Re: Easter Egg Recognition

[winnga -at- us -dot- ibm -dot- com]

Barbara pondered:
<<
I have been approached to have the product of my endeavours recognised through
an Easter Egg in the software.

<SNIP of explanatory text>

Has anyone else done this before?  Is this an acceptable industry practice or
is it generally frowned upon.

I am not used to getting any recognition (outside my department) for the
products I produce. It feels weird.
>>


Although this question may be slightly off-topic for this list, it does bring up
the interesting question of whether we *need* to get recognition for the work we
have done for a company. But first, I would like to address the Easter Egg
thing.

Easter Egg thing:

Are easter eggs an acceptable industry practice?  Yes and No.  Yes because
"everyone is doing it" and No because some people think that: easter eggs waste
disk space with extra code and programs; programmers should improve the product
rather than waste time doing an easter egg; and those responsible for a
product's development should not receive individual recognition.

As a result, many companies do not admit that they have easter eggs in their
products, and developers don't tell the company when they put the easter eggs in
(this is highly generalized, and may not be true in all situations). However, if
you are the type of writer who takes the Microsoft Manual of Style as (insert
favorite book of scripture here), then you may find comfort in the fact that
most Microsoft products have at least one easter egg!  The book, Roadkill on the
Information Superhighway (I don't have it with me so I do not know the author or
probably the exact title), tells about many easter eggs in products all over the
computer industry.

As for me, I have put easter eggs in some of the products I have been a part of.
It was kind of fun and exciting, and felt kind of good to get some recognition.

Any way, now on to the other recognition thing.


Other thing:

In all the work I have done, as soon as it left my hands and went off to be
printed (or otherwise published), the document became the work of the company.
I assume this is to create a sense of uniformity in all documents, as well as to
protect the writer from harrassing phone calls at 3 AM ("You jerk . . . you
mispelled 'software'!") since the writer's identity would not be known.

So, do we need recognition? I'm sure many would say no. I am not so sure. Maybe,
if we knew who the writer was so we could make those phone calls at 3 AM, the
writer would work doubly hard at doing a fantastic job the first time. Of
course, deadlines and late product development often limit a writer's ability to
create fantastic documentation. But, supposing these were not a factor, what do
you suppose would happen

Cheers,

Garrett