I stopped attending Hackathons (and Jams) out of a principle decision. I&#x27;ve come to feel that Hackathons are only encouraging some of the worst aspects of the software industry. The industry as a whole has long, bad habits of encouraging &quot;crunch work&quot; and unpaid overtime. Hackathons are a celebration of those bad habits (and a mirror to them). The arguments pro-Hackathon point out that such events are unsustainable and you can&#x27;t expect to do it every weekend, and yet you also start to see Hackathons filling up nearly every weekend in a year and people that try to attend all of them that they think they safely can.<p>I don&#x27;t want to encourage &quot;crunch work&quot; and so I stopped paying attention to Hackathons entirely. Life is too short to burn so brightly on weekends for projects that mostly don&#x27;t matter. I do worry that Hackathon culture encourages more bad software business cultures that think that they need crunch or can survive on crunch and that &quot;everybody is doing it&quot;.