Public Complaints and Controversies
Salesforce Hackathon Controversy (2013)
In November 2013, Salesforce’s $1 Million Hackathon at Dreamforce drew *“vehement backlash”* from
the developer community. Participants alleged the contest was unfair – the winning app **“Upshot”**
had been partly built before the event and was led by a former Salesforce employee. Many developers
were also upset that judges seemingly overlooked numerous entries and provided no feedback.
One participant, Alicia Liu, wrote a scathing Medium post *“The Dirty Secret Behind the Salesforce
$1M Hackathon,”* calling the event *“just another marketing gimmick”* to make developers work for
free. She argued Salesforce rewarded an ex-employee for solving a problem he failed to fix
internally, dubbing the situation a **“debacle.”**
As Salesforce’s VP of Developer Marketing at the time, Seligman became the company’s spokesperson
for damage control. He acknowledged the complaints and issued a public apology on Salesforce’s blog,
admitting *“We didn’t get this right”* regarding judging transparency and the lack of participant
feedback. CEO Marc Benioff also promised a full review.
Ultimately, to address the outcry, Salesforce took the unprecedented step of **awarding a second
$1 million prize** to the runner-up team (Healthcare.love) so that there were two winners.
Seligman’s blog post explained the findings of an internal audit (which claimed no official rules
were broken) and outlined improvements for future hackathons.
Despite the resolution, the incident left a lasting stain on Salesforce’s developer relations
reputation, with tech press and blogs widely covering the *“hackathon scandal.”*
Mozilla Leadership and Restructuring (2020)
Seligman joined Mozilla as Chief Operating Officer in May 2020, but his tenure coincided with a
turbulent period. Just a few months later, Mozilla announced a major **restructuring that eliminated
~250 jobs** – roughly 25% of its workforce – in August 2020.
This mass layoff (blamed on COVID-19 revenue shortfalls) was heavily criticized in tech circles.
Observers noted the irony of Mozilla’s leadership hiring new top executives (like Seligman) only to
shortly thereafter cut a quarter of the staff. The move drew negative press coverage and community
ire, with many questioning Mozilla’s direction and priorities.
Mozilla’s CEO Mitchell Baker defended the layoffs as necessary for a *“new focus”* on
revenue-generating products (such as the Mozilla VPN that Seligman’s team launched). While Seligman
was not singled out by name in these critiques, he was a key executive during this **controversial
downsizing**, which hurt morale and prompted several long-time Mozilla employees to express
disappointment publicly.
Seligman departed Mozilla in under a year, following the tumultuous reorganization.
Amazon Web Services: Honeycode and Generative AI
(2021–2023)
After Mozilla, Seligman joined AWS in 2021 to lead Amazon Honeycode – a no-code app builder.
Honeycode, however, struggled to find success. By mid-2023, **insiders reported that Honeycode was
being quietly “phased out”** after lackluster adoption.
Business Insider revealed that AWS had stopped active development: the service remained in beta with
“bare minimum support,” no new features, and its internal status page hadn’t been updated for
months. This stagnation followed the exit of Honeycode’s founding GM (Adam Bosworth) and Seligman’s
appointment as his replacement.
In fact, **rumors of Honeycode’s demise** had started by late 2021; Seligman himself **moved off
Honeycode in 2022** to become AWS’s VP of Developer Experience as the project languished. The
situation was covered as an example of Amazon’s missteps in business applications. It amounted to
negative press for Seligman’s unit, with one outlet flatly stating Honeycode’s future *“is not
looking so sweet.”*
In an informal **Hacker News** discussion about Honeycode’s fate, one commenter took a swipe at
Seligman’s influence within AWS. Noting Seligman’s Mozilla background, the user speculated that
**AWS employees were evangelizing Mozilla Firefox internally** (and disparaging alternative browsers
like Brave) because *“It’s Adam Seligman.”*
Other Critical Commentary and Press
Throughout his career, Seligman has occasionally faced criticism in developer forums and blogs
beyond the major events above. For example, some **Salesforce developers** were vocal on
Twitter/Reddit about platform decisions made under Seligman’s watch (such as emphasizing “low-code”
tools for non-coders, which traditional developers sometimes resented).
Likewise, at **Google**, where he was VP of Developer Relations (2017–2019), there were internal
murmurs about the direction of Google’s dev advocacy program. While no singular public scandal
emerged, a later whistleblower case in Google’s DevRel team (involving unrelated individuals)
underscored challenges in that organization, hinting at the difficult environment during Seligman’s
tenure.
In terms of *informal complaints*, there don’t appear to be Glassdoor reviews explicitly naming
Seligman. However, the **employee review sentiment** around times of upheaval (e.g. Mozilla 2020)
was negative toward leadership generally.