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Some Hackathon Hustlers Make Their Living From Corporate Coding Contests (bloomberg.com)
Some coders go from one marathon hacking session to another, subsisting on prize money and schwag. From a feature article on Bloomberg: Peter Ma looked around his San Francisco condo and realized he'd won everything in it. His flat-screen TV, home theater system, 3D printers, phones, tablets, computers and furniture were either hackathon prizes or purchased with hackathon earnings. Stashed under his leather couch -- which he'd bought with an Amazon gift card -- was a thick stack of 2- and 3-foot-long cardboard checks commemorating his most cherished wins. "The only non-schwag I have are shoes," he said. With his gray hoodie and close-cropped goatee, 33-year-old Ma looks like any of the thousands of computer programmers roaming the city, but he's part of an elite corps. He and about a dozen friends travel the hackathon circuit. They build apps, connected devices and other products during all-night, fiercely competitive programming contests where sleep is scarce and caffeine is plentiful. The sessions are usually sponsored by corporations, and top prizes mean serious cash. Some of the hackers have jobs. Some do contracting work. Some have corporate sponsors. Almost all of them are working on a pet startup idea. For Ma and a few others, hackathons are a job. Ma knows he would make more money if he had a more traditional career. He just doesn't want one.
... were sleep is scarce and caffeine is plentiful.
Ah yes, "The Gig Economy". Hope he's saving some of that cash-ola because that scarce sleep and lots-o-coffee is going to get old and he's going to run out of steam with no healthcare and no retirement savings in a "Gig Economy" where he's no longer in the desirable / hirable age bracket regardless of his uber-leet hacking skills...
Ma knows he would make more money if he had a more traditional career. He just doesn't want one.
Please, tell me more!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I wonder if these hackers would have more or less money if they put all that time coding their hacks into coding projects that make money? If you spend 100 hours to earn a $5000 prize, is that really any different than working for a real company at $50/hr?
The implications sort of alarmed us. We don't particularly like the idea of competing against people exploiting these potentials, acting like they are doing a community service, when really motivated by fame & fortune. But we also decided that we don't really care about winning. For us, a hackathon is a motivation to get off our asses and work really hard on something cool we want to create instead of just wasting yet another weekend on YouTube and video games. If we win, any prize money is just gonna go into the next crazy project we want to see exist.
No, still not tired of winning
Did you say "prize money and schwag"? Uh, what
I have an amusing story to tell along these lines - many years ago I went to JavaOne a number of years in a row.
Well one of these times I was just strolling down the sidewalk in SF after having gone to some sessions, when someone approached me on the sidewalk, asking if I wanted to enter a coding contest. They didn't have many people entering and they really wanted more programmers participating - it was a contest to write some useful J2ME service in an hour or two.
Well I didn't really know J2ME well, but I did know Java so I thought I'd give it a shot. So I went in, and while I spent much of my time learning J2ME API details, I did produce something that kind of worked (though honestly I can't really remember exactly what it did).
However all that is incidental to the main point - I didn't win, or even come close to winning. The winning entry was not all that complex, just something that (as I recall) let you enter a UPC and return a few fields from some Amazon web service.
So what did that win? A BMW Z3. Yes, an actual car, I think worth $40K at the time.
That just goes to show how crazy things were before the DotCom bubble burst the first time... I don't think it's ever been like that again.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
hackathons for my company. The people that win come in with a pre-built solution of some sort, and then do some thin integration with whatever the sponsor is pushing. They carry that same solution around to every hackathon and use it over and over again. The idea that people come in with a blank slate and pull ideas out of their ass then write 10k lines of code to back it up is false. It's much less impressive than you might think looking at it from the outside.
You put a bunch of hackers in a room with an electronic prize. Wouldn't it be beneficial to have it bugged from a gov perspective?
a match made in investor heaven. All the benefits of a transient uninsured workforce and no need to worry about cumbersome, expensive things like security or making a product that is more than a flash in the pan.