I’m still not at all sure how I feel about hackathon culture.

Let’s just assume for a second that my first impulse has always been completely wrong, and the vast majority of the hackathons out there aren’t a barely disguised psychological ploy, expressly designed to trick overly competitive people into doing an intense amount of free work (Don’t worry: At the end of that one second, I’ll resume my own default set of assumptions and everything will go back to normal). Let’s say for that one second, that the organizers of hackathons have the participants best interests at heart, and are genuinely trying to improve the state of Things.

What those organizers are usually doing, whether they know it or not, has always seemed to me to amount to the active and systematic discouraging of the participation of an extremely wide variety of individuals, by the entire industry.

If you want to know why you only seem to be able to attract participants or employees (because let’s face it: Lots of fun hackathons amount to a not-so-elaborate recruiting ploy) who fully qualify as “Brogrammers”, you may want to spare a few mental cycles answering the following questions:

• Are you promoting expediency at the complete expense of all rational thought?
• Do you appear to be promoting the idea that all tech people should be at the very least totally comfortable (but really, more like explicitly eager) to do as much work as possible out of one half-open bloodshot eye while crashing after their 7th consecutive Red Bull?
• Does your event glorify the kind of reckless cowboy behavior that would make any rational ops person on the planet take away your deploy rights with extreme prejudice?
• Are you throwing new participants in the same functional group as the experts, and providing no mechanism through which they can gain domain knowledge without getting straight-up run over and marginalized?

Frankly, I don’t want people who excel in that kind of environment anywhere near me professionally, as they tend to do things like completely ignore suggestions, execute solo on half-baked unplanned ideas (which usually cause more cleanup work to be generated, which, strangely enough, they seem to show zero interest in doing), and burn out right when you need them the most.

I want people who can do a regular day of undramatic, planned and thoughtful work for about eight hours, and go home to something unrelated of their own choosing (I think it’s called “having a life” or something). I want people who won’t automatically interpret being asked to do regular code maintenance as form of punishment. I want people who can write a freaking roadmap once in a while. I want somebody who can do all of those things, without the relative monotony of undramatic planned-out thoughtful work making them want to jump out of the window.

Unfortunately, most of those people have it in their heads that we’d rather have a steady crop of perpetually burning out lunatics.

And that’s why I’m not at all sure about hackathons.

This post was, incidentally, brought to you by my Alma Mater apparently running a hackathon of their own for Computer Science majors back in January. The flyer for said event prominently featured the line “Sleep is optional but not encouraged”.

…Incidentally: That second? It’s over now.