Hackathons as dystopias
March 24, 2018 11:19 AM Subscribe
Sociologist Sharon Zukin spent a year observing hackathons and then wrote about it (paywalled article, Google Books preview) for Research in the Sociology of Work. Wired interviewed Zukin for their article Sociologists Examine Hackathons and See Exploitation. "Zukin tells WIRED the unpaid labor of hackathons recalls sociological research on fashion models, who are also expected to spend time promoting themselves on social media, and party girls, who go to nightclubs with male VIPs in hopes of boosting acting or modeling aspirations. Participants are combining self-investment with self-exploitation, she says. It’s rational given the demands of the modern labor market. It’s just precarious work."
at least [law graduates] are not yet expected to participate in litigatathons
Oh, there are legal hackathons, too, and they're growing in importance as technology reshapes the legal sector.
More classically, one of the few ways for law students to gain practical legal experience (and differentiate themselves in a terrible job market) is to participate in a law clinic. Those students are paying for the chance to work for free (~$6k for a one semester clinic is typical at a private law school). Students also differentiate themselves by doing review or editing work for a law journal, the vast majority of which are run by law students, not law professors. Again, students pay a significant amount in tuition for the privilege of doing this free labor.
It's less common now (because of lawsuits), but unpaid or grossly underpaid summer internships are another way desperate law students are exploited for cheap labor.
posted by jedicus at 11:51 AM on March 24, 2018 [28 favorites]
Oh, there are legal hackathons, too, and they're growing in importance as technology reshapes the legal sector.
More classically, one of the few ways for law students to gain practical legal experience (and differentiate themselves in a terrible job market) is to participate in a law clinic. Those students are paying for the chance to work for free (~$6k for a one semester clinic is typical at a private law school). Students also differentiate themselves by doing review or editing work for a law journal, the vast majority of which are run by law students, not law professors. Again, students pay a significant amount in tuition for the privilege of doing this free labor.
It's less common now (because of lawsuits), but unpaid or grossly underpaid summer internships are another way desperate law students are exploited for cheap labor.
posted by jedicus at 11:51 AM on March 24, 2018 [28 favorites]
And at least in theory all attorneys are supposed to spend part of their time doing pro bono work (the Model Rules suggest 50 hours per year), although it isn't mandatory in any state I'm familiar with.
posted by jedicus at 11:54 AM on March 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by jedicus at 11:54 AM on March 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
And yet still all we hear about is how we should train our kids to code because "STEM skills" are so in demand.
As an aside, I (as a coder) think it's funny that there are two emergent parallel narratives:
1) Everyone must code.
2) AI will soon replace coders.
Although the second item is more complicated than breathless tech journalists make it out to be (isn't everything?), I would be amused if there came a time when coders were considered to have wasted their time and potential on engineering, and should have gone into the humanities.
posted by klanawa at 11:59 AM on March 24, 2018 [19 favorites]
As an aside, I (as a coder) think it's funny that there are two emergent parallel narratives:
1) Everyone must code.
2) AI will soon replace coders.
Although the second item is more complicated than breathless tech journalists make it out to be (isn't everything?), I would be amused if there came a time when coders were considered to have wasted their time and potential on engineering, and should have gone into the humanities.
posted by klanawa at 11:59 AM on March 24, 2018 [19 favorites]
Oh, there are legal hackathons, too, and they're growing in importance as technology reshapes the legal sector.
Huh, I had no idea. Although at least law clinics seem to be mostly nonprofit?
Well, my advice to anyone choosing what field to go into still stands. Ask if there are there any fun opportunities on evenings and weekends for young people just starting out in the field to network, maybe do a little work and show off their skills to potential employers. Maybe there's some free food or beer involved? Possibly even a contest with prizes for the best efforts?
Yes? Then run.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 12:06 PM on March 24, 2018 [17 favorites]
Huh, I had no idea. Although at least law clinics seem to be mostly nonprofit?
Well, my advice to anyone choosing what field to go into still stands. Ask if there are there any fun opportunities on evenings and weekends for young people just starting out in the field to network, maybe do a little work and show off their skills to potential employers. Maybe there's some free food or beer involved? Possibly even a contest with prizes for the best efforts?
Yes? Then run.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 12:06 PM on March 24, 2018 [17 favorites]
I've seen hackathons work in a positive way, but only when they're used to reallocate regular work time to interesting work that's otherwise low priority or high risk. "Take three days and make something on your wish list happen." I've seen some really great projects come out of events like that.
They're really hard to get right though, because they have so many failure modes.
posted by fencerjimmy at 12:13 PM on March 24, 2018 [26 favorites]
They're really hard to get right though, because they have so many failure modes.
- You have to schedule this during regular work hours, not evening or weekends.
- No penalty for participation ("you failed to get your regular work done")
- No penalty for non-participation ("why aren't you being cool with us?")
- You have to actually let people work on whatever they want, and be ok if that wish list item turned out to be a bad idea anyway.
- If someone comes up with something awesome for the organization, they should be rewarded appropriately (rather than just taking their idea).
- I don't think there's any way to make a "public" hackathon that's non-horrible. This applies to internal events only, with people already being compensated fairly for their time and labor.
posted by fencerjimmy at 12:13 PM on March 24, 2018 [26 favorites]
I would be amused if there came a time when coders were considered to have wasted their time and potential on engineering, and should have gone into the humanities
nah, they'll just tell you that you should have leapt straight into the Rendering Vats upon graduating high school -- after signing the paperwork tethering any of your surviving family to any and all fees and debts accruing from said Rendering and the resultant waste disposal in perpetuity, of course
posted by halation at 12:17 PM on March 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
nah, they'll just tell you that you should have leapt straight into the Rendering Vats upon graduating high school -- after signing the paperwork tethering any of your surviving family to any and all fees and debts accruing from said Rendering and the resultant waste disposal in perpetuity, of course
posted by halation at 12:17 PM on March 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Well, my advice to anyone choosing what field to go into still stands. Ask if there are there any fun opportunities on evenings and weekends for young people just starting out in the field to network, maybe do a little work and show off their skills to potential employers. Maybe there's some free food or beer involved? Possibly even a contest with prizes for the best efforts?
Yes? Then run.
As I've said before, the tech sector and open source in particular has a massive free labor problem. A lot of the system is built on extracting free or undervalued labor, and eventually the usual bromides aren't going to cover it up anymore.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:19 PM on March 24, 2018 [22 favorites]
Yes? Then run.
As I've said before, the tech sector and open source in particular has a massive free labor problem. A lot of the system is built on extracting free or undervalued labor, and eventually the usual bromides aren't going to cover it up anymore.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:19 PM on March 24, 2018 [22 favorites]
This reminds me of our great open source software discussion from 2013.
Hackathons seem like some messed up corporate outgrowth from the push for engineers to have an "OSS CV" as a sort of hiring screen. The difference is OSS contributions are of course self-driven and often intrinsically motivated whereas hackathons take that same unpaid labor concept and bring that labor and caffeinated focus directly under the corporate umbrella for 1-3 days so you work on their projects on their terms.
I think the one bright side of this hackathon mania is that it seems like a decent recruiting tool (disclaimer: I'm neither a tech recruiter nor even in tech). If you're looking for the rockstar, motivated engineers from within a huge pool of talent, what better recruiting tool than to put them in overdrive working on a project to see how it turns out? And the ones who go to the hackathons and do very well in them are probably the ones who love coding as a hobby and have the intrinsic motivation to do this stuff.
Basically, this comment from the earlier thread:
I use open source as one of many things I look at when interviewing candidates. Ashe has given me something to think about here, which is that lack of OSS contributions doesn't necessarily equate to lack of passion, or skill.
However, if I was hiring a musician, (or maybe composer is a better analogy), I'd want to hear their music and I would not feel bad hiring the one that devoted more of their off hours to practice.
In my twenty years of working in the field, I've noticed quite a strong correlation with regard to the motivations of great vs. mediocre programmers. The great ones almost invariably love doing it, they have personal projects, they write about it, speak about it, and think about it both in and out of work. The ones that are primarily attracted to the salary never quite seem to get the idea of craftsmanship. To paraphrase a friend: "They don't pay me to write good software - I'd do that for free. They pay me to attend the meetings and to let them tell me what to work on."
So I want to screen for that kind of enthusiasm, and OSS is a good proxy, but not perfect. I'd love to have something better and less discriminatory, but it seems most filters have problems. For me the key is to look along a number of axes and try to get context for everything. I always pair program during the interview if possible, but given the context of the interview, even that can give a skewed picture sometimes.
posted by bashos_frog at 9:30 AM on November 16, 2013 [32 favorites +] [!]
posted by hexaflexagon at 12:43 PM on March 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
Hackathons seem like some messed up corporate outgrowth from the push for engineers to have an "OSS CV" as a sort of hiring screen. The difference is OSS contributions are of course self-driven and often intrinsically motivated whereas hackathons take that same unpaid labor concept and bring that labor and caffeinated focus directly under the corporate umbrella for 1-3 days so you work on their projects on their terms.
I think the one bright side of this hackathon mania is that it seems like a decent recruiting tool (disclaimer: I'm neither a tech recruiter nor even in tech). If you're looking for the rockstar, motivated engineers from within a huge pool of talent, what better recruiting tool than to put them in overdrive working on a project to see how it turns out? And the ones who go to the hackathons and do very well in them are probably the ones who love coding as a hobby and have the intrinsic motivation to do this stuff.
Basically, this comment from the earlier thread:
I use open source as one of many things I look at when interviewing candidates. Ashe has given me something to think about here, which is that lack of OSS contributions doesn't necessarily equate to lack of passion, or skill.
However, if I was hiring a musician, (or maybe composer is a better analogy), I'd want to hear their music and I would not feel bad hiring the one that devoted more of their off hours to practice.
In my twenty years of working in the field, I've noticed quite a strong correlation with regard to the motivations of great vs. mediocre programmers. The great ones almost invariably love doing it, they have personal projects, they write about it, speak about it, and think about it both in and out of work. The ones that are primarily attracted to the salary never quite seem to get the idea of craftsmanship. To paraphrase a friend: "They don't pay me to write good software - I'd do that for free. They pay me to attend the meetings and to let them tell me what to work on."
So I want to screen for that kind of enthusiasm, and OSS is a good proxy, but not perfect. I'd love to have something better and less discriminatory, but it seems most filters have problems. For me the key is to look along a number of axes and try to get context for everything. I always pair program during the interview if possible, but given the context of the interview, even that can give a skewed picture sometimes.
posted by bashos_frog at 9:30 AM on November 16, 2013 [32 favorites +] [!]
posted by hexaflexagon at 12:43 PM on March 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
And the ones who go to the hackathons and do very well in them are probably the ones who love coding as a hobby and have the intrinsic motivation to do this stuff.
…and are relatively free from outside commitments. It's a lot harder to do a weekend hackathon if you're the primary caregiver for a kid, for instance.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:00 PM on March 24, 2018 [31 favorites]
…and are relatively free from outside commitments. It's a lot harder to do a weekend hackathon if you're the primary caregiver for a kid, for instance.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:00 PM on March 24, 2018 [31 favorites]
I don't choose my plumber based on how fun she thinks plumbing outside of work is.
posted by tofu_crouton at 1:01 PM on March 24, 2018 [70 favorites]
posted by tofu_crouton at 1:01 PM on March 24, 2018 [70 favorites]
I’m happy to make open source contributions to tools that I actually use. I have a hard time understanding professional coders who give unpaid labor to Kaggle and its corporate sponsors- sometimes direct competitors of their own employers.
posted by simra at 1:14 PM on March 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by simra at 1:14 PM on March 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
In my twenty years of working in the field, I've noticed quite a strong correlation with regard to the motivations of great vs. mediocre programmers. The great ones almost invariably love doing it, they have personal projects, they write about it, speak about it, and think about it both in and out of work. The ones that are primarily attracted to the salary never quite seem to get the idea of craftsmanship. To paraphrase a friend: "They don't pay me to write good software - I'd do that for free. They pay me to attend the meetings and to let them tell me what to work on."
So I want to screen for that kind of enthusiasm, and OSS is a good proxy, but not perfect. I'd love to have something better and less discriminatory, but it seems most filters have problems. For me the key is to look along a number of axes and try to get context for everything. I always pair program during the interview if possible, but given the context of the interview, even that can give a skewed picture sometimes.
Yeah, this is pure, unvarnished bullshit, and rather emblematic of the toxic thought in our community, with its devotion to the cult of the amateur. I can't think of any other professional field in which devoting oneself to the field is seen as healthy or necessary outside of athletics (and that mainly stems from the fact that performing at the elite level demands that physically). I'd argue that his "observation" is nothing more than good old selection bias based on cultural prejudices of what makes a "good" programmer. (Of course, our media doesn't help there either, with how it depects programmers and other techies.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:16 PM on March 24, 2018 [39 favorites]
So I want to screen for that kind of enthusiasm, and OSS is a good proxy, but not perfect. I'd love to have something better and less discriminatory, but it seems most filters have problems. For me the key is to look along a number of axes and try to get context for everything. I always pair program during the interview if possible, but given the context of the interview, even that can give a skewed picture sometimes.
Yeah, this is pure, unvarnished bullshit, and rather emblematic of the toxic thought in our community, with its devotion to the cult of the amateur. I can't think of any other professional field in which devoting oneself to the field is seen as healthy or necessary outside of athletics (and that mainly stems from the fact that performing at the elite level demands that physically). I'd argue that his "observation" is nothing more than good old selection bias based on cultural prejudices of what makes a "good" programmer. (Of course, our media doesn't help there either, with how it depects programmers and other techies.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:16 PM on March 24, 2018 [39 favorites]
I like the idea of internal hackathons, where they happen during regular work hours, all people participating are salaried, and folks from other departments get to collaborate.
posted by oceanjesse at 1:17 PM on March 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by oceanjesse at 1:17 PM on March 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
Yeah, this is pure, unvarnished bullshit, and rather emblematic of the toxic thought in our community, with its devotion to the cult of the amateur.
A thousand times, this.
There's nothing incompatible with being great at software development and also believing in work/life balance. That our industry tells young up-and-comers that there is an incompatibility therein is a function of the desire of management to get as much profit for as little expense as possible, and the desire of those who have bought into this ego-boosting lie to never self-reflect and consider maybe they got duped.
Your unreasonable work schedule that's destroying your personal life does not make you a badass.
posted by tocts at 1:28 PM on March 24, 2018 [29 favorites]
A thousand times, this.
There's nothing incompatible with being great at software development and also believing in work/life balance. That our industry tells young up-and-comers that there is an incompatibility therein is a function of the desire of management to get as much profit for as little expense as possible, and the desire of those who have bought into this ego-boosting lie to never self-reflect and consider maybe they got duped.
Your unreasonable work schedule that's destroying your personal life does not make you a badass.
posted by tocts at 1:28 PM on March 24, 2018 [29 favorites]
Hackathons and requiring job candidates to have extensive personal gitlab projects and contributions to OSS projects just seem like excuses for age discrimination. Who has time for this stuff other than young single people? I do my job very well and I'm happy doing it but I'm not spending my evenings and weekends doing free work just to bolster my LinkedIn profile.
posted by octothorpe at 2:09 PM on March 24, 2018 [17 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 2:09 PM on March 24, 2018 [17 favorites]
>And yet still all we hear about is how we should train our kids to code because "STEM skills" are so in demand.
The demand is very apparent from the starting salaries and employment rates for those college majors. It is not some capitalist fiction. And I am pretty sure that things are even more lopsided in Asia.
posted by tirutiru at 2:11 PM on March 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
The demand is very apparent from the starting salaries and employment rates for those college majors. It is not some capitalist fiction. And I am pretty sure that things are even more lopsided in Asia.
posted by tirutiru at 2:11 PM on March 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Hackathons and requiring job candidates to have extensive personal gitlab projects and contributions to OSS projects just seem like excuses for age discrimination.
It's not just age discrimination (though that's certainly part of it), but more of a cultural reinforcement. Getting involved in all of these things also gets you immersed in the culture, which almost certainly rubs off on you just from exposure.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:13 PM on March 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
It's not just age discrimination (though that's certainly part of it), but more of a cultural reinforcement. Getting involved in all of these things also gets you immersed in the culture, which almost certainly rubs off on you just from exposure.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:13 PM on March 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
The extent to which any of this extracurricular stuff, like an extensive github or participation in hackathons, is required can be overstated. I have never participated in a hackathon and my github is pretty thin, but i’ve been employed every day of the last 16 years. I’ve also done recruiting in the industry and candidates that had a lot of github stuff . . . I don’t recall that I ever saw any.
posted by chrchr at 2:25 PM on March 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by chrchr at 2:25 PM on March 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
The extent to which any of this extracurricular stuff, like an extensive github or participation in hackathons, is required can be overstated. I have never participated in a hackathon and my github is pretty thin, but i’ve been employed every day of the last 16 years. I’ve also done recruiting in the industry and candidates that had a lot of github stuff . . . I don’t recall that I ever saw any.
How important they are depends on a few factors, like where in the field the prospective employer is, where in the country they are, what the business does, etc. But in some of the major tech hubs, this is a real thing, and a real problem.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:34 PM on March 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
How important they are depends on a few factors, like where in the field the prospective employer is, where in the country they are, what the business does, etc. But in some of the major tech hubs, this is a real thing, and a real problem.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:34 PM on March 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
Ask if there are there any fun opportunities on evenings and weekends for young people just starting out in the field to network..>Yes? Then run
Are there any fields that are not like this? Maybe the trades. But I do work in the humanities - cultural orgs - and all of this is true for us too. We have hackathons and design labs and enrichment sessions and change-the-world projects, and those who show up to them and give their free time do enhance their profile, network, and CVs. Yes, the increasing importance of extracurriculars in your professional profile is is a massive labor issue, but not one unique to STEM fields, at all.
posted by Miko at 2:55 PM on March 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Are there any fields that are not like this? Maybe the trades. But I do work in the humanities - cultural orgs - and all of this is true for us too. We have hackathons and design labs and enrichment sessions and change-the-world projects, and those who show up to them and give their free time do enhance their profile, network, and CVs. Yes, the increasing importance of extracurriculars in your professional profile is is a massive labor issue, but not one unique to STEM fields, at all.
posted by Miko at 2:55 PM on March 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Thanks for this! I resent being judged on my passion. I enjoy my job, I think I'm extremely competent (and my employer seems to agree), but I spend my weekends with my kids. Am I passionate about my job? Probably not. But I'm good at it, I work well with my team, I produce solid work. I've turned down about 6 hackathons in the past few months, and I have no blog and a sparse GitHub.
posted by Valancy Rachel at 2:55 PM on March 24, 2018 [15 favorites]
posted by Valancy Rachel at 2:55 PM on March 24, 2018 [15 favorites]
Some of the most brilliant and hard working programmers I know don't do it in their free time, and only during work hours. Conversely, I've met and worked with plenty of really mediocre programmers that make programming their hobby. They go to meetups, conferences, hackathons, hell -- even *speak* at conferences. They have little life outside of a tech/programming scene and people think they must be really brilliant. But if you work with them, you realize how little they know and really they are merely a fanboy/girl.
There's nothing wrong with extreme passion at any skill level of course, but there's sometimes a false correlation that a person with a plump resume of "open source work" and community activities actually makes them a better hire or a smarter person.
I think there is a clear distinction between open source contributions and personal work. Programmers that have their own hobby projects or sample portfolio work to build a resume for companies is not necessarily open source work, but it is a useful way show off skills. But programmers that actually file issues, submit patches and pull requests, active in feature implementation on a visibly used project or module library is more considered actual open source work. HOWEVER, getting to that point is open to a whole other discussion.
Not only does getting into open source contribution work take a ton of time and dedication (where people with families or hobbies or commitments outside or programming can't possibly have time for this), but has a significant barrier to entry. Not to mention the rampant toxicity, sexism, political in-fighting.
Also let's be real -- a lot of modern web development is not rocket science. There's a whole smoke and mirrors about skill levels and competence in computer science algorithms, but a lot of "senior software engineer" work at a startup is grunt work. Setting up Docker. Setting up Webpack. Spinning up APIs by setting up web framework of your choice. I'm talking web application work here, which is what a lot of craze is over at hackathons is about. It's not that hard, and to be honest sometimes a mediocre programmer is all you need because this stuff isn't grade A++ complex work, but there's too much parading about wanting to hire "the best." When I interview I look for team work and people skills above all. Any competent person can figure shit out from Stack Overflow. It may not be possible to undo toxic behavior and sink morale of the whole team.
posted by xtine at 3:17 PM on March 24, 2018 [22 favorites]
There's nothing wrong with extreme passion at any skill level of course, but there's sometimes a false correlation that a person with a plump resume of "open source work" and community activities actually makes them a better hire or a smarter person.
I think there is a clear distinction between open source contributions and personal work. Programmers that have their own hobby projects or sample portfolio work to build a resume for companies is not necessarily open source work, but it is a useful way show off skills. But programmers that actually file issues, submit patches and pull requests, active in feature implementation on a visibly used project or module library is more considered actual open source work. HOWEVER, getting to that point is open to a whole other discussion.
Not only does getting into open source contribution work take a ton of time and dedication (where people with families or hobbies or commitments outside or programming can't possibly have time for this), but has a significant barrier to entry. Not to mention the rampant toxicity, sexism, political in-fighting.
Also let's be real -- a lot of modern web development is not rocket science. There's a whole smoke and mirrors about skill levels and competence in computer science algorithms, but a lot of "senior software engineer" work at a startup is grunt work. Setting up Docker. Setting up Webpack. Spinning up APIs by setting up web framework of your choice. I'm talking web application work here, which is what a lot of craze is over at hackathons is about. It's not that hard, and to be honest sometimes a mediocre programmer is all you need because this stuff isn't grade A++ complex work, but there's too much parading about wanting to hire "the best." When I interview I look for team work and people skills above all. Any competent person can figure shit out from Stack Overflow. It may not be possible to undo toxic behavior and sink morale of the whole team.
posted by xtine at 3:17 PM on March 24, 2018 [22 favorites]
I just came here to mention the “Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon”, which embodies the exact opposite attitude of usual/boring/exploitative hackathons by being irreverent, gross and useless. I find it lovely.
posted by vert canard at 4:08 PM on March 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by vert canard at 4:08 PM on March 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
Wow am I welcoming Zukin's analysis, but as a couple-few of you have pointed out, there are issues with the hackathon form beyond those it presents in the ethics of career development.
In my own sector, hackathons tend to be oriented toward developing tools for civic engagement and municipal resource management (if I can fairly gloss a very broad field in such a reductionist way). But they tend, too, to reproduce without ever once questioning the decades-regnant neoliberal orthodoxy about how cities ought to be run (i.e. as businesses), what municipal government is for (primarily service delivery), and how the role of citizen ought to be understood (as a customer, and perhaps these days a generator of useful data as well).
That I've witnessed, the people who participate in them are energetic, hopeful, enthusiastic, generous with their time and energy, and boundlessly sincere. But they're also, generally speaking, operating without much historical perspective, or anything like an understanding of power. Fold these factors in with the compressed timescale of a hackathon, and it shouldn't really surprise anyone that the things they generate are, at best, tactical, ahistorical and incapable of being used to contest the distribution of power. They're palliative, or therapeutic, in Sherry Arnstein's terminology.
And I can't help but think there's a deep relationship between the form and the output. Only under a neoliberal dispensation would anyone think that corralling twenty or fifty technically competent but broadly non-representative volunteers in an empty law school auditorium for the space of a weekend, and feeding them bottled water and catered sandwiches and stickers for their laptops, would result in systems capable of meeting the needs of a large, diverse, complex and heterogeneous urban population. Whether the developers involved are being exploited, whether other parties are benefitting from their work far more than they themselves, and whether the biggest part of that benefit ultimately comes down to the optics of being the kind of forward-looking, open organization that sponsors such things all seem to me to be at least strongly plausible, but what bothers me most of all is the crap conception of cities, urban citizenship and software development that hackathons nurture, foster and propagate. Cities and other public entities that are serious about developing digital tools for their constituencies should maintain an in-house software development competency, and pay the developers involved the salaries they deserve.
posted by adamgreenfield at 4:35 PM on March 24, 2018 [34 favorites]
In my own sector, hackathons tend to be oriented toward developing tools for civic engagement and municipal resource management (if I can fairly gloss a very broad field in such a reductionist way). But they tend, too, to reproduce without ever once questioning the decades-regnant neoliberal orthodoxy about how cities ought to be run (i.e. as businesses), what municipal government is for (primarily service delivery), and how the role of citizen ought to be understood (as a customer, and perhaps these days a generator of useful data as well).
That I've witnessed, the people who participate in them are energetic, hopeful, enthusiastic, generous with their time and energy, and boundlessly sincere. But they're also, generally speaking, operating without much historical perspective, or anything like an understanding of power. Fold these factors in with the compressed timescale of a hackathon, and it shouldn't really surprise anyone that the things they generate are, at best, tactical, ahistorical and incapable of being used to contest the distribution of power. They're palliative, or therapeutic, in Sherry Arnstein's terminology.
And I can't help but think there's a deep relationship between the form and the output. Only under a neoliberal dispensation would anyone think that corralling twenty or fifty technically competent but broadly non-representative volunteers in an empty law school auditorium for the space of a weekend, and feeding them bottled water and catered sandwiches and stickers for their laptops, would result in systems capable of meeting the needs of a large, diverse, complex and heterogeneous urban population. Whether the developers involved are being exploited, whether other parties are benefitting from their work far more than they themselves, and whether the biggest part of that benefit ultimately comes down to the optics of being the kind of forward-looking, open organization that sponsors such things all seem to me to be at least strongly plausible, but what bothers me most of all is the crap conception of cities, urban citizenship and software development that hackathons nurture, foster and propagate. Cities and other public entities that are serious about developing digital tools for their constituencies should maintain an in-house software development competency, and pay the developers involved the salaries they deserve.
posted by adamgreenfield at 4:35 PM on March 24, 2018 [34 favorites]
I have helped run Health Hack in Brisbane for the last 3 years, and we're about to start planning for this year's. I do it because it's a great fun weekend, I love working with the people involved, and I believe that there are often great outcomes for the community. Many times a prototype developed at Health Hack has gone on to bigger things. Last year the winner was Yarning, a beautiful project that used culturally sensitive sound, vision and animations to walk Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through the difficult process of making end of life care decisions. If the sociologists want to regard volunteering to help the community as exploitative, well fine, I'm still going to the Health Hack Brisbane 2018 planning meeting tomorrow night.
posted by drnick at 4:37 PM on March 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by drnick at 4:37 PM on March 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
drnick, I'd be very interested to know how many people are still using Yarning a year later, and whether it's actively being maintained or further developed. I know that this is far from an exhaustive list of possible success metrics, but those are particularly important to me.
posted by adamgreenfield at 4:59 PM on March 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by adamgreenfield at 4:59 PM on March 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
Oh my god, the Stupid Hackathon is my *favorite thing* now. I must go to one of these.
posted by faineg at 6:33 PM on March 24, 2018
posted by faineg at 6:33 PM on March 24, 2018
Also let's be real -- a lot of modern web development is not rocket science.
Agreed. There are a wide variety of jobs that fall under the generic category of "programming" and some of those jobs are much harder than others but receive surprisingly similar pay. I think this condition is unsustainable, both because it inflates requirements for employees who need to justify their value (through hackathons and OSS resumes as discussed here) and because it forces employers to pay a lot for skills that are not particularly rare or difficult to learn. One of those two groups is going to call bullshit on this dynamic eventually (probably employers, since they have everything to gain and nothing to lose) and I have a bad feeling that wages for a lot of the less difficult/niche software jobs will plummet when that happens. Let's see how many people are pushing to teach kids programming once a CS degree no longer guarantees roughly six figure starting salaries for any recent college grad.
posted by jv776 at 6:45 PM on March 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Agreed. There are a wide variety of jobs that fall under the generic category of "programming" and some of those jobs are much harder than others but receive surprisingly similar pay. I think this condition is unsustainable, both because it inflates requirements for employees who need to justify their value (through hackathons and OSS resumes as discussed here) and because it forces employers to pay a lot for skills that are not particularly rare or difficult to learn. One of those two groups is going to call bullshit on this dynamic eventually (probably employers, since they have everything to gain and nothing to lose) and I have a bad feeling that wages for a lot of the less difficult/niche software jobs will plummet when that happens. Let's see how many people are pushing to teach kids programming once a CS degree no longer guarantees roughly six figure starting salaries for any recent college grad.
posted by jv776 at 6:45 PM on March 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Agreed. There are a wide variety of jobs that fall under the generic category of "programming" and some of those jobs are much harder than others but receive surprisingly similar pay.
Isn't a lot of this the result of the stupid money flying around in the startup scene? Don't imagine that I have more than a hunch here because I haven't done any serious comparison but I have a sense that there are pay differences between different sectors of the "software industry" which have to do with the amount of money that's there to throw around, the number of applicants, and god knows what else. Which means that within one of those sectors there's a pay difference between the people with really rare skills and really basic skills, but in the big picture there are some rare and important skills which are surprisingly poorly compensated compared to basic web development in boom towns.
posted by atoxyl at 7:06 PM on March 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Isn't a lot of this the result of the stupid money flying around in the startup scene? Don't imagine that I have more than a hunch here because I haven't done any serious comparison but I have a sense that there are pay differences between different sectors of the "software industry" which have to do with the amount of money that's there to throw around, the number of applicants, and god knows what else. Which means that within one of those sectors there's a pay difference between the people with really rare skills and really basic skills, but in the big picture there are some rare and important skills which are surprisingly poorly compensated compared to basic web development in boom towns.
posted by atoxyl at 7:06 PM on March 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
adamgreenfield, the Brisbane Health Hack was only 4.5 months ago, so it may be a little early to see if Yarning has longevity, though I'm following up with them now to see how/if it's going. But certainly there are Health Hacks that have lived on and been further developed well after the Health Hack. For instance, mdbox , an online repository for molecular dynamics simulations, started as a Brisbane Health Hack in 2015, went on to gain several hundred thousand in funding based on the Health Hack prototype, and is actively being developed and extended. Karmen Condic-Jurkic who was the original problem owner at the 2015 Brisbane Health Hack talks about her experiences here. Some projects will live, some will die. Mostly it depends on the energy of the original problem owner (though all code is open sourced so there is potential for anyone to pick up and further develop a Health Hack project). Lorraine McMurtrie, who presented the Yarning problem at the Brisbane 2017 Health Hack is Director of Nursing at Goondiwindi Hospital, and she had an enormous amount of energy and belief in the importance of the problem (she gave an awesome and emotional impromptu speech explaining why it mattered when she won!), so my money would be on it going further.
posted by drnick at 8:12 PM on March 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by drnick at 8:12 PM on March 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
I can't think of any other professional field in which devoting oneself to the field is seen as healthy or necessary outside of athletics
Hi, I'm from academia. Nice to meet you.
posted by erniepan at 9:22 PM on March 24, 2018 [24 favorites]
Hi, I'm from academia. Nice to meet you.
posted by erniepan at 9:22 PM on March 24, 2018 [24 favorites]
Yep. My working life touches on three fields: academia, technology in humanitarian aid, and popular writing.
All three massively valorize people who do nothing but The Thing for every waking hour of the day. People who don’t do The Thing all the time probably just aren’t passionate enough to make it, which is their own fault for being lazy. All three gleefully encourage people to compete over whose life is the most of a smoking stress-shambles. People in all three professions seem to have lots of issues with chronic stress and unhealthy coping mechanisms. But I don’t think they’re different from many other professions, nowadays. They’re becoming the norm, and it’s spreading everywhere else.
posted by faineg at 9:44 PM on March 24, 2018 [17 favorites]
All three massively valorize people who do nothing but The Thing for every waking hour of the day. People who don’t do The Thing all the time probably just aren’t passionate enough to make it, which is their own fault for being lazy. All three gleefully encourage people to compete over whose life is the most of a smoking stress-shambles. People in all three professions seem to have lots of issues with chronic stress and unhealthy coping mechanisms. But I don’t think they’re different from many other professions, nowadays. They’re becoming the norm, and it’s spreading everywhere else.
posted by faineg at 9:44 PM on March 24, 2018 [17 favorites]
It's the Hollywood model. A small number of stars make a ton of money, while a large number of people scrape by and get exploited because of their hope of one day becoming a star. When one person nopes out, five are ready to take their place.
It occurs in any line of work that has high social status. The status attracts people who are willing to not make any money for an extended period of time in order to get ahead in the field, and the huge number of candidates compared to the number of star jobs makes them ripe for exploitation.
With the massive increase in the number of people with college and advanced degrees, the Hollywood model is extending throughout the economy. The trades are immune because of their low social status.
The big difference is that Hollywood has unions that have fought and won some basic protections for people on the bottom of the ladder, and even there, the power imbalances that create possibilities for abuse are still striking.
posted by fuzz at 4:59 AM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
It occurs in any line of work that has high social status. The status attracts people who are willing to not make any money for an extended period of time in order to get ahead in the field, and the huge number of candidates compared to the number of star jobs makes them ripe for exploitation.
With the massive increase in the number of people with college and advanced degrees, the Hollywood model is extending throughout the economy. The trades are immune because of their low social status.
The big difference is that Hollywood has unions that have fought and won some basic protections for people on the bottom of the ladder, and even there, the power imbalances that create possibilities for abuse are still striking.
posted by fuzz at 4:59 AM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
Is programming more like an academic profession or a trade?
At many points, you're almost literally doing plumbing - using existing tools and materials to get stuff from one place to another in a form it can be used. There's still - just as in a physical trade -the need to route around historical nonsense, use an imperfect solution at hand rather than go shop and evaluate a better one, but in the end you're maybe not as concerned that the water is the perfect temperature all the time, that's for later (or another team).
But that trade-like work is in service, usually, of a longer term vision like a product. As you do more programming and take on more senior roles chances are you're balancing architecture and design work with occasions of either just doing the plumbing or figuring out generalized solutions to make parts of the plumbing less tedious. This is where the parallels break down - imagine if you could replace all the pipes and connectors with capillaries built into prefab wall units with redundant, self balancing guarantees of fluid throughout. Sometimes what you're doing is a paradigm shift like that... But you still have up link it up to the municipal pipes at some point.
Finally, @adamgreenfield specifically, I'd suggest that a project's longevity isn't the only measure of its value. It's very common for a project to be a proof of concept or even just a user experience exploration to push understanding forward. Those projects tend to be high risk/unknown reward, but in this case perhaps the humans who did the work come away with an improved understanding of their user and problem space. In short, the code doesn't need to live that long for the value of perspective gained by the coders. At least that's not the only measure of value.
But yes, extracurriculars being required for a profession is s labor problem, and one being peddled to junior folks as experience. Any decent hiring manager will take into account the difficulty of the problem and scale the qualifications appropriately. Now find me one of those decent hiring managers.
posted by abulafa at 5:56 AM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]
At many points, you're almost literally doing plumbing - using existing tools and materials to get stuff from one place to another in a form it can be used. There's still - just as in a physical trade -the need to route around historical nonsense, use an imperfect solution at hand rather than go shop and evaluate a better one, but in the end you're maybe not as concerned that the water is the perfect temperature all the time, that's for later (or another team).
But that trade-like work is in service, usually, of a longer term vision like a product. As you do more programming and take on more senior roles chances are you're balancing architecture and design work with occasions of either just doing the plumbing or figuring out generalized solutions to make parts of the plumbing less tedious. This is where the parallels break down - imagine if you could replace all the pipes and connectors with capillaries built into prefab wall units with redundant, self balancing guarantees of fluid throughout. Sometimes what you're doing is a paradigm shift like that... But you still have up link it up to the municipal pipes at some point.
Finally, @adamgreenfield specifically, I'd suggest that a project's longevity isn't the only measure of its value. It's very common for a project to be a proof of concept or even just a user experience exploration to push understanding forward. Those projects tend to be high risk/unknown reward, but in this case perhaps the humans who did the work come away with an improved understanding of their user and problem space. In short, the code doesn't need to live that long for the value of perspective gained by the coders. At least that's not the only measure of value.
But yes, extracurriculars being required for a profession is s labor problem, and one being peddled to junior folks as experience. Any decent hiring manager will take into account the difficulty of the problem and scale the qualifications appropriately. Now find me one of those decent hiring managers.
posted by abulafa at 5:56 AM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]
There’s some overlap here between the thread on age discrimination in the workforce and the expectation of free and extracurricular labor described here.
In the ageism thread, some people mentioned how younger people don’t “do” work life balance. While I think this is true, from my millennial perspective, a lot of that is rooted more in “existential terror” than in actual preference.
Most of us, I suspect, don’t actually want to work (paid or unpaid) all of our waking hours, we just don’t think we have much of a choice in the matter if we want basic financial stability.
I hate that race to the bottom work-until-you-die mentality and how it’s poisoning everything, but I also participate in it, because I absolutely lie awake at night terrified I’ll die alone in a cardboard box.
Of course, there’s also the Freelancer/Contractor problem. If you’re not a salaried employee, then literally all of your waking hours could be used for working. A lot of people in that position thus end up working all the time, even if they technically could take more time off. I remember feeling extremely guilty about any time I spent “slacking off” when I was a full-time freelancer: thus all the unpaid projects that might still help you get ahead in some nebulous way.
posted by faineg at 6:09 AM on March 25, 2018 [6 favorites]
In the ageism thread, some people mentioned how younger people don’t “do” work life balance. While I think this is true, from my millennial perspective, a lot of that is rooted more in “existential terror” than in actual preference.
Most of us, I suspect, don’t actually want to work (paid or unpaid) all of our waking hours, we just don’t think we have much of a choice in the matter if we want basic financial stability.
I hate that race to the bottom work-until-you-die mentality and how it’s poisoning everything, but I also participate in it, because I absolutely lie awake at night terrified I’ll die alone in a cardboard box.
Of course, there’s also the Freelancer/Contractor problem. If you’re not a salaried employee, then literally all of your waking hours could be used for working. A lot of people in that position thus end up working all the time, even if they technically could take more time off. I remember feeling extremely guilty about any time I spent “slacking off” when I was a full-time freelancer: thus all the unpaid projects that might still help you get ahead in some nebulous way.
posted by faineg at 6:09 AM on March 25, 2018 [6 favorites]
I would be amused if there came a time when coders were considered to have wasted their time and potential on engineering, and should have gone into the humanities.
I have two degrees in the humanities and no degrees or formal training in computer science and have been a web developer for 20 years. Back when I started, one could learn front-end web development by looking at the source code. Most of my cohort at work are from the humanities, attracted to front-end development not for the money but because we like making things and care about craft, etc. One the most interesting developments in recent years has been the many graduates of computer science programs who apply for front end jobs with crazy Javascript skills - they have a bajillion sort algorithms memorized - but they can’t tell that the paddings on the buttons they’ve coded are completely different from the paddings in the buttons in the design comp. So I think programming might need the humanities more than it realizes.
The great ones almost invariably love doing it, they have personal projects, they write about it, speak about it, and think about it both in and out of work. The ones that are primarily attracted to the salary never quite seem to get the idea of craftsmanship. To paraphrase a friend: "They don't pay me to write good software - I'd do that for free. They pay me to attend the meetings and to let them tell me what to work on."
Apart from the other many valid objections to this unmitigated bullshit there is also the fact that this assumes very one-dimensional human beings who are only interested in one thing. Most of the great programmers I know have probably done some programming for the joy of it but they are also musicians, artists, and writers who are programmers for the same reason they’re artists: because they like making things. Some of those things might get made with code. Sometimes there’s overlap, but not having a GitHub filled with personal projects does not mean someone isn’t passionate about craft, elegance, accessibility, sustainability - it just means they don’t put it on GitHub.
posted by eustacescrubb at 6:56 AM on March 25, 2018 [7 favorites]
I have two degrees in the humanities and no degrees or formal training in computer science and have been a web developer for 20 years. Back when I started, one could learn front-end web development by looking at the source code. Most of my cohort at work are from the humanities, attracted to front-end development not for the money but because we like making things and care about craft, etc. One the most interesting developments in recent years has been the many graduates of computer science programs who apply for front end jobs with crazy Javascript skills - they have a bajillion sort algorithms memorized - but they can’t tell that the paddings on the buttons they’ve coded are completely different from the paddings in the buttons in the design comp. So I think programming might need the humanities more than it realizes.
The great ones almost invariably love doing it, they have personal projects, they write about it, speak about it, and think about it both in and out of work. The ones that are primarily attracted to the salary never quite seem to get the idea of craftsmanship. To paraphrase a friend: "They don't pay me to write good software - I'd do that for free. They pay me to attend the meetings and to let them tell me what to work on."
Apart from the other many valid objections to this unmitigated bullshit there is also the fact that this assumes very one-dimensional human beings who are only interested in one thing. Most of the great programmers I know have probably done some programming for the joy of it but they are also musicians, artists, and writers who are programmers for the same reason they’re artists: because they like making things. Some of those things might get made with code. Sometimes there’s overlap, but not having a GitHub filled with personal projects does not mean someone isn’t passionate about craft, elegance, accessibility, sustainability - it just means they don’t put it on GitHub.
posted by eustacescrubb at 6:56 AM on March 25, 2018 [7 favorites]
At least that's not the only measure of value.
Yesssssss...which is why I explicitly acknowledged that the longevity of a project, while particularly important to me personally, is just one among many, many possible success metrics. : . )
posted by adamgreenfield at 11:18 AM on March 25, 2018
Yesssssss...which is why I explicitly acknowledged that the longevity of a project, while particularly important to me personally, is just one among many, many possible success metrics. : . )
posted by adamgreenfield at 11:18 AM on March 25, 2018
The key problem is that nobody really knows how to do recruiting well at scale. Not Microsoft, not Google, not IBM, not some random magic-sauce HR startup... nobody. There's no clear process or algorithm that results in "the best" people—hell, there's not really even clear agreement on what "the best" people are.
The best people for a particular team are primarily the people who fill the needs of and fit in best with that particular team. The most brilliant candidate can and will fail hard if they don't "gel", as Peopleware describes it, with their coworkers. Engineering, at least as it is currently practiced in most commercial settings, is not a lone-wolf activity; if you don't find a place in the pack, you'll probably starve.
Which of course means that a fucked-up team can't just grab some awesome people and suddenly become great, or even good. You can't recruit yourself out of dysfunction, although companies certainly try and try. "Unicorn hunt"-style recruiting is, in my experience, often symptomatic of this. Rather than get candidates in front of the team they'll be working with, the company just tries to create more and more complex qualifications, in the hope of finding the "perfect" person who will come in and solve their problems.
That's not, again IMO, how shit works. The perfect candidate for one team will bomb in another one. The same person who might turn into a "rockstar" at devops, who repeatedly saves everyone man-weeks of work through build automation or something, on a different team might end up being regarded as a total bottom-feeder, fit for only the worst "plumbing" tasks and glass-ceilinged until they move on.
This leads to problems when we try to discuss tech hiring, because the hiring process and heuristics that work fine for one team won't work for another. For one team, maybe looking for people with a shitload of green squares on their Github means they're going to fit in well; but on another team that might be nonindicative—at best. There are teams where that level of passion and interest in coding-as-lifestyle are basically normal and people who are that way thrive; I've worked at places like that and seen it. (I get that there is sort of a Mefi-hivemind-opinion hatred of those sort of workplaces, and that's fine, but it's not universal. There are a fair number of people, mostly but not exclusively younger, who actively seek places like that out.) But if a team isn't like that and high-performing already, adding a bunch of people who think like that isn't suddenly going to make it high-performing—it could very well have the opposite effect. And I'm a little suspicious that the proliferation of hackathons stems from exactly this mistaken belief.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:25 PM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
The best people for a particular team are primarily the people who fill the needs of and fit in best with that particular team. The most brilliant candidate can and will fail hard if they don't "gel", as Peopleware describes it, with their coworkers. Engineering, at least as it is currently practiced in most commercial settings, is not a lone-wolf activity; if you don't find a place in the pack, you'll probably starve.
Which of course means that a fucked-up team can't just grab some awesome people and suddenly become great, or even good. You can't recruit yourself out of dysfunction, although companies certainly try and try. "Unicorn hunt"-style recruiting is, in my experience, often symptomatic of this. Rather than get candidates in front of the team they'll be working with, the company just tries to create more and more complex qualifications, in the hope of finding the "perfect" person who will come in and solve their problems.
That's not, again IMO, how shit works. The perfect candidate for one team will bomb in another one. The same person who might turn into a "rockstar" at devops, who repeatedly saves everyone man-weeks of work through build automation or something, on a different team might end up being regarded as a total bottom-feeder, fit for only the worst "plumbing" tasks and glass-ceilinged until they move on.
This leads to problems when we try to discuss tech hiring, because the hiring process and heuristics that work fine for one team won't work for another. For one team, maybe looking for people with a shitload of green squares on their Github means they're going to fit in well; but on another team that might be nonindicative—at best. There are teams where that level of passion and interest in coding-as-lifestyle are basically normal and people who are that way thrive; I've worked at places like that and seen it. (I get that there is sort of a Mefi-hivemind-opinion hatred of those sort of workplaces, and that's fine, but it's not universal. There are a fair number of people, mostly but not exclusively younger, who actively seek places like that out.) But if a team isn't like that and high-performing already, adding a bunch of people who think like that isn't suddenly going to make it high-performing—it could very well have the opposite effect. And I'm a little suspicious that the proliferation of hackathons stems from exactly this mistaken belief.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:25 PM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
@adamgreenfield, the main coder on Yarning got back to me. He is still actively working on the project with the problem owner, and is pretty enthusiastic about it. As I understand it, it was presented to community members a month ago to get feedback for further development.
posted by drnick at 3:10 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by drnick at 3:10 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
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posted by Ralston McTodd at 11:29 AM on March 24, 2018 [13 favorites]