November 24, 2013 The Dirty Secret Behind the Salesforce $1M Hackathon

I know that if I put this much time and effort into something and the judges didn’t even launch my code, I’d be pretty upset, but anyone going into this thinking it was completely unbiased, and not a huge marketing ploy cooked up to benefit the host is just naive. On the other hand, it’s impossible to get the one true story in situations like these.

At any rate this is why I’m increasingly dismissive of any corporate “hackathon” competitions. They are rarely setup with the developers’ best interests in mind, but rather for some other type of self-serving agenda1.

  1. “I’m not lumping any type of charity/non-profit events in here, those clearly articulate who these projects benefit”