I'm with you. Where I work Hackathons happen because someone in management has heard it's a cool thing to do. Practically nothing that happens in those ever is shipped and nothing is learnt from the experience. It's just a way of wasting people's time and appearing to be cool.
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's 20% time which as far as I hear isn'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're basically getting the "true" hackathon effect ...
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's 20% time which as far as I hear isn'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're basically getting the "true" hackathon effect ...