Pranks seem to have a long history in science. For instance, you had this nuclear scientist who’d crack safes in his colleagues’ offices and give waitresses a hard time.

The computer engineering equivalent of a prank would be the easter egg– the inside joke that made it to the released product, the hidden feature that prints out the developers names, or simply the flight simulator tucked away in a mapping application.

Several well-respected hackers, like jwz, shot to Internet-fame based on easter eggs they created (jwz’s page on his about:authors egg is a pretty good read).

At large (and possibly small) companies, however, a series of events conspire and would prevent an easter egg from ever hatching. For example, you have managers whose job is to give you enough work that you aren’t idle and dreaming up easter egg ideas. Then, you have other developers who’ll see the code you add in a code-review and wonder what it does (of course, it works fine if you already have an understanding with them). Then you have testers who might just notice it and raise a bug. And we’re just talking about the process of adding an easter egg. Even if one has official sanction to add an egg, once you factor in policies and the business and legal side of things, matters quickly get trying.

Organizations as a whole simply hate easter eggs. Surely, that hate is not misdirected– an easter egg could possibly present a security vulnerability (especially if it escapes testing), attract lawsuits, or simply annoy some users. Several large products seem to frown upon the idea of easter eggs, considering them an unnecessary ego-boost. Some organizations even have a policy against easter eggs.

This state of affairs, I feel, is rather unfortunate– pranks (and in the context of computer software, easter eggs) are a good indicator of whether people who created something had fun doing so, which in turn is an indicator of how good their creation is.

An easter-egg isn’t about getting an ego-kick out of seeing your name in a released product, but really a way of having fun and looking at things differently. It isn’t for nothing that Isaac Asimov said “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it) but ‘That’s funny…’”. Taking a non-serious look often exposes one to (possibly laughable) approaches that one may never consider otherwise (It happened to me!).

Furthermore, the prankster needs to be pretty good to get away with planting an easter egg. And I don’t just mean “be smart enough that it goes unnoticed for some time” but “be good enough at his paying job so people don’t want to fire him/her for the easter egg”.

Isn’t this the sort of people every enterprise is supposedly after?

Will encouraging people to play pranks and insert easter eggs actually benefit in the long term? Or maybe simply tolerating ones that are harmless help? I honestly don’t know the answers; but I’m wondering what people think. Pour your thoughts in the comments below!