[mafuyu]

I haven’t seen any incredible outcomes from them, but I think they can be nice if they’re low key with no real expectation of productization. Definitely shouldn’t be any “prizes”.

The best uses of hackathons I’ve seen are for experimenting with things that will have a direct workflow improvement for your team/org. You’re not gonna impact the company product roadmap with a hackathon project. If you do, it’ll feel lame because it’ll be a product manager lifting your concept and throwing away the implementation.

I’ve spent hackathons getting team members together and working on things like a bootloader rewrite, toolchain improvements, adding that one API to our SDK that I really wanted personally, etc. Stuff that’s hard to find time to work on day-to-day, but can be marketed internally and if it works out, merged to immediately improve things for your team.