

Salesforce’s Hackathon Scandal: Secret Judging, Favoritism, Cheating? - jefflinwood
http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/11/25/salesforce-hack-scandal/

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bronbron
Hackathons in general should be viewed with a serious amount of skepticism
because it mostly is, as Liu notes, a way to get you to work for a company for
(basically) free.

That being said, this sounds above-and-beyond scummy based on the information
provided. The lack of transparency and the fact that the grand-prize winner
worked at Salesforce for 9 years is a seriously questionable combination.

Aside from apologizing profusely, though, I don't know what Salesforce does
here. It'd be pretty mean to yank the guy's prize (and would only lend
credence to the conspiracy argument), but doing nothing or promising to "do
better in the future" will certainly be a PR hit for Salesforce both in terms
of recruiting and future activities sponsored by them.

They're in a tough spot, though I don't really pity them since it was their
own doing.

~~~
wheels
_> Aside from apologizing profusely, though, I don't know what Salesforce does
here._

They're a big enough company that "throw money at the problem" wouldn't be an
especially difficult fix. They could just apologize for the confusion, bring
in a new review board and dole out additional prizes.

~~~
mathattack
I was thinking the same thing. They could give away three million in new
prizes. It's worth the PR that it will buy. It only takes a few lost contracts
for them to lose more than that in goodwill.

~~~
fleitz
Isn't salesforce pretty much SAP in the cloud?

IMHO no one who cares about rigged hackathons is writing cheques for
salesforce... if anything most of their customers are the kind of people who
view developers as 'prima donnas'.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
Salesforce also owns Heroku.

~~~
fleitz
Yeah, that could be a problem.

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chasing
> "They set expectations that they were looking for serious apps, serious
> work, serious time,” [Seth Piezas] says.

That's wonderful! As a serious developer, you have a serious rate you offer
your serious services at.

(Also: Do I read right? They own the code? To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi:
"That's no hackathon.")

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raganwald
Outrageous, but consistent with a world where most sales are made by gaming
procurement processes.

~~~
lanstein
If anyone is interested in what sales is actually like, drop me a line.

~~~
raganwald
I also have a great deal of experience in corporate sales. It is entirely
possible for you to close business without gaming the process _and_ enterprise
sales to be a world where people game the process.

~~~
lanstein
Fair, I was referring more to sales at startups, which is what I would guess
most people here are focused on.

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VladRussian2
young naive hackers and BigCo's "developers, developers, developers" marketing
management drones. Call it a hackathon and they'll come.

I may be too old, yet i just don't get how exciting is the app that builds an
itineary for visiting most valuable clients or any other CRM app. Until of
course 1M is thrown into the pot. And of course excitement disappears again
once 1M happens to not even make it to the pot. :)

btw, closing shop at 6pm isn't a sign of conspiracy - it was already an hour
past 5pm as in "9 to 5" :) Talking about canyon deep gap between different
mentalities ...

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avalaunch
Just to play devil's advocate, wouldn't it make sense that members of the
winning team had previously worked for Salesforce? They would have a big
advantage of knowing the sort of apps Salesforce were looking for. I suppose
the best counter to this would be if Salesforce disallowed previous employees
from entering at all.

Also, I'm still confused at what does and doesn't constitute pre-existing code
at hackathons. It's such a grey area. I think Salesforce definitely should
have done a better job of addressing this before the hackathon began. As it
was, it's no surprise that some teams interpreted the rule differently than
others and those teams that interpreted it most loosely held the advantage.

~~~
draz
I think it's less the fact that the individual has worked for Salesforce for 9
years, rather that the winning app was not developed for the hackathon. Heck,
the product was even shown at a Meetup on Oct 8, weeks before the hackathon
was announced.

Edit: just to add another layer to my response -- I had formed a team for the
hackathon, but ended up not flying to SF for the hackathon (so I'm definitely
not bitter about money/time spent, although we did meet several times to come
up with ideas, etc.). One of the things we feared most was that some company
will indeed present a polished product it had worked on for the past year, but
never launched it. It's always a concern in any hackathon, and we figured it
would be even a bigger one at a hackathon with a grand prize that big.
HOWEVER, what's infuriating about the Salesforce hackathon is that the winning
team had actually _presented_ their product prior to the announcement of the
hackathon! To me, it's very clear cut and enforceable. Although I'm not a
lawyer, I think it's similar to a patent: if you are making your invention/app
public, it's already in the public domain and shouldn't be given
protection/eligibility to compete.

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rickrozay
It sounds like they were working on it much longer than 4 weeks:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4844318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4844318)

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danso
If these allegations are true...I don't know what's worse. The actual alleged
wrongdoing, or how ineptly it was conducted. Business-minded people may be meh
about whether hackathons are good...but a CRM company that can't even conduct
he basic functions for a coverup (I.e. Create a themed bootstrap page that
simply lists all entrants)...if they can't do CRM when it's absolutely
necessary to protect their own asses, it doesn't speak we'll for how they
perform CRM for their clients

~~~
wavefunction
Here's another data point. Salesforce has to rely on Oracle (!) for their
cloud services. They can't even put together their own offering...

~~~
rgbrenner
Salesforce was started by an Oracle VP, and Ellison was one of the early
investors in it. It's not really surprising they used Oracle for some of their
infrastructure.

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Xeroday
The problem is that the judges didn't have time to do a background check on
all the submissions. After all, UPSHOT only came under scrutiny after they had
already won.

~~~
veemjeem
Background check? They don't need to do background checks on a coworker. I'm
sure the judges knew exactly which team members worked at Salesforce. One of
the team members worked at Salesforce for 9 years, which is probably a longer
tenure than all the judges combined.

~~~
jasondemeuse
I don't think he meant background checks on the people, rather on the project
itself. The biggest issue with the submission wasn't the fact that there was
an ex-employee, but that the project itself (Upshot) was demoed at a meetup a
month ago. If they would have done their homework they would have known that
Upshot was an old project and obviously not created for, or at, the hackathon.

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justinelof
I mean, of course there was cheating and favoritism... lol, kqed.

