Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

When I was in college (over 20 years ago now), what we called “hackathons” was a bunch of us (4-6 max) holing up in an apartment for the weekend, and working on our personal projects while ordering pizza and sleeping on couches.

It was really nice having a group of people you could demo what you were working on/ask for help or feedback within immediate range at all times. There was also something really peaceful about coding at 5a on Sunday while everyone else was fast asleep.

When I moved to SF, I was so surprised to find out that there were “professional” hackathons. I went to a couple and came to the same conclusion as you.

I do miss the vibe of the OG hackathons I did with my friends, but I was 19 and we had no commitments back then. Nowadays the best way for me to be productive is to have regular meal, disciplined working hours, and good nights of sleep - so no more sleeping on couches with half empty boxes of pizza by my side.

I mostly agree with the premise, but to point out something kinda funny: these complaints are basically identical to the ones I remember from a time I personally remember as the "heyday" of hackathons (early/mid 2010s).

I think:

- they've had this degree of fakeness for almost the entirety of their existence (as long as they've needed "sponsorship" / been 6+ figure events)

- at its best, there also was a scene/subculture _surrounding_ hackathons that did care about building genuinely "cool" / "impressive" things, had an earnest interest in actually starting something longer term (there are some really successful founders that "incubated" in the hackathon scene). these folks frequented hackathons, and eventually moved on as the scene saturated with careerism / they "grew up" professionally

I organized some grassroots hackathon events 10+ years ago. Turnout was mostly students and die-hard geeks who wanted something to do on the weekend. Even in this small pond we had a local startup sponsor and try to shoe-horn their service into it.

When I attended bigger events with bigger sponsors it felt like 90% marketing to pitch your idea. The actual technical side was never that impressive or interesting.

One community that kicks ass at this are InfoSec people, I've done a lot of terrific volunteer-run CTFs.

[delayed]

One company I worked for had a culture of semi-regular hackathons and are they were often a lot of fun. As an old, I got to work with some non-jaded wide-eyed interns from U of Waterloo who worked their asses off on inspired hackathon projects as well as doing some solid work for our team. Interns had plenty of motivation to make a splash (and to take chances) and working with them was often a breath of fresh air.

On our larger team, we'd have week long hackathons where the theme was the elimination of jank/cruft/hazards/annoyances across code, infrastructure, and process. We'd split into 2-4 person teams and do our work, and at the end there'd be presentations and war stories, celebrations and the occasional defeat. Somebody would win a prize, and we'd do it again in 6 months.

Corporate Hackathons have been a net positive for me, but I've also seen them implemented poorly, where you were still expected to shovel a full load of story points that sprint.

Hack the hackathon. My follow-at-your-own-risk pro tip: Find a team not too much into wining and

- connect with others. They’re primarily networking events and are still good for that.

- Don’t bother checking the sponsors boxes too much. Have fun trying technical/product ideas that interest your for any _personal_ reason. Should fit with your team project obviously. If not, keep it for next time and instead:

- peer with others. Peering with a person you don’t know is an incredible social and technical experience, whatever your level difference.

- sleep at night. You want to be rested to have a good and useful time.

- don’t bother too much wining. The podium looks fancy but won’t make much a difference as soon as the doors close. It doesn’t really make a difference for networking, bootstrapping the resume line or having fun. But:

- aim for a MVP or at least something that run and you can show. It’s not fun to tight the last knobs afterwards. Something (anything) functional will make you and your team proud, will assist the resume line and will be fun and memberberries for the future.

I agree. As a sponsor, we don’t also do it any longer. The incentives are fake. You want people to be excited about using your tool, not using it in some contrived way to win a few bucks. When the use is real, the feedback is real. Otherwise, it’s the blind leading the blind.

The hackathons I remember as a college student were different. They were much more free form. You were asked to create something around a broad topic: eg graphics, operating systems, modeling a neuron. You were allowed and encouraged to go outside the box.

Getting the prize was fun, but a working artifact was much more satisfying. That’s why we did it.

So, yes, it’s too commercial these days.

Based on my experience, Hackathons are meant as networking events where you might put together some simple prototype. Usually people oversell whatever it is that they built, and they're using existing skills to rebuild some small part of a larger thing which they've already studied extensively outside of the event.

If a company is a big sponsor and they're offering an extra prize for using their tool then people will figure out a way to jam it into their project, but it's rarely the optimal choice. I think it has always been like this.

But if you really want to build something and there's a sponsor at the event you should ask them for lots of free credits or for some contact info in order to establish a longer-term sponsorship.

Seeing some good comments and will add to the pile.

IMO it's not a "now" thing. There's a natural ad-hoc, close proximity vibe that some gatherings have. They often come with everything else, including flow and good (best of this kind) memories.

I imagine some of these were called hackathons and some LAN parties, etc. Nevertheless it's not a straightforward thing to recreate artificially. Unfortunately most public / large "hackathons" I went to were failed attempts.

I've had the great experience of growing up in eastern Europe in 90s and 00s and so in highschool if you qualified for the higher stages of CS olympiads you were allowed to skip classes and spend time in the "lab" with the other "olympics". That was the first "hackathon", basically sometimes a few weeks in a row of coding with everyone else from 8AM till whenever you were in trouble if you didn't get home. Sometimes playing Doom, sometimes with the teachers, but most times coding. It was ... "electric" - unfortunately I don't have writing skills to make justice to it. Then there were the LAN parties and those were very good too, and so on.

I've actually been through a few hackathons at work that were pretty good.

Every time they are with the people you know well and few more (1-2) degrees of separation, but always with a shared goal and nothing else but the pure shared goal of the hackatahon. Everyone is already fluent and will hit the ground running, etc. Otherwise it's bunch of people that never worked together, not "style" cohhesion, etc. fucking around trying to figure out stuff that should already be in place for a proper hackathon.

I could go on and think I'd probably have a few good things to add here, but wouldn't be sure that it's a "solution", just some facts from my own experience.

But man, those days in the "lab" doing CS problems, they gave me the "high" for what coding can be like for the rest of my life. I don't need more than 15s of that to want to GO, haha :)

“Hackathons are how marketing guys wish software were made.” - http://scripting.com/stories/2012/02/19/hackathonsAreNonsens...

As discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3609912

I haven't been to a hackathon in a long time, but the best ones I remember were explicitly about getting designers and developers to build something concrete but simple for a good cause. I think in some cases just a working prototype was sufficient for the "client," who could then more easily apply for grants to build a more robust or fully featured version.

POV, the PBS documentary series, used to have weekend hackathons in NYC in the early 2010s that paired the filmmakers with designers and coders. They were pretty good—filmmakers would come with an idea for a website they needed to support the film, basically, often a data visualization component or something to collect information from the public about the subject of the film.

The Tribeca Film Institute did something similar a couple of times, too—I went to one at CERN that they ran where scientists worked with designers, developers, musicians, etc. to build projects presenting their research, and another in Detroit.

I remember others like this as well from other organizations. It's still a bit of a weird format because you're basically doing pro bono or minimally paid freelance work on a tight deadline with your client sitting next to you, but they could produce some generally interesting work.

Some hackathons in this category I remember also had a goal of letting non-coders understand how the coding process works, which is hard to balance with actually getting stuff done.

Game jams are less fake and quite numerous.

The reason is simply because there is very little money in indie video games. But still a ton of passion. If you want authentic nerd dev time, it's still there.

Just don't expect it to be catered.

When I was salaried, I never participated in company-sponsored hackathons and actively resisted attending any conferences or anything of the sort. Even back in late 00's / early 2010's it all felt like sponsorship hell, and my point of reference for the activities was nigh-impossible to recreate..

When I was a teenager in the mid-90's, I would go to a monthly Boy Scouts Explorer Post group hosted/sponsored by CompuServe (at their headquarters). My brother and I were a couple years younger than some of the "cool hacker" dudes (it was almost all dudes), like this guy Travis who had already had multiple Dade Murphy-esque run-ins with the feds and would give little talks on why it's not worth it and was honestly really supported by the alpha-nerd adults (not pejorative) who worked for CompuServe who ran the thing and were trying to keep us all from life-changing mischief (while still encouraging safer mischief).

Other attendees would give presentations on MODs (FastTracker / Impulse Tracker), or show off software they wrote (or found) that was cool, that kind of thing, and the only sponsor was CompuServe itself (which gave us all free dialup accounts).

I remember one time we set up a booth at the fairgrounds, like inside of one of those giant, long open-air pavilion buildings that normally would have horse/animal stalls, with a row of computers to demo either their brand new service "WOW!" [0] or maybe it was WorldsAway [1] to the general public. I had no idea what I was doing lol, but it sure did feel important!

Anyways, my rose-tinted vision of what a hackathon should be is some amalgamation of trading rainbow books at Cyberdelia mixed with those monthly CompuServe meetings where elders guided the young through the labyrinth of technology mixed with like a LAN party where instead of games, people get together, code, push boundaries, exchange ideas, and make something cool. Or something.

Not a brutal, forced interaction with your coworkers that wastes time, produces jack shit, and is sponsored by SliceLine Pizza lol

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6BQzd2km58

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/424450/this-old-tech-remembe...

I’m not really sure they ever made much sense. Going back 15-20 years ago, they were always poorly executed and was not for the devs.

The only exception was one I went to put on by Atlassian a long time ago which was a hardcore geek-vs-geek live coding night with lots of drinking and real prizes. This was before they went public and didn’t care about offending.

The company I work for has hackathons. Come up with a good idea and spend a lot of time (after hours) on the project. In the old days that was called a job and you got paid.

From my experience, I find most of the time the best part about hackathons is not what you create, but who you get to meet/network with. It may just be my uni/age cohort, but most projects I saw at the last hackathon I went to were less "MVP" type/semi-complete projects and more just "we have a concept of a plan."

Recently on HN: "The Gang Has A Mid-Life Crisis"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43860696

Hackathons are fun and productive when what you need to do/learn — something you haven't already done/learned — can be done/learned in a weekend. Once you graduate, there's a lot fewer of those things lying around. Quote:

> We need look no further than the "hackathon," that sad facsimile of the days when we were all learning the basics so fast that the world could be ours with just a day or two of focused effort. Hype up an exciting atmosphere, assemble some folks with so few attachments in life that they have time to spend all weekend at a hackathon, and this ritual will summon up the old gods. The hackathon is the proof that people believe this can work, and it is the proof that it doesn't.

Yes most hackathons are crap but I will say one I attend (or at least try to mostly due to how I work) is the HL7 FHIR Connectathons. Its for an altruistic purpose (making healthcare data easier to exchange) and there are always a slew of topics, vendors, visionaries, and options. You will have these 1-2 day sessions where people are trying out things hitting each others servers or clients. Its a worldwide consortium thing with both online and in person meetups. Its worth it if you are into the field.

Those who remember the start of eternal September have similar sentiments about the decline of the Internet experience as well.

All the stuff you can do just with software? It was done years ago.

The easy stuff was done and the teams got acquired/acquihired.

The hard stuff was done by VC backed companies.

All the stuff that’s not done is even harder than that.

Hackathon in 2025 is late to the party. But it’s still fun to spend a weekend making whatever you want and be fed - food and credits! - by VC-backed companies trying to juice numbers.

Plus a hackathon is the perfect amount of time to vibecode something cool.

I've seen some cool hackathons run internally at some companies I've worked for. It was during work hours (paid) and managers set time aside for people who wanted to participate. Often it was something like, "we have all this data, what could we use it for?" and teams would often come up with some pretty cool projects based on the data.

At the end there was a big presentation that anyone in the company could attend and each team would present what they came up with.

Some of them eventually became products directly, or at least set the groundwork for future products.

So in a sense it was basically just "work", but it was driven by the individual contributors and not a top-down directive.

The first time I went to a hackathon early in my career, the team that won doesn't even have a working product. It's just a screenshots of a multiple websites that was stitched together to visualize what the product will be. Kinda bullshit but the presenter was very well spoken.

I've never been to a hackathon ever since then.

IME hackathons have always been a farce. Maybe I saw too many win with a nice UI and mocked data. Form over substance seems to be even more in vogue nowadays. Maybe I need a nap…

Ten years ago they were fake. Everyone that won basically prepped their system and worked on their own presentation.

Every commercial hackathon I've ever seen was basically been that.

The only good ones have ironically been government run. Like you need to use open data or a new government API or something but the rest is up to you.

I haven't attended one in a while, but I signed up for some on devpost and so far it seems on point. Also -- lots and lots of AI, which I guess is to be expected.

I remember attending a hackathon many years ago in my university's comp sci department. It was just a random weeknight, a smallish group of people coding and talking. Anyway, like 5 pizzas came, and I asked who I should give money to. I was told "don't worry, Google buys them". It was the first and last time I heard the company mentioned that night.

It was cool.

My company does a lot of hackathons and we support a decent number of hackathons in quantum computing throughout the world. And I have had the same sentiment in the quantum computing space as well and thinking through the reason for it, my sense is that 24-48 hours is not enough time to build something meaningful. This is not to say that absolutely cannot be done, but the chances of something cool being made are generally low. My guess is that this idea might hold in general, anything that can be built really quickly tends not to be too impressive and all impressive things tend to take longer. I have gotten to a point where, if I see something impressive, I have this nagging feeling, Was this completed here? or were you working on this for a decent amount of time and just took this opportunity to showcase it?

I’ve participated in many hackathons in recent years and they’ve all been great. I’ve not heard of anything like what you described (though I’m also not anywhere near CA).

same as hardware hacking on "conferences" - they make you go with them on 2 hour journey of unlocking something, just for you to realize after doing some of it by yourself, that they can just download firmware update from manufacturer and run BINWALK utility on it, it will spit out filesystems, which you just mount, and read from that how is everything configured, how things work, what version of linux kernel they use.... so it is just hacking of YOU. it is advertisement, marketing story. XD

The best hackathons are community driven, like the annual Ludum Dare or the advent of code. If you're going to a highrise office building for a hackathon then yeah, it's going to be overly commercial.

Try a game jam, I've never been to one with a sponsor and they were much more interpersonal and social with the participants than you describe.

It felt fake and not innovative to me in the late 00s, so I'd say yes, it may have always been the way.

I'm old enough to remember MacHack. A 72-hour Mac hackathon in Ann Arbor (late 1980s).

"Kill Dean's Inits!"

Otherwise, hackathons aren't particularly consistent with the way that I work, so I don't do them, anymore. For that reason, I don't really feel that I have any basis to judge them.

worse is when its a giant brain rape. Anything you make at the hackathon is property of <insert> sponsor. This is why I don't do them anymore. Same with game jams.

I run a nonprofit called Hack Club that helps organize most of the hackathons for high schoolers in the USA.

We’ve been trying to make high school hackathons much more around building fun projects you’re proud of than building something “impressive” - and it’s working!

You may like this video of Hack Club Scrapyard, our hackathon where you had to build stupid projects. We had 3,000 high schoolers come to the 61 locations: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8iM1W8kXrQA

What makes Hack Club events different is:

1) You must actually ship a project with a live, deployed URL and open source code, or it doesn’t count

2) They are peer-judged, instead of judged by clueless “experts” who can’t tell if a project is fake or not

3) They are organized by high schoolers, for high schoolers so there is a heavy emphasize on friendship-building and helping people go on adventures

One cool project from Scrapyard was “Desktop Circus”, where your home screen gets invaded by a circus cast that messes with your mouse, moves windows on your screen, etc. It’s inspired by Desktop Goose, which was built by another Hack Clubber.

https://bucketfish.itch.io/desktop-circus

It’s funny, when you have those 3 constraints suddenly everything feels less like “college application” and much more about building cool stuff to show your friends. All the ChatGPT wrappers rank poorly.

It’s really important that we as a society encourage young people to have fun with technology.

The few I saw had terms of participation that gave the organisers IP first rights to everything and anything done during them and every IP release was at their discretion. Even the naive soon got wind of that.

These have felt fake to me since college, so, for 20 years or so?

They’re so far from the environment where I’m most productive and creative that I’ve always considered them to be performative nonsense at best.

To be fair, what innovative projects would you expect to be even half-completed in a weekend or a few days?

Honorable mention must go out to the OpenBSD team who have been running hackathons for 20+ years now. The difference is that they are invitation only and tend to zoom in on a specific area, eg this week we will all show up in Prague and hack on routing protocols, or whatever. I can't imagine what deraadt@ would have to say about one of those Major League Hacking type events with a big corporate sponsor and influencer wannabe types floating around eveywhere.

The tl;dr is that hacking, like discussion on the Internet, is into the dark forest model now.

Not for nothing but... What event DOESN'T feel fake these days? SXSW? Burning Man? DEFCON? It's all corporate and lame. I look around and all I see is lameness. Grifters everywhere.

The only hackathons I've been part of were internal ones at a single job. Complete waste of time as the shit executives had already decided who the winners should be. So disheartening to see people deliberately misunderstanding our presentations so that they could vote for the team they wanted to win for political reasons. The final hackathon I did there ended with some execs saying "this is exactly how we will build software going forward" after my presentation.

Of course this was totally forgotten about mere hours after they said it.

I'm in the UK, so don't know what it's like elsewhere, but I get the impression it's pretty much the same thing.

Feel the same

Towards the beginning of my career, my boss asked me to go with him to a [partially] NASA-sponsored hackathon. Being more junior, I wasn't really in a position to say no and not surrender my Saturday (or so I thought at the time). He didn't really do any programming at the Hackathon. I did some pointless space-themed web UI work. It didn't result in anything worth talking about.

He used this event as a PR opportunity and went on the local radio to say we had done a project for NASA.

I'm still embarrassed about that.

An easy way to avoid this is not going to corporate-sponsored hackathons.

For a very short timespan they felt organic. But very quickly became something where companies could get value for free or very low cost.

It's because they truly are fake.

I've been to several of them in Toronto, this year and last. Teams nowadays just `git clone` some repo, put in some crappy logo and then say "I made this", and they mean it.

This is a general trend I've observed to be prevalent with zoomers (but not Gen Alpha), they just lie to others as if it was nothing. No idea what are the social cues that led them to this, but I would find that interesting to study. I don't think they're ill intentioned, I think they don't consider lying to be bad and it's some sort of way of going through life.

Not long ago I was having dinner w/ some scammers (one of them is on the latest YC batch, btw) and this guy was telling everybody that you need to lie to get ahead, "if you don't lie to your investors they will invest in someone else who is lying to them". This guy was somewhere between milennial and zoomer by age, but with a mien and mind more akin to that of a zoomer (TikTok, etc...).

Very vulgar individual. That's SOTA these days.

They felt fake 10 years ago. Some good still came from them but except the one I did at Facebook, they all felt dominated by BS. FB at least had a separate room for people actually coding who didn't want a constant stream of interruptions from advertisers, announcers, etc.

Always has been.

I have always thought of these as networking events for early career/junior SWEs. It’s almost never about “building something” but rather learning and connecting with people of various skillsets. "Winning" doesn’t matter, it’s the equivalent of a participation trophy in the real world.

Over 20 years too late on this observation

Fame, money are fickle but many people seem to go to great lengths to get them. Hackathons give those 2 and these people game the system to get them.

I joined a few corp hackathons before - only to realize the team had been coding even before the hackathon started - rather than hacking during the hackathon period!

There are weeks where every workday feels like a hackaton, honestly.

I haven't been to one in the last 6-7 years, but in the times I did, it was quite fake. The corporate ones were definitely fake to the bone (max. cringe), the external ones so and so. Nowadays I have zero expectations, its just some event to spend some time and socialize.

Even in college they always seemed like a waste of time. Cool to meet new people, but to "build" something and win was always a fools errand.

This was further enforced when I drove up to attend Hack the North at U Waterloo with a few friends from Boston. One of the contestants stayed up so late he tore a muscle in his eye and now has a permanent deformity / disability.

As an adult I'd simply never even show up to such an event, if my employer wants to pay me overtime sure - but I'd still say no.

Build cool things, get normal amounts of sleep. It's not about the clout its about improving as an engineer.

Yeah, hackathons were always shit. They're an apparatus for getting essentially free labor out of unsuspecting and gullible nerds.