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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 (basic
by bronbron 13y 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 13y agoI'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 13y agoAt 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 13y 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 13y agoI 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 13y agoIsn'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 13y agoSalesforce also owns Heroku.
- fleitz 13y agoYeah, that could be a problem.
- igul222 13y agoDon't yank the winners' prizes, but re-judge the entire hackathon and award the new winners equal prizes.
- veemjeem 13y agoToo 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 13y agoLet the internet re-judge, worst case scenario they get a bunch more PR on what you can do with the API.
- kandalf 13y 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.