1- Can I know why you are contacting the winners in advance? In all the competitions I know, the winners are informed on the day of the announcement, and all the procedures to collect their prize start from that day. Why this advance call? It’s a bit weird.
2- Another question, why did you choose the technology winners first? When evaluating the submissions, didn’t you evaluate them all together? This suggests that you might redo the evaluation, or how does it work? There is a lot of ambiguity, really?
3- And why all this added ambiguity regarding the deadlines: “by mid-November” and “late 2024” on the official page?
4- Regarding the People’s Choice Award, why wasn’t there a counter showing the actual number of votes? How was it awarded? Can we access the number of people who voted for us? Could you send us this number since you have counted it for all submissions?: I would like to know exactly how many votes the winner of the People’s Choice Award received and how many votes each of us got as well: This is called transparency.
They reach out to the winners to confirm they complete the necessary tax forms and to verify their availability. According to the terms of agreement, if a winner doesn’t respond within a specified timeframe, the prize will be awarded to the next highest scorer.
Yes, I understand, but that’s exactly what I’m referring to regarding the procedures. Filling out tax forms and other paperwork should come after the announcement. The transfer, as indicated, is done electronically, so it’s not very complicated. Perhaps the only thing to verify is the age (>=18), but everything else should start on the day of the announcement (even the country is requested in the submission). Thank you for your response, I am looking forward to getting clarification on all my other questions here because it’s very embarrassing…
Very embarrassing is a bit of an exaggeration to say the least, and not due here, feel free to have questions, but again how they run their competition is their game, not really our call. The logistics of taxation, evaluation, and transfers, even communication is at their own discretion as it depends on the resources allocated, legal implication (for example tax holding for U.S. income) and other points that the team at Google will see.
Seeing the number of voters isn’t really the concern for People Choice Awards, not to mention it was just for fun, nothing tangible.
There were several delays (happens as this is the first competition of its kind, so initial estimates didn’t match what really happened), which is understandable.
Only thing we can do now is wait and see how things will go, so it makes sense to announce “late 2024” as things could happen.
I think it makes perfect sense to contact and verify the winners prior to the announcement. It would be incredibly embarrassing from a PR perspective to announce winners publicly, just for them to be under the age of 18, unable to accept the prize, in sanctioned countries, etc. This would then require backtracking and announcing new winners.
Regarding why the tech prizes are first, I think it’s because these prizes are much more narrow in scope and more objectively judged. It is probably easier to define the quality of a firebase implementation vs. how “creative” or “impactful” an app is. This is besides the fact that these prizes are technology agnostic so the scope is much wider.
Overall this competition has been managed just fine in my opinion. I think people have been rather impatient and are not being understanding of the work required to run this competition in addition to their day jobs at Google.
@Khaled_Abbas I would prefer if they specified the deadline as December 30, January 5, 2025, or even January 15, 2025, etc rather than leaving it ambiguous and making us wait…
Regarding “Seeing the number of voters isn’t really the concern for the People’s Choice Awards, not to mention it was just for fun, nothing tangible,”: that’s not true. The winner will be featured on the Google site, which is significant… Many submissions that might be much better won’t get this chance (and are top submissions but not winners) , so it’s not insignificant. …I want transparency on the number of votes each of us received… and I think it’s easy to communicate this to all of us since they have counted all the votes to determine the winner. This would also say a lot about the overall process of determining the winners in general…
@EdgarM On what basis do you say that the competition is well managed (managed fine) ? Management? The inability to allocate resources in terms of time, people, and everything needed to conclude the competition (whether they do it alongside their work or not, they just need to allocate the resources to get the job done…). Or is it the deadlines that have never been precise (I’m not commenting on why it’s not fast, I’m saying estimate your time, with at most a 20% margin of error, and give an exact date: say January 20, 2025, or December 30, 2024, whatever…). Where do you see good management? Sorry… When I say things as they are, it’s not an exaggeration. But saying things as they are not is embellishing reality (to put it mildly)…
I’m sure if it was as straightforward as giving an exact dates it would be done. There are many factors at play that determine how fast they can complete the judging, such as judge availability, competitiveness of submissions, number of submissions, and more.
You are of course entitled to your opinion on how you feel about the competition. But I think you’re oversimplifying this by saying “just allocate the resources”. Google doesn’t solely exist to judge this competition. This is priority #5386 at Google, and I’m sure the team is doing their best to accurately assess over 3000 code submissions with what’s available.
@EdgarM You didn’t understand anything. If it’s priority #53800, they should set a deadline of April 30, 2025. If they can’t meet it, they shouldn’t do it at all. You need to understand what it takes to get the job done (I’m not criticizing Google, but the people who judged this competition). Google teaches people how to manage things…I won’t go into details. Yes, I’m aware, if they can’t estimate even with this number of submissions, they’re missing the mark…and i wish the determination of the winners didn’t follow the same path: randomly (or another way…), as you see, everything is left to chance…That’s it. I hope they do good things, I really do…
I’m not a judge, but I have very good guesses. Here you go:
During that step the cat can be out of the bag if someone is not eligible. What would be embarrassing is to announce a winner just to realize later that it’s not eligible. So this is the smart way of doing it, even if it delays the announcement.
If they want to re-evaluate than that can lead to an even more fair judgement as far as I am concerned.
There are just too many submissions and too much work with the judgement. It’s better to not give a firm date than be late on a date because more verification round were needed due to fallbacks. Or due to workload in general. Let’s not forget that Google was laying off staff as well. Who knows how it affected the hackathon. As far as Google concerns this hackathon might not be high on their priority list, engineers have better things to do.
If there was a counter it could potentially induce ferocious hammering of the site for votes. It’s not unheard of to not display numbers to avoid runoffs with public voting sites. It may even help judges to be less partial with respect to the popular opinion (they also won’t see it).
I think the big picture here is that Googlers who judge have this task not on the top (maybe not even in the middle of their priority list). It’s not that resources couldn’t or weren’t allocated. They were, but there were more submissions than expected. They’ll come through with the judging. We’ll live.
There are some more or less convincing elements in your response.
For the 3rd point, everything could be convincing except that it’s not a priority for Google (this might be the case, but handling it this way only casts a very negative light on Google). Either do it very well or don’t do it at all. Doing things well has nothing to do with priorities (if you commit to something, either do it or don’t, it’s simple).
For the 4th point: Ok but I want them to communicate the voting results for each of us. I think it’s very simple since they counted the votes to determine the winner: it’s about transparency… Just like in elections, would you accept it if they announced that a candidate won without providing the voting results for all candidates to the public? No one would believe it… I assure you. The same here, but it’s even simpler…
For the 2nd point: this is the best thing I hope they are doing…
For me, I think that Google judges are normal developers. If you think, oh it’s Google and everything is perfect. You are wrong. Every company has these kinds of developers and there are too many categories. Maybe, they outsource this to any smaller companies that are working for Google. I think they are also not running the code. My app is attached to Firebase. It is simple to run. It will take less than 30 minutes to run it if you are a coder. In Firebase analytics, there is no activity shown. The only activity, it is showing is my own activity. This means they are not even testing codes on real devices or emulators. They are just checking them manually. If they are not testing it, then how they can judge app performance, and bugs and give points? Big question.
The more people get angry in here the better because it means they haven’t been contacted by Google yet, meaning that I still have hope of being contacted, I just need another 3183 to get angry here and for sure I’ll be the winner! #science
Jokes asides, a bit more frequent updates from the organizers would have been better at preventing this rants.
I am not angry but rules are rules. I accidentally checked my Firebase analytics because I was updating my app. I do not care because a startup can be made big even if not supported. Also, you cannot depend on evaluation. Groq AI startup was developed by one of Google’s engineer and was not supported by Google.
