In the situation the parent described, I find it hard to construe it as benefiting the company over the individual (other than naturally making the company more

In the situation the parent described, I find it hard to construe it as benefiting the company over the individual (other than naturally making the company more attractive to work for). We did this when I was at Guidewire and it was amazing. I explored Event Sourcing during a hackathon and eventually went on to build it into a product using those skills - it's a really happy memory. In another hackathon I built easter eggs into our internal seating chart application - the vibe of everyone hacking together was great. This was a hackathon where it was broad enough that "reading an interesting programming book" counted, and nobody really bothered you if you did something completely different.