Hackathons turned into “nice ui with mock data”-athons. Whoever got the best ui person on their team won. I benefitted from this a few times!
Hackathons turned into “nice ui with mock data”-athons. Whoever got the best ui person on their team won. I benefitted from this a few times!
Yes, I ran into this during an internal company hackathon. This was before LLMs.
We took a problem, designed an internal tool for it, and put some Bootstrap UI on top with some fancy CSS animations.
After wiring up the mock data, it looked convincigly real.
We did win, got congratulated by upper management, and were immediately asked if we could get this into production in a week, or do we need 2?
Judges are managers with typical mediocre technicality
This has pretty much always been the case. You've never been able to build production-level software in 2 days (not even in the age of AI, no), so it's always been about having a UI with mocked data.
I did a lot of hackathons when I was in school more than 10 years ago and that's how they all were and what every team did.
I’ve seen powerpoint presentations win, and that was my last hackathon
I did a 3-month bootcamp back in the day and the top assessed final presentations were a powerpoint and some bs JS "game" that indeed was a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code. This was a Rails bootcamp, not a powerpoint one, not a js one...
"a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code" does sum up quite a bit of the videogame industry, including GTA VI ...
It's all about the pitch the other half.
When did this happen? I remember judges at hackathons used to be very forgiving about lackluster UIs as long as the idea was cool and at least functional by the presentation time
It depends a lot on the hackathon/what the judges are looking for. A few are run by technical people who pick the coolest technical architectures, a few are run by casual users who pick the best looking result.
The majority of the ones I’ve been in have tended to be run by people who judge based on their notion of how useful the app will be societally, with the tie breaking factor being the UI/architectural design.
10+ years ago, when most "grassroots" (and some of the better startup) hackathons were displaced by enterprise-sponsored hackathons. I can mostly talk about the Berlin hackathon scene, but as far as I understand it the same thing happened in SF/London as well around the same time.
Presentation-first judging has been a thing for a long time, and unless there is a organizing party that explicitly makes code reviews a part of the scoring, and the organizers ensure attendance quotas for different personas (engineer vs. product vs. designer) it will always drift that way.
It's more about unconscious bias. The slick smoke and mirror will simply show better.
Reminds me of the inconsistency of take home interview tests where you have no idea if the person reviewing cares that the UI is shiny or not or if they want you to write a novel in the readme and make it look like a real project.
I thought I was the only one wondering why people are preparing in advanced with polish and not much to build the day of.
[dead]
It’s been like that for at least a decade.