I&#x27;m with you.  Where I work Hackathons happen because someone in management has heard it&#x27;s a cool thing to do.  Practically nothing that happens in those ever is shipped and nothing is learnt from the experience.  It&#x27;s just a way of wasting people&#x27;s time and appearing to be cool.<p>When I was younger I used to work through the night with friends on stuff we wanted to do.  It was fun and social.  There was no commercial motivation or value.  We just had a lot of time on our hands being geeks with no social life and we enjoyed building things.  In a corporate setting this is maybe similar to Google&#x27;s 20% time which as far as I hear isn&#x27;t really working any more either.  The closest thing to this in my day job world is people taking some time to just do whatever they want to do without giving a damn what management thinks.  If you can do a little of that in your workplace then you&#x27;re basically getting the &quot;true&quot; hackathon effect ...