Salesforce.com To Review Controversial Hackathon Win

itwbennett writes "Adding to the growing sentiment that prizes ruin hackathons, Salesforce.com has come under fire from critics who say the hackathon the company held at its Dreamforce conference was judged unfairly. Not long after the $1 million prize was handed to Upshot for a mobile app that let users to create and edit Salesforce.com reports, other contestants raised allegations of unfairness. Among the complaints: That Upshot's CTO Thomas Kim had demoed a similar-sounding application a couple of weeks before Oct. 25 cutoff; that Kim is a former Salesforce.com employee (although that isn't in violation of the rules); and that their own entries weren't evaluated by judges at all. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is now promising a thorough investigation of the hackathon."

Comments

giving 1 million to your buddies

[gl4ss]

at a startup that could be an exit for you! say it ain't so!

also, duh, if you're going for a win at a salesforce hackathon of course you're going to try the api beforehand if you can and preferably bribe the guys with free booze or something. it's fucking salesforce after all.

Re:giving 1 million to your buddies

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the article I read about this fiasco yesterday. Well written from the point of one of the entries: https://medium.com/hackers-and-hacking/b839268fb82d

Her final point is interesting:

"If I was Salesforce, I’d be pissed an employee was so bad at his job he left a gaping hole in the product, then he leaves and starts a company that conveniently fills that hole? Yet, Salesforce gives him a million dollars. Either Salesforce is an investor in Upshot, or they’re dumb."

Re:giving 1 million to your buddies

[Bill_the_Engineer]

"If I was Salesforce, I’d be pissed an employee was so bad at his job he left a gaping hole in the product, then he leaves and starts a company that conveniently fills that hole? Yet, Salesforce gives him a million dollars. Either Salesforce is an investor in Upshot, or they’re dumb."

Unless she has proof then it's nothing but a sour grapes speaking. How do we know that the employee left the company because his ideas were constantly shot down by management, and it was only after he was able to make the product that his old employer saw the potential in that feature being provided? This happens all the time in the technology sector.

Burned out

[nightsky30]

After experiencing a few hackathons and seeing people submit re-titled pre-existing apps when the rules state they should be creating the app that day from scratch, I'm burned out. It shouldn't be a cheating contest. It arguably shouldn't be a contest at all. Hackathons are about collaboration, creation, and innovation.

prizes are not the problem

[schneidafunk]

Prizes don't ruin hackathons, cheating does.

so split the prizes?

[dutchwhizzman]

How about splitting the prize money based on an objective points system? You could add bonus money for the apps that score higher, subtract for apps that merely add features to an already existing app, so you'll only merit the improvements, not the whole app. It makes it ridiculously complicated to come up with a points system that isn't cheatable, but you could probably come up with something that's harder to doctor than it's worth.