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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?)
I once worked on a government project codenamed "Bullfrog" back when I worked at Rockwell-Collins. I won't go into too much details (we were told that it was "sensitive" but not classified), but I'll just mention that part of the project involved a radio turner that could scan through frequencies. One of my tasks was to implement the frequency sweeper, which was supposed to have a dot that would show what frequency was currently being scanned. I also as part of a different task had to implement a subwindow that could be opened or closed, which showed snapshots of the past several sweeps. The easter egg would occur if you clicked on the open/close button for the snapshot window precisely 42 times: the dot would change into a hopping frog animation ;)
Nothing huge, but nothing evil either, and something that was easy to implement and easy to sneak into the code unnoticed.
Trump's plan to get rid of Mueller appears to be 'be so guilty of so many things that Mueller works himself to death.'
Easter eggs were "par for the course" back in the day. It was a way for us to blow off some steam for the very long crunch. i.e. Our physics guy added a machine easter egg.
Context: The high score screen only allowed N characters. My last name of course had N+1 characters so I made the code detect it and append the last character. :-)
Harmless, but fun.
Years later, the younger brother of my best friend was doing QA for the company and was testing a port. He came across this easter egg and told his older brother that "I had hacked the game!"
He didn't realize I had worked on the original game and _wrote_ that easter egg. :-)
Easter Eggs, when they are small cosmetic things, are harmless.
Painting the walls is an obvious change. Pretty much the opposite of an Easter Egg.
An Easter Egg, in the construction sense that you describe, would be more like the time a construction crew opened up the wall in my apartment to fix a leak in a pipe and found a lunchbox that someone left behind when the building was built in 1928 with a note inside reading "Hello."
Harmless. Amusing. And it generally makes the world a better and more interesting place to live and work.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
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.
That's the mindset of most managers. It doesn't matter if that's good or bad; it's just a fact.
It does matter whether it's good or bad, and it seriously is a reason why many of these managers should be fired.
There are numerous scientific studies showing the benefits of breaks, downtime, doing leisure activities, naps, etc. during the workday -- resulting in greater productivity than if workers don't have such things. Managers who insist that workers be productive continuously are actually decreasing their productivity.
Same thing with forcing people to work 7 days per week. Same thing with vacation time. There are a number of studies showing that if people take a few weeks or even a month off from work per year, they more than make up for it in increased productivity after the rest.
I realize that many managers are stupid, but this kind of stupidity is costing their company productivity and thus MONEY. It may be the norm, but it does matter that it's a stupid policy that not only harms workers but often harms the managers and their companies too.
Oh, and guess what -- added stress and fatigue causes injuries and health problems, often leading to more extended leaves due to sickness that end up costing a lot more. What's a big expense for most companies? Health coverage. Not only are you decreasing the effectiveness of your workers during work hours, but you're driving up one of your biggest costs in terms of additional healthcare.
It's inexcusable. Some high-powered companies in finance, law, as well as hospitals with doctors doing crazy shifts, etc. have started to recognize that it's really bad to have your workers coming in 7 days per week or working days at a time. It leads to inferior work and thus some corporations have started actively trying to get people to stay home on Sundays or whatever. (Think I'm kidding? Here's a story from the New York Times about financial firms adopting policies trying to get workers to stay home on the weekends.)
Managers who refuse to acknowledge good scientific studies showing how to make workers productive are bad managers.
(This is not to say that "Easter eggs" are always a good thing or a good use of time or resources. There are many reasons they can be problematic, as others have pointed out, like unintentionally creating problems in the code or whatever. But objections should be founded on reasons relevant to the project or security or whatever, not on bad managerial science.)