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Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
100 sepidy 70 5/4/2025, 8:55:41 PM
Been going to a bunch of hackathons in SF lately and honestly, everything feels fake. There are like 20 sponsors handing out credits for their tools that all do the same thing. Half the time, they can’t even explain what they’re for. They’re just hoping someone uses them so they can count it as adoption. Everyone jams these into projects to check a box, and what gets built is mostly BS with zero innovation.
Was it always like this and I'm noticing it now, or has something changed?
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.
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Great times
As discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3609912
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
Meatspace get-togethers focused on hacking, either for a specific project or for a clique, never used the term "Hackathon". At least in my circles. Those were just "get togethers" or maybe "hacking weekends". But with small caps. I.e., not "Hacking Weekends" or "Hackathons", but "a weekend we're scheduling the purpose of which is to hack on something; i.e., a hacking weekend".
Less of an "event for the public" and more like "a group of friends planning a weekend get-away". I think for one of them we managed to get a few thousand or something from someone's employer to cover some costs. But "sponsorship" would be a strong word.
I've never lived in SF so maybe it was more of a thing there.
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.
I will say (as someone that runs, organises and builds CTFs) organising meaningful CTFs is becoming slightly challenging though, a lot of challenges are highly treaded ground where one very mature team just comes along and clears the table.
That and generative AI can solve a lot of CTF problems with enough prodding if it’s at all derivative.
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.
- 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.
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...
"hackathons" were lame once they got a name. They became lame because it wasn't exploring what interested you, pushing frontiers but had a define goal that wasn't yours. You have to fit into someone else's plan for the "hackathon", and what the outcomes would be.
How on earth is there anything "hackerish" if you're diligently fitting into someone else's plan? Lame.
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.
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.
To the latter, the benefit for me was to have tech folks help the policy folks ask and answer the right questions. Later, specific projects were started to help social service orgs implement some thing.
Have to say, both events (and I attended several of each) were exciting. . . they challenged me in a way I was unfortunately not used to (except in high school and college) and showed that others were actually interested and part of the solution.
The major plus of the budget hackathons was that we got to see students (middle schoolers, IIRC) who were doing whatever it was they were doing and having a blast. As a child advocate (lobbyist on kids issues), this made me very, very happy.
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.
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.
Corollary: if your company promises to have a hackathon one day, it's best to get prepared and have a bunch of good ideas well ahead of time.
I've found that the group really makes the experience, and find them less fun for the tech and more fun for learning about the people through the work and a team project without the constraints of a corporation.
And generally, it's not just people who aren't tied up in this that will participate, but people who will make time to do something exciting and form an interesting connection.
Regular software projects can also be creative, but almost all software is pure CRUD at the heart.
The next issue is the required time for the MVP. For a game, you can validate the base game loop quiet quickly. It's a lot harder to validate wherever regular software is actually viable, because you usually need to basically finish it entirely before the UX can really be validated if a mock-up doesn't suffice
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.
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.
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 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.
Pretty good deal to me!
The tl;dr is that hacking, like discussion on the Internet, is into the dark forest model now.
"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.
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.
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.
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 extremely useful 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
They're often framed by employers as perks: Look, we're giving you the chance to come and work overtime for free, isn't that great?
My company 15 years ago or so did a hackathon with arduinos, where they provided a bunch of arduinos and hardware and food, but the projects we made were completely unrelated to work and served no practical purpose. My team made a Simon says game.
It was just for fun, there was no benefit for the company. I think those are fine.
A recent boss mandated that people come on weekends. Everyone’s contract said you have to, except mine. I pointed out to the boss that even though he can ask people to work on weekends, there are laws that prevent how much (you need more and longer breaks, and you can’t do it every weekend.)
He got cold feet and cancelled the event. But he forgot to tell people. The most junior developer had spent 2+ hours on the commute.
These are not real hackathons.
They’re corporate knockoffs.
Often sold as team building and way to level up in competence/skill, with an undertone of proving your loyalty to the company.