Salesforce $1 Million Hackathon Update - Two Winners
blogs.developerforce.com
blogs.developerforce.com
So how does this constitute a full review and audit. The reality is that SF royally fucked up on many fronts and lost developer cred in the community. As if they cared in the first place.
If they attempt this next year, they need to appoint an outside 3rd party to oversee the contest and git rid of their own employees from the process.
I've worked with Salesforce for 4+ years now (as customer and partner), and sadly I agree with you. This should be the message that someone at salesforce reads. Want to be invited to their pilots? Want to have access to their PMs? You had better not say anything bad, I even had my AE pull me aside when I was out there for an EBC to tell me to not bring up their recent service outage during the meeting. If you don't have anything nice to say about salesforce, they don't want to hear your voice.
Was at Dreamforce last week and it felt like one giant sales-pitch-cum-Anthony-Robbins event.
Let me know if you have a few minutes to chat, and how best to contact you. My email is in my profile. Thanks!
Now, very few people can confirm that they had no views of their videos because most people watched it themselves several times and/or shared the link. One person claims they had zero views on the video, which isn't a very good sample size. We had 18 views of our video by the time judging ended and we had 16 before it started, but whether those two were by judges or by people we shared with, I have no idea. Either way, it wasn't viewed multiple times by many different judges as we've been told.
I already commented on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784782), and so far I can find only one person that is claiming that their video was not shown (@colabi). While every complaint deserves to be investigated, I think colabi's has been heard multiple times already and I'd like to see if there is some other cause for concern.
Since you are confidentially asserting that you believe that salesforce employees are lying, it would help everyone if you could identify just a couple of the dozens of developers that you reference.
If you do so, I will investigate their specific situation directly.
Put another way, I look at a lot of resumes that have personal links/CVs on them. 90% of the time I've decided no before I get to them, making their inclusion irrelevant. Could this not have happened?
So, the assumption is that judges' computers don't block phone-home and other tracking/analytics services? That'd be a very poor and dangerous assumption to make.
"We instructed both our first and second round judges to evaluate the submissions using the apps’ description, screen shots and the demo video using the same four criteria"
Lock-step global counters, even when you play games like sharding and summing to reduce contention, can still introduce latency and SPOF. But then again, I would have expected any probabilistic counter to only kick in after a certain popularity threshold.
I would hesitate to make any claim that something definitely was not viewed based on anything less than the full HTTP access logs of a self-hosted video.
2. Build an API.
3. Make mobile application that 'uses' API to do something cool.
4. Judges think API/Data set are inherent properties of your app.
4. Profit.
* Optional. You could just make an API that does something cool way before hackathon.
(That is my understanding of what happened with that event and it is most likely inaccurate.)
The point is that Upshot wasn't granted an 'exemption' in any sense of the word.
Salesforce had already decided that they were going to win, and now they are being forced to justify that decision in the context of the rules.
Going forward, there is every reason to assume that future hackathons/competitions run by salesforce will be likewise pointless to participate in, unless you have been given the nod by Salesforce.
They haven't just set a bad precedent, they have totally trashed their credibility.
I am taking bets that the next time they run a hackathon there will be (anonymous) stories of Salesforce leaning on their 'partners' to ensure they get a sufficient number of entries.
They should: If you know what you're building, and the prize is enough motivation, of course you should do everything you possibly can in advance, and any rules that tried to prohibit that would essentially be crippling only the naively honest.
Even if there were keystroke and screen loggers and you had to "show your work", a prepared team would have gone through the process multiple times, completely refining their work to the point of rote re-implementation of version 10 of a proven out implementation.
This may sound cynical, but it is truthful. Which is exactly why most such competitions simply announce the goal and an end date in the future, and people grind as they see fit.
What is this referring to? Has this ever actually occurred?
If you tell people there is a million dollar prize at stake (and to add to the financial stakes, charge hundreds per contestant), and details of the problem they will be solving, 100% of your contestants will try to solve as much of the problem as they can in advance (while, most likely, declaring it a crime that anyone else did so).
Anyone who claims otherwise is the sort of person you should protect your wallet around.
It is impossible to guard against this.
While the Upshot mobile app used some pre-existing code,
this did not violate the rules. Use of pre-existing code
was allowable as long as the code didn’t comprise the
majority of the app and didn’t violate any third party’s rights.
I don't understand how someone can use pre-written code written specifically for use in this hackathon. It's one thing to write some generic libraries, but they had the product made beforehand, they even demo-ed the app on the 8th! (according to the meetup post)[1]
This doesn't even touch on the allegations that some contestants' apps weren't run and videos weren't watched.
What a sham of a contest ...
1 : http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/e...
Full stop. That's it. Hackathon's with prizes are their own beast, and have their own rules. But hackathons themselves are purely about seeing what you can do. I hate the idea of turning Hackathons into something that destroys that fundamental piece, and money does that.
That also throws out jQuery and any of its libraries.
The beauty of hackathons is they force you to think about the deliverable and attempt to mitigate reinventing the wheel by using as many plugins as possible to deliver your concept.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
Personally, I think the Upshot approach was a sleazy hack of the competition rules. On the other hand, with a $1 million prize, you'd have to be an idiot not to expect rules-lawyering to be at least as important in winning as a good idea…
Salesforce had one out, throw money at the problem and hope it fades away.
because you were expecting the pre-determined winner to be using it?
The right thing to do would be to ask Upshot to submit ALL their code and add it to Salesforce.com. I think most of the other participants would consider that fair justice.
Guess there are Three Winners.
So what does "a majority" really mean? Can I come in with 49% of the code and still be eligible? 49% isn't technically a majority. What about 49.99%? How do you even determine the concept of "a majority"?
The real issue is poor metrics on which to apply that threshold...
Deleted comment
Now that Salesforce has given their response, it should be evaluated just like any other company statement, to see if it is accurate and meets the community standards of what's "fair". Yes, fairness is partially subjective, which is why people want to discuss it here.