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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... |
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.