Salesforce’s Hackathon Scandal: Secret Judging, Favoritism, Cheating?

http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/11/25/salesforce-hack-scandal/

by jefflinwood • 13 years ago

108 33 13 years ago

blogs.kqed.org

justinelof• 13 years ago

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

bronbron• 13 years ago

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.

leokun• 13 years ago

I've never seen these as doing work for free. I've seen hackathons as a way to get developers excited about a product, platform or API. A cool and fun form of marketing, in effect.

Sniperfish• 13 years ago

At the risk of being cynical, I think that's the point. If everyone who could contribute considered them (corporate sponsored hackathons) as work for free they'd quickly run out of submissions and fail. Keeping the perception as a way to excite and/or challenge developers is pretty well essential for their continuation.

wheels• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

igul222• 13 years ago

Don't yank the winners' prizes, but re-judge the entire hackathon and award the new winners equal prizes.

veemjeem3• 13 years ago

Too late for that, unless they find a 3rd party judging group. There's no way people will think salesforce is being fair on the 2nd round of judging.

swalsh• 13 years ago

Let the internet re-judge, worst case scenario they get a bunch more PR on what you can do with the API.

kandalf• 13 years ago

*corporate hackathons. I agree that Salesforce is giving hackathons as a whole a bad name, but there are plenty of hackathons (the college hackathon scene in particular right now) out there without the inherent conflict of interest of a single company hosting, and there are even some good corporate hackathons around too.

raganwald2• 13 years ago

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

lanstein3• 13 years ago

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

pstuart• 13 years ago

I bet a lot of us here are. Are you interested in doing a write-up and posting it as a Tell HN?

raganwald2• 13 years ago

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.

mb22• 13 years ago

intriguing, please expand.

danso• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

chasing• 13 years ago

"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.")

avalaunch• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

veemjeem3• 13 years ago

They already have a huge advantage since they already know exactly what APIs Salesforce offers and how to use them. Most people going to the hackathon have probably never seen the Salesforce API in their life until that day. It's simply wrong to let company employees participate.

dougmccune• 13 years ago

personally I don't think that it was an ex-employee was a problem. But I was at the meetup group in SF on Oct 8 where they demo'd upshot. From what I can gather, the only thing that was developed for the hackathon was making the web app, which already existed, work slightly better in a mobile browser. In the meetup I remember hearing that they had been working on upshot for something like 8 months at that point. So yeah, that's pretty jacked up.

VladRussian2• 13 years ago

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 ...

rickrozay• 13 years ago

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

Xeroday• 13 years ago

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.

veemjeem3• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

Salesforce’s Hackathon Scandal: Secret Judging, Favoritism, Cheating?

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