I participated in a hackathon a few years ago. The task was to create a finance app using the first Pebble (remember: three (or four?) buttons, black/white no-touch display).

We thought hard about an actually useful finance app on this very limited smart watch, discarding any accounting or similar beacause input using three buttons is too cumbersome if you have a mobile phone in your pocket a few inches away.

We ended up creating a watch app that showed you the route to the next ATM on a map, along with a description of the route. Technically pretty challenging since we had to generate map tiles on a remote server and load them onto the watch. Also, each image had to be sent in two chunks since the transfer buffer was smaller than the screen...

Another group just assumed the Pebble had a camera, color display and a microphone and had no demo, just a power point presentation. They ended up as winners...

Sounds like perfect prep for a career as a developer

This is basically every sales guy I have ever met.

I've seen this sort of thing happen many times and been in similar shoes. It is very disheartening.

How is a PowerPoint presentation hacking at all???

Because you call yourself a hacker while doing it, duh

Ugh, that's ridiculous. There should be some form of accountability system for hackathons. Maybe like charitynavigator.org.

Jesus christ.

Horrific!

I've helped organizing the last two editions of the FIESP Hackathon in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It is a big event for Latin America standards: 3 days, 40 teams of 5 hackers (200 contestants total).

My pet peeve was always make the event more about "the hacker experience" and less about "the best PPT wins".

Things we did:

* PPT-free event: a team must show something working.

* Startup teams trying to pitch an already working product were kicked out.

* Each team must name one PR member, mentors and other staff should not interrupt anyone except this PR guy.

* Ingenuity and implementation completeness were the main criteria (the least mockups the better).

* Zero tolerance for antisocial behavior.

We strive a lot do make sure "the best hack" wins.

The trick is realizing the sponsors incentives -- they don't actually want the code you wrote in a weekend. If it's recruiting, they're looking for people to hire. If it's devrel, they're looking for people to sell their SaaS to.

They may not want the code, but they do want evidence that you can actually code. Hackathons are meant to find developers, not salespeople. So picking a team that didn't actually build something real as the winner seems like a rather bad idea.

Do you think they are out hunting powerpoint experts then?

Nah, but a developer who can sell is usually a better proposition than who cannot.

Really? I'll take the developer who actually makes things work.

If the developer cannot sell at all you won't really find him though.

I had a couple of very similar experiences.

1. A team winning a few very significant awards (including second place) for pitching an app that allows you to take picture of your food bowl and tell you the nutritional content breakdown. Of course no demo was provided, and the guys fessed up that they "didn't know anything about machine learning until two days ago, but learned everything needed to make it work in that time period." No one questioned authenticity or whether it was actually a possible thing to make.

2. Another group of 10 people who ONLY made a powerpoint talking about some app that mixed traveling and tinder. When asked by judges whether they had something besides powerpoint, they said that they "are not coders, but idea-people", and that it took 10 of them to make that powerpoint.

> No one questioned authenticity or whether it was actually a possible thing to make.

Why didn't you call them out on their bullshit?

Shooting down ideas on feasibility grounds is "not a culture fit" for the ethos of hackathons in general.

It isn't just on feasibility grounds, it is on the grounds that they showed nothing but a powerpoint and other questionable things they said. Feasibility is just icing on top.

Oh, I did. But I was not a judge, just another participant, so my opinion on their powerpoint doesn't change a bit.

In NYC, there was a hackathon I attended a few years ago where everyone got the same problems (forget what it was called - comedy hackathon maybe?). It was about who could solve it fastest (or at all). Each problem was time-boxed, to be done in a short session, and as a team. They even had games (like Golden Eye) and other crazy social stuff (go out to 5 strangers at lunch time and make them say a binary string on video). We need more pure-tech fun hackathons like that IMHO.

Hacker Olympics! The organizer for it moved to San Diego and the event moved with him sadly :(

Yup! That was it!!

Ugh. My first Hackathon we built a little app that we thought was pretty cool. Nothing world-changing but it was something we were proud of for three freshmen. Then they sat us down in front of a judge who was some corporate shmuck that looked at us like we had three heads because we didn't have a "pitch".

I've had similar experiences at some hackathon events. The local Startup Weekend event a few years ago was similar, but in some ways that is more predictably skewed to who can give the best pitch, so that one didn't rub me quite so bad.

Along the same lines, there were a few local meetups where people were going to plan some ideas for innovative uses for public data sets, and what kind of data we should try and get released from the city & county. The whole thing ended up getting de-railed by non-tech "thought leader in a turtleneck" consultant types giving their personal pitches to market their brand, and nothing solid came out of that. Those who were interested in building something formed a separate group and went their own way.

At the risk of sounding like a delicate snowflake, I would really enjoy more "tech events for people who really want to get their hands dirty".

It could be a two-parter: first round is no-pitch, just POC. Second round is pitchers who choose one of the first round projects to pitch. The two teams involved in the winner split the prize.

How about no pitch? Keep business out of it

"It" being the hackathon to create a product in some amount of time?

No, it's to create something.

That is brilliant.

I guess hackathons stopped being fun the moment that too many people that are not really "hackers" got involved. Unfortunately it's the typical thing that happens when something becomes too popular.

I think the big difference can be seen across two types of hackathons: ones that are corporate-sponsered, with corporations offering massive prizes and startup funding for people with "fresh, hip disruptive ideas leveraging their cool web tech", versus small ones that are about creating something neat and showing it to others. Of course, this is a gradient, and things are not black-and-white here.

A lot of small local game jams fall closer to the second category there. I think you are right that financial stakes affects the attitude of the hackathon.

At my first hackathon I had entirely opposite experience. Though it was not less disappointing.

Most of the teams came with something pre-made and tried to fit it to the theme of the event. And one team was pitching their startup. Of course all of them were good at pitching, but implementation-wise they were ahead of "hackers" too even not touching their keyboards...

Reminds me of my friends' nightmare experience at the SF girls-only hackathon.

My friends are both pretty darn good software engineers, and went to pick up some other floaters to build a team there. They got a project manager, who they tasked with finding them more engineers. Project manager comes back.... with 2 more project managers. So with their team of 2 engineers and 3 project managers they got very little product done.

I think events like this shouldn't be called "Hackathons." Maybe "Pitch Events" or something. If you can win without writing a single line of code (which I have seen at two SF "hackathons") it should not be a hackathon.

> Project manager comes back.... with 2 more project managers. So with their team of 2 engineers and 3 project managers they got very little product done.

Why? Just ignore the PM and get work done, just like normal.

PMs are great at hackathons for getting your drinks, talking to other teams, talking to judges and organisers about stuff they are looking for, getting the presentation ready.

Well, two engineers vs teams of 5 engineers is a pretty distinct disadvantage. Furthermore, the PMs weren't doing their assigned tasks, like setting up the PPT and shit, so my friends had to do all that as well.

So really the problem is the 3 other people on their team were just straight up incompetent / unmotivated, not so much that they were of X_Y_Z career.

I've had similar experiences. At one "hackathon" I went to in Chicago, the winners made a powerpoint of a Coke vending machine with NFC payment...

Those have existed for a few years now. When was this hackathon?

2011 :(

Instead of being discouraged, another takeaway from your experience is that presentation skills are extremely important. You'll need them to sell your ideas to your boss, investors, customers, and coworkers. Expecting them to figure out your ideas for themselves is rarely going to work.

"Build it and they will come" is a Hollywood myth.

It seems like there’s a spectrum between “pitch competition” (best idea wins) and “coding challenge” (best implementation wins). Hackathons are somewhere in the middle, but given the zeitgeist behind the “hacker” movement, I am not surprised that they are leaning more towards the pitch side. After all, corporations are looking for implementable ideas rather than cool bits of tech someone hacked out in 24 hours. Transparency in the process and clear expectations help here.

That's disappointing to hear. I was considering attending some hackathons locally and was looking forward to the technical aspect of it all. I suppose the prize money incentivizes people who are more focused on "playing the game" for a profit.

Kinda like real life.

At a company hackathon, we had a outside company sponsoring the hackathon, including a prize they would award to the best user of their API. It was kind of a clunky API, and their product didn't really fit what we did, so my teammate and I decided to use it - hoping that we'd be the only ones to use the API, and therefore winners by default.

We didn't win. Obviously, I'm biased, but I think our product was more promising both in terms of realistic use of the technology, and in terms of the possibility of going to market quickly. But our demo wasn't as shiny, we were from a remote office so people didn't really know who we were, and neither of us were particularly charismatic presenters.

Presentation matters. This has been impressed on us repeatedly; the joke is now that whoever manages to snag the UI/UX person first for their team is going to win.

Apparently marketing always wins, even at hackathons! :(

You are all being used as pawns

This is interesting in a world where all I ever hear is "ideas are meaningless, execution is everything."

I get the same feeling often when reading papers. It feels like the abstract and first few paragraphs hold great promise and then you get down to what the authors really did and it's like "are you kidding?" So often there is a big hype/substance mismatch.

But is there really another way?

The idea that hackathons can favor style over substance rings true with me. Sometimes people get unfairly screwed by a bad judging panel. This is particularly true when evaluating technical merit : I've literally seen judges swoon over cool looking Axure / Pidoco presentations.

However, it goes deeper than that as not even all developers (myself included) are always as good at evaluating technical merit as we think we are - particularly if the solution involves a lot of math.

The sad story is that the pitch is actually that important. There's always people that can build and code. But not so many people that can come up with something people actually want.

It all depends on the judges. You often get non-technical judges, who have no idea about the difficulty of actually creating something.

So they judge it off an idea. Does the idea sound cool?

I’ve participated in three hackathons in Puerto Rico and have the same experience. My advice is to just go for the sponsor challenges.

yeah that was my experience with a few hackathons too, it wasn't at all what I expected. And a powerpoint presentation with static HTML pages got a prize in that one as well.

I usually go to get in the zone with some new technologies around like minded people, and not really about the theme of the hackathon itself. A lot of hackathons have tons of tertiary prizes and networking opportunities.

Unlike other places with a tech scene, Silicon Valley has an industry that caters to unskilled and wannabe programmers that aren't currently into programming at all. Hackathons, Meetups and the coding schools are at the center of that. So you shouldn't expect actual deep technology discussions at those particular things, you will be underwhelmed.

I won a hackathon at work once with a mostly faked out app. It was still a neat idea, we just ran out of time to do more.