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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>They're in a tough spot, though I don't really pity them since it was their own doing.
> "They set expectations that they were looking for serious apps, serious work, serious time,” [Seth Piezas] says.<p>That's wonderful! As a serious developer, you have a serious rate you offer your serious services at.<p>(Also: Do I read right? They own the code? To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi: "That's no hackathon.")
young naive hackers and BigCo's "developers, developers, developers" marketing management drones. Call it a hackathon and they'll come.<p>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. :)<p>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 ...
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.<p>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.
It sounds like they were working on it much longer than 4 weeks: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4844318" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4844318</a>
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
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.