alt Hacker NewsYea, Quality Control and Risk Management. You really don’t want even the slightest risk of messing up the build or the product just so that you can bury some secret treasure in the code! We’ve all at some point been responsible for a big goof-up in code that we believed to be harmless.
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Not that I don't also wish for a return of more whimsy to software development, but those risks are real— there have been some pretty high profile embarrassments over the years in connection with pranks and easter eggs. The GMail "mic drop" is an obvious one, also the Spider-Man PS4 proposal was another, plus of course stuff like the GTA Hot Coffee minigame.
Also from a Risk Management perspective, you might be embedding the name/photo of a future sociopath or someone who is litigious. The "human" aspect cuts both ways.
Yeah but you write the easter egg in one product cycle and you put it in the code at the beginning of the next, so it has all the time in the world to 'bake'.