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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.'
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...
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.
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."
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
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.)
>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
I guess in today's security-conscious world, you have to break some definitions to make an omelet.
If you think the Easter egg is dead, go and play with Google Maps today.