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Apple Ending Engineering Credits in Products
JChris writes "Apparently Apple is ending its tradition of allowing team members to take named credit for products." It also talks about the end of easter eggs and changes in the Apple corporate with Jobs back at the helm. Its an interesting bit. Makes me kinda sad. Easter eggs are one of those things that I always enjoyed, and just seeings credits... well, it only seems fair.
So you have to draw the line somewhere. When an engineering effort gets big, it can become unwieldy just to list all the current workers, much left those who've moved on. What do you do: list them all, just the current people, or nobody at all? It's easiest to list nobody.
Take a look at the credits for Eudora Pro sometime when you're bored (and if you're really bored, hold down the ctrl key while the list of names is scrolling by). Some of the people listed there haven't worked at Qualcomm for years. But they've been left in because some part of themselves went into Eudora.
Leaving them in is fine by me -- they were all part of the same big family. But maybe Apple doesn't think that way anymore. Maybe Jobs is just making sure he has one less thing to worry about. Either way, it's not much of an issue.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Anyway, more of this stupidity can be found at The Easter Egg Archive.
Regards, Ralph.
It's also bloat, and can potentially be a political hot potato. (Although no company ever acted on it, any company with a no-games policy would either have to ban Excel or scrap the policy. In the end, the compromise of everyone shutting their eyes became standard practice.)
But what if a company stood firm? Can you imagine the publicity that could generate? I doubt much of it would be favourable to the company, either.
Credits, though, are another matter. There's no real risk of bugs (it's mostly text), there's no real space consumed (text compresses to around 1/10th uncompressed size, which is often small, anyway. A few 10's of K, tops.)
There is no justification for omitting credits, either in terms of stability or space. As for ex-employees, keep 'em in. If they've earned the right to be there, they've earned it. Taking it away, merely because they've moved, quit, been sacked, etc, is churlish.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Do you read them all, caring about the name of the grip, or do you do it looking for the odd joke, and waiting till the theatre empties?
Movies have the same problem software is starting to have. Way too many people to list. You either list just the big names, thus pissing off people who didn't make the cut, or you list everyone, drowning out the names of the important people, or you go with the minimum, ie those people whose union contracts require them to be listed.
In my opinion, listing grips and other people in movie credits is ridiculous. Their influence is insignificant, and doesn't take any 'art', they could be easily replace by anyone else trained in the field and the work wouldn't suffer.
If you start listing everyone in software projects, either you get insanely long lists, which have to be alphabetically sorted (to avoid fights over priority) and include everyone from the lead programmers down to temporary data entry staff, or you get arbitrarily short lists and piss people off.
A company like id software can do it, because they have few enough employees, and all of them (even, so they say, their secretary/mom) have enough influence on the project that listing them isn't a joke. But this is because they have less than twenty people involved in actually making the game.
And even then it's a stretch. They aren't mentioning any of the testers, famous ones like Thresh, or anonymous ones at Activision, or (I think) the guy who now maintains the eiting tools, etc.
So, being that any attempt to list credits in a company with more than 20-30 people is going to be flawed, I think it's something that should best be left out.
What they could do, if they make feel team spirit, is to code some cool effect, and use the team's internal codename (if they have one.) Thus getting an easter egg, and team pride, without the task of having to name each and every person at all responsible in such a way that wouldn't piss anyone off.