Is this new or just 'new mainstream enterprise practice' I was under the impression that hackathons had been subverted as a tool of corporate exploitation of young devs for some time now.
The events that I ran were about team building and giving the younger folks a safe chance to build some leadership skills. They were fully internal events though, not a "win a free monkey if you make the best app on my api" kind of hackathons.
I found that lots of the older folks were happy to get a chance to sit down and program again. They had moved into jobs that were more about managing and communication, so they were not able to find time to code like they used to.
Giving the newer devs a chance to lead a team gave them a chance to hone that skill if it was something they were interested in developing.
This article presents no data and does not feature any discussion of economics. It simply lists off a couple of different hackathons, namedropping Mastercard, Disney, and Dropbox. I haven't seen a good article from The Economist on HN in a long time.
I worked as the Developer Advocate at my last company (An Agile tools vendor). While I was there I had helped out some larger companies run their own internal hackathons. One of the services that we helped them with was planning the event.
For the most part I worked as a therapist for their executive team, usually I spent most of my time reassuring them that losing a day of engineering time would be a good investment and that they didn't need to vet the projects that the teams worked on. It was fun work bringing that awesome kind of "goof-off" dev work to engineers that had been working with the same team for 20 years and had been pidgeonholed onto some old legacy system.
The execs pretty much always loved it, you got to see teams led by interns with grizzled senior neckbeards getting to write some code for them.
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Great fun and a positive exposure to code for newbies or the simply curious.
For the most part I worked as a therapist for their executive team, usually I spent most of my time reassuring them that losing a day of engineering time would be a good investment and that they didn't need to vet the projects that the teams worked on. It was fun work bringing that awesome kind of "goof-off" dev work to engineers that had been working with the same team for 20 years and had been pidgeonholed onto some old legacy system.
The execs pretty much always loved it, you got to see teams led by interns with grizzled senior neckbeards getting to write some code for them.