<story><title>Hackathon hustlers who make a living from corporate coding contests</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-04/these-hackathon-hustlers-make-their-living-from-corporate-coding-contests</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>I hope the article is exaggerated. The way they are described here, these hackathons appear to be little microcosms of everything currently wrong with MVP-obsessed Silicon Valley. Let&amp;#x27;s round up a bunch of early-twentysomethings, feed them junk food, see what they can cobble together without sleep in 48 hours and reward the shiniest turd that plops out with the leftover pocket change from marketing&amp;#x27;s budget.&lt;p&gt;Where is the engineering rigor? Where is the quality assurance? Are all the edge cases handled? Security review &amp;#x2F; penetration testing? What is the performance when you serve 10K users simultaneously? Can one actually build a business out of the &amp;quot;product&amp;quot; of a hackathon, or does it basically need to be thrown away and re-architected properly? Is it even a goal to build something viable, or is it the whole event simply a way to spend corporate marketing money on buzz?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nakedgremlin</author><text>Hackathons rarely need to deal with such rigor. I&amp;#x27;ve participated in quite a few and the it all boils down to understanding the judging metrics (and personalities), the bite-size tangible demo, and the marketing pitch. If you have a team that does that well, winning becomes an achievable and repeatable end result.</text></comment>
<story><title>Hackathon hustlers who make a living from corporate coding contests</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-04/these-hackathon-hustlers-make-their-living-from-corporate-coding-contests</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>I hope the article is exaggerated. The way they are described here, these hackathons appear to be little microcosms of everything currently wrong with MVP-obsessed Silicon Valley. Let&amp;#x27;s round up a bunch of early-twentysomethings, feed them junk food, see what they can cobble together without sleep in 48 hours and reward the shiniest turd that plops out with the leftover pocket change from marketing&amp;#x27;s budget.&lt;p&gt;Where is the engineering rigor? Where is the quality assurance? Are all the edge cases handled? Security review &amp;#x2F; penetration testing? What is the performance when you serve 10K users simultaneously? Can one actually build a business out of the &amp;quot;product&amp;quot; of a hackathon, or does it basically need to be thrown away and re-architected properly? Is it even a goal to build something viable, or is it the whole event simply a way to spend corporate marketing money on buzz?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Klockan</author><text>These people wouldn&amp;#x27;t be living on hackathon prize money if they could actually build viable products in a few days.</text></comment>