[HN Gopher] The first time I was almost fired from Apple
___________________________________________________________________
The first time I was almost fired from Apple
Author : chmaynard
Score : 311 points
Date : 2025-07-04 09:59 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.engineersneedart.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.engineersneedart.com)
| brogdan wrote:
| The title as expected is bait. It's a common situation in many
| companies where new hires are given authority with
| risks/consenquences and they overstep. They're told not to do it
| again. That's the gist of it. You're welcome.
|
| For everyone else - make sure your DB backups work. You'll need
| them.
| ajkjk wrote:
| It's weird how... servile... this person sounds. They're wondered
| why they weren't fired, when their prank had no negative side
| effects and the only issue was a department head being a dick
| about it? hey think the lesson here was that they needed to learn
| professionalism? They should be bemoaning the world of power-
| tripping unreasonable bosses. No need to warp your idea of what's
| right around what someone got mad at you about.
| jldugger wrote:
| It sounds like they had to scrap a CD run, so it wasn't exactly
| "no negative side effects." But yes, it's always a bad sign
| when the project you were hired for is canned and you get a new
| manager.
| ajkjk wrote:
| It sounded like they _didn 't_ have to scrap it, but did
| anyway? Or at least did not feel like it had to actually be
| justified to him.
|
| > I remember him explaining how many CDs would have to be
| destroyed (had they already been created?) and the cost of
| those. I think I weakly explained that I had assumed that
| there were no copyright conflicts but he wasn't hearing it.
| After that half-hearted defense I let him berate me and more
| or less accepted whatever fate was coming my way.
| jldugger wrote:
| It sounds like he thought it was fair use and their lawyers
| were less confident in that assessment. Technically at that
| point it's up to management about whether the cost of
| remastering / producing outweighs the EV of that easter
| egg, but they're not gonna be happy about having to make
| that tradeoff either way. And really, from stories 20 years
| ago with substantial adrenal and emotional impact, I figure
| the story is about the clearly recalled emotional beats
| than a technical analysis of costs.
| alexjplant wrote:
| > They're wondered why they weren't fired, when their prank had
| no negative side effects and the only issue was a department
| head being a dick about it?
|
| There are _plenty_ of companies where your boss being upset
| with you can lead to you being fired irrespective of whether it
| 's logically justified. The author doesn't seem servile so much
| as green (which they admit and talk about quite a bit).
|
| > No need to warp your idea of what's right around what someone
| got mad at you about.
|
| Part of being an adult is the ability to mentally square how
| the world ought to be with how it actually is. It is perfectly
| reasonable to acknowledge that a decision you made wasn't
| optimal in retrospect even if it was the theoretically-correct
| one. This isn't "warping" anything as much as it is getting on
| with your life.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Well sure you can always do what your boss says. The part
| that's weird is that the author seems to think their boss was
| in the right.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > They're wondered why they weren't fired, when their prank had
| no negative side effects ...
|
| Copyright infringement lawsuits are a real thing and can
| include both the offending company (Apple) _and_ all parties
| identified as potential violators.
|
| In other words, management may have saved this guy's ass from
| being named in a very costly lawsuit.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This was the 1990s. Attitudes about work were different. This
| was still (mostly) the era of "If the boss asks you to jump,
| you ask how high."
| ajkjk wrote:
| yeah, I'm getting that, but it's sad to read the mindset
| still existing in 2025
| dcrazy wrote:
| Carl Sagan had sued Apple the prior year for merely using his
| name as a project codename that was never going to be published
| anywhere or included in any customer product. John had placed
| an excerpt of a still-copyrighted text into a resource fork
| that would ship to customers--and in fact had already been
| burned to discs.
|
| I think it would have been an overreaction to fire him, but it
| was absolutely within the realm of plausible outcomes.
| eviks wrote:
| > sued Apple the prior year for merely using his name as a
| project codename
|
| This just highlights the fact that you can be sued for
| anything. For example, you could be sued for the same thing
| (even though CDs were destroyed) based on information from
| this blog.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I found the linked article about his interview even more
| fascinating!
|
| I heard once about a mechanical engineer who brought printed
| photos of his previous projects to the interview instead of a
| typed resume, to good results. Once you've had to interview
| someone, you realize many times the interviewer is as nervous as
| the interviewee, so breaking the ice is valuable.
|
| https://engineersneedart.com/blog/interview/interview.html
| joezydeco wrote:
| As an embedded developer I do this regularly and encourage
| others to do the same. I bring a binder, each page has a large
| photo of a project or PCB and lists the core technologies
| involved.
|
| I also bring a small case with a few previous projects from
| other jobs, ones that I can legally share outside an NDA, and a
| power supply.
|
| It's been critically handy in some situations when I'm asked if
| I've worked with a certain technology, chip, protocol, etc. I
| can either flip to the page with a relevant project and start
| pointing (which also jogs my memory), or plug in the related
| device and fire it up. It definitely gets their attention and
| stands out.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| After having introduced an Easter egg and being called out for
| it, the author states: I became a cautionary tale
| though and would occasionally warn off the new hires who
| might have had an inkling to do something similar. And
| true to my word, I would tread very carefully from that
| day on with an eye to what Apple HQ would think about any
| of my actions -- and potential consequences (intended or
| not).
|
| It is very likely that management weighed the author's value to
| the organization against the cost, real or perceived, to rectify
| this particular situation. An additional potential value which
| was ultimately realized is the author became an extension of
| organizational policy "at ground level."
|
| IMHO, this is an optimal resolution and should be applauded.
| Management reaped a 20-year reward and the author kept his job.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Reminds me of a story (which I've heard in slightly varying
| versions) that happened in the early days of IBM. A man had
| made a costly mistake, but Thomas Watson didn't fire him,
| saying "we just spent all that money educating you!"
|
| People learn by screwing up, and those can be the best lessons.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I did.
|
| In one of my early jobs, I spammed a bunch of the company
| customers, trying to promote my music. This was before the
| Internet (1987 or so), and before spam, so I was a "proto-
| spammer."
|
| It became a watershed in my life, and I took my work and
| career, very, very seriously, after that.
| charcircuit wrote:
| That's a classic case of the sunk cost fallacy. Just because
| you spent a lot educating someone doesn't mean that you
| shouldn't get rid of them.
| hnfong wrote:
| It does sound like the classic sunk cost fallacy. But it
| also implies that the would-be-fired person has become
| better after being "educated", and probably better than the
| average newly-hired person replacing them if they are
| fired...
| ajb wrote:
| "all that money" here refers to the money they lost due to
| the mistake. The sunk cost fallacy refers to money you
| _intended_ to spend...
| PunchTunnel wrote:
| You may want to refresh yourself on the definition. Sunk
| cost is resources already spent, which cannot be
| recovered - the inability to recover it is what drives
| the reluctance in the case of the fallacy.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| When a generally smart person makes a humiliating million-
| dollar mistake, then you can trust that person, more than
| any of their coworkers, to never make that specific mistake
| again. That's the "expensive education" here.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Depending on the mistake it could also mean that they are
| more likely to make the same mistake. Especially after
| the memory of the event fades, they may regress to the
| old way they acted.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If considered an "investment" (will produce value if
| retained) it's not a sunk cost.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > Reminds me of a story (which I've heard in slightly varying
| versions) that happened in the early days of IBM. A man had
| made a costly mistake, but Thomas Watson didn't fire him,
| saying "we just spent all that money educating you!"
|
| > People learn by screwing up, and those can be the best
| lessons.
|
| Precisely.
|
| Had the author been fired for his actions, the only people
| who could learn from the situation would be those employed at
| that time. As each cycled out of the company, this lesson
| would be lost.
|
| By addressing the error in judgement while retaining the
| author, the organization ensured the lesson would be passed
| on to each new generation of engineers without having to
| prescribe the policy dictatorially.
| whstl wrote:
| This is also a much better way of handling the problem than
| OP's blunder on the article.
|
| Berating in an office might teach one person. Not berating
| and admitting process failure in public can be educational
| for the whole company.
|
| Reminds me of Gitlab's database deletion thing a few years
| ago. Not only they spent money educating the one engineer, by
| making the story public they also educated their other
| employees, and dare I say the whole industry. I still hear
| people referring to that story from time to time.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's an optimal resolution, because it was a
| _complete overreaction_ by management in the first place. The
| optional resolution would have been that the author was
| _gently_ but firmly told "that isn't acceptable here, don't do
| it again". There was no need for his manager to tear him a new
| one over such a minor incident.
| tptacek wrote:
| It was probably _not_ an overreaction: if they 'd had to pull
| millions of CDROMs off the shelves, that would be a very big
| deal.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| But they didn't have to, and a bit of thoughtful
| consideration would have (and presumably did) make that
| clear.
|
| This is less of a "caught driving drunk" situation and more
| a "caught driving with one taillight out" situation. You
| want to make sure it doesn't happen again, but there was no
| real danger from this single instance.
| tptacek wrote:
| If he'd _actually_ caused a recall, he 'd probably have
| been fired. Instead, he got chewed out. Sounds about
| right.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| No, it would still be an overreaction in that case. When
| someone makes their first mistake, even if it's an
| expensive mistake for the company, you don't start with the
| kind of berating that the author related. Certainly you
| might have to escalate to that level of intensity if the
| person doesn't improve, but you don't _start_ there.
| tptacek wrote:
| I get that in cases where, like, you accidentally drop a
| database table. Deliberately adding unauthorized code to
| a build in 1995 was much less OK than that. Regardless:
| he wasn't fired.
|
| I really think these reactions come down to people not
| having working in shrink-wrap software in the mid-1990s.
| You weren't missing much, though.
| stavros wrote:
| I think the argument here is that the dressing-down is
| done in hindsight, which the developer didn't have. It's
| not fair to vary the punishment by the cost of the
| mistake, if the person didn't intentionally make the
| mistake (and thus didn't take the cost into account), as
| that's just revenge.
|
| What you want instead is corrective action, which is
| achieved fine by saying "this cost us $X million in
| recall costs because we don't want a copyright
| infringement lawsuit", and then counting on the employee
| to now know not to make that mistake again.
|
| You _could_ , I guess, argue that if you yell at an
| employee, they're less likely to make that mistake again,
| but then you'd have to be yelling at them for _every_
| mistake, since they didn 't know which mistakes would end
| up being costly (otherwise they wouldn't make them).
| tptacek wrote:
| What's weird is that even this developer seems to
| disagree with people here. It's not complicated, I don't
| think: we just have a rooting interest in IC developers,
| and in Easter eggs. I'm really only here to keep saying
| that 1995 was nothing like 2015, nothing _at all_ like
| it.
| stavros wrote:
| I agree with you on that, I'm just saying that yelling at
| people is rarely productive. Even firing should be
| something that's done after multiple issues, not because
| of one mistake, even if it's sizable. That's just my
| opinion, though.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm 100% on the same page with the "don't freak out at
| the early-career developer who accidentally drops a
| table" people; seems like a good management lesson (it
| also makes me glad I don't manage people). I just read
| this thread and the Jamiroquai and Sublime started
| playing in my head and I was teleported back to cubicle
| culture, which I am here to report is totally different
| than modern dev culture. :)
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, we really had to make sure software didn't have too
| many backs back when we'd have to issue a patch release a
| year later. I'm not sure I miss it.
| dataflow wrote:
| I think you're missing a key point here.
|
| The (business) reason you don't punish people for a
| mistake _as a general policy_ isn 't that you're being a
| forgiving soul and giving them a second chance. It's
| because humans have a natural unavoidable tendency to
| eventually make certain errors in certain roles, and it's
| counterproductive to punish the poor soul that happened
| to make that mistake. It could've been anyone else, and
| you're punishing the one who has the best experience for
| avoiding the same mistake in the future. You should
| instead use their experience to design a process that
| catches those mistakes.
|
| That rationale goes completely out the window when you're
| talking about lapses in judgment that the average
| employee would absolutely not make, like a random
| unauthorized Easter egg that could put the company in
| legal jeopardy. It's like if a surgeon brought his
| Playstation to the operating room. It's not a case of "we
| just spent $cost training him" anymore - that was never
| even part of his job description in the first place, nor
| something anyone would have expected him to even try.
| There was simply no reason for it; it was just an
| employee fooling around and planning to apologize for it
| afterward. (!) At that point you're dealing with
| something that's much closer to an insider threat than a
| human error.
|
| So, as a matter of general policy, firing him for that
| would have absolutely made sense. Of course individual
| cases may warrant different reactions, but the general
| reasoning for blameless mistakes simply would absolutely
| not have applied here.
| jldugger wrote:
| It's really, really important to understand the context
| here. From the article:
|
| > I was hired on at Apple in October of 1995. This was
| what I refer to as Apple's circling the drain period.
| Maybe you remember all the doomsaying -- speculation that
| Apple was going to be shuttering soon
|
| Everyone in the company was presumably on edge, and
| expensive mistakes were starting to border not on career
| ending, but on _company_ ending. The difference between
| firing someone for making expensive mistakes and laying
| them off is nearly immaterial, IMO.
| dctoedt wrote:
| That's why it's often critical to implement systems to
| second-check important stuff.
|
| If I may lapse into garrulous-old-fart mode: Soon after I
| made partner in my BigLaw IP firm, as the resident
| software(-adjacent) geek I was tasked by the management
| committee with overseeing the firm's docketing operation:
| Six very nice people (ladies of varying ages, as it
| happened) who for many years had opened all our incoming
| mail from courts, agencies, etc., and logged future
| deadlines into our by-then antiquated, home-grown, pre-PC
| calendaring system, still running on a mini-computer.
|
| The proximate cause of my tasking was that the other
| partners were getting increasingly frustrated by the human-
| origin calendaring errors that kept showing up in lawyers'
| tractor-feed greenbar printouts. If we'd blown a court
| deadline, we likely would have gotten zero sympathy from
| the court, the client, and our malpractice-insurance
| carrier.
|
| The first thing I did was implement a Navy-nuke system in
| which _every_ deadline entry got second-checked. That
| produced some grumbling among the docketing staff because
| it made extra work for them.
|
| (We mitigated that by eliminating some calendaring tasks
| that no longer made sense, such as logging every date, in
| ink, into a bound ledger book, _which no one had looked at
| in years_ -- I called it our WORN drive: Write Once, Read
| Never.)
|
| I reassured the staff that no one would get fired for
| making a mistake, because we _all_ do that. But they very
| well might get fired if their mistake got out the door
| because they 'd bypassed the second-checking system.
|
| Happily, the rate of calendaring errors showing up on
| lawyer greenbar printouts dropped to essentially zero. No
| one had to be fired, and several staff members said that
| they liked the second-checking system.
|
| (Soon after, we switched to a then-modern, PC-based
| system.)
| rezmason wrote:
| The author of this post is a regular commenter on HN, JKCalhoun.
| Nice post, JKCalhoun! I love the three dozen dongles hanging on
| the wall of Dithering Heights.
|
| The versions of these color pickers that were included in builds
| of Copland contain the strings "Hey what?" (for the HSL picker)
| and "Scheherazade" (for the crayon picker). Might those have been
| some of yours?
|
| https://rezmason.net/chattin_with_jkcalhoun/copland_colorpic...
| snapetom wrote:
| He says of himself that he "wrote games for the Macintosh."
| That's an understatement. The guy wrote Glider!
| alexjplant wrote:
| Blast from the past! A handful of sacred Power Macs in my
| elementary school computer lab had the shareware version of
| Glider installed ("Glider Trial", or "Trail" [sic] as my
| spelling-challenged classmates called it who were unfamiliar
| with trialware) and every one of us jockeyed for one of these
| machines as we filed into the room so that we could play it.
| Circa 1999 I somehow got my mom to ask a hapless Wal-Mart
| employee whether they made Glider from Casady and Greene
| written by John Calhoun for Windows. We got a weird look and
| a devastating "no". Sometime in the next year or two my best
| friend and I fixed up his Grandpa's old Mac Plus which
| happened to have an older full version of Glider on it which
| made me quite happy.
|
| Hats off to you, Mr. Calhoun!
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Wait, that is him? JKCalhoun? I probably should read more
| closely.
|
| Jeez JKCalhoun is one of my favorite commenters on HN. He is
| very knowledgeable about Apple stuffs and I knew he probably
| worked in Apple for a long, long time just by reading his
| replies. He is one of the people that I look up to (i.e., when
| I don't feel burned out).
| floren wrote:
| Only corporate legal could freak out over the idea of hiding a
| single stanza of an 80 year old poem across a dozen resource
| names where they'll never ever be seen by the average user. If
| that's not fair use it should be.
| rectang wrote:
| You don't want to end up with a court trying to figure out
| whether that usage constitutes fair use. Taking a stand on
| whether it "should be" fair use isn't what company resources
| are for.
| floren wrote:
| An accurate representation of corporate legal's general
| attitude, yeah... just say no to any request because that
| covers your ass.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Neither is stopping the presses for every little thing.
| jackblemming wrote:
| Legal troubles are exactly why you have a legal team. Uber
| didn't ask for permission, neither did OpenAI. Now they're
| worth billions. Microsoft and Apple do their own fairshare of
| probably borderline illegal things too.
| stavros wrote:
| Yes but they did illegal things that materially increased
| the value of the company, they didn't send employees off to
| mug people in alleys just for the fun of it.
| windows2020 wrote:
| This is an example of classic software engineering. It's when the
| person writing the code understands why they're doing it,
| succeeds in that, then tastefully adds a little more, and has
| some fun, which in turn makes the product delightful.
|
| Not to dismiss the importance of a strong Product lead, but often
| the role is a permanent stopgap for engineers who lack the talent
| and discipline demonstrated in this article. (Easter egg aside.)
| sublinear wrote:
| One of the deliberate outcomes of putting a product lead in
| place is to prevent the engineer from fully understanding the
| product.
|
| This is politics baked into the heirarchy, not a lack of
| "talent and discipline".
| baxtr wrote:
| No engineer is the same.
|
| I had devs who told me they don't care about product
| features. "Just tell me what to do, it's my job to
| implement."
| YeahThisIsMe wrote:
| This is the result of advice being rejected too many times
| (and later turning out to have been correct).
| sublinear wrote:
| I'm not saying every engineer has ambitions to be in
| management, but your quote is just as likely someone who
| has become fed up with sloppy management and deliberate
| gatekeeping.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| In the days of the rampant layoff culture, where your
| competence, experience, or output quality no longer matters
| because someone sorted an Excel spreadsheet in a particular
| way and had you at the bottom 10% -- it should be a miracle
| when companies are getting this much.
|
| No more extra miles, not a single one.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Probably someone who burned out and found the work not
| enjoyable. I wouldn't blame him as long as he delivers.
| nradov wrote:
| One of the deliberate outcomes of putting a product lead in
| place is to train the engineer to fully understand the
| product. For any vertical market or B2B product the chance of
| hiring engineers who understand the business domain is
| virtually zero so they need clear guidance to build what
| customers want.
| sublinear wrote:
| I completely disagree, but your experience may vary. I am
| not trying to take away from that.
|
| I am merely saying that maybe there should be a stronger
| discussion than just dismissing engineers as mere "thing-
| doers". I also accept that there are many people here who
| are exactly that, and I and they should find it shameful.
|
| We can't control that, but maybe we should try harder to do
| instead of being lazy and assuming market forces are the
| boss... maybe we are the boss (we are).
| prinny_ wrote:
| I have worked as an engineer on a product that didn't
| have a dedicated product lead and it was extremely hard
| to deliver new features without understanding the complex
| business side of things. Working without a dedicated
| product person to explain the business sounds hell to me.
| whstl wrote:
| Having worked in both situations (product person vs no
| product person), this reads like fiction to me.
|
| Most PMs I worked were nowhere near being able to guide
| anyone, especially on B2B domains. I had to train a lot of
| them just to do basic follow up stuff, and honestly the
| vast majority was below expectation, and mostly just
| receiving requests from customers and giving opinions on
| designs.
|
| And even in the best cases, an understanding of the product
| filtered by a product lead was nowhere near as good as
| actually having engineers who care, dogfood, talk with
| customers, read feedback, design solutions and verify them
| with end users.
|
| IMO the concept of product leads, PMs, etc, is ok, but the
| implementation is always lacking. It's always a "creative
| type" that is stifling creativity of engineers while not
| really adding a lot of value.
|
| I much prefer the concept of "Product Owner" of Scrum:
| someone that brings the tasks but isn't really dictating
| taste (except via feedback) or removing the creative part
| of engineering work.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I think that's far too cynical.
|
| Usually what you end up with is a "three blind men and the
| elephant" situation; the product is simply too large for any
| one person to "fully" understand. Humans have a finite
| context window too.
|
| So ending up with a product manager who is standing far
| enough away to see the whole elephant, but not in detail,
| while the engineers have detailed views of their part of the
| product but not the whole thing, is a reasonable position.
| sublinear wrote:
| > "the product is simply too large for any one person to
| "fully" understand. Humans have a finite context window
| too."
|
| Not personal towards you, but we're gonna wheel that one
| out again? Bullshit.
|
| We're living in a time where people who can't code and
| aren't organized enough by anyone's standards who actually
| gets shit done are under serious threat and hoping their AI
| god(s) will save them. None of these arguments surprise me.
| ben_w wrote:
| > We're living in a time where people who can't code and
| aren't organized enough by anyone's standards who
| actually gets shit done are under serious threat and
| hoping their AI god(s) will save them. None of these
| arguments surprise me.
|
| Always was it so; the play remains the same, only the
| names are changed.
|
| But that doesn't challenge the validity of what pjc50
| wrote: literally nobody has time to count the transistors
| on a modern CPU (exceeds maximum human heartbeats), nor
| even the much easier task of skim the lines of code in
| say Windows 10 and the bundled drivers and apps.
|
| We have division of labour because we need it, we have
| abstractions because we need them.
| tptacek wrote:
| To answer the author's question: because the crayon picker rules!
| It's genuinely useful.
|
| The article covers this but I think it's worth saying again: this
| was a different era in software development. In 1995 "shipping"
| meant _literally_ "shipping": they had to produce real inventory,
| and then get it out into a bunch of different distribution
| channels. A problematic Easter egg caught too late could
| ultimately require an actual physical recall.
|
| It's not surprising people freaked out over it.
| eichin wrote:
| Also, there was at least one scientific graphics package from
| the late 1980s (I used it under BSD4.3 on microvaxen[0]) that
| not only had a crayon-based color picker, but used it for a
| simple calibration mechanism, since you could just buy a cheap
| box of crayons and adjust the screen colors to match. So there
| was at least one contemporary existence proof of "Crayola
| probably isn't going to go after you for this".
|
| [0] I've forgotten the name; the main thing I remember is that
| your window was dimensioned in 0.0-1.0 floating point, not
| pixels. Some searching suggests it might have been PHIGS or
| GKS... and turns up a Tugboat article about FoilTeX using
| crayola color names similarly in 1992, so it was a more popular
| hack than I realized at the time.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| We used to have to physically fly out a technician to each of
| our customers office to install software updates and fixes.
| Those bugs were very expensive to patch!
| mrpippy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the Gold Wing-riding, pipe-smoking boss is/was
| C.K. Haun
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've never been a huge fan of Easter Eggs. From a risk management
| and QA point of view: there are a lot of things that can go wrong
| in a software project, why deliberately add something else not
| asked for, even if there was only a 1% probability that it would
| break? It just seems that the downside risk massively exceeds any
| potential upside. If something actually fails because of it and
| you have to write the postmortem, what are you going to say?
| secondcoming wrote:
| "someone added an Easter Egg"
| microtherion wrote:
| I started at Apple a few years after the original author, and
| by then the policy on Easter Eggs was that they were allowed
| within reason, but had to be declared internally, so they could
| be tested. There were even "official" Easter Eggs that listed
| all the engineers in the team.
|
| There were lots of Easter Eggs in Apple products:
| https://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/
|
| I believe they were prohibited (at least officially) starting
| with Mac OS X.
|
| In addition to genuine Easter Eggs, there were numerous
| instances of "products with attitude". One good example are
| some of the error messages that MPW C produced:
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/personal/humor/compile.html
|
| I snuck what technically might be a copyright violation into
| the EXAMPLES section of the say(1) manpage.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| some of us have a soul
|
| some of us need a way to express ourselves
|
| why not start digging your grave right now? it's more
| efficient.
| sublinear wrote:
| > It's an embarrassing thing when you realize that those
| irresponsible tendencies you had in your youth are still with
| you. To fuck up in a professional environment like Apple is like
| committing some social faux pas that reveals suddenly to all the
| guests your poor and unsophisticated upbringing.
|
| Hard disagree. It reveals to management their own failings at
| setting expectations. Perhaps their heads were too far up their
| own asses to actually bother engaging with their team.
|
| I know easter eggs are a tradition, but let's be honest. They're
| also a passive aggressive response to feeling bored and without a
| sense of direction. Why is that anyone's fault but management and
| ultimately the executives for yanking their attention away from
| actual work?
| iainmerrick wrote:
| _They 're also a passive aggressive response to feeling bored
| and without a sense of direction._
|
| That's a very pessimistic view! You don't think they can also
| sometimes be a sign of pride and investment in your work?
| Especially the ones that involve showing the names of the
| developers when you press a secret key.
| sublinear wrote:
| Nope, I see it as accurate once younger people take off their
| rose-colored glasses of a time they never lived in.
|
| I hope someone from the past reads this and confirms. If
| there was ever a time for them to be real, it's now.
|
| I do agree that pride despite everything else is a factor,
| but let's not pretend like the past embraced that beyond
| trying to "team build" or whatever vague and ineffective
| nonsense.
|
| "Buy the ticket, take the ride."
| svachalek wrote:
| You mean the classic easter eggs from the 70s and 80s?
| There were no corporate drones writing software back then.
| I learned to program in 1980 and have been doing it for a
| living since 1990.
|
| Most programmers were enthusiasts working for themselves or
| for small companies. Microsoft was like 20 people including
| non technical staff? Apple was tiny too. They tended to be
| independent minded, anti establishment types, completely
| unlike today's crop of youth who spout hustle culture and
| corporate jargon. Go look at pictures of what teams at
| Apple, Microsoft, or Atari looked like. It was a very
| different time.
|
| For comparison I guess look at the top scientists at OpenAI
| or something, do you think they're bored and disaffected
| while doing some of the most impactful work of their time?
| sublinear wrote:
| > There were no corporate drones writing software back
| then
|
| Sure, but there were a lot of army-of-one jackasses who
| were their own cult of personality equipped with their
| own brand of "jargon" that became what we have today.
| Does it really take so many years to deprogram a
| corporate drone who refuses to acknowledge that label?
| iainmerrick wrote:
| I can't grasp your overall thesis here, except maybe some
| general notion that the world of software is one of class
| warfare?
|
| That's definitely very arguable overall, but I don't think
| the specific points you make are correct.
|
| Jim Carlton's book on Apple ("the inside story of intrigue,
| egomania and business blunders") is a great read. It feels
| a bit strange now as it was written in the period the OP
| talks about, when Apple was on death's door, rather than
| the world-striding colossus it is now. But I think it
| describes very vividly the environment where easter eggs
| like the OP describes were more common.
|
| There _were_ definitely plenty of bored, checked-out
| engineers -- often between projects with few
| responsibilities, or "on the beach" in Apple parlance. But
| those weren't the people shipping stuff. There were also
| engineers who loved Apple's products and culture (maybe to
| a dangerous, cult-like degree), who wanted to contribute
| and to add their personal stamp as a mark of pride.
| sublinear wrote:
| > those weren't the people shipping stuff
|
| I find this very hard to believe.
|
| There's nothing stopping someone who is checked out from
| still delivering what the business wants. This is
| especially true in a time period when the business may
| not want much for the reasons you and the article already
| stated.
| stavros wrote:
| Sometimes it's not secret at all. I've long wondered who
| Seetharaman Narayanan is.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| > I became a cautionary tale though and would occasionally warn
| off the new hires who might have had an inkling to do something
| similar. And true to my word, I would tread very carefully from
| that day on with an eye to what Apple HQ would think about any of
| my actions -- and potential consequences (intended or not).
|
| And that is probably the day the culture died a bit. Hearing that
| tale, I'd stick to the specification every time. And get an email
| trail.
| rezmason wrote:
| The November '97 issue of MacAddict (#15) lists a couple of the
| crayon picker easter eggs, though the one with engineers' names
| was only found with ResEdit.
| godot wrote:
| I think the general public (and by that I mean including software
| engineers too) overestimate the likelihood of a huge screw-up
| leading to being fired like they do in the movies, if the screw-
| up is neither (1) malicious/intentional in nature, nor (2)
| demonstrates that you're grossly incompetent for the job.
|
| Most huge screw-ups happen to well-intentioned, knowledgeable
| software engineers, who simply made an honest mistake.
|
| The correct way to handle it, on the company/management's
| perspective, is not to fire the person who made the mistake, but
| to allow them to correct it (perhaps with help from others). And
| that is indeed what happens in most cases. There are certainly
| poorly managed companies who would fire someone in these
| scenarios, but they should be less common than otherwise.
|
| I'm not going to name any names: in the late 00s/early 10s I
| worked in one of the highest-profile, high-growth tech startups
| of its era, and I've personally made a blunder that corrupted
| literally millions of user records in the database. This incident
| was known internally as one of the most disastrous technical
| things that happened in the company's history, among a few
| others. The nature of the product was one of very quickly
| updating data, and updates were critically important (e.g. is
| affected by user spends) and hence restoring from DB backups of
| even the night before was unfeasible. There was irreparable
| damage where a whole team of us had to spend the next few weeks
| painstakingly hand-fixing data for users, and coming up with
| algorithms/code to fix these things as users use the product as
| they go. As you expect in this anecdote, I did not get fired, I
| was part of the team that worked tirelessly following this
| incident to fix user data, and I continued to have a good,
| growing career in my remaining time in this company (the next few
| years).
| michaelt wrote:
| There are, I think, different norms and risk levels in
| different types of employment.
|
| Somewhat ironically, it's much easier to get fired from a
| minimum wage fast food service job than it is to get fired from
| a six-figure-salary job at Google.
| nine_k wrote:
| The expense and time required to hire a well-paid, highly
| qualified engineer is much bigger than to hire someone to do
| a burger-flipping job. Firing is writing off these expenses.
| dataflow wrote:
| Your point aside, that particular example is not the best
| since it's a lot easier to quickly land a customer in the
| hospital as a random fast food worker than as a random
| software engineer.
| whstl wrote:
| That's the rationale, but most of the firings of fast food
| workers I've seen are not related to hygiene but rather due
| to scheduling and attendance issues. And very often because
| of management lack of planning.
| watwut wrote:
| It is not that easy, actually. There is remote possibility
| for it to happen, but it is not likely nor easy. You need
| to break quite a few rules and also be very unlucky too.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In most European countries it is certainly hard to fire people
| on a whim like in US and countries with similar weak labour
| laws.
|
| I have seen often enough puzzled looks from team managers from
| such countries, when leeding European teams for the first time,
| and routinely get a NO for whatever crazy requests they happen
| to do.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Depending on which country, there still are mechanisms in
| place to fire people for what's called "culpable reasons"
| where I live, but there's a mandated layoff period (15 days
| here) after being fired to leaving the company. You get paid
| a certain fraction of what you'd otherwise be paid during
| that period and so on.
|
| So yes, they can fire you if you (maliciously) screw up, but
| it's not like they just escort you out of the building on the
| spot.
| p_l wrote:
| Egregious cases can lead to immediate dismissal, you also
| don't have to let anyone continue working even if you still
| pay them if they are on the notice period (the notice
| period is for both sides, honestly - for employer to have
| chance to find/train replacement, and for let gone employee
| to find new work).
|
| There's a bunch of cases that can lead to immediate
| dismissal though in most EU countries, starting with
| illegal activity, some things that are borderline
| (disallowed in law even if sometimes tolerated by employer
| - for example being drunk on the job or otherwise under
| influence by ones own action, not accident), or _explicit
| action against the company_.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, however those are quite critical scenarios and not
| firing someone because management feels like doing so.
| close04 wrote:
| > I think the general public (and by that I mean including
| software engineers too) overestimate the likelihood of a huge
| screw-up leading to being fired
|
| I've seen this misconception perpetuated by management even in
| countries with very strong worker protection laws. Works
| particularly great on people who already have strong work
| ethics and internal fears, it stokes that fire. Employees would
| work as if any failure could lead to termination, especially in
| emergencies. Those managers use this as a "motivational" tool
| (as much as a hammer to the face can motivate you). They can
| squeeze more results out of their teams and maybe edge out a
| promotion.
|
| It's illuminating to see when the people understand the
| pressure is many times fake, that even the internal SLAs are
| more relaxed than what they fear.
| ido wrote:
| I made a somewhat similar blunder to the original poster at a
| job some years ago. I got a dressing down from the CEO and
| that's it, went back to work and never heard of it again. As
| far as I can tell it had no effect on my career at that
| company.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Great share! What do they say, "You can't make an omelette
| without breaking eggs". I think people can go through life
| trying to never make mistakes and ultimately I think that just
| holds them back.
| matwood wrote:
| Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out
| how far one can go. -T. S. Eliot
| dakiol wrote:
| In the software engineering industry, what I have seen is
| people not afraid of being fired due to a mistake, but to be
| afraid of the cost of their mistake in their next performance
| review. Make two mistakes (not necessarily in a row) and you
| are putting yourself in a dangerous corner (e.g., you may be
| considered to be lay off in the next round of lay offs).
| IAmBroom wrote:
| So, actions have consequences, you say?
| matwood wrote:
| Work long enough and a person will screw up. That's how things
| go. And if you never screw up, then you're not really pushing
| yourself. Personally, I've deleted customer tables, updated the
| whole table when meaning to update one record, even shipped our
| private key once. There are probably even more I can't
| remember, and others from people that I helped fix (one time a
| boss locked us all out of the db - only fix was restoring lol)
| In all cases I became a better engineer by owning the mistake
| quickly, fixing the issue, and then putting processes in place
| to avoid it in the future. I think it shaped who I was to be a
| better engineer, manager, and owner.
|
| The only time I've seen people fired on the spot is when they
| lie. After seeing someone fired, I asked one of the owners at
| an old company I worked at why that was the line. He responded
| that even the best performers make mistakes, but if he couldn't
| trust someone, he couldn't work with them. This was many years
| ago, and as I've grown in my career I have found it to be a
| pretty good line to draw.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > A young executive had made some bad decisions that cost the
| company several million dollars. He was summoned to Watson's
| office, fully expecting to be dismissed. As he entered the
| office, the young executive said, "I suppose after that set of
| mistakes you will want to fire me." Watson was said to have
| replied,
|
| > "Not at all, young man, we have just spent a couple of
| million dollars educating you." [1]
|
| [1] http://the-happy-manager.com/articles/characteristic-of-
| lead...
| msgodel wrote:
| This kind of thinking is super destructive too because you'll
| just panic, turtle, and stop communicating which makes it
| impossible to get anything done.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I think the general public (and by that I mean including
| software engineers too) overestimate the likelihood of a huge
| screw-up leading to being fired like they do in the movies
|
| I've done some volunteer mentoring for a while. Fear of getting
| fired for small things is very widespread among younger
| generations right now. As far as I can tell, some of them build
| their mental model of the office from a combination of movies,
| Reddit posts, TikTok rage bait, and stories on social media.
| They're so convinced that every corporation is an evil entity
| set on destroying their lives that small mistakes are
| catastrophized into career-ending moves.
|
| The saddest part is when they make a small mistake and then let
| it snowball into lies and manipulation to cover it up. In the
| program I'm familiar with I don't recall any stories of people
| being fired for singular honest mistakes, but there have been
| plenty of stories shared where people made a mistake and then
| caused far more problems by lying about it or even doing things
| like trying to attack and discredit people who witnessed the
| mistake as a defensive measure.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| They've often only had part time jobs for small business
| owners, which is a situation more prone to getting fired for
| minor faults, or owner's whims.
| seethishat wrote:
| People who actually do things make mistakes. It's the ones who
| never screw-up you should scrutinize.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| You're not really a sysadmin until you take down prod and not
| really a network engineer until you cut off your arm (drop a
| router connect with no way back in) or cause an STP storm. I'm
| sure there are more examples...
|
| The joys of learning how tech works in the real world.
| doubled112 wrote:
| My team is in charge of infrastructure so most of us do
| everything. Sometimes I get to take down prod AND cut myself
| off from the network in one move.
|
| Why is every service on this site alerting? All I did was
| plug something in. Maybe that cable wasn't labelled correctly
| after all, proof is in the results.
| guywithahat wrote:
| While I agree in principle, in this particular example the
| author was a new-ish hire who included an easter egg for no
| particular reason, which included copyrighted content that
| required all the existing CD's to be destroyed.
| koiueo wrote:
| I get strong "Severance" (a TV series by Apple) vibes from this
| story.
|
| An employee being manipulated into loyalty and servitude through
| guilt. This seems fucked up...
| getflourish wrote:
| I want to read more work stories of retired engineers and
| designers.
| sgt wrote:
| Who is this Honda Goldwing riding (pipe clenched in his teeth) OS
| manager from Apple? I'd like to check out this YouTube channel.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Question for OP: can you explain why the colour picker component
| takes so long to load in MacOS? There's a noticeable delay of
| 1000-2000ms every time I click a button that brings it up.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| Tangent, but for all we whinge about flat UIs and pine for the
| bezelled good old days, that colour picker from the oldest good
| old days is really bloody flat!
|
| https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/almostfired/HSL_RGB_Pi...
| stavros wrote:
| Those were days too old to be good.
| trinix912 wrote:
| It was flat, yet designed well in the sense that one can tell
| which things are clickable, which areas scrollable, etc.
| Contrary to many modern flat UIs that don't even show the
| scrollbar upfront so you just have to "feel" when something is
| scrollable or not, don't distinguish between links and buttons,
| and so on.
|
| It also manages to give controls "breathing room", yet not
| waste too much space on margins and paddings.
| sublinear wrote:
| What could possibly be more threatening, especially in a time of
| dire straits for a business, than a "lowly dev" who has an
| opinion and has visions of more and better?
|
| Let's get real.
|
| Who is more directly in charge and knowledgeable of a product
| result than a developer? If you are not heads-down and working
| than you are (intentionally or not) misrepresenting your product
| and a fool. This has always been true and nobody knows it better
| than the investors. Do you think we're stupid?
| ykonstant wrote:
| >This has always been true and nobody knows it better than the
| investors. You think we're stupid?
|
| Erm, ehh... n-nooo...
| sublinear wrote:
| Yes.. y-y-yessss
|
| This world is in the shitter and for what?
|
| Far too many people with their mouths "occupied" to see
| things for what they are and say it. Don't make me say this
| in a more vulgar way.
|
| Do you seriously think that people are investing in "AI"
| because they think AGI is just around the corner? Fuck no!
| They invest because everyone else does and they think they
| can time the market (and many reading this right now probably
| will).
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| I hear being unfortunate enough to be in an elevator with Steve
| Jobs was enough to get you fired from Apple back in the day.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| I remember that crayon picker very well! I was always intrigued
| that it had a slightly different visual style than the rest of
| the UI, but I would never have guessed it was created by the
| author of Glider.
|
| In hindsight, this is a really well-designed UI. It's
| skeuomorphic in that it resembles physical crayons with some 3D
| shading; but at the same time has a flat layout -- the crayons
| are in a regular grid rather than a realistic 3D perspective.
| Good combination of attractive, clear and usable.
| satisfice wrote:
| I was a manager at Apple in 1990. It was very hard to be fired
| from Apple in those days, because they were very buttoned up
| about labor law. There were layers of corrective action you would
| have had to go through.
|
| I left Apple in 1991 because they disbanded the testing
| department, sending a clear signal about not wanting there to be
| people who lived and breathed testing. I am probably the only
| person in that building who still has an active career as a
| tester, today.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think maybe we can introduce a law saying that any X% portion
| of poetry or book (e.g. 20% for poetry and maybe 200 words for a
| book) is in the public domain immediately following its
| publication IN ONE QUOTE.
|
| But it probably introduces other complexities such as how to
| define one quote. Ah, wish we could advance from rule of lawyers
| to something better. What is it? I have no idea.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| That would upend the entire copyright-royalty framework under
| which modern music sampling exists (since lyrics are one thing
| to be sampled).
|
| I'm NOT saying whether that's good or bad - but those
| benefitting from status quo would vigorously oppose it.
| btrettel wrote:
| I took an IP law class in grad school. I asked the professor a
| question about making a more clear rule about how much is use
| of a copyrighted work is fair use or something along those
| lines. (I think I had some vague idea about using information
| theory to quantify it though I didn't say that.) The response
| was some argument against "bright-line rules" [1] like what I
| was proposing. I personally can see how bright-line rules can
| be bad in some contexts, but I don't think copyright is one of
| them. Legal clarity would be very helpful here in my view.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright-line_rule
| frou_dh wrote:
| Having a zero Easter Egg policy is simply the only thing that
| makes sense, because there's no guarantee that something slipped
| in by an individual employee who thinks it's funny or tasteful...
| is actually funny or tasteful.
| gyomu wrote:
| That's why we love Easter eggs, they're a sign that the
| software is built by a small enough team that those cover-your-
| ass processes haven't been put in place.
|
| As an indie dev, if users trust my taste enough to use my
| software, then I can follow my taste as well when it comes to
| Easter eggs.
|
| And it's why most attempts to do cutesy Easter egg style things
| by bigger companies tend to just sound lame and fall flat.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| this story plus the one that jobs asked to end all Easter eggs,
| just show that this one guy was picked to serve as the example
| (because nobody would be reading memos, but water cooler talk
| about the guy who got a dress down would spread like wild fire)
|
| interesting that management choose the guy that, by his own words
| on this post, took everything without complaining. and that to
| this day still believes he was the only one screwing up on weird
| Easter eggs at the time.
| jldugger wrote:
| FWIW, Jobs wasn't with Apple at the time of this story (1995)
| shiva0801 wrote:
| intresting info
| coldcode wrote:
| I too worked at Apple during this period (Dec 95 to May 96). It
| does not surprise me that code was released without anyone asking
| or looking at it from a product standpoint. Management of Copland
| for example (the new OS from hell that was eventually canned,
| leading to the purchase of NeXT and the return of Jobs) was a
| complete utter shitshow, leading me to give up and quit (leading
| to me spending my life going d'oh).
| gttalbot wrote:
| Dude I think the whole "we're going to fire you" thing is weird
| on Apple's part. Look at how good the color picker became once it
| became yours. A bunch of resource string names should not be a
| big deal.
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