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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

I'll be the cynical one this time and say that I'd rather carefully calculated PR stunts didnt have an affect of making corporations seem more fun and human. Sociopaths wear all kinds of convincing masks

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As a google employee I’m glad the culture of doing fun things perseveres from the early days, despite our massive growth.

I still don't consent you tracking me on web properties all around the world. Crazy how people justify doing these things at the time everyone needs to question themselves. No means no ib this context as well.

> No means no in this context as well.

No, you have no right to demand that so it does not.

In all reasonable jurisdictions I have the right to server logs and to share those as I feel reasonable. Protect your own privacy, don't intrude on my right to journal.

I have to say that I'm impressed that at the scale of google they have the ability, and the desire, to approve and turn around small fun things like this so quickly.

I assume there must still be a fairly deep process to get approval to do something like this, but, one which must be hyper-efficient and streamlined. If google took even 24 or 48 hours to approve a change like this the moment would be gone.

I'm very curious if you know, and could share, anything about what that process looks like? Is it actually a formal process or are people just encouraged to bring up off-the-wall ideas to senior leadership who are empowered to approve things like this?

I don’t know the specifics but my guess is that the team responsible for search front end has people who are responsible for Easter eggs. Someone, maybe from that team, would have filed a launch ticket for that specific feature, and quickly obtained approvals from privacy, legal, and product management people. Then some engineer and designer probably volunteered themselves to do the work, and did it. Generally launch approvals are fairly streamlined, and only get bogged down when the thing being launched has complex privacy, security, or legal considerations. In this case I’d imagine those issues are almost nonexistent so that’s why it could happen so quickly.

I will pray for your soul.

I think this is childish for a company of googles size.

Next time google goes down should Microsoft make fun of them? That’s what google did here.

No fun allowed

Whatever cynicism, it doesn’t take away that this is just a fun thing to do.

I wonder if maybe Google employs humans that like things that are fun?

It is both things of course, to different people.

It is something fun to do for the coders who implemented the animated ships, and most of the people who see them.

Likewise, it is a calculated PR stunt by the executives who approved the release.

Or even better: a calculated decision to create a culture where people who are not executives can approve a release that ultimately functions as a PR stunt, without requiring everyone involved to necessarily see it that way. It scales much better

Every last one of us is a potential bad actor. This is why the enlightened self interest metric was such a big deal to introduce and why we have myriad traditions for trying to curb our tendencies, such as the Christian idea of "Lead me not into temptation."

Finding systems to plug individuals into that have some hope of doing good for both them and others is our only hope of making a world with nearly 8 billion people function at all sanely.

I have a difficult time believing this didn't go through multiple layers of review.

I bet it did (as any change to production); whether that had to involve "executives" that's another story.

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