Yep, a way to get free work by pretending its fun, most corpos immediately turn around and do this.

It's also funny to me because of how they try to show its a treat to the engineering staff, and then railroad them as soon as they can to implement the half baked idea.

The truth is that most management don't ever get beyond half baked ideas and so trying to push you to make low quality crap is often their only move.

I dunno, I think I got more out of it than I put in, but it was mostly due to happenstance and knock on events, and my name sounding more familiar to some important people, but this wasn't really in the cards.

Imo if you don't do stuff others dont you wont end up in places others dont, which might be good or bad.

I mean, one of the biggest raises I got was when I brought my dog to the company cookout, and it turned out my boss's boss was a huge dog person, and we bonded over that, and he decided I was a good guy, which was kinda ironic as I was working my arse off to little benefit at that time.

Same scummy move as streamers / online personalities having a "contest" for a t-shirt design or logo design, which the streamer will sell for their personal profit while offering nothing but "exposure" to the creator.