Salesforce hackathon comes under attack from devs
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
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.
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.
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.
Cheaters always get caught.
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.
Like others have said previously, Salesforce must have forgotten about analytics.
So, no, the people complaining are not lying but they and anyone else would be incorrect to conclude that their app was not evaluated. Every app was evaluated. All by videos. Some by code review. And a few through every reasonable means.
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...
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
http://vimeo.com/79921465
the only views were me. i included the other video after i spoke with a salesforce person about the issue. and they had directed me how to enter the links. that full one is the one that's getting hits because i like it more. it was obviously labeled as not the official video with directions to the official video in case it was accidentally seen.
here's the big problem though. this contest was supposed to validate real applications. healthcare.love is nice, but it's a hollywood set. it doesn't wire into that much. it makes the erroneous mistake of targeting the new healthcare marketplace with an application for expensive iphones? in a demo state that is already covered by covered california? not the government exchange that it's adorable name harkens? i actually wrote simulated systems to pull member plans off the db and fake authorize them and submit them back into the system so that notifications could travel back to the app. oh, and instead of text i included twilio for VOIP and data coordination between the client, not assuming the target individuals would be text savvy youngsters. oh, that, and having to pull of the 85,000 healthcare plans that actually come from the healthcare.gov open marketplace. not just a single json list. so in the end, yah, i guess maybe i should have just focused on the icons? didn't think that was the point.
i held back until now, but looks like the makers of that app are also employees of a salesforce invested company. so they are DQ'd. this is all the kind of thing an open judging with actual use or connection with the entrants could have simply identified. but it all happens in the dark.
Tell Salesforce to hold an open judging and I'll spin them back up. And EVERYONE should get a chance to show off their applications.
people did hard work. and i'm not just advocating for myself. it is appauling that the work went into the circular file. and what they would have been judged on is the marketing brochure.
But it’s not going to be easy—$1 million is going to bring out the best of the best. So don’t wait until Dreamforce, you’re going to want to get started now.
and you only have 150 entries, you owe everyone a run. video review becomes inexcusable. people flew in with weeks of work and teams of people. and you reviewed their video? was this supposed reward video craftsmanship? the last thing on many people's minds when you intentionally led them to believe it was the work that counted?
First, salesforce is taking this very seriously and there is an ongoing discussion at the highest ranks to evaluate the complaints. Literally, the entire executive team is watching this.
Second, there were close to a hundred people that were internally part of the judging process. Each of these judges looked at a dozen or two entries. I could see little opportunity or motivation for collusion.
Finally, salesforce is one of the most self-critical companies that I've ever been a part of when it comes to evaluating ourselves in terms of trust and integrity. Nearly every internal communication begins and ends with a statement around how trust is our most important value. And while some our doubting our credibility in this moment, there's a reason why so many large and small companies trust us to hold their data; it's because we never compromise on any issue of integrity and if we make a mistake we investigate it and own up to it.
It doesn't make sense to say "Hackathon, 1 million dollars, Go!".
edit: To add. The problem should be announced the day of!
Apologies for the very long sentence, I love commas and am the arch-nemesis of conciseness.
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 something together is the really valuable part.
- 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 concepts and form teams.
Each of those can be gamed to some degree, but they can go a long way, and to game them requires serious intent to deceive.
They didn't even try, at all. The winner was openly a fully formed startup that demoed their app at a Salesforce meetup weeks before the hackathon. That's just, mind-blowing.
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.
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.
[1] Rhetorical question.
If I accuse you being a cheater you sure won't check HN. I am pretty sure.
Allegations of cheating are serious, but they shouldn't affect your enjoyment of the event unless your main purpose was the win the prize.
I don't know about you, but I enjoy winning, and I've won hackathons before. If I just wanted to build something with my hacker friends, I can do it any weekend I want.
any publicity is good publicity.
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.