Hackathons Are Dystopian Events That Dupe People Into Working For Free, Say Sociologists (fastcompany.com) 155
An anonymous reader writes: That's the conclusion that two sociologists came to after observing seven hackathons over the period of one year, reports Wired. In "Hackathons As Co-optation Ritual: Socializing Workers and Institutionalizing Innovation in the 'New' Economy," sociologists Sharon Zukin and Max Papadantonakis argue that companies use the allure of hackathons to get people to work for free. They says sponsors fuel the "romance of digital innovation by appealing to the hackers' aspiration to be multi-dimensional agents of change" when in fact the hackathons are just a means of labor control.
Socialists or sociologists? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that the terms are not mutually exclusive.
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I can't find a PDF copy or free access to the full text of t
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Karl Marx founded one of the major schools of thought in Sociology: Conflict Theory.
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I'm guessing that it was more of a typo than an assumption. Here's the offending line of the summary:
> That's the conclusion that two socialists came to after observing seven hackathons over the period of one year, reports Wired.
Socialists... Sociologists... Sociopaths... so many words to confuse.
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It appears that they've already fixed the summary.
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How about this. People who hate coding, think people who love coding are being enslaved when they code for fun. Nothing confusing there, just a lack of thought on behalf of the people doing some very shallow thinking. Sharon Zukin and Max Papadantonakis, at a guess you are shite coders and really hate doing it, gives you a headache.
Well I am a crap coder too, any problem and I immediately come up with a range of solutions my dyslectic coding problem, is I try to use a jumble of different solutions at the s
Re:Socialists or sociologists? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't find a PDF copy or free access to the full text of the publication so I can't speak to its quality, but with quotes like "romance of digital innovation by appealing to the hackers' aspiration to be multi-dimensional agents of change" I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same kind of flowery shit that Sokal made fun of [wikipedia.org] over two decades ago.
What's even funnier is that I don't think that "labor control" (understood as forcing more labor out of someone in a short period of time) is as important as the desire for 'intellectual farming', wherein hackers spew out original ideas, processes, and code, and corporations (and/or sponsors) immediately take possession of that freshly brewed intellectual property, immediately locking it down as theirs.
Re: Socialists or sociologists? (Score:2)
I always assumed participants owned their own work. Is there any evidence it's otherwise? In order for copyright to be granted over, one would typically expect compensation or a contract. Without those things, copyright naturally falls to the author.
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Which is exactly what economists say to do.
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idiotologists (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it considered duping to get people excited about working on something for free? Passion is one of the greatest joys and I'd sacrifice a lot of take home pay if I could get more passion for my work. Thus breaks now and then where I get excited and work on fun challenges with other people to create something remarkable are not working for free, they are working for me.
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Mod parent up.
People don't necessarily work for the money. Yes, they have to eat, and monetary reward wasn't the first things on their minds. Viz teachers, social workers, and so many volunteers in so many areas.
There are people that work for slave labor, meaning university adjuncts. I see pride in workmanship that has little or nothing to do with the wages paid.
Hackathons are an exercise. They're olympics of the mind. They're full of ego, truthfully, but also a competitive spirit. Does someone rob them of
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There are people that work for slave labor, meaning university adjuncts. I see pride in workmanship that has little or nothing to do with the wages paid.
I'm an adjunct, and it's probably the best paying part-time job a person can find. I make over $40 an hour, but if you factor in the out-of-class hours I spend on grading, class prep, etc., it's closer to $25.
I wouldn't call it slavery, but I'd never want to try & make a living from it. Too much chaos, the threat of full time faculty bumping you when their sections don't make course load, no real input on how the courses are taught, no benefits. Getting the number of credit hours you need is the bigges
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My friends and colleagues that are adjunct faculty make far less than you do. They're treated as contractors, saving the university from having to play prevailing, living wages, requiring no benefits, and allowing them no recourse if their contracts aren't renewed. But they know this.
Some of them attempt to "live" from the wages. They can make more at McDonalds, and they're teaching incredibly difficult courses (comparatively speaking).
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This affects millions, who were dumped to part-time status to get around the civil act of giving people needed health care coverage, which is also otherwise poorly managed by states, including those that bucked the ACA.
I know several individuals in just this mess. It sucks. Universities should have more dignity for their faculty. But they don't.
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Re:idiotologists (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll be the devil's advocate here.
Going to a hackaton and working for free isn't the problem. The problem is what happens with said work afterwards. Does it become F/OSS with some sort of GPL license or something similar, thus preventing corporations from taking that work and making it theirs, locking down the code? Then it's all cool.
But if corporations lure people into working for free through whatever means, then use those ideas, that code and that development to expand their portfolio, making shit tons of money in the process, then there's a big problem.
I did work for free in the past out of enthusiasm, saw my work being used by other entities to make lots of money and I got the shaft, so I can relate to TFA concerns.
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So now people writing BSD code isn't cool?
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Does it become F/OSS with some sort of GPL license or something similar, thus preventing corporations from taking that work and making it theirs, locking down the code?
Depends on why you code. Some people who do something for the joy of it don't care if it gets locked away afterwards.
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Depends on why you code. Some people who do something for the joy of it don't care if it gets locked away afterwards.
That excuse can't fly anymore. I mean "I'm just a scientist" excuse.
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That excuse can't fly anymore.
By nature that excuse has to fly because it is a personal opinion, and personal opinion doesn't get overridden by other people's opinion. e.g. What *you* think about what *someone else* is doing with *my* work is irrelevant.
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Personal opinion is not a trump card beating social and/or economical impact.
Scientists researched a lot of nasty weapons "for fun", without considering the impact of what they were doing.
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Personal opinion is not a trump card beating social and/or economical impact.
Except there is no such thing. We are talking about single people's time that makes only those people's opinions relevant. Society or the economy have to go pound sand if I decide to donate time for whatever reason I want.
Scientists researched a lot of nasty weapons "for fun", without considering the impact of what they were doing.
Interesting leap. Similar scientists have also created a world of exciting discoveries that have bettered your life.
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Re: idiotologists (Score:2)
The problem isn't you working on something with your friends. It's me coming along and saying thanks sucker, this belongs to my corporation because we paid for the Mountain Dew you drank.
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Clearly you're the expert on all things linguistic.
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And some people wonder why there's no conservative arts being taught in college.
Isn't that what seminaries are for?
Thousand year old religious texts are about as conservative as it gets.
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So is history, come to think of it.
Not quite sure which side of the alleged ideological fence you would place logic, rhetoric, and critical thought, though. Seems the edges of both ends of that continuum are horribly short on those.
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And some people wonder why there's no conservative arts being taught in college.
Isn't that what seminaries are for?
Liberal in liberal arts does not mean liberal in a political sense. There are some conservative liberal arts colleges, and many seminaries that are liberal in the current political sense.
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there's no conservative arts being taught in college
Most of the conservative voter base don't make it to college.
love the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the article summary carefully:
The mask slips.
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in my version of the summary, it still looks like this: That's the conclusion that two sociologists came to after .
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It said "socialists" first, then it got corrected. Corrections usually ought to be marked, in order to avoid confusing people like you, but it's Slashdot, so what do you expect.
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Read the article summary carefully:
The mask slips.
Over-analysing a typo is 'insightful' now?
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I'm not "analyzing" the typo, I'm pointing out that it the typo accidentally reflects reality: sociologists are overwhelmingly leftists; in fact, sociology is the most left leaning of all major academic fields. That's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. It has been that way since the 1970's.
They may be considered as free advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
And while on the subject, please feel free to discuss non-paying Internships...
Re:They may be considered as free advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
And while on the subject, please feel free to discuss non-paying Internships...
Different animal altogether. I work as a programmer and I like to attend hackathons every once in a while for the following reasons (in no particular order):
There are probably other benefits that I do not specifically consider, but the ones above are the big ones for me.
I go to hackathons because I get something out of it, more than they get from me, as it were.
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I would never attend a hackathon where I don't own all of my own ideas and work at the end. Period. Those exist, and it baffles me that anyone would agree to such garbage terms. I think that's what the author is referring to (where you sign your IP rights away in order to participate).
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Color me confused. My company's hackathons are attended by internal salaried employees. Nobody's working for free.
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And while on the subject, please feel free to discuss non-paying Internships...
Or people that do things as a hobby or charity or simply because they enjoy doing it - w/o any monetary considerations for themselves. No one is forced to participate in a hackathon (which Firefox suggests should be spelled "Shackleton" [wikipedia.org]).
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(which Firefox suggests should be spelled "Shackleton" [wikipedia.org]).
Hey fellows, you want to spend countless hours working in shitty conditions to complete a meaningless task faster than anyone else? Later on, you can say "we did it," and bring it up in a job interview where you can tell the panel about all of your "experience."
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And while on the subject, please feel free to discuss non-paying Internships...
In America, unpaid internships are generally illegal. They are only allowed if purely educational, involving no economically useful work. If you work, you must be paid at least the minimum wage.
If you work an unpaid internship, and document your activities, you can likely sue for backpay.
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And while on the subject, please feel free to discuss non-paying Internships...
In America, unpaid internships are generally illegal. They are only allowed if purely educational, involving no economically useful work. If you work, you must be paid at least the minimum wage.
If you work an unpaid internship, and document your activities, you can likely sue for backpay.
I know they illegal in Europe and essentially non-existing there too, but I was under the impression it was pretty common in the US.
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Somebody has to get the fucking coffee.
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And while on the subject, please feel free to discuss non-paying Internships...
In software engineering if someone offers you an unpaid internship you laugh at them. Long and loud.
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Apprenticeship, often fulfilling college credit requirements + having experience on the resume.
Anything built at a hackathon is junk (Score:1)
Working for free? That doesn't even make sense. I've never seen anything come out of a hackathon that isn't junk. Some people in power think hackathons are ways to generate buzz and recruit talent. The truth is the real talent is out building real products for real money. We don't have time to spend our free time hammering together some piece of shit for some free pizza so that we can win $1000 in funding or some bullshit prize.
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I wouldn't go that far. We've gotten a couple of nice projects out of them and several people got jobs. The best one integrated Google Maps with our expense software to automatically pick the right M&IE limits for the ZIP code. Aside: our employees are still pissed about that one since the IRS requires you to 1099 when you go over. I got my current job after winning a contest in 2007 where I drew an organizational hierarchy on an HTML canvas. We still haven't put it into production yet since we're
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Since you've participated in these things, perhaps you can answer a question: Do hackathons like this require you to assign rights to the promoter/host of the hackathon? It seems like anything of value you produced while there should by default remain yours.
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I had to sign it away. Seems mostly fair since I wanted the prize which was a iBook and a chance at a job.
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Hmm. That doesn't sound fair to me at all. Maybe sign the rights AFTER you win, but not before.
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We're planning our first-ever company hackathon. We plan to hold it during normal work hours at an offsite location. Our intent is to make this a fun event, promoting team-bonding, giving the team a chance to work on projects of their choosing (but related to our company's products).
We thought this would be a good thing and certainly don't want negative feelings to come from it. So I'm interested in feedback from others that have participated in this type of thing. Did you enjoy it and would you recomme
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We're looking at offsite for a couple of reasons:
* because our office environment isn't well suited to this sort of thing. Everyone is in individual cubicles with high walls. Nice sometimes, but not so nice when collaborating.
* for separation from the sales and marketing team. We want this to be a dev event.
Thanks for the feedback. I think it is going to be fun. And useful.
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At least one who can spell Shakespeare would help.
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Better not ask the man himself, then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Original article is here (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.wired.com/story/sociologists-examine-hackathons-and-see-exploitation/amp [wired.com]
nor the actual paper being discussed:
https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/S0277-283320170000031005 [emeraldinsight.com]
WIRED and Emerald Insight are both pay sites (Score:3)
Both the wired.com and emeraldinsight.com articles are paywalled.
But.. but.. (Score:2)
Think of the exposure you're getting!
duh (Score:1)
"Duping" people ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if the Hackathon is for something like OpenBSD, then I think people already know and expect the work will be free/open source and such.
If the hackathon is for a proprietary company, then the people either work for the company, or receive some sort of compensation for their work, otherwise they would retain the rights to their code; either way, it's not free work....
Their technical credentials and aspirations are..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't read TFA, but do these researchers understand what motivates people to participate?
Speaking as an established professional in a highly technical field -and as someone whose career has been further as much by hobbies and personal interests as certifications and professional experience- hackathons are in fact insanely fun, an invaluable social outlet that helps form lasting friendships and establish professional contacts, and a great way to build teamwork skills, learn new things, and challenge your abilities.
Sure, it's a challenge to build an app in a weekend (Rails Rumble), but it's fun. If that's your idea of fun.
I wonder how these researchers would describe gyms (establishments which trick you into paying money to do meaningless physical labor?), marathons, and online dating?
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True, but reading TFA does clear things up a bit
The sociologists point out that at many large tech companies, employees may feel compelled to attend weekend internal hackathons that are only designed to squeeze the innovation out of [their workers], for free
Yup, work over the weekend and gives us your ideas. Noobs. No thanks.
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Free coffee/soda/food/t-shirts/sponsor swag. I did a hackathon a few weeks back and came away from it like I'd gone to re:Invent. All the food was free. I showed up at 9am and left around 5 both days, which is my usual schedule. Some people stayed late; it was their choice.
See the violence inherent in the system? (Score:2)
Nope. Nope. Nope. No having fun. You are there to be exploited, and so called, 'fun' you had was just the sponsors tricking you into working harder.
At the end of the weekend, hundreds of highly polished, scalable, and very robust apps are ready for market, and the poor dumb code
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Just be careful you don't end up whitewashing the fence.
hackathons run by private individuals (Score:5, Informative)
If you'll allow me to indulge in a bit of "Back in my day", companies used to do these things during working hours. It was part of your ongoing training. For those of you too young to know what that is, training is what companies did before they could go running to Congress to bring in as much cheap labor as they want.
I've been to 2 hackathons and they're a farce. (Score:1)
I won one of them because I teamed up with someone who already had a body of work. The call them hackathons becuase it implies you can actually do enough in time to win. Reality is they're just a pitch party where some company can get a lot of innovative ideas relatively cheap. I would be surprised if anyone comes up with a concept at a hackathon and actually wins. The people who have been working for months do win.
Hackathons are a joke. Cool place to meet other geeks though and network. Just don't spend mu
We all know what ideas are worth though... (Score:2)
I agree that the companies try to mine these things for ideas, but an idea alone is worth almost nothing. It still takes a ton of effort to bring even software to market, so I don't begrudge the company if they take an idea and run with it... As you say, the hackathons are usually more pitch parties than anything.
Good ones aren't. (Score:2)
Good hackathons should be:
- optional
- during regular working hours
- not limited in scope or expected value to the company
Bill them (Score:2)
I just billed my hours as usual in the first and last "hackathon" I participated in.
you know what is dystopian? (Score:3)
Everything in the future. And you know why? Because it's strange.
We do not like realistic depiction of the future and call it dystopia because it is different from our way of life. We will be gone and what we call dystopia will be just normal for contemporaries.
Like academic publication (Score:2)
Intersestingly, their article is published in a pay per view journal. One that, no doubt, is not paying the authors for their work and which, no the less, no seems to own the copyright of that article. Dystopian, working for free?
"Outsource Work" - dubious at best (Score:2)
I only read the summary of the paper but the claim that they are a way to "outsource work" is insane to anyone who has every actually programmed anything.
After 48 hours of being up almost all the time, we all KNOW some shitty code is being produced - especially that being the entire time allowed and the goal to just get something to function. The resulting code is barely capable of being called demoable, much less anything of value.
Now it can indeed produce value for the sponsors in other ways, in that now
They're not wrong (Score:2)
Fund raising fun runs (Score:2)
Just wait until they discover that people pay money to run 5km.
All These Hard-headed Capitalists... (Score:1)
This old bird has got tired of working for free and of being asked to work for free.
The Original Paper (Score:1)
Are all you people posting
Perhaps some misunderstanding? (Score:2)
Reading the comments, I suspect some misunderstanding, because a cursory reading of the summary might give the impression that the issue is about the hackathons themselves (i.e., the fact that organisers get people to produce work for free during those events by getting them excited and feeding them snacks). And commenters disagree that it’s a bad thing (or even that it’s true, since hackathons don’t really produce anything useful).
The study’s abstract makes things quite clear, as do
Captain Obvious In da House (Score:2)
Whoever hadn't figured this out already deserves some sort of long-term ignorance award. I have never made myself available for such events as the bullshit kinda transpired, although I have been a part of one or two due to academic/professional conjuncture. From those short experiences, but also mostly from what I hear about every colleague, friend or coworker, these events easily transpire as the most obvious "free brainstorming session" there can be. Non-competes come close second to ways of stealing indi
Fake-news-a-thons (Score:1)
Re:sociology (Score:4, Insightful)
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Have a few citations? What percentage of papers repeat dogma? what does "in a lot of cases" mean? What does "repeat dogma" mean? How does this paper fulfill any of your definitions?
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evil != illegal see also banks
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It's easy to abuse that kind of "contests".
Star Citizen did it with various contests such as "design a weapon" and so on, where they had literally dozens of teams competing for the "glory" of having a ship weapon they designed implemented in the game. No, you can't say "nobody forced them to participate", because while it's true (nobody was forced), there's more than one way to have someone work a lot for free. Such as the ole carrot-on-a-stick: "your NAME will be in the GAME" - well fuck that, how about my
What source of revenue for labor toward free SW? (Score:2)
if you're going to use my work in a commercial product, I fully expect to be paid.
Consider a case in which your work will be distributed as free software [gnu.org] and/or free cultural works [freedomdefined.org]. By these definitions, downstream reusers of free software and free cultural works have the right to distribute copies for a fee [gnu.org]. From what initial source of revenue should your payment come?