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Hackathons Are Dystopian Events That Dupe People Into Working For Free, Say Sociologists (fastcompany.com) 155

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
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.
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Hackathons Are Dystopian Events That Dupe People Into Working For Free, Say Sociologists More

Hackathons Are Dystopian Events That Dupe People Into Working For Free, Say Sociologists

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  • Socialists or sociologists? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dlleigh ( 313922 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:07PM (#56292205)

    I know that the terms are not mutually exclusive.

    • There's a great deal of overlap between the two (at least in academia), but it isn't fair to just make that assumption. Sharon Zukin has authored books such as "Beyond Marx and Tito : Theory and Practice in Yugoslav Socialism" and "Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places". Given that I'd probably guess she's a Marxist of some sort. The other author is apparently her PhD student so he doesn't have much in the way of publications.

      I can't find a PDF copy or free access to the full text of t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mentil ( 1748130 )

        Karl Marx founded one of the major schools of thought in Sociology: Conflict Theory.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dlleigh ( 313922 )

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dlleigh ( 313922 )

          It appears that they've already fixed the summary.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          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)

        by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:55PM (#56292535) Journal

        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.

      • By saying "[t]here's a great deal of overlap between the two" you are implying that it is, in fact, "fair to just make that assumption" of the sociologists are socialists.

    • idiotologists (Score:4, Insightful)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:43PM (#56292453)

      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.

      • 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

        • 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

          • 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).

            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

              • 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.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:idiotologists (Score:5, Insightful)

        by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @03:09PM (#56292661)

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Megol ( 3135005 )

          So now people writing BSD code isn't cool?

        • 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.

          • 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.

            • 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.

              • 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.

                • 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.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • 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.

  • love the summary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ooloorie ( 4394035 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:11PM (#56292237)

    Read the article summary carefully:

    Hackathons Are Dystopian Events That Dupe People Into Working For Free, Say Sociologists. That's the conclusion that two socialists came to after observing seven hackathons over the period of one year, reports Wired.

    The mask slips.

    • in my version of the summary, it still looks like this: That's the conclusion that two sociologists came to after .

      • in my version of the summary, it still looks like this: That's the conclusion that two sociologists came to after .

        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.

    • Read the article summary carefully:

      Hackathons Are Dystopian Events That Dupe People Into Working For Free, Say Sociologists. That's the conclusion that two socialists came to after observing seven hackathons over the period of one year, reports Wired.

      The mask slips.

      Over-analysing a typo is 'insightful' now?

      • Over-analysing a typo is 'insightful' now?

        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)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:13PM (#56292253)

    And while on the subject, please feel free to discuss non-paying Internships...

    • Re:They may be considered as free advertising (Score:5, Insightful)

      by El Cubano ( 631386 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:30PM (#56292371)

      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):

      • Meet other programmers outside my normal professional circle
      • Get to work on/hack on projects substantially different from what I work on day-to-day
      • Getting the brain moving/heading in a different programming direction for a while makes me a better programmer with the "normal" things I program every day

      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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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).

      • Color me confused. My company's hackathons are attended by internal salaried employees. Nobody's working for free.

    • 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]).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by q4Fry ( 1322209 )

        (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."

    • 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.

      • 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.

    • I've been asked to solve previously-unsolved problems during job interviews. Does that count?

    • Somebody has to get the fucking coffee.

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plopez ( 54068 )

      Apprenticeship, often fulfilling college credit requirements + having experience on the resume.

  • Anything built at a hackathon is junk (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • 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

      • 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.

    • Offering junk food-only during any even which may lead to recruitment is tentamount to age discrimination.

  • Original article is here (Score:5, Informative)

    by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:30PM (#56292365) Homepage
    For some reason the summary linked a news article ABOUT the Wired article, not the Wired article:
    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]

  • Think of the exposure you're getting!

  • this is legit from the duh department. if you have heard of the company sponsoring it then you probably shouldnâ(TM)t do it. same goes for the ones where they try to get people to invent new ideas on-the-fly so a startup flipper can take your idea and sell it without any regard for you or the longevity of the idea.

  • "Duping" people ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:45PM (#56292469)

    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)

    by llamalad ( 12917 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:50PM (#56292507)

    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?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

      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

    • hackathons run by private individuals (Score:5, Informative)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @03:47PM (#56292917)
      aren't what's being called out in the article. It's ones being run by businesses. I've been lucky enough to have a pretty solid career trajectory. But several of my buddies have been stuck applying everywhere under the sun. One of the most common tricks they've all seen is when they 'test' you to solve this one problem and you do and never get a call back. The huge number of unemployed and underemployed techs (thanks, H1-B program!) mean companies can do this pretty much indefinitely. A lot of company run hackathons are just that.

      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 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

    • 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 hackathons should be:
    - optional
    - during regular working hours
    - not limited in scope or expected value to the company

  • I just billed my hours as usual in the first and last "hackathon" I participated in.

  • you know what is dystopian? (Score:3)

    by mapkinase ( 958129 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @03:38PM (#56292867) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • 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?

  • 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

  • just sayin'

  • Just wait until they discover that people pay money to run 5km.

  • ...who want to work for free. Used to be, this type of event was in the context of cooperation, work on what we would now call FOSS projects. Running them so as to produce profit for one firm or another was not done; that was just work. People are now behaving as though they are still working for cooperatives, even though they're giving away work which someone else will profit from. Pretty sure that isn't a healthy thing.

    This old bird has got tired of working for free and of being asked to work for free.

  • It's here [emeraldinsight.com], behind a paywall. The abstract is worth reading. People with access to good academic libraries, which I expect are many of us, can read the whole thing.

    the format of the event and sponsors’ discursive tropes, within a dominant cultural frame reflecting the appeal of Silicon Valley, reshape unpaid and precarious work as an extraordinary opportunity, a ritual of ecstatic labor, and a collective imaginary for fictional expectations of innovation that benefits all

    Are all you people posting

    • 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

  • 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

  • This article is primarily about fake, "Internal" hack-a-thons. Yeah, those are complete bullshit, and not hack-a-thons at all -- it's just quasi-forced free work. Sure, they're optional, but you have to attend to get your career to progress. Real hack-a-thons are for people who are just enthusiastic about making something, who know there's a %99.9 chance they won't get a dime in return. They tend to be at conventions, schools, or just a bunch of pals who want to take a stab at a group project over a weekend

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