Hackathons Are Ruining Students

Let me be clear from the start: not all hackathons are created equal. Events like FreeBSD hackathons, where developers collaborate on meaningful operating system improvements, represent the best of what these gatherings can offer. But since arriving at the University of Waterloo, I’ve witnessed a troubling transformation in hackathon culture—particularly among freshmen who treat these events as golden tickets to FAANG companies rather than opportunities for genuine innovation.

The Hackathon Gold Rush

Ontario’s hackathon circuit—Hack the North, Hack the Valley, DeltaHacks—follows a familiar formula: teams sprint through 24-36 hours of coding, judges crown winners, and everyone goes home exhausted. These events were designed to reward brilliant ideas and creative problem-solving. That original vision, however, has been casualties of a much larger shift in the tech landscape.

The post-pandemic job market fundamentally altered how students approach their careers. With supply dramatically outpacing demand in software engineering, stories of graduates struggling for years to find work have shattered the once-reliable narrative that a computer science degree guaranteed a pathway to Big Tech. Students who once believed GPA alone would open doors now scramble for any edge they can find.

Enter the modern hackathon: a perceived shortcut to distinction. Unlike GPA, where theoretically everyone can excel, hackathons produce a limited number of winners. Victory promises not just a line on a resume, but face time with senior developers and hiring managers from sponsoring companies. In this new reality, the original purpose—fostering innovation—has become secondary to career advancement.

When Competition Corrupts Innovation

The pressure to win has transformed hackathons into something unrecognizable. While rule-bending has always existed—teams uploading pre-written code to GitHub was once the height of cheating—the rise of LLM coding agents has fundamentally broken the playing field.

Today’s hackathon landscape rewards resources over creativity. Teams with premium AI subscriptions, multiple specialized tools, and access to various LLM models hold decisive advantages. When participants can generate entire project architectures and implementations without understanding the underlying code, we’re no longer measuring innovation or skill—we’re measuring who can afford the best digital assistants.

This pay-to-win dynamic violates the fundamental philosophy of hackathons. Instead of identifying the brightest ideas and most talented developers, we’re selecting for those with the deepest pockets and the most sophisticated AI toolchains.

The Hidden Cost: Technical Debt as Education

Perhaps most concerning is what hackathon culture teaches about software development. The sprint mentality—ship something, anything, in 36 hours—produces code that would horrify any professional developer. No version control, incomprehensible commit messages, zero documentation, and architectural decisions that would make maintenance impossible. These aren’t just bad habits; they’re anti-patterns that actively harm students’ development as engineers.

I regularly review code from serial hackathon participants, and the patterns are depressingly consistent: branches merged instead of rebased, creating labyrinthine Git histories; commit messages that explain nothing; code generated by AI that neither the author nor reviewer truly understands. One memorable submission included hundreds of lines of refactoring with a single-line commit message.

This is the opposite of what industry needs. While hackathon veterans chase the next win, they’re failing to develop the fundamental skills that matter: writing maintainable code, thinking about long-term architecture, collaborating effectively through proper version control, and—critically—understanding what they’re building.

The Wrong Lesson at the Wrong Time

Computer science students should be learning to write good code, not just fast code. They need a learner’s mindset, not an entrepreneur’s hustle. Yet hackathon culture teaches them to prioritize velocity over quality, prizes over understanding, and shortcuts over craftsmanship.

The irony is stark. While students optimize for ephemeral 36-hour sprints, the industry still runs on COBOL systems in financial institutions that have operated reliably for decades. We’re creating a generation of developers who can spin up a flashy demo but can’t maintain a production system, who can prompt an AI but can’t debug its output, who can win competitions but can’t collaborate on real codebases.

A Call for Better

Hackathons could be valuable learning experiences. They could teach collaboration, innovation, and yes, even how to work under pressure. But the current model—driven by job market anxiety and enabled by AI shortcuts—is producing the opposite of what our industry needs.

We’re teaching students to play a lottery rather than develop skills, to generate code rather than understand it, to win at any cost rather than build something lasting. If we continue down this path, we risk creating a generation of developers who view software as something to be generated quickly and discarded, rather than crafted carefully and maintained.

The “move fast and break things” mentality has its place in certain contexts. But when it becomes the primary educational model for our future developers, we’re not just breaking things—we’re breaking the very foundation of software craftsmanship that our industry depends on.

It’s time to reconsider what we’re really teaching when we celebrate the hackathon winner who cobbled together an AI-generated project they don’t understand over the student who spent the same weekend learning to properly use Git, understanding design patterns, or contributing to an open-source project. Because in the long run, I know which one I’d rather have on my team.

What’s your take on hackathon culture? Have you seen similar patterns at your institution? Let’s discuss in the comments.