I see hackathon as a scam<p>or how to teach early to young new passionate developers that the &quot;norm&quot; is to work long hours for next to no pay, pizza? yeah good enough.<p>It also vehiculate the idea that code is a just commodity, that anyone can piss some code over few days and build full working apps supposed to impress people.<p>Well, understand those poor company, they are not sure you can be a good slave, so they need to test you over a week-end: does he&#x2F;she complain for not being paid? not sleeping? being forced to use this API vs another?<p>howdy boy, &quot;slap on the back&quot;, here your prize, by the way everything you have produced this week-end is owned by whoever organized the hackathon and they can do whatever they want with it while still not paying you, now go away you need to sleep and you stink.<p>I saw companies organizing hackathon for their own employee, not something open to other developers or involving a public API, no sir, a company week-end event.<p>They did those hackathon to allow their own employee to work on &quot;what they like&quot; or &quot;what they did not have time to work on during working hours&quot;, but still have to be related to the company business, in exchange of beers and pizzas .. oh and if you don&#x27;t show up we&#x27;ll know you are a lazy bastard not inline with the company direction.<p>So yeah maybe not all hackathon are like that, but most of them has this feel of scam where at the end you want to scream &quot;fuck you pay me&quot;.