I must say, I have encountered free-form hackathons (category 3) at companies with no ideas provided by management, and no expectations. It happened at a team-building event at some nearby lake, only half of the people who were there even participated, and that was fine. People made games, stupid hacks, only one team came up with some cool tool that we kept around and used internally.
> It happened at a team-building event at some nearby lake
Given the choice of
1) Being shipped off to a nice location where managers will demonstrate their authority by requiring you to perform suspiciously work-like fake recreation with other employees
or
2) Actual time off
I am pretty sure which one I'd pick, most of the time at least.
Any team building event i have been to has always been paid work. Why would anyone do that for free?
Now some of them were fun nice breaks from the normal day to day while others sucked and i wish i was doing normal work instead, but either way i was on the job and being paid.
"Here at Craptech we are all about team building. We love to treat our employees to lavish company retreats - after which we'll go back into crunch mode for the rest of the year."
Paid is better, but tbh I'd probably take unpaid time off in many cases. I'd actually prefer to work half time as long as it worked financially.
