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?)

Comments

Mamangement

[jklovanc]

Put yourself in a project manager's shoes. What would you say if one of your programmers was working on a cool Easter Egg instead of being productive and working on the actual product? I wouldn't want to be the project manager who had to tell higher management that the product will be late but have some cool Easter Eggs.

Re:Mamangement

[JMJimmy]

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.

Re:Mamangement

[hey!]

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.

Re:Mamangement

[rtb61]

Put yourself in the marketing directors shoes. Government agencies across the globe are becoming more and more ardent about computer security are watching computer company employees hiding code in programs. Hiding computer code in programs, code that is not a function of the program, code that does other stuff and, code the customer does not want. Harmless code fine, CIA and NSA and GHCQ and ASIO and CSIS and NZSIS, code not so much and of course not to forget organised crime, although I did technically mention by far largest English speaking organised crime groups (yes spying is literally organised crime and in reality does form links with other countries crime gangs).

Re:Mamangement

[wallsg]

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. And if you don't like it you can always go elsewhere because we're looking for H-1Bs, outsourcing, or "locating production in dynamic new markets" anyway.

I work in an industry that is competitively-bid large-scale systems sold to a handful of manufacturers to run their very-expensive low-volume product that requires government certification (which when said product fails or is intentionally caused to fail makes international news), not consumer-oriented programs. The only time the consumer sees anything about our products would be as background displays in a movie.

If someone managed to sneak an Easter Egg into this product then that means that the requirements-based and path-coverage testing was faulty, and there would be customer and government audits coming at us. The people who wrote and who reviewed the code would have a lot to answer for.

Re:Mamangement

[Reaperducer]

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.

Re:Mamangement

[RabidReindeer]

Put yourself in a project manager's shoes. What would you say if one of your programmers was working on a cool Easter Egg instead of being productive and working on the actual product? I wouldn't want to be the project manager who had to tell higher management that the product will be late but have some cool Easter Eggs.

I put myself in the customer's shoes.

Over the years I've learned certain characteristics of software products.

One is that the more expensive the product is, the more likely it's crawling with bugs and the less likely I'll get good support on it.

Another is that the software that's full of "fun things" tends to be higher quality than the software that's "serious business". That's even been my experience with stodgy old IBM's product line. Yes, even IBM has had occasional breakouts of humanity and some of their most useful - and critical - products were actually fun for someone, based on the code and/or documentation.

Granted, that was before they shipped it all offshore.

Re:Mamangement

[bmo]

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."

Sometimes it's a singing frog.

Don't bother trying to put the frog on Broadway, though.

http://static.comicvine.com/up...

--
BMO

Re:Mamangement

[JMJimmy]

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 how a small minded manager would see it for sure. Personally, I do Easter Eggs when a piece of code is just not working and it's starting to get me frustrated - I don't want to lose my momentum/coding mindset so I work on something fun for a bit then come back and work the problem. Better than losing the rest of the day being unproductive due to being frustrated. My favourite is adding a hidden to webpages that does something innocuous. Gotta love the hilarity that is "The Net" https://youtu.be/46qKHq7REI4?t...

Re:Mamangement

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.)

Re:Mamangement

[ckatko]

>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.

Re:Mamangement

[Zero__Kelvin]

"How would you feel if your plumber painted your walls some crazy color because he thought it looked better that way?"

So long as it normally appears as the color I wanted, and only changes to his color when I open the draw, turn on 2 stove burners and twist the doorknob 3 times, I don't really see the problem.

Re:Mamangement

[Zontar The Mindless]

"You must be great fun at parties."

Re:Mamangement

[ruir]

The word is not small minded, is douchebag.

Re:Mamangement

[uninformedLuddite]

>

Sounds messy.

As to fucking around with medical things, you should be banned from the industry for life.

Are you retarded?

Re:Mamangement

[Altrag]

I'm sure if you had access to all of the design files in any of those companies, you'd find more than a few that have goofy things added to them "just because."

The difference of course is that its a lot easier to overlook a small chunk of code in a million line program than it is to overlook your latest car design having bat wings.

There's a convergence though.. I would be totally unsurprised if it was discovered that some of these new digital devices in cars have Easter eggs in them. Because its software as well and while the UI is a lot more restricted than a mouse and keyboard (or even a gamepad in a lot of cases,) there's still enough buttons that an Easter egg could easily be hidden.

Of course making sure Easter eggs are documented and tested would be even more important in a vehicle due to the safety concerns.

Of course I've created some Easter Eggs

[reboot246]

Just got through boiling a couple of dozen, and now we're going to decorate them. Come tomorrow we'll be hiding them all over the yard. Wanna help look for them?

Yep

[Rei]

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.

Early days of PHP

[nbvb]

I once managed a department website - back in the mid 90s - and anytime you added someone named Fred to the administrative directory, it set their photo to Fred Sanford and started playing the theme to Sanford & Son.

Mid 90s PHP was fun...

Yup, added an easter egg in an old PS1 game.

[UnknownSoldier]

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.

Splash screen easter egg

[chocotof]

I once wrote a program with an animal as image in the spash screen. When the program took longer than expected to start up (there were some network connections being established), when you pressed the ctrl-alt, the animal yawned ...

Re:Usually just harmless fun

[Rei]

Everyone knows that the value of Flavor should have been "Flav"

Best easter egg of all time

[elmer at web-axis]

I created a easter egg in a piece of software i wrote for a client after they hired me to fix a backend problem. It causes a pie symbol to appear on their webpage and when you click on it and enter in some special key strokes it allows entry into the system by passing their 'Gatekeeper' authentication system. Problem is now I'm on the run and the FBI is hunting me.

Re:History of the Egg

[Reaperducer]

How about the Easter Egg currently inside the millions (billions?) of 555 timer chips in use around the world?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

My Easter Eggs

[Torin Darkflight]

Only twice that I can recall have I put in what I would consider true Easter Eggs. The first one was in a program I wrote for the TI-86 graphing calculator that would plot on a world map the exact location of latitude and longitude coordinates entered by the user. There was an Easter Egg where entering a specific combination of button presses on the map screen would make the program plot the coordinates of my hometown that I lived in at the time.

The second Easter Egg was in a very quick Visual Basic program I wrote where you could pop virtual bubble wrap by clicking on the bubbles. It had an option to "tear off a new sheet" whenever all the bubbles had been popped. The Easter Egg is triggered after popping and tearing off a ridiculously high number of sheets consecutively, at which point a message box would appear suggesting the user may wish to seek professional help for their severe stress.

In management shoes

[SuperKendall]

If I were a manager I would be ecstatic that a developer cared enough to attach something so personal to a project. It speaks to a higher level of effort across the whole system, over someone who is just implementing feature points.

Easter eggs as useless, or Easter eggs as 'alpha'?

[acroyear]

My new music player (SubFire - a player for Subsonic servers) has an easter egg in it, but only because i don't have time to give it the care it would need to actually make it a "useful" feature to anybody but me. Triple-clicking in the copyright footer will bring up a search box, and that can only happen on the Chrome version.

Basically, I needed a quick search to get to song titles, for my own purposes, but if I were to properly implement search, it would need to be very different...I know what it should be, and I don't have time to build that. So I now have one undocumented feature that does what I want the way I want for the purpose I need it for.

"It's a feature!"

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Or you could look at it as your employees doing [long list]

Tell management it's a "watermark" to detect copied code. (It's obviously not an open-source project. B-) )

Seriously: Suppressing easter-egg hiding means the best programmers are likely to look for a happier shop and move on, leaving the anal manager with the cream skimmed off his pool of talent.

On the other hand, a professional programmer will not spend substantial time on such things.

(An easy way to do it without substantial cost is to build it initially as part of a scaffold or a test suite component - with the easter-eggyness being a way to make it obviously a side issue and not corrupt the mission-critical output. Then the incremental labor cost of building it in as an easter egg is small - or may even be negative, by not taking it OUT of the version to be shipped as the product. B-) )

742 Evergreen Terrace

[bob301]

While working at a company that makes an online real estate listing and search platform, I added a Simpsons easter egg. If you searched for 742 Evergreen Terrace in any town named Springfield, the app would load a Simpsons-esque webfont, all text would be rendered in it, and the color scheme would change to yellow, orangered, and blue.

Re:Cracking down?

[Frobnicator]

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.

Re:Document your Easter eggs

[tepples]

I guess in today's security-conscious world, you have to break some definitions to make an omelet.

Google Maps

[johnw]

If you think the Easter egg is dead, go and play with Google Maps today.

Easter eggs

[fyngyrz]

I *always* squeeze out one or more easter eggs.

My latest: The application, which is free, is software defined radio. It's loaded with features, and everything is documented in detail. Radios have something called an "S Meter", which in a "real" radio is often an actual meter. I offer, and fully document, quite a few different s meter types you can switch by simply clicking on the currently displayed meter. Left click gets you the next model, right click the previous model. Some are classic looking meters, some are digits, some are graphs, some have audio dB meters incorporated as well, some read S, some read S+AGC, some read S+noise reduction, some read S+microvolts at the antenna input, some graphs are vertical, some are horizontal... and there are various combinations of the foregoing. Quite a variety.

So, if you follow the directions, you get exactly what the docs tell you you'll get.

But if, when you reach the last s-meter model, you left click again, you get an s-meter with some of the above information packed into it... in Klingon. :)

If you click one more time, you get the same set of information again, but this time... predator.

Both meter styles are quite dynamic. As they should be, since they're driven by actual data and displaying it. Albeit not in the usual fashion.

My only regret is that Alien's aliens were not written language users. I suppose it was alien to them. And perhaps that's why they were so mean... because they were... alienated.

Ok, I'll stop now. :)

Re:Easter eggs

[fyngyrz]

My software is SdrDx. Details here: Very much a "radio person's" design.

As for the eggs, that's not all of em -- those are the easiest to find, too. And they're a thing that's been in there for a couple of years or so, I figure it's not much a secret. Also, there's not much overlap between slashdot and my users. If any. Lastly, I don't think of them as exclusive so much as I do something fun to find.

You might be the first, if it turns out to be something you can use. :)

Re:Cracking down?

[TechNeilogy]

A company I worked at had a similar policy: we were allowed one Easter egg per app, and we had to disclose it to management. The management took the rather enlightened view that it could be used to liven up product demos, etc.

Re: Cracking down?

[JWSmythe]

Time based ones, especially for religious holidays are touchy. For some, they're friendly. For others, they're anything but.

Easter Eggs should generally be non-intrusive. They should take very intentional actions to make it happen.

Entering the Knomi code is a good example of that.

Just a randomizer that switches all your text to comic sans on presentations, with 8-bit game music in the background, not so much.

Re:Easter liability

[drumlight]

This might be fairly common as this was reported in Canada a couple of weeks ago.Family finds message in last Kellogg’s box made at London plant