I don't think hackathons are always a gimmick, but then again I was probably too loose with my word choice. I mostly meant a period of sustained cooperation wit

I don't think hackathons are always a gimmick, but then again I was probably too loose with my word choice. I mostly meant a period of sustained cooperation with a small group where most of the time is spent together, all meetings are canceled, and you don't try to split up work into bite sized pieces with any formality (like a story/jira ticket). I agree that organizations that don't trust their engineers with any design or implementation decisions are wasting their talent and probably creating a lot of bored and burned out engineers. If an engineer wants to use a fancy new piece of tech and they can justify it, let them do it.