allows runners to see how far they can push themselves running. Likewise, a hackathon gives a place for one to see how far they can push themselves to create something over a short amount of time, beyond what would normally be possible, and beyond what would be sustainable in an everyday setting. I suppose you could argue that it is contest with yourself, but calling that a contest is atypical.
You are right to call out that few people want to push themselves to their limits for a corporate event, so corporate entities have turned to contests instead to try and find something that does appeal, but a contest, no matter how it is conducted, is outside of the spirit of a hackathon.
It is viable for a race to take place at the same time as a marathon. From a logistics point of view, there is benefit in trying to draw in both those interested in marathons and those interested in racing. But there is a difference in motivation. Choose at random one of the 70,000 registrants of the NYC Marathon and ask them if they plan to win: the answer will almost certainly be no. They are there to see how far they can push themselves only. Whereas in an event that is strictly conducted as a race, generally every participant will tell you that they are seeking the win.
It is also viable for a sales pitch competition to take place at the same time as a hackathon. When we look past the early hackathon days, we can observe a trend towards events hosting both. Similar to marathon/races, appealing to a wider audience helps with logistics. Maybe that is where things get confusing?
Perhaps this is easier for you to reason about with a telethon? Rarely do we find a competitive element show up as being an objective of the event in that setting. Only the endurance component, where telephone operators push themselves to answer phones for periods of time beyond what would be considered normal.
Hackatons are commonly used as a way to take credit for & reap the benefits of another person or team's work, without attribution or compensation. And oftentimes, a promising hackathon idea will be "improved" by management & added to the creator's workload with tight deadlines (because the hard part is already done!) -- even if they don't necessarily agree with the "improvements".
Yep, a way to get free work by pretending its fun, most corpos immediately turn around and do this.
It's also funny to me because of how they try to show its a treat to the engineering staff, and then railroad them as soon as they can to implement the half baked idea.
The truth is that most management don't ever get beyond half baked ideas and so trying to push you to make low quality crap is often their only move.
I dunno, I think I got more out of it than I put in, but it was mostly due to happenstance and knock on events, and my name sounding more familiar to some important people, but this wasn't really in the cards.
Imo if you don't do stuff others dont you wont end up in places others dont, which might be good or bad.
I mean, one of the biggest raises I got was when I brought my dog to the company cookout, and it turned out my boss's boss was a huge dog person, and we bonded over that, and he decided I was a good guy, which was kinda ironic as I was working my arse off to little benefit at that time.
Same scummy move as streamers / online personalities having a "contest" for a t-shirt design or logo design, which the streamer will sell for their personal profit while offering nothing but "exposure" to the creator.
I did a 3-month bootcamp back in the day and the top assessed final presentations were a powerpoint and some bs JS "game" that indeed was a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code. This was a Rails bootcamp, not a powerpoint one, not a js one...
I did a hackathon many years ago (before LLMs) where I spent a serious amount of effort training a conventional machine learning algorithm and integrating it into a react native app. I had a genuinely impressive team to make this possible given it was 2016.
The winning team bought a bootstrap theme for $35 and made a landing page for a nonexistent app.
When did this happen? I remember judges at hackathons used to be very forgiving about lackluster UIs as long as the idea was cool and at least functional by the presentation time
It depends a lot on the hackathon/what the judges are looking for. A few are run by technical people who pick the coolest technical architectures, a few are run by casual users who pick the best looking result.
The majority of the ones I’ve been in have tended to be run by people who judge based on their notion of how useful the app will be societally, with the tie breaking factor being the UI/architectural design.
10+ years ago, when most "grassroots" (and some of the better startup) hackathons were displaced by enterprise-sponsored hackathons. I can mostly talk about the Berlin hackathon scene, but as far as I understand it the same thing happened in SF/London as well around the same time.
Presentation-first judging has been a thing for a long time, and unless there is a organizing party that explicitly makes code reviews a part of the scoring, and the organizers ensure attendance quotas for different personas (engineer vs. product vs. designer) it will always drift that way.
Reminds me of the inconsistency of take home interview tests where you have no idea if the person reviewing cares that the UI is shiny or not or if they want you to write a novel in the readme and make it look like a real project.
This has pretty much always been the case. You've never been able to build production-level software in 2 days (not even in the age of AI, no), so it's always been about having a UI with mocked data.
I did a lot of hackathons when I was in school more than 10 years ago and that's how they all were and what every team did.
I had a similar experience in my undergrad software engineering course. One group literally took a JS facial recognition library and wrapped a halfway decent UI around it. That’s it, that was their entire project. But the grad student teaching the class and a lot of the other students were very impressed.
You'd be surprised about how much production level software was built in two days — the fact that organizations are usually unable to do that is what gave rise to the agile movement, though it falls apart as soon as management asks for agile coaches and for agile teams to document their processes for others to use.