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Hackathons Are Dystopian Events That Dupe People Into Working For Free, Say Sociologists (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader writes: That's the conclusion that two sociologists came to after observing seven hackathons over the period of one year, reports Wired. In "Hackathons As Co-optation Ritual: Socializing Workers and Institutionalizing Innovation in the 'New' Economy," sociologists Sharon Zukin and Max Papadantonakis argue that companies use the allure of hackathons to get people to work for free. They says sponsors fuel the "romance of digital innovation by appealing to the hackers' aspiration to be multi-dimensional agents of change" when in fact the hackathons are just a means of labor control.
I know that the terms are not mutually exclusive.
Read the article summary carefully:
The mask slips.
And while on the subject, please feel free to discuss non-paying Internships...
Or maybe sociology is the scientific study of society, including patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture.
Sheesh, have people forgotten how to use the internet to look things up or is a stupid sound-bite enough these days?
A few hackathons that I've visited were just means to push corporate agenda and image. No actually useful product was released. A waste of developer time, but an option to practice pitching ideas to useless corporate drones.
Working for free? That doesn't even make sense. I've never seen anything come out of a hackathon that isn't junk. Some people in power think hackathons are ways to generate buzz and recruit talent. The truth is the real talent is out building real products for real money. We don't have time to spend our free time hammering together some piece of shit for some free pizza so that we can win $1000 in funding or some bullshit prize.
As China already knows..
However, these congregations can have a useful function, but it turns out exploitation of ignorance is still the rule of the day in the quest for endless profit.
Was anyone under the impression that companies are hosting hackathons out of the goodness of their corporate hearts, and--oh goodness me--just happened to benefit enormously from them?
Sometimes people like a product, want it to succeed, and are willing to put up their own time, labor, and skill to boost that product.
When it comes to business, every single decision is made with the underlying motive of money. A for-profit company can be trusted for exactly one thing: that they will advance their own self-interest.
My company has a Hackathon every year.
And we're paid for the day like any other day.
Are people actually not getting paid?
hackathon, bug bounties etc, = get people to do your work for almost free. How many monkeys with typewriters do you need for one Shakespear play?
https://www.wired.com/story/sociologists-examine-hackathons-and-see-exploitation/amp
nor the actual paper being discussed:
https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/S0277-283320170000031005
That's the definition. In practise, in a lot of cases GP isn't too far beside the mark. That doesn't mean there's no science going on at all in sociology departments, but if you read some of the papers coming out (which I do just to amuse myself from time to time), you'll see that a big part of it is an enormous echo chamber where "scientists" repeat dogma with little or no scientific basis.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Think of the exposure you're getting!
is duping people to work for free too?
This reminds me of the case where kickstart video game was bashed for a contest of a single piece fan created music (the rest would be done by professionally hired musicians)
Why is it considered duping to get people excited about working on something for free? Passion is one of the greatest joys and I'd sacrifice a lot of take home pay if I could get more passion for my work. Thus breaks now and then where I get excited and work on fun challenges with other people to create something remarkable are not working for free, they are working for me.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
this is legit from the duh department. if you have heard of the company sponsoring it then you probably shouldnâ(TM)t do it. same goes for the ones where they try to get people to invent new ideas on-the-fly so a startup flipper can take your idea and sell it without any regard for you or the longevity of the idea.
Well, if the Hackathon is for something like OpenBSD, then I think people already know and expect the work will be free/open source and such.
If the hackathon is for a proprietary company, then the people either work for the company, or receive some sort of compensation for their work, otherwise they would retain the rights to their code; either way, it's not free work....
do you need a hanky, princess?
Didn't read TFA, but do these researchers understand what motivates people to participate?
Speaking as an established professional in a highly technical field -and as someone whose career has been further as much by hobbies and personal interests as certifications and professional experience- hackathons are in fact insanely fun, an invaluable social outlet that helps form lasting friendships and establish professional contacts, and a great way to build teamwork skills, learn new things, and challenge your abilities.
Sure, it's a challenge to build an app in a weekend (Rails Rumble), but it's fun. If that's your idea of fun.
I wonder how these researchers would describe gyms (establishments which trick you into paying money to do meaningless physical labor?), marathons, and online dating?
I won one of them because I teamed up with someone who already had a body of work. The call them hackathons becuase it implies you can actually do enough in time to win. Reality is they're just a pitch party where some company can get a lot of innovative ideas relatively cheap. I would be surprised if anyone comes up with a concept at a hackathon and actually wins. The people who have been working for months do win.
Hackathons are a joke. Cool place to meet other geeks though and network. Just don't spend much time trying to win if you don't have your project before you show up.
Good hackathons should be:
- optional
- during regular working hours
- not limited in scope or expected value to the company
I just billed my hours as usual in the first and last "hackathon" I participated in.
True, but reading TFA does clear things up a bit
The sociologists point out that at many large tech companies, employees may feel compelled to attend weekend internal hackathons that are only designed to squeeze the innovation out of [their workers], for free
Yup, work over the weekend and gives us your ideas. Noobs. No thanks.
if you read some of the papers coming out (which I do just to amuse myself from time to time),
Liar!
Hello, suckers!
Everything in the future. And you know why? Because it's strange.
We do not like realistic depiction of the future and call it dystopia because it is different from our way of life. We will be gone and what we call dystopia will be just normal for contemporaries.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Free coffee/soda/food/t-shirts/sponsor swag. I did a hackathon a few weeks back and came away from it like I'd gone to re:Invent. All the food was free. I showed up at 9am and left around 5 both days, which is my usual schedule. Some people stayed late; it was their choice.
hackathons are in fact insanely fun, an invaluable social outlet that helps form lasting friendships and establish professional contacts, and a great way to build teamwork skills, learn new things, and challenge your abilities.
Nope. Nope. Nope. No having fun. You are there to be exploited, and so called, 'fun' you had was just the sponsors tricking you into working harder.
At the end of the weekend, hundreds of highly polished, scalable, and very robust apps are ready for market, and the poor dumb coders are far too tired to see how much they have been exploited and used. Its all part of the plan. Why hackathons aren't running afoul of the emancipation proclamation is beyond me....
'elp! 'elp! He's bein' oppressed!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Referring to TFA as an FA would be generous; there really isn't much FA there to R, and what there is seems to use "socialist" and "sociologist" interchangeably. It seems to have been written by someone who has no grasp of the possibility that some people might enjoy doing something for the fun and challenge of it.
aren't what's being called out in the article. It's ones being run by businesses. I've been lucky enough to have a pretty solid career trajectory. But several of my buddies have been stuck applying everywhere under the sun. One of the most common tricks they've all seen is when they 'test' you to solve this one problem and you do and never get a call back. The huge number of unemployed and underemployed techs (thanks, H1-B program!) mean companies can do this pretty much indefinitely. A lot of company run hackathons are just that.
If you'll allow me to indulge in a bit of "Back in my day", companies used to do these things during working hours. It was part of your ongoing training. For those of you too young to know what that is, training is what companies did before they could go running to Congress to bring in as much cheap labor as they want.
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Intersestingly, their article is published in a pay per view journal. One that, no doubt, is not paying the authors for their work and which, no the less, no seems to own the copyright of that article. Dystopian, working for free?
I only read the summary of the paper but the claim that they are a way to "outsource work" is insane to anyone who has every actually programmed anything.
After 48 hours of being up almost all the time, we all KNOW some shitty code is being produced - especially that being the entire time allowed and the goal to just get something to function. The resulting code is barely capable of being called demoable, much less anything of value.
Now it can indeed produce value for the sponsors in other ways, in that now a lot of developers have gotten slightly into working with something, which they may continue. But that is mutually beneficial and I would still argue presents way more value to the participant than the sponsor, in that the participants can always choose to continue work with a sponsor or not, but either way that was valuable coding/hardware experience that is applicable to a TON of other vendors of whatever.
I think people casting aspersions on hackathons just have no clue what the hell is going on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm glad you never let ignorance get in the way of trying to make your point. Whatever that point is.
X-Prize even worse - you pay to get in, and pay even more to get to next stages, with lax rules to enter, it is nothing short of a pyramid scheme scooping up the poop that are duped into paying until it generates more money than what the winners are able to get for the small payout that it does make.
Doh!
just sayin'
Did the hackers blindly sign a contract proclaiming "All your bases are belong to us"? Without, some form of labour contract and remuneration, copyright remains with the hackers. If they did sign, more fool them.
Salaried people are expected to work on all sorts of things regardless of the hours. It's weird but you warrant your salary based on your output not your hours. At the same time billing to contracts is based on billable hours. Time cards represent proportions of work on projects not actual hours. In my company the rule is exactly that-- if you do something extra you have to pro-rate the hours across all your charge codes.
Wager earners are not in that boat. For them hours are exactly what you work. You are paid on hours not output.
I agree that the companies try to mine these things for ideas, but an idea alone is worth almost nothing. It still takes a ton of effort to bring even software to market, so I don't begrudge the company if they take an idea and run with it... As you say, the hackathons are usually more pitch parties than anything.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tricked, I thought it was fuck'n obvious.
> [socialists] ... The mask slips.
Eeeek! Help! Red scare!
There are two things you folks seem to be afraid of: commies and germs. Then, your brain goes into panic mode.
Pro tip: breathing into a bag mitigates hyperventilation.
Just wait until they discover that people pay money to run 5km.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Both the wired.com and emeraldinsight.com articles are paywalled.
if you're going to use my work in a commercial product, I fully expect to be paid.
Consider a case in which your work will be distributed as free software and/or free cultural works. By these definitions, downstream reusers of free software and free cultural works have the right to distribute copies for a fee. From what initial source of revenue should your payment come?
Says two people who don't enjoy their jobs and would therefore never do them without some sort of compensation.
Like the entrepreneur podcast that urged founders to disregard being profitable or even their business model and let them (the podcast's guest speaker / venture capital rep. ) do what they're expert at.
Yeah. Sure thing. Blow me.
This old bird has got tired of working for free and of being asked to work for free. Why aren't more of you? And I've also noticed that FOSS projects have all kinds of problems in documentation and support. I think we ought to be asking questions about our economic models.
Are all you people posting sure they are wrong? I've seen a lot of broken hearts in this business, people who've poured their lives into "free" products and gotten nothing back.
Reading the comments, I suspect some misunderstanding, because a cursory reading of the summary might give the impression that the issue is about the hackathons themselves (i.e., the fact that organisers get people to produce work for free during those events by getting them excited and feeding them snacks). And commenters disagree that it’s a bad thing (or even that it’s true, since hackathons don’t really produce anything useful).
The study’s abstract makes things quite clear, as does Wired’s article, which says:
“To Zukin, this is a problem, because hackathons are making the “hacker subculture” they promote into the new work norm. That norm, which coincides with the labor market trend of less-secure employment, encourages professional workers to adopt an “entrepreneurial” career and market themselves for continually shifting jobs. The trend also includes motivating workers with Soviet-style slogans venerating the pleasures of work.”
In other words, hackathons are a tool used by corporate suits to give their employees the idea that a crazy work schedule is the new norm, that it’s the cool way to live the smashing coder’s life, and that no less would be expected (by their peers, even) from a successful smart engineer. And that, of course, is merely a way to get them to work 80 hours a week for the price of 40, without complaints.
It all boils down to that phrase. If you do real work, you should be fairly compensated for the value of the labor. Anything less is robbery, though sometimes that is a theft some people are willing to accept. But acceptance of theft should not be the default.
Have a few citations? What percentage of papers repeat dogma? what does "in a lot of cases" mean? What does "repeat dogma" mean? How does this paper fulfill any of your definitions?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
evil != illegal see also banks
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Whoever hadn't figured this out already deserves some sort of long-term ignorance award. I have never made myself available for such events as the bullshit kinda transpired, although I have been a part of one or two due to academic/professional conjuncture. From those short experiences, but also mostly from what I hear about every colleague, friend or coworker, these events easily transpire as the most obvious "free brainstorming session" there can be. Non-competes come close second to ways of stealing individual creativity.
If I was a company/organization in search of new ideas, the easiest, cheapest course of action I would take to amass intellectual property, would be to create a contest where only "new, exclusive, non-patented" ideas can be brought up. Then, to make these ideas mine, all I would need to do is define rules such as "whatever you come up with during the event is property of the event organizer" and "participants only have 10/24/48 hours to put in practice (read: code) their idea". These are structural to hijack great IP from the deluded participants - make them do something for you that is palpable enough from a managerial point of view, but at the same time that doesn't have its potential fully visible to anyone that isn't watching closely (such as other participants, who should be way too busy coding their own speedy prototypes).
Finally, the last nail in the coffin: never ever give the main prize to the ideas you like the most. This cements the theft strategy (because that's what this is all about: grand theft IP), by discouraging participants to pursue similar projects afterwards - both the participants who came up with the idea themselves and other keen-eyed participants who saw potential in others. This is crucial, because despite the "property of the event organizer" rule, some people would still pursue projects related to the event. This eliminates that motivation, and would provide me, as a company with access to financial and human resources, to really develop the best ideas.
In short, hackathons and similar events are a form of venture capital with ~0 risk, targeting the creatives that didn't even get a chance to kick-start (read: make a startup) their cool, fresh ideas. And further turning their chances of "making it" into dust, despite any sense of the contrary passed by the events.
This article is primarily about fake, "Internal" hack-a-thons. Yeah, those are complete bullshit, and not hack-a-thons at all -- it's just quasi-forced free work. Sure, they're optional, but you have to attend to get your career to progress. Real hack-a-thons are for people who are just enthusiastic about making something, who know there's a %99.9 chance they won't get a dime in return. They tend to be at conventions, schools, or just a bunch of pals who want to take a stab at a group project over a weekend. Once a business is involved with the intention of getting a free prototype of their next hot product, it's not a hack-a-thon, just a slimy con game.
That's what it ought to be. Unfortunately, in practice, it is not. Hence my comment.
I suggest you use the Internet and read a representative sample of sociology papers from recent decades; they are overwhelmingly unscientific.
Bake sales,
barn raisings,
quilt-a-thons,
and literally every other activity when people use and refine their skills without expecting direct recompense. In this case, the benefit is for the "community" (lol) of the corporation.