This hackathon wants to save coders from joyless jobs in IT services firms

Vignesh Natarajan was stuck. He was a final-year student of computer science at an engineering college in Chennai, India. He was armed with reams of theoretical knowledge, programming languages, and what not. And he was staring at the prospect of working for an IT major – mostly probably a joyless, high-paying job.

India has thousands of engineering colleges, which spew out over 1.5 million graduates every year. A lot of them will get wooed by large multinational technology companies with fat pockets. Most of the jobs are offshore IT services, which could turn a bright mind into just another drudge. Only a few thousand smart engineers venture out to build a startup. However glamorous it may seem to code, build, and sell a tech product, most engineers settle for the security of an IT services job.

This is the fate that Freshdesk wants to reverse with its “Save the Hacker” initiative launched last year. The second edition of the two-day hackathon is scheduled for May 9 and 10 in Chennai. This time, Google, Twilio, Box, Saavn, and Ola have also joined Freshdesk’s mission to “to give talented programmers a taste of what it feels like to build actual products.” Together, they are offering rewards worth INR 5 million (US$80,500) to the winners.

But do good coders need any prodding to code? Why wouldn’t they go after a problem, build a team, and solve it themselves instead of taking part in a hackathon? There are virtual coding platforms to help them as well. Shankar Ganesh, who works with Freshdesk, answers: “A hackathon is where smart minds come together to take on a problem, get their hands dirty, and ship ideas to completion. Unlike a virtual coding environment, a hackathon has so much energy and spirit that motivates people to keep shipping great things in a really short time. Some hackathons, like Save the Hacker, come with mentors who’ve “been there, done it” so they can help developers when they’re stuck with a problem.”

Vignesh Natarajan was one of the winners of the first edition of Save the Hacker. He, along with three classmates – Hamid Muneerulhudhakalvathi, Parikshith Mechineni, and Srinivas Suresh Kumar – built a location-intelligent, Twitter-based app that matches blood donors with those looking for blood, and sends push notifications to donors in the vicinity of a needy patient. Besides proximity, the app takes into account key parameters like blood type, whether the donor is fit and sober, and so on. These filters could be modified according to requirements.

Though Natarajan and his friends had dabbled in coding before the hackathon, they were “rotting without writing a single line of code to be proud of” during four years of college. At the hackathon, “I wrote code because I was scared of not giving myself a chance to try,” Natarajan recalls. “To me, the hackathon was a starting point, when I realized that coming up with new and exciting problems to solve is as important as coming up with interesting and novel solutions for existing problems. I would not take up a typical IT job as it would stop being fun after a few weeks, maybe even days. Through the hackathon and also reading about new products on the internet, I have seen the fun side of the software development world,” he says.

A hackathon organized recently by Tech in Asia

Lately, India has been seeing a lot of hackathons organized by startups, accelerators, and even VC firms. Some startups like Bangalore-based Venturesity and HackerEarth use hackathons as a hiring tool to find programmers and developers for other startups like InMobi, Practo, and Druva as well as biggies like Amazon, Target, and Citrix.

Last year, Freshdesk’s hackathon had about 100 coders in 30 teams, and this year, it expects to see 300 coders in 100 teams. The Chennai-based cloud-based customer support company is one of India’s hottest tech startups rated among the toppers in its domain globally.

Natarajan is now doing his Master’s in computer science at the Arizona State University in the US. He is looking forward to working with Amazon in the summer. “After the hackathon, my attention turned towards building small prototypes of ideas that I can come up with now and then. I am sure the hackathon subconsciously helped build my confidence, which in turn has made me open to new challenges,” he tells Tech in Asia.