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Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs

venturebeat.com

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Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs

#31

Post by jskopek »

devanti wrote: post #27

This is why I don't attend hackathons anymore. At the bigger events, there's always bound to be controversy, cheaters, questionable criteria, etc.

Perhaps you are attending hackathons for the wrong reason? I didn't personally attend, but I'm sure anyone who went in order to build an interesting indea with smart hackers probably had a decent time.

Allegations of cheating are serious, but they shouldn't affect your enjoyment of the event unless your main purpose was the win the prize.

Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs

#32

Post by mceoin »

breck wrote: post #14

I 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…

Launch Hackathon had the best process of the dozen-or-so large hackathons I've been a part of. They split the judging into two rounds: a 4 minute face-to-face interview with 2 mentors (2-minute presentation, 2-minutes for questions), and if you were the top team in your group (10 teams per interview group) then you made it on stage for the grand final pitch to the audience and a judging panel of 6.

Things they did well: * Each team received a score and brief feedback afterwards. (Ours was "7/10, it looks like you've solved a real problem for that industry" - so not extensive but our effort was validate, which is psychologically important for the end of a weekend hackathon - especially when you don't make the final round : ) * 20 mentors for preliminary round meant that everyone had their pitch and the process went smoothly and ran on time (seemingly a rare occurrence for these events). * 3 wild-cards. (13 teams eventually pitched) * Face-to-face interviews. A nice change to the theater of pitching an audience. * Grand final was short instead of a 2-hour fiasco where everybody loses interest.

Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs

#33

Post by CalRobert »

johnpowell wrote: post #28
leeoniya wrote: post #7

the article is stuffed with salesforce.com backlinks, including a nice salesforce profile at the bottom. any publicity is good publicity.

The summary of the company is the best part. With more than 100,000 customers, salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that is leading the shift to the social enterprise. Social enterprises leverage social, mobile and open cloud technologies to put customers at the heart of their business. I don't know what this means.

It means some obnoxious twit telling you to start using Chatter instead of email, and spend half your day using one of the worst UI's known to man instead of getting work done.

Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs

#35

Post by mceoin »

breck wrote: post #14

I 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…

I don't know anyone involved in the judging or the winning team, but if what is alleged is true (that a team won that violated the terms of service) then my guess is that it was the team actively breaking the rules, and a judging panel selecting what they saw was the best product and being unaware of the violation. Honestly, judging hackathons is tough and screening each team ahead of time is close to impossible - it's not like you're going to code review everybody.

Cheaters always get caught.

Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs

#36

Post by gwf »

teraflop wrote: post #26
gwf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am saying that there is a misunderstanding. The earliest rounds of judging looked at the videos of the apps that contestants produced as well as a code review as a sanity check. This was done most likely so that each app could be viewed in the best possible light as well as to help the judges scale to the number of entries. So, no, the people complaining are not lying but they and anyone else would be incorrect to…

What about the people who checked the analytics on their videos and determined that they hadn't been viewed?

I honestly haven't seen a single complaint like that. Can you point me to one? FWIW, I am pretty sure that each entry was reviewed at least twice.

Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs

#37

Post by shuzchen »

gwf wrote: post #36
teraflop wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the people who checked the analytics on their videos and determined that they hadn't been viewed?

I honestly haven't seen a single complaint like that. Can you point me to one? FWIW, I am pretty sure that each entry was reviewed at least twice.

This hn comment links to a few places where people complained: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6779036

The link that specifically shows people complaining that nobody viewed their app or looked at their video is this: http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/forum_topics/264...

Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs

#38

Post by saryant »

resu_nimda wrote: post #24
sek wrote: post #6

This is a general problem for hackathons, the idea of limiting something like development is impossible. Even if you don't code, you could plan the whole concept, user your super familiar framework and there is a huge difference to the "spirit" of just developing the concept on the spot. I don't want to say I dislike hackathons in general, but not for huge prices. Just meeting interesting people and trying to build s…

There are a number of ways to combat this. - Have a theme, a dataset, or some other component that is not announced until the day it starts (and to be eligible an entry must demonstrate meaningful incorporation of that component). - Have a manageable organizer-to-participant ratio so they can do a decent job of verifying that teams aren't using a developed concept. - Don't allow premade teams, have individuals pitch…

There's another good way to eliminate these concerns: don't have big prizes.

When I hosted a hackathon last summer, I put no limits on projects but the max value of the prizes was $25. With prizes so small, there's no incentive to game the system nor is it grossly unfair to let people work on something they'd already started on.

The goal was purely to work on something cool for a day with like-minded people. One guy brought on a voice-controlled Nest lamp he'd been working on, another built an Arduino step-counter, a third took a crack at writing a basic chess AI.

We provided pizza and beer and just let everyone loose. It went great and there were no hard feelings.

Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs

#39

Post by gwf »

shuzchen wrote: post #37
gwf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly haven't seen a single complaint like that. Can you point me to one? FWIW, I am pretty sure that each entry was reviewed at least twice.

This hn comment links to a few places where people complained: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6779036 The link that specifically shows people complaining that nobody viewed their app or looked at their video is this: http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/forum_topics/264...

Your first link doesn't contain a single complaint claiming that people's videos were not viewed. It does, however, link to the second link, and the other two links it contains make no references to this sort of complaint.

The second link has exactly one person clearly stating that they've received zero launches and zero video plays. There is a second person that states "Yeah, same here. We had a workflow setup to send us notifications if any new used the app and received none." Notice that he/she doesn't mention video plays.

So, in total, we have exactly one person that says that they've received zero launches and zero video plays. If I've unfairly characterized the data behind your links, please let me know. But that's all that I can find.

In trying to find out if they have a valid complaint, I've discovered that the person behind that complaint is responsible for a significant portion of all of the discussions and complaints at the challenge site.

One thing is clear: their submission is in the same area as the winning entry. In their shoes, I might be disappointed for that reason alone. But for the sake of transparency, here are the two entries:

The winning entry (which is admittedly being evaluated to see if they conformed to all rules):

    http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/submissions/18552-healthcare-love
The entry for the person or group that claimed that their video was never viewed:

    http://vimeo.com/79921465
In any case, I encourage you to look at the two videos and tell me if you think there was an injustice with the rank ordering.

Re: Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs

#40

Post by justinsb »

I participated also, and enjoyed the hackathon itself. I wasn't expecting to win. I expected the winner to be someone that had a suitable product that was ready to launch around the same time as the hackathon was announced, and decided to seize the moment for some PR. This is more or less what happened. I think what is leaving a bad taste is that I didn't expect that it would done so brazenly.

The problems in my mind aren't about unfair judging (all judging is biased), but rather that:

* The winning company had clearly been started long before the permitted start date.

* It took less than an hour for this to be 'proved'; Salesforce obviously can't check compliance on every team, but not double-checking the five finalists seems foolish.

* The smoking gun was a demo Upshot gave at a Salesforce meetup. One of the two company founders had worked at Salesforce for 9 years until earlier this year. There's no way any sensible verification could have missed that they'd been working on this for a while. Asking a few of his former colleagues, for example, would likely have revealed the truth.

* Salesforce haven't yet acted to remedy this; which makes them appear complicit in it. I attribute their behavior to incompetence rather than malice. If it was a total fix from the start, there's no reason to exclude projects started before the hackathon in the rules.

The Upshot product itself looks fairly good, so I feel sorry for them in that they could do even better financially if they hadn't won. But not that sorry, given they have a million dollars cash-in-hand :-)

To be fair to Salesforce, their million dollar prize seems to have backfired rather spectacularly with the very audience they were trying to win over. They are probably more annoyed than anyone, and are probably having to tread very carefully for legal reasons. Even if they reclaimed the prize and gave it to #2, it seems that many of the top 5 may also not be entirely above suspicion, and they would want to be doubly-sure of those entries. They'd also presumably have to figure out who was #6 and give them the (new) 5th place prize.

All in all, a major mess.

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