The developer world is a rapidly changing one, and it demands practitioners keep on top of the latest languages and platforms. Becoming fluent, however, can take some time, especially as the number of platforms largely demands developers focus their time and energy rather than spread themselves too thinly.
On the flip side, software companies face an intense amount of competition in their hunt for the best developers. As such, they have a clear incentive to encourage those people to develop for their particular platform. New research from Harvard Business School suggests that hackathons can play a crucial role in pairing up both sides.
“Developers want to join platforms that other developers have already joined or will join. Then they can benefit from network effects,” the researchers say. “Without seeing other developers at a hackathon, it would be hard to know how many developers are excited about a particular platform.”
Testing the waters
The researchers found that hackathons provide a unique, social environment, which allows developers to try out new platforms and understand not only how valuable and popular platforms are, but how difficult they might be to learn.
“There’s been a massive proliferation of platforms, so developers cannot possibly know all the platforms that exist or have all the information they need to decide which would be worth developing on,” the researchers explain.
The researchers argue that hackathons are great in that they enable “complex contagion”, which involves exposure to something from multiple dimensions, which is then believed to help speed adoption.
As well as helping developers, the researchers also argue that hackathons help companies, as it provides exposure to the developers who will ultimately make or break the platform.
Matchmaking
The researchers studied 167 different hackathons that between them had 1,302 developers involved. They combined data on the participants, prize winners, and sponsors, with data from GitHub to ascertain the kind of projects developers are currently working on.
The data revealed that there was a baseline for developers to adopt a new technology in a given year, and that this baseline rose by about 20% after they’d attended a hackathon that revolved around that tech. What’s more, for every 10% increase in the number of developers attending the event, the likelihood that an individual developer would adopt that platform rose by 1.2%.
The data was then augmented with interviews with developers, who revealed the difficulties they face in learning about new platforms and how hackathons are a great way of overcoming some of these difficulties.
The researchers believe that hackathons provide a number of things to help speed adoption. Firstly, they typically have very prominent sponsorship from tech companies. They also allow participants to see how popular particular platforms are, particularly among successful peers. The presence of this network also facilitates knowledge transfer. This helps to facilitate the complex contagion that is key to adoption.
“The worst thing for a developer to do is join a platform, put in all the effort to learn it, and then have nobody else show up,” the researchers say. “Developers want to identify and join fashionable platforms that other developers are joining as well.”
Indeed, the benefits of hackathons are so great for tech companies, especially compared to the modest investment required, that the researchers believe they should be using them far more than they currently do.
“The amount of money Google and other tech companies are putting into these hackathons is small relative to the benefit they get,” they say. “This is an unbelievably effective way to get developers to use your technology. If I was a tech company, I would sponsor every single hackathon I could find.”
While COVID has limited the possibility of large-scale gatherings, it is perhaps food for thought for the post-pandemic period.
