Hackathons

And it’s evolution over the last 5 years

Hackathons have changed over time.
Earlier it used to be techies, mostly softwares.
Soon it shifted to being a techies-kinda-party.
But since it costs money, people started extracting more business value out it.
A major problem that was faced by majority of organisers is that quite often, a hack remained just a hack.
So much so, that even the first prize winners would not continue to work on the idea, even for a single day after the hackathon.

What I hated the most, for a long time, was the fact that people organising a social hackathons, just talked business when one pitched on stage with the social factor on focus.

But soon, I realised that hackathons have to slowly evolve, after the spark, and soon need to have a business model, no matter how social they are.
Otherwise they will just die off anyway.

And soon the field expanded and attracted variety of people organising hackathons, when the designers and makers pooling in.

One of the interesting findings of this hackathon culture is that a lot of corporates, spent their CSR on hackathons.
Spending CSR on socially relevant problems, in the real sense of it, would not give them as much name-fame-branding as much sponsoring a big fat hackathon would.

Moreover, it became a very good source of hiring from the talent pool that's energetic, excited, comfortable to give their best, all at the same place and all competing.

That's like the best fishing grounds for the sharks. Is it not ?

Where visiting colleges after colleges, with deteriorating quality of talent, was going to cost the time plus extra pay for their HR and hiring employees, Hackathons became a weekend party to hire talent.
A talent which may not need much training either.

And this is surely going to continue and grow in the future.
Hackathons are going to happen a lot more.
Because more than anything, it's also a meet-up of old coder friends who would otherwise prefer to stay home on their table and code.

These days, organising a hackathon is the next gen hype of the event organising sector.
Companies which organised marriage parties, now even organise hackathons. Caterers make money.
Money flows and materialism shows.

Focus started being divided between design, code, innovations, and business models.

Jury is sometimes even hired. People started building their profiles, and very soon many people very Hackathon-judge-worthy.

Everyone in that league wants to be an Angel investor. Businessmen judged, scolded and burned dedicated social entrepreneurs on stage. Young people spending years of their lives behind and idea. And professors who never did anything original ever in their lives, are called for judging 'innovative-ness' of young dreaming minds.

Actually, the whole of the Indian society has never seen the backstage stories of a proper disruptive innovation happening over years. Because the almost all the entrepreneurship of the last 5 years was about the service sector.

But in the undercurrent, smart people have sensed it. And large wave of product innovations are going to come around us, I have hope.

Things are getting better pretty fast.

Hence, many Hackathons have got their own flavours to it.
Some are more serious kind. Some are just mere parties.
Very few people understand the very essence of it.
Of what it means to code for the night and get that one bug fixed by the morning.
Of how teams come together and how ideas spark into fire.

So yes, to conclude — whether we like it or not, hackathons have evolved over time. And they will continue to do so.
For the simple reason that everything around it has, the people, the business, the responsibilities, the fun and most importantly, the intentions.

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