The best defense for Salesforce, in light of the circumstances, is to argue that if they had really intended to scam everyone, would they be this dumb about it?
Yes. It is, after all, Salesforce.
Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
#12If developers are incentives by the possibility of winning $1m, they would start working months in advance. That's why it's not ok to offer $1m as a hackathon prize, as it's not in the spirit of hacking.
I think you could offer 1million but it has to be a competition where the teams that enter solve a single problem. That way accurate scoring metrics can be developed and used.
It doesn't make sense to say "Hackathon, 1 million dollars, Go!".
edit: To add. The problem should be announced the day of!
Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
#13Hah Salesforce - you were better off having no hackathon at all. This is disgusting. Preselecting winners possibly?, not looking at everyone's app / video, selecting a winner that started way before hackathon was announced. yep total mess.
Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
#14I participated in this Hackathon.
It was a good hackathon.
I am happy for the winners.
The truth of the matter is, there were so many entries, that it was a complete lottery who ended up winning. I personally thought our app was great, and had a decent shot at winning, but I went to bed assuming 99% odds we wouldn't get picked. With that many entries the odds were not that great.
As lame as this sounds, I've learned the way to really win at Hackathons is to build something you wanted to build anyway. That way, if you win, it's a nice bonus, but you'll come out ahead no matter what.
The judging processes in these things is always suboptimal. I knew it was going to be a nightmare to try and narrow down that many entries to 5 in just a few hours. They were very optimistic in thinking they could pull that off. I think ChallengePost has a great opportunity to improve here by innovating so that if you enter a Hackathon, you get direct feedback from the judges (either quantitative numerical feedback or qualitative comments), so you get some acknowledgement for the hard work put in. The judging was indeed very light--as another data point I don't think we got a single hit on our app-- but I thought they tried to do something unprecedented and did a decent enough job and can learn going forward.
It was a very cool event, I'm happy for the winners, and hopefully some of these Hackathon software tools like ChallengePost and HackerLeague can continue to get better and help alleviate some of these transparency concerns for future Hackathons.
I would definitely recommend participating in future Salesforce Hackathons.
Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
#15If developers are incentives by the possibility of winning $1m, they would start working months in advance. That's why it's not ok to offer $1m as a hackathon prize, as it's not in the spirit of hacking.
I think you could offer 1million but it has to be a competition where the teams that enter solve a single problem. That way accurate scoring metrics can be developed and used. It doesn't make sense to say "Hackathon, 1 million dollars, Go!". edit: To add. The problem should be announced the day of!
I guess that it's better to allow much more time for bigger prizes. Like the Netflix prize. That was a great mix of marketing and feeding the recommender system.
Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
#16I participated in this Hackathon. It was a good hackathon. I am happy for the winners. The truth of the matter is, there were so many entries, that it was a complete lottery who ended up winning. I personally thought our app was great, and had a decent shot at winning, but I went to bed assuming 99% odds we wouldn't get picked. With that many entries the odds were not that great. As lame as this sounds, I've learned…
Paying $500 for a 0% chance to win; that doesn't sound like the best deal to me. You can get a lot more value from a regular hackathon that you can actually get some attention and feedback from and that isn't going to charge you a crazy amount of money. I don't understand how you can justify the competition when your app wasn't even viewed.
Edit: Apparently the ticket price was $100 and then reimbursed. That makes it better, but I would still argue you get more benefit from a standard hackathon.
Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
#17I work at salesforce but I am not a spokesperson for salesforce nor do I have any authority to speak for the company. What I write here, I write as a member of HNN only.
I did not have any part in the hackathon process, but I had and still do have quite a bit of visibility on how the process was run. I can assure you that an enormous amount of effort went into the judging and that it was entirely unbiased. There were literally dozens of the most senior executives and engineers within the company that worked on the earlier judging rounds behind the scenes. I actually declined to be part of that process because it was too much of a commitment for me to make. I know, for example, that the next-to-final round judges were up until the early AM reviewing the submissions and that each judge looked at on the order of 20 different submissions per rounds.
Sadly, whenever something like $1M is on the line, there is always going to be someone that is unhappy with the outcome. People will speculate and make claims that are outright false. But please keep an open mind as you read more about this event. There will soon be some official communication on this topic from salesforce. I suspect that the more actual facts you learn about the process, the more reasonable it will seem.
Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
#18I participated in this Hackathon. It was a good hackathon. I am happy for the winners. The truth of the matter is, there were so many entries, that it was a complete lottery who ended up winning. I personally thought our app was great, and had a decent shot at winning, but I went to bed assuming 99% odds we wouldn't get picked. With that many entries the odds were not that great. As lame as this sounds, I've learned…
Paying $500 for a 0% chance to win; that doesn't sound like the best deal to me. You can get a lot more value from a regular hackathon that you can actually get some attention and feedback from and that isn't going to charge you a crazy amount of money. I don't understand how you can justify the competition when your app wasn't even viewed. Edit: Apparently the ticket price was $100 and then reimbursed. That makes it…
Tickets for the Hackathon were $99 a head but they quickly started giving them out for free. I also heard stories that people got reimbursed fro the ticket price if they had payed.
Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
#19I work at salesforce but I am not a spokesperson for salesforce nor do I have any authority to speak for the company. What I write here, I write as a member of HNN only. I did not have any part in the hackathon process, but I had and still do have quite a bit of visibility on how the process was run. I can assure you that an enormous amount of effort went into the judging and that it was entirely unbiased. There were…
Are you saying that the dozens of people claiming that no one tested their apps are all lying?
Like others have said previously, Salesforce must have forgotten about analytics.
Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
#20I participated in this Hackathon. It was a good hackathon. I am happy for the winners. The truth of the matter is, there were so many entries, that it was a complete lottery who ended up winning. I personally thought our app was great, and had a decent shot at winning, but I went to bed assuming 99% odds we wouldn't get picked. With that many entries the odds were not that great. As lame as this sounds, I've learned…
Paying $500 for a 0% chance to win; that doesn't sound like the best deal to me. You can get a lot more value from a regular hackathon that you can actually get some attention and feedback from and that isn't going to charge you a crazy amount of money. I don't understand how you can justify the competition when your app wasn't even viewed. Edit: Apparently the ticket price was $100 and then reimbursed. That makes it…
Our team (2 people), paid $99 each for Hackerpass tickets, which Salesforce then reimbursed after they started giving them out for free.