220
tocttou
7y

I know I should not be naming names but WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016 was actually a fuckfest. It was supposed to be a 14 day online hackathon followed by an offline event for top teams. I got in top 6 among the 4350 participants.

In the offline event:

1. They didn't allow us to give live demo of the project. Instead they asked us to present a ppt. The HR idiot even asked me to take screenshots of my cli app and put that in instead.

2. 4 out of the 6 teams actually presented their startup products. It was supposed to be a 14 day hackathon for fucks sake. How can you present some shit that you were working on for the last 1.5 years! This one team literally had "Copyright 2015" mentioned on their product page. This another team had 100,000+ downloads on his app already. Of course Walmart didn't care about it. They didn't listen to my complaint. I wish I had created a scene there :( Another team was boasting on stage about how they got selected in the FB startup accelerator and how they won 3 more hackathon (evidently equally shit) using their shit. This was met with praises from the judges.

3. The results were declared after 3 fucking months! Don't organize this shit next time if you don't have any interest, bitch.

4. The code was supposedly never checked. Other teams kept working on their shit for the 3 months in between. In the live presentation, this guy even had photoshopped a feature which wasn't even present there (and he boasted about it later on).

5. Hackerearth (platform for the hackathon) was equally incompetent in this mishap of a hackathon. One of the teams which won had one the previous hackathon (Pluralsight hackathon) as well on Hackerearth using the same fucking product. What pieces of shit >.<

6. The hackathon was supposed to be tech based and all the categories were like that. Instead the teams presented business models and shit like that and judges focused more on that. They were not concerned about the technical aspects at all. The more noise you made, the more lies you told, the better chance you had to win it.

7. They were supposed to give prizes in 4 categories but silently reduced it to 3 on the event day. They still publicised it as 4 prizes until now.

All of the above is true and I am willing to testify if someone asks for it. I am going to write a nice blog post about it and post it to their idiot HR.

Hackathon: WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016
Team name: psyduck (which is just me)

Sorry for being too salty but it was indeed a fuckfest.

Comments
  • 117
    This is devRant. If you're not salty, you're not doing it right.
  • 16
    I thought I was going to get some spicy stories about some orgy with that title. 'Fuckfest' isn't the best word for what you've described. LOL! Watch out for the word 'hack' - red flag.
  • 4
    I don't participate in them for that reason. It should be from new file to Product/Feature but it's not, just additional funding.
  • 0
    smack them, @tocttou 😎
  • 6
    Psyduck. Best Team Name :D
  • 2
    I was also among the finalists. But now I'm glad that that I couldn't make it to top 6 😂
  • 0
    I've seen a lot of company Hackathons turn into "product sprints" or a continuation of prior work. It's sad and when I was livid when I was figuring it out from experience.
  • 2
    I would never enter a hackathon myself unless my company would asks me.
    (Sometimes they organize it for big companies when they feel they are falling short in marketing or sales, to weed out the competition and get that huge project they where hoping for)

    I mean, why would I sacrifice my weekend for some bigass company who has 0 interest in me, only in what I come up with so they can profit? Fuck that! Keep your petty 100$ price.
  • 0
    Sounds like an accurate representation of the corporate world though.
  • 1
    Couldn't we coin some new name for Hackathon since that had been hijacked? So that we devs know for sure that it is a Hackathon as we would like them.
  • 1
    @siljamicke when you do, be sure to trademark it before stupid people take it away and do the same thing they did with Hackathons.
  • 0
    @Neotelos it's easy! We'll just use some old business terminology that they feel is not hip any more. They hijack, we hijack.
  • 1
    @siljamicke synergy is pretty dead...
  • 2
    @jeeper to me "swing by next weekend, we're doing synergy" sounds either like we're gonna do drugs or have gender agnostic sexy time...
  • 1
    @siljamicke when you put it that way we definitely need to bring synergy back into the business world!
  • 1
    If I had to guess, I'd say the majority of Hackathons are shit. Sorry you had a bad experience!
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