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by morgante 4078 days ago
> Competition creates a bad atmosphere and it's better to reduce it to minimum. It's much more fun to care about maximizing the amount of cool projects being created than just fighting for the top spot.

I understand that theoretical viewpoint, but I've never seen it play out that way.

Even at huge hackathons with prizes of thousands of dollars, I see lots of people helping each other across teams. At the end of the day, true hackers will like the money but also like helping out new developers.

I don't like the societal assumption that competition is automatically evil.

1 comments

> Even at huge hackathons with prizes of thousands of dollars, I see lots of people helping each other across teams. At the end of the day, true hackers will like the money but also like helping out new developers.

Thanks for the data point.

> I don't like the societal assumption that competition is automatically evil.

The societal assumption, at least the one I grew up with, was that competition is Good and Awesome, because it drives the Great Capitalist Economy (as opposed to socialism that ended just around the time I was born). But it seems more and more evident that competition has only very limited applications.