Rally's been doing Hackathons for a fair number of years now, and has a pretty healthy attitude towards them. It's well-understood that they are exploratory, and most of the projects won't come to anything significant, but a modest fraction turn out to be pretty important (my project this year involved enhancing one of our common systems, which itself started from a Hackathon four or five years ago). They pretty much never result in something complete, but that's not the point: they're mostly about prototyping and idea-generation.

And yeah, historically it's been mainly for the engineers. But given this year's weird circumstances, they decided to open it to anyone who wanted to play along, with the result that we got a somewhat broader set of ideas, and some better-rounded teams. Overall, I think it was a nice success...