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Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

And now, 'Easter eggs' are forbidden through policy and a fireable offense if you're not in a creative line of work where it is intentional. The same being for April Fools'.

They seem to serve a legitimate purpose though. Provenance of creators/creation. While it is a cliche Hollywood plot line that true ownership of an entity is proved by an Easter egg, these seem to be harmless ways to stick it to the man.

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I work in video games industry for one of the top 3 publishers and easter eggs definitely aren't a "fireable offsense", unless I guess they are in particularly poor taste or something. If you mean things hidden in the game without explicitly telling the player about them and hoping they find them, that still happens all the time. But even things which are hidden which no one really approved also happen on pretty much all levels, both from programmers as well as artists.

No experience in gaming but given the amount of creative control I'm given in other dev work it's not surprising when you're talking about projects at the scale of most video games.

My last project had 800 people on it and little things were added pretty much all over the place without the art directors ever knowing - even us as programmers shipped some programmer art that definitely wasn't meant to be there but it got "accidentally" left in the game files and shipped. And then there is a whole category of "official" easter eggs that obviously get approved by creative directors and are meant to be there for players to eventually find.

Emphasis on if you're not in a creative line of work.

So managers, accountants and VPs?

They are by definition something an engineer snuck in. Anything else is a regular feature that has been premeditated.

If it was snuck in, what else has been? What does it say about your security policies and practices if engineers can sneak stuff in?

This is why they are fireable offenses. It might not be for a piece of entertainment software like a video game, but sneak one in while working at FAANG and you'll most likely get fired.

Maybe these days. There’s a famous story from early YouTube though and no one got fired. And Google frequently throws in Easter eggs like the time searching for cats or dogs let you trigger a mode where you can make paw marks on the page, although those are more formal affairs probably and not some random thing you throw in there on a whim.

Just to rephrase the OP’s point, I think they are drawing a distinction between “a feature not directly advertised to the user” and “a feature not authorized by whatever chain of command is supposed to be followed at the developer”.

The paw marks are an example of the former, but I believe OP was saying the latter is the fireable offense

The YouTube story I mentioned (couldn’t find it) is an example of the latter. There was like 1 guy and when Google introduced approvals he co-opted a coworker to stamp his PRs. This was a while back so unlikely to fly anymore, but only because the companies are so big and have all sorts of government and large business contracts that prevent that kind of stuff from a regulatory perspective.

> What does it say about your security policies and practices if engineers can sneak stuff in?

I mean, what does it say about hospitals that doctors can kill you with one stray cut? Ultimately you trust them to be benevolent.

Heh. What does it say about your engineers if they can't sneak something in?

I always found the whole affair of walking people out when they give their 2 weeks to be exceedingly idiotic.

I’ve known for a week or two that I was going to quit. If I was going to do something bad I would have done it before printing out my notice.

> If it was snuck in, what else has been? What does it say about your security policies and practices if engineers can sneak stuff in?

I mean, of course engineers have that ability regardless? Maybe I’m being too technically-minded, but I just don’t see how not detecting an Easter egg somehow indicates that the engineers haven’t put one in surreptitiously..

>What does it say about your security policies and practices if engineers can sneak stuff in?

What does it say about developer efficiency if you can't make any change or audition without getting approval from the CEO? Giving power for lower levels to make decisions is important to remain efficient.

For security most places don't leader molest require more than 1 or 2 people to approve your change. You just need get them on board your Easter egg.

Not if it’s something really subtle like manipulating a texture to have some small detail in it.

It's older than video games, and there's a spectrum between easter eggs and watermarks. Consider mapmakers adding fictional places to prove map copyright. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trap-streets-with-no-n...

That's a different motivation

If readers refer to the article, the reason for the easter egg was because the textile execs hired to manage game development treated the idea of crediting developers as absurd, and so the developers inserted evidence of their work into the games as easter eggs, literal hidden paths. While it was not direct copyright enforcement, it was leaving a "makers mark" on the product, which has precedents in other fields such as map making. Or, I'm probably just too dumb to tell the difference and this insight was both incisive and deeply edifying.

how about this: Easter eggs as we've been discussing are meant to be found, albeit with a lot of effort and good luck.

Deliberate mistakes in maps are meant NOT to be found. If an infringer found them, they'd be sure to omit them from their maps.

Anything is a fireable offense if you're at-will. A termination like that is not likely to hold up in better jurisdictions.

Although not technically an Easter Egg (more like unused code), the Hot Coffee mod [1] to Grand Theft Auto San Andreas certainly cost the developer and publisher a lot of headaches and money. I can see why Easter Eggs would be forbidden after that experience.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)

I always found it absurd that in a game where the player character is a street criminal and most of the game objectives involve robbery or murder, a minigame depicting clothed dry-humping is what pearl-clutchers found to be a step too far.

When I was a teen my hometown's government fired me for "security concerns" because if you looked at the JS console on their website you'd see an innocent but goofy easter egg.

It's still there, which continues to tickle me.

It was supposed to be a firing offense at Atari. We put easter eggs in the cartridges anyway (it helps when there is no source control at all, and your manager thinks that assembly language has something to do with LEGO).

In my opinion, easter eggs that aren't against the rules aren't actually easter eggs at all. The whole point, and the thing that makes them awesome, is that they're illicit.

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