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I would suggest before you leave your job, you say "it was nice working with you" to the people you liked working with, and absolutely nothing to those who you did not enjoy working with.

The tech world is big in some ways, but also equally small in others. A select few might find this funny, but others will not appreciate their day (or longer) spent debugging your practical joke...and on the chance you actually get something like this onto production, well now it won't just be your developer buddies you got off side.



It's the correct advice, but I'm sure 99% of people reading this are seeing it as simply a joke. For the other 1% see above.


(author of the gist...) Anyone really thinks it's not a joke? This was all a few years ago, but IIRC the original thought behind it was something I saw on twitter, or perhaps just pondering how evil can C/C++ preprocessor could possibly be.


Don't feel too bad, people who are genuinely considering this are likely vindictive enough to deserve getting black balled.


I don't think anyone is seriously advocating people do these to company assets. This is just stuff that would be funny in a hypothetical scenario rather than a suggestion.


And if you do a code change, make sure it is really funny, is easy to fix and discover and is invisible to customers. Like, inject a hilarious joke into the log files or something.


A coworker at a previous job altered the company's internal web application so that when one specific user was logged in, about 1/20 of the time it would load a hidden iframe that played Rebecca Black's Friday. This stayed in place for a long time because the user couldn't figure out what was going on and was too embarrassed to ask anyone else about it. Instead, they turned off the computer's sound and started listening to music on their phone.


I did have a friend that wrote a feature that would make ghosts flash across the screen. Long enough to see, but fast enough to make it hard to pinpoint for sure what you saw. It was locked to only happen when the "boss" used the app.

Kinda funny, no customer impact. Not sure what would have happened if he had a bug and made ghosts appear for everyone...


Right before leaving my last job, I updated an internal web-based tool to add a menu item called "Add Unicorns." It just used cornify to show unicorn images when clicked. But I also made it only show that menu item at random and somewhat rarely, so I heard that it took some people a while to notice, which was fun. To my knowledge, that change is still there!


A coworker of mine, definitely not me, left an html comment in a template for a page on a fairly big website that read similar to "Help I'm trapped in a website factory". So anyone perusing the generated html might read that. Similar to the xkcd pi joke: https://xkcd.com/10/




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