11 ms·

The first time I was almost fired from Apple

345 points by chmaynard 1y ago

brogdan 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
    - JKCalhoun 1y ago
      I honestly don't know to this day if they had to scrap a run. Certainly there was the potential though.
- alexjplant 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    yeah, I'm getting that, but it's sad to read the mindset still existing in 2025
- dcrazy 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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.
  - LocalH 1y ago
    Never forget, Sagan sued them again over "BHA"
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Yeah. I see what you are saying. I think the reason I am embarrassed about it is not that I am averse to offending upper management (my corporate overlords) but that I offended on petty grounds. An Easter egg is kind of an ego thing and I think that is what was embarrassing.
  - ajkjk 1y ago
    (fwiw I regret sounding so mean about it now that you're here, sorry.)
TheJoeMan 1y ago
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 https://engineersneedart.com/blog/interview/interview.html
- joezydeco 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
    - cperciva 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
        It was a joke.
  - 1y ago
rezmason 1y ago
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_colorpicker.png https://rezmason.net/chattin_with_jkcalhoun/copland_colorpic...
- snapetom 1y ago
  He says of himself that he "wrote games for the Macintosh." That's an understatement. The guy wrote Glider!
  - alexjplant 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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).
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Sheherazade, definitely me from my "The Tale of the 1001 Arabian Nights" period. I can't recall the "Hey what?" though.
floren 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    An accurate representation of corporate legal's general attitude, yeah... just say no to any request because that covers your ass.
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    Neither is stopping the presses for every little thing.
  - jackblemming 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
    - D-Coder 1y ago
      Selection bias. Lots of other companies did borderline illegal or fully illegal things and they are gone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporate_collapses_and_scandals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporate_collapses_an... (although many of these are incompetence collapses).
windows2020 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      This is the result of advice being rejected too many times (and later turning out to have been correct).
    - sublinear 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      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.
mrpippy 1y ago
I’m pretty sure the Gold Wing-riding, pipe-smoking boss is/was C.K. Haun
tptacek 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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!
ryandrake 1y ago
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 1y ago
  “someone added an Easter Egg”
- microtherion 1y ago
  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/ 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 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 1y ago
  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.
hobbitstan 1y ago
[dead]
sublinear 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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?
bravesoul2 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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).
- seethishat 1y ago
  People who actually do things make mistakes. It's the ones who never screw-up you should scrutinize.
- michaelt 1y ago
  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.
  - 1y ago
koiueo 1y ago
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 1y ago
I want to read more work stories of retired engineers and designers.
sgt 1y ago
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 1y ago
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.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  I can't say. I am decades removed now from responsibility for that component. (And retired as well.)
akdor1154 1y ago
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_Pickers.png https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/almostfired/HSL_RGB_Pi...
- stavros 1y ago
  Those were days too old to be good.
- trinix912 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  >This has always been true and nobody knows it better than the investors. You think we're stupid? Erm, ehh... n-nooo...
  - sublinear 1y ago
    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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright-line_rule
frou_dh 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  FWIW, Jobs wasn't with Apple at the time of this story (1995)
shiva0801 1y ago
intresting info
coldcode 1y ago
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).
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Everyone that bought even a share of AAPL and sold before … last year … is going d'oh.
gttalbot 1y ago
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.
LocalH 1y ago
The continued death of easter eggs is sad. I get it for certain classes (or scales) of software, but I still think there's a place for easter eggs that are small enough to be vetted as clean and security-conscious. Nothing says security-first principles can't be applied to the implementation of an easter egg that is internally proposed through a formal process, and documented where necessary for the customers who would care. The loss of easter eggs is the loss of part of the "charm" of computing. A loss of a reminder that (For now) software is produced by humans, with emotion and love for the craft. I suppose that's changing with LLM assistants and vibe coding. Who will be the first to prompt a coding LLM to include an easter egg? It's probably already happened.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Easter Eggs make products cool. Corporations are not.

345 points by chmaynard 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    I honestly don't know to this day if they had to scrap a run. Certainly there was the potential though.
alexjplant 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  yeah, I'm getting that, but it's sad to read the mindset still existing in 2025
dcrazy 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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.
- LocalH 1y ago
  Never forget, Sagan sued them again over "BHA"
JKCalhoun 1y ago
Yeah. I see what you are saying. I think the reason I am embarrassed about it is not that I am averse to offending upper management (my corporate overlords) but that I offended on petty grounds. An Easter egg is kind of an ego thing and I think that is what was embarrassing.
- ajkjk 1y ago
  (fwiw I regret sounding so mean about it now that you're here, sorry.)

TheJoeMan 1y ago

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 https://engineersneedart.com/blog/interview/interview.html

joezydeco 1y ago
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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - cperciva 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      It was a joke.
- 1y ago

rezmason 1y ago

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_colorpicker.png https://rezmason.net/chattin_with_jkcalhoun/copland_colorpic...

snapetom 1y ago
He says of himself that he "wrote games for the Macintosh." That's an understatement. The guy wrote Glider!
- alexjplant 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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).
JKCalhoun 1y ago
Sheherazade, definitely me from my "The Tale of the 1001 Arabian Nights" period. I can't recall the "Hey what?" though.

floren 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  An accurate representation of corporate legal's general attitude, yeah... just say no to any request because that covers your ass.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Neither is stopping the presses for every little thing.
- jackblemming 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
  - D-Coder 1y ago
    Selection bias. Lots of other companies did borderline illegal or fully illegal things and they are gone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporate_collapses_and_scandals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporate_collapses_an... (although many of these are incompetence collapses).

windows2020 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    This is the result of advice being rejected too many times (and later turning out to have been correct).
  - sublinear 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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.

mrpippy 1y ago

I’m pretty sure the Gold Wing-riding, pipe-smoking boss is/was C.K. Haun

tptacek 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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!

ryandrake 1y ago

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 1y ago
“someone added an Easter Egg”
microtherion 1y ago
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/ 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 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 1y ago
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.

hobbitstan 1y ago

[dead]

sublinear 1y ago

> 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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?

bravesoul2 1y ago

> 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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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).

seethishat 1y ago
People who actually do things make mistakes. It's the ones who never screw-up you should scrutinize.
michaelt 1y ago
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.
- 1y ago

koiueo 1y ago

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 1y ago

I want to read more work stories of retired engineers and designers.

sgt 1y ago

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 1y ago

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.

JKCalhoun 1y ago
I can't say. I am decades removed now from responsibility for that component. (And retired as well.)

akdor1154 1y ago

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_Pickers.png https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/almostfired/HSL_RGB_Pi...

stavros 1y ago
Those were days too old to be good.
trinix912 1y ago
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 1y ago

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 1y ago
>This has always been true and nobody knows it better than the investors. You think we're stupid? Erm, ehh... n-nooo...
- sublinear 1y ago
  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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright-line_rule

frou_dh 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago

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 1y ago
FWIW, Jobs wasn't with Apple at the time of this story (1995)

shiva0801 1y ago

intresting info

coldcode 1y ago

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).

JKCalhoun 1y ago
Everyone that bought even a share of AAPL and sold before … last year … is going d'oh.

gttalbot 1y ago

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.

LocalH 1y ago

The continued death of easter eggs is sad. I get it for certain classes (or scales) of software, but I still think there's a place for easter eggs that are small enough to be vetted as clean and security-conscious. Nothing says security-first principles can't be applied to the implementation of an easter egg that is internally proposed through a formal process, and documented where necessary for the customers who would care. The loss of easter eggs is the loss of part of the "charm" of computing. A loss of a reminder that (For now) software is produced by humans, with emotion and love for the craft. I suppose that's changing with LLM assistants and vibe coding. Who will be the first to prompt a coding LLM to include an easter egg? It's probably already happened.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Easter Eggs make products cool. Corporations are not.