Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture
It bothers me to see how obsessed with success this generation of "hackers" seems to be. I have met people who were justifying censorship, population control and unfair business practices because they could benefit from them someday. I was expecting a little more regard to civil liberties and ethics from students and so called "hackers".
People win by making "cool" apps (Uber for X) whereas technical hacks are totally ignored.
I am glad that people are motivated to succeed but this lead to some of them taking themselves very seriously. Often to the expense of ethics.
"There is such ignorance in this world about who we are. We are not criminals. We are innovators. We create things. We change the world.[...]"
And this is one example among many other from a guy who has never engineered anything. Weeks are spent planning for their new "great project" with at the end little to no execution.
Students who believe to be 1000x SE because they can stick two APIs together and use bootstrap end-up to be very condescending older engineers.
This "bro"/"my framework is the best"/"Make money fast" culture that stinks a little bit IMO.
Hackathons are great to try out new technologies, meet new people and outreach to demographics that are traditionally under-represented in CS but I don't like where this is headed.
Like HS there is "cool kids" who are "Student Entrepreneur" or "Innovator, UX Artist blah blah", "RoR Genius" etc... and the rest of the world.
My apologies if this post is a little bit ranty, I hope to get other perspectives on this.
163 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadLast hackathon I attended at a university (last month, I think) was pretty lame, except for like one sound-transmission hack. I think that students are being encouraged more to focus on businesses or theory and less on the playful stuff.
Possibly because the "playful" stuff will get you expelled, arrested, or both these days. :\",
The first place won because they created a custom piece of hardware, but really it was just a couple of parts bought at radioshack and a simple arduino controller. Hardware wins big at hackathons.
The second place was a typical hackathon CRUD app.
The third place was a Minecraft bukkit plugin that allowed gambling bitcoin in a minigame. It was at least a novel idea, and it did directly interact with the blockchain (as opposed to using some kind of SaaS API), so there's some technical merit as well.
I think there was one other interesting one in the top ten, and a couple others that weren't selected for prizes.
Part of the problem is that when you make a more interesting hack, it's harder to judge whether or not you'll be able to finish it within 24-36 hours. So you end up with too ambitious a project that you fail to complete, or with too simple a project, that while novel, fails to impress.
Hackathon judges need to start favoring half-baked interesting hacks over polished "Uber for X" apps if we want to see more variety.
If you have the idea, I write the code, and angersock markets the product, how do we divide the equity?
There are some good answers to that question but the Startup Weekend company - a private, for-profit corporation - simply didn't address it, rather they got angry with me when I brought it up.
Yeah, I've noticed that younger programmers started talking down to me like my experience is worthless. Then they ask me to debug their code for them.
The frustrating part is that, when I interview, my experience in now-obsolete languages has a value of $0. My skill for understanding business requirements and debugging is mostly transferable, but that doesn't seem to be valued. I understand valuing my experience in older languages at a discount, but I don't understand why it gets a value of zero or negative.
I never saw the point of hackathons, because I'm interested in projects that take more than a couple of days to finish. You can do "Uber for X" in a weekend, but not something substantial or truly original.
Just this week we've interviewed a lady for a development position who had a very long career and had experience with not just old technologies such as, I don't know, Delphi, but she taught herself new things as well such as ASP.NET MVC and Node. She is a mother of two yet she has managed to find time to keep her skills up-to-date. Obviously we have offered her a senior position pretty much immediately.
Also, once you have a job using X, there isn't much opportunity to get work experience in Y.
I've also have several recruiters say "Learning stuff on your own doesn't count. You need actual work experience in Y for employers to value it." That's hard when you have a job where they only use (somewhat-obsolete) X.
Answers are obv: (1) you (2) no - so your skills are not valued at $0.
So I'm less attractive than a recent grad with no experience, which means my experience has negative value.
That leads to stupid stuff like when someone is hiring for MS SQL Server 2014, and they say that experience in MS SQL 2000 or 2008 is worthless.
He is actually doing you a favor (in general terms, since one need food on the table...), and also protecting his company from frustrated employees (like you would, probably, be), since the young guys are able to endure more BS and bad management.
Fortunately, I only need one job, so if 99% of people doing hiring are clueless, I only need to find one who values my experience and ability.
My first memory of one is Yahoo using it to get people to use its API in London, about 10 years ago. That was when a web API with major data behind it was an important new thing. The openness was quite radical, and linked somewhat to the open source movement.
We (ScraperWiki, Rewired State...) did a bunch of hack days for mainly philanthropic purposes - democracy, journalism and so on. More recently DataKind does that even better.
Now though it has become so mainstream, there are hackdays everywhere. They're being driven even more by marketing, rather than coding. The original purpose feels lost.
There'll be something else next.
I remeber when hackatons were made by programmers for programmers, when they were about hacking on actually cool projects and having fun. Those hackatons had some serious devs participating, because hell, even if you're doing this professionally, you need to take a break every now and then and do something just for fun.
https://twitter.com/shit_hh_said
Don't go to a hackathon to "win." In fact, I wish prizes were removed completely. Instead, go to hang out with like-minded folks, learn something new, and teach a newcomer. You'll get the most out of THAT as opposed to slamming a few APIs together and claiming whatever quadcopter Twilio is giving out this year.
Some other folks brought up Startup Weekends. We have them in my town and I've never seen them get anything off the ground. Some of the organizers tried to cozy up to our hackerspace which is fine, but we really had nothing in common. The reality is that Startup Weekends are stupid. It's a nice idea to get a bunch of technical people and investors together to build something, but you don't start a business worth pursuing by committee. You have a small number of folks very focused on what they want and that builds momentum until it can draw others in. By the time outsiders are being attracted there's usually a solid idea there that people are contributing towards. A committee is going to water an idea down until it's a shallow frank-n-beans version of the original idea. The other possibility is that they end up making a new "Uber for X" which never goes anywhere.
But someone with their wits about them can use this to networking opportunity with local tallent. Just don't participate in the main project if you can avoid it.
A ton of it is muddled in politics and branding. I have yet to see many "big, scalable" companies come out of the ones that have been hosted.
Getting developers is tough, and being the only developer on the organizing team selling the event to other developers when they had free, more legit hackathons made it an insane choice.
I will say that events that Code for America have hosted have been nice. They seem as far as I can tell trying to change something a little more real than the "Uber for X".
This spectrum though is everywhere, from professional sports, to programming, to finance, to dog training.
But from your example, " ... this ... from a guy who has never engineered anything." pretty much defines the term 'poser' people who try to talk the talk and act like people who they see getting a lot of "coolness" or "celebrity" without actually understanding where that coolness or celebrity comes from. There are a lot of them, they are mostly harmless, identify them and move on. If they are trying to recruit you to come work for them, work somewhere else, you will be happy you did :-)
2. Get a part time job
3. Graduate
4. Get a full time job
5. Do things for fun that don't involve computers.
The fact I happen to interact with X framework in Y language, running on Z environment has zero relevence in my life. I more quickly ignore people talking about Ruby/Python/Javascript running Rails/Django/Node than the homeless person trying to wash my windshield.
You get too involved in tech communities and you forget what the real world looks like. I've literally met better people while delivering HIV test kits than while dealing with HPC systems. Find good people rather than defaulting to people like you who make money.
1. After going to a few hackathons, most of my side projects had very "hacky" code - not something I liked and definitely something that goes against the basic SE practices.
2. Most hackathons don't challenge participants to innovate, but just to "make something cool". I have seen a few truly innovative projects being made in only a weekend at hackathons that did not get enough attention let alone a prize just because they weren't cool enough.
3. There have been numerous hackathons where winning teams made something so stupid, it filled me with rage (eg: http://hackgt2014.challengepost.com/submissions)
4. The Facebook group has essentially become a circlejerk - it had a lot of value when there were <2k members.
5. Too much focus has been on horizontal growth and not vertical - how many students can we get, how much sponsorship, how much food, how many Medium posts. A lot of of deep thought is missed out.
But at the end of the day, I think hackathons have their own place in helping schools become more progressive and to give students exposure that's left out of the classroom. I also think the best hackathons are the ones that motivate new comers to try something new and to give life to their ideas with resources and mentorship. The focus of hackathons, IMO, should be on learning and networking rather than winning. It'd be nice to have a very personalized hackathon experience now for a change.
Back when I was in school, Matrix was popular, and the term "hacker" had very different connotations.
People would call themselves "cyberpunk", "1337", they would install linux because it was a status symbol in that culture and it was trendy to hate on microsoft. Overall, the "haxx0rz"/skiddies/whatever were just as insufferable as today's "genius 10x entrepreneur 23-year-old CTO"-s.
In the end, it was a net benefit. The more talented of them actually became software engineers, IT or security specialists. Maybe a similar thing will happen with the current generation.
For me.. cyberpunk was cool because of Neil Stephenson, William Gibson, and uhh ShadowRun.. Somehow this meshed with the rave scene and I guess also 'industrial' music which was slowly becoming cool.. but for a while.. it wasn't quite there yet and being a hacker had negative coolness connotations kind of like being into MTG or D&D.
I never thought about the release of the movie "the Matrix" as being the pivot moment after which the consensus view of hackerdom coolness shifted (at least in highschools across america), but you're probably right.
In mainstream culture, the latter gets far less press, but the rewards of those hackathons in terms of networking are priceless.
Jeff Dean was a judge at TreeHacks but some of the top prizes where shitty hacks (App to wake up or something). Most of the prized hacks were really impressive though and involved a lot of engineering. I was really excited about that.
Same feeling at Hack the North (Waterloo) some shitty Airbnb for X but overall some really impressive and cool hacks. Speaks volume for the engineering culture at both Universities.
He had all the markings of being a fantastic intern for us.
About half way through his internship we had to fire him. He lacked the attention span for a long term, rigorous software development project. We later hired someone whom we evaluated very differently and it has been incredible. He's doing a fantastic job. Constantly questions our opinions about software and pushes the boundaries of our depth of understanding.
To add to this, we knew the fired intern went on to another startup to keep doing whatever it is he thinks he's doing. The founders of that company ended up telling us the same exact problems were happening with them. Don't worry about these "hackers" and what they're doing. They'll all end up getting a reality check at some point. If they frustrate you, then just remember that the best revenge is living well.
Feels somewhat equivalent, even though it's probably for different reasons.
Totally ignore is probably stronger than I mean, I take a look, but I don't think it's ever strongly effected my decision.
I also can't speak for the entire industry, this is just what I've seen where I've worked.
We started by assuming most of what we saw on paper lack credibility. We questioned their abilities, in a friendly way, and made sure they proved to us what they claimed. We also cast a wide net - we didn't just assume because we liked someone at first that we should just wrap things up. That candidate was the best of maybe 3-4 people we brought in for in-person interviews. Instead of 1 intern candidate whom we felt we knew.
> It bothers me to see how obsessed with success this generation of "hackers" seems to be.
Yeah, there's a lot of people who want to get rich by making a startup, and recently there was a poll that showed that the majority of people in the Facebook group want to go into management in their mid to late career. We're in the middle of a tech bubble and I think this is a symptom of it. Over the past decade or two, working with computers has become "cooler" as a part of "geek culture". People have seen a lot of people get outrageously rich with tech startups. And people are realizing that software is a high-paying field with a lower barrier to entry than most similar occupations. It's attracted a lot of people who just want money where previously there were people who were truly passionate. Or maybe it was always like that, I can't know.
> I have met people who were justifying censorship, population control and unfair business practices because they could benefit from them someday. I was expecting a little more regard to civil liberties and ethics from students and so called "hackers".
I haven't noticed that there's more people with this attitude within the hackathon community than outside it. Maybe a bit of unfair business practices, but the cases I saw seemed to be the result of not realizing that a practice was unfair. (Not counting the joke ideas that get thrown around all the time of course)
> People win by making "cool" apps (Uber for X) whereas technical hacks are totally ignored
It's a sad truth that simple CRUD apps are over-rewarded at hackathons. Interesting technical hacks aren't "totally ignored" though. It's just that it's harder to judge how long it will take to make something interesting, so either the result ends up being unfinished, or too unambitious, and it fails to capture the attention of judges.
It's also important to note that making a CRUD app that doesn't need to scale is easier than making an actually interesting piece of software. Some people aren't/think they aren't skilled enough to make anything else (yet).
> "There is such ignorance in this world about who we are. We are not criminals. We are innovators. We create things. We change the world.[...]"
While this does display narcissism, I think you're misinterpreting "we are not criminals". I think in context this person is saying that "hacking" in the context of hackathons is not what movie hackers do, breaking into networks and stealing sensitive information.
> Students who believe to be 1000x SE because they can stick two APIs together and use bootstrap end-up to be very condescending older engineers.
Yeah, this is a thing. I think it's a part of getting good at something for some people. I was certainly like this at around age 14 when I started being able to make software that could be useful. Suddenly I thought I was some sort of genius and looked down upon a lot of other people. I grew out of it, partly by not being 14 anymore, and partly by being exposed to the wealth of things I didn't know about.
> Hackathons are great to try out new technologies, meet new people and outreach to demographics that are traditionally under-represented in CS but I don't like where this is headed.
Show up to hackathons, make something technically interesting, and tell other people about it. People are intrigued by those willing to step outside the normal realm of hackathon projects. I do this. I have some friends who do this. If enough people go in with this attitude, eventually the culture will change.
> Like HS there is "cool kids" who are "Student...
"Criminals" do things like try to watch DVDs on Linux. "Criminals" use encryption without giving the US government a key[2]. "Criminals" design platforms that allow people to share information conveniently[3].
When you have people, even in 2015, in positions of power over technology law and policy who have never even used email[4], we still have to worry that the US government, and other governments who are similarly populated by such illiterates will make people who want to develop, learn and share information about technology "criminals"[5].
This isn't new, either[6]: During the duration of the US involvement of the great war (1917-18) amateur wireless equipment was not legal to operate. Instead of fully legalizing it afterwards, they brought in regulation to control who had the ability to use what kind of equipment -- in effect taking a generation of people who were tinkering with technology and taking the commons that was the public airwaves and slowly beginning the process of partitioning it into the state we have today, where iHeartMedia owns 850 radio stations, wireless use is just now with wifi and cellphones beginning to be something the public 'just does'...but only when they connect to large company networks(eg comcast).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lech_Johansen [2] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/16/obama-goes-record-en... [3] kim.com [4] http://www.businessinsider.com/lindsey-graham-says-he-has-ne... [5] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html [6] https://plus.google.com/105395547687614433866/posts/WHHYbLcG...
I agree with most of what you said, but as I understand you are arguing that radio should have been left unregulated? Wireless wouldn't work on the scale we use it today if it weren't for these regulations. Or maybe today we would get by, working around interference, but 15 years ago we wouldn't have had the tech. I'm sure there are better methods of regulation than partitioning the spectrum, but radio anarchy is not one of them.
There was a whole community of dare I say hackers who were ready to innovate around spectrum crowding at the dawn of the 20th century. They were systematically removed from participating in radio technology, except as passive consumers. Anarchy was working just fine up until then.
With all the power that Clearchannel has had, they could have been helping to be part of that solution. Instead they've been allowed to be lazy, and reap the benefits of a monopoly without contributing back in terms of advancement on this problem.
Knowing whether or not they could have been able to do so is of course an open question and as we learn how to do it right we can extrapolate whether they were capable of it. We could have had Frequency-hopping spread spectrum deployed decades earlier had the right mind been put to the task, and had patents not gotten in the way.
As for the hackers, let's see the distinction between the "hacker" and the "problem solver" Richard Stallman did not only hacked software, he solved the problem of software being unaccessable to everyone. Rich Hickey did not only hacked software, he solved the problem of Lisp being unaccessable to newer generations and platforms. The founders of YCombinator didn't only hacked software they solved the problem of eCommerce.
I actually love the people who stick two APIs together and use bootstrap end-ups to show something interesting because they at least 'do' something. But the problem solvers are always the superior ones and I eventually spend more time following them because I myself have to solve problems in my life :)
From a 1976 musical, for example: "Don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." (Peter Stone)
The quote contrasts "known poor" (exploited proletariat) with "delusional poor" (temporarily embarrased millionaires).
Those are orthogonal: there are enough temporarily embarrased millionaires out there that will never "make it" while self-aware exploited proles can be quite the force.
And yet the social mobility in the USA is quite low compared to other developed countries: "Several large studies of mobility in developed countries in recent years have found the US among the lowest in mobility." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...)
Empirically those countries with a highly built-out welfare system (e.g. those where the economic pressure on the poor individual is lowest) see higher probabilities of those poor people working themselves out of poverty.
1. Get introduced to new technologies 2. Get inspired to build something new 3. Meet interesting people and help them debug code 4. Win prizes
The immovable deadline is an amazing motivator for me. I recently finished some code at 12:59:28. The deadline was at 1:00pm. At 32 seconds on the clock, my code finally stopped returning errors.
Technical hacks are not ignored by everyone. They are, however, often poorly presented. I got tired of that problem, so I am working on making it easier to get better exposure during hackathon presentations even if the presenter is not amazing at pitching. I helped many presenters improve their pitches in only a few minutes, but it's a difficult skill.
Sponsors don't ignore cool technical hacks. For them, such events are partially a recruitment opportunity. They often continue to work with interesting people after the event is over even when they are not winners.
Although I won several hackathons, more importantly I got started working on my products at such events. They were a catalyst for me to stop dreaming and start building.
I think that hackathons should revamp this process. If the goal is truly to build something amazing then judging people on 2 minutes pitch does not make sense. Maybe let a couple days to a team of judge to go through the project/code etc...? Just a random thought.
> They often continue to work with interesting people after the event is over even when they are not winners.
I second that, I got several interviews that way.
I get it, it's extremely frustrating that hackathons, like TechCrunch and the rest of the startup press focus inordinate amounts of attention on lightweight, consumer focused startups that are probably going to go under in a couple months if they ever actually get off the ground. But that is the reality that we live in because that which is easily understood (obviously) gets more attention from more people than other topics which may have more value, but require significant industry knowledge to even understand, much less competitively evaluate.
We fall into this same trap though, as a CS student you probably understand on a much more detailed level what a profound breakthrough it would be to have some sort of technology that would double the speed of database queries, but it's much less likely that you'd really deeply get the impact of a cool "hack" for some chemical process for doubling the rate of some reaction.
So, in summary:
1. Don't despair.
2. Go to hackathons to make stuff and meet people and don't worry about winning them.
3. Found your own company and do your own thing.
I realize that this is news.ycombinator.com, but it's really sad that everything needs to end in entrepreneurism, startups, and money.
In hacker culture, the hack used to be the end, not money or power.
The Theo Deraadts and Werner Kochs are the real hackers of this world. They could have worked for anyone from Google to Facebook and have big paychecks. Instead, they accepted having more modest means to do what they love: hacking on code and being in a position where one can uphold their ethics (and the hacker ethic).
Case in point:
The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.
The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.
Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.
Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”
Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.
To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.
-Mark Zuckerberg in his letter to investors at the FB IPO.
Nowadays, "hacker" has cultural cachet so we get lifehackers, growth-hackers, hackathons, etc.
In my curmudgeonly opinion, none of these are really hackers or about hacking. Real hackers (I do not consider myself one) need to do a better job of policing the use of the word "hacker", but they tend to be terrible at doing so, because they remember what it's like to be socially excluded and don't want to be seen as socially exclusionary.
[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html
tl;dr: Apparently I am 19 years old nostalgic.
From my perspective, there's a certain je ne sais quoi of real hacking, and it has nothing to do with churning out an MVP in a weekend. In fact, sometimes the greatest hacks are the least practical.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers#Real-li...
http://xkcd.com/297/
Ignore the bullshit — there will be plenty. Focus on what you want to do.