Hackathons are not the nonsense in this piece, the author's assumption that hackathon projects are expected to be actual business-ready products, that's the nonsense. The author is really shooting himself in the foot and missing the point of hackathons: they are about experimentation and practice.
> However, to make good software, requires lots of thought, trial and error, evaluation, iteration, trying the ideas out on other users, learning, thinking, more trial and error, and on and on.
The whole point of a hackathon is practicing and experimenting with some of those or other aspects of software development in an environment where the quality of the product isn't that important. The product doesn't have "to be any good" for it to be a successful hackathon project!
One could easily say this support's the author's argument, but it doesn't really evidence that hackathons are nonsense, just that hackathon projects are often not viable business-wise. It's great if they are, but that shouldn't be the point.
Indeed, you don't explicitly make that assumption. It's just the only one I could think of that would make any sense of your leap from "quality software takes a long time to make" to "hackathons are nonsense". If you won't warrant that assumption, then I don't know what the point of the article is.
> However, to make good software, requires lots of thought, trial and error, evaluation, iteration, trying the ideas out on other users, learning, thinking, more trial and error, and on and on.
The whole point of a hackathon is practicing and experimenting with some of those or other aspects of software development in an environment where the quality of the product isn't that important. The product doesn't have "to be any good" for it to be a successful hackathon project!
The ill-recieved Facebook timeline comes to mind:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/building...
One could easily say this support's the author's argument, but it doesn't really evidence that hackathons are nonsense, just that hackathon projects are often not viable business-wise. It's great if they are, but that shouldn't be the point.