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Re:Hackathon hustlers who make a living from corporate codin... by komali2 on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @03:06PM (#14044662)
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.

Re:Hackathon hustlers who make a living from corporate codin... by megablast on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @07:32PM (#14046656)
> 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.

Re:Hackathon hustlers who make a living from corporate codin... by komali2 on Thursday April 06, 2017 @06:45PM (#14055395)
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.