I am an american CS student that goes to (a lot) of hackathons. The purpose of this post is to get feedback/opinions from people that are outside the "Hackathon Hackers" bubble to determine whether or not my rant is founded and if the issues I am highlighting are characteristic of the tech industry.

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.