I participated in (and hosted) some hackathons in college, and I think those were useful in that they gave you an opportunity to drive your own project - a lot of people otherwise had only done coursework, served to introduce students to companies/potential employers, as most sponsors had some kind of presence, and were fun.
It hasn't come up, but I might still do an internal or public hackathon now, just for something to do. If I had a family and lots of responsibility/time pressure, maybe not.
I do think the short time window is a real limitation though. The only way to make significant progress in 24-48 hours is to already be really familiar with your tools. If half your team knows a stack and the other half doesn't, you don't really have time to teach them and build your project. It's also very difficult to find an idea which can be built in the available time while also being actually interesting.
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I participated in (and hosted) some hackathons in college, and I think those were useful in that they gave you an opportunity to drive your own project - a lot of people otherwise had only done coursework, served to introduce students to companies/potential employers, as most sponsors had some kind of presence, and were fun.
It hasn't come up, but I might still do an internal or public hackathon now, just for something to do. If I had a family and lots of responsibility/time pressure, maybe not.
I do think the short time window is a real limitation though. The only way to make significant progress in 24-48 hours is to already be really familiar with your tools. If half your team knows a stack and the other half doesn't, you don't really have time to teach them and build your project. It's also very difficult to find an idea which can be built in the available time while also being actually interesting.