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Is This the Death of the Easter Egg?
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC reports that more and more companies are cracking down on the practice of hiding harmless snippets of code in their products. Known as "Easter eggs," they can be anything from the names of the developers, to pictures, to games like pinball, to a flight simulator. Is this simply professionalism, or is it stifling programmers' quirky, playful side? (Have you created any Easter eggs yourself? If so, what did they do?)
Or you could look at it as your employees doing self-training, stress management, staying "productive" while stepping back from a problem set of code, or trying to add value to a product by making small additions. Full blown flight sim is overboard I grant you, but simple things like in VLC every Christmas time the cone gets a Santa hat - it's a nice touch that shows they're thinking about the end user... not every easter egg adds value and some are unprofessional but there should always be room for some expression beyond the bare bones function.
If the programmer in question was at least as good as average at meeting his targets, and the Easter Egg was suitably hidden, I probably wouldn't say anything. And I speak as someone who's actually managed programmers successfully.
Play and humor are essential feature of learning and advanced human cognition. We're more creative and effective when we give a our brains a little stimulation. When you treat programers as code generating machines you get less out of them than if you treat them as code generating animals.
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>Ha ha. If you can get your work done and still have time to "goof off" like this then obviously you could do more work.
William Deming would like to have a word with you.
If you measure someone's productivity by hours, and not solving problems, then it's clear you're not a market leader. You can't use people like robots. The human brain cannot be simplified to easy math. There's ramp up time, there's ramp down time, culture and more. If you attack people who are trying to keep their brains fresh, you're hurting both your employees AND your own business productivity. In otherwords: you're as stupid as the people who cut short-term corners thinking it'll save them money in the long run and then blame their line workers when productivity falls.
They can try all they want.
It all depends on who they happen to be, and how you define an Easter Egg.
I worked in games for many years and we included quite a few Easter Eggs. But they were not hidden from the studio. They were approved by management, tested by QA, and documented internally. We tried to keep them quiet to see how long it took for them to be found.
The article is right -- large corporations that are risk averse tend to crack down hard on undocumented Easter Eggs. I think that is correct for a business, to crack down hard on undocumented, unapproved, untested features.
The key detail is who knows about it, and how appropriate it is for the product.
Critically: Did it get approved and tested, and is it okay for the user? An Easter Egg that has been approved by designers and product managers, tested by QA, and is a happy surprise to the user is a good thing. If it was not approved, but the programmer intentionally threw in the feature without testing and without documentation, yes, the business should crack down.
The trickier ones are the ones that are approved and tested, but not quite what the customer expects. Microsoft's bouncing text screensaver used to have an Easter Egg that typing "volcano" for the text caused a cycle of volcano names. Fun, for sure, but if your screen savers were used for the machine name, and the machine name happened to be "volcano", then it is an unexpected negative behavior.
Someone working on Excel, a product used inside government agencies and nearly every major business, including secret unapproved features? Yeah, that's absolutely a fire-able offense.
Someone working in a smaller company, with management approval, adding in a small feature to change the color scheme to red and green on Christmas day? Potentially a fun little Easter egg... unless the user is making a major presentation on that day to group that doesn't respect the Christmas holiday, then better make sure there is a way to turn it off.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement