Some years ago I recall hearing a story about how a software engineer intentionally created some easily removed program feature (it may have been an animated rabbit or some silly character that followed the cursor around) that he was certain would get axed, just so that when his boss evaluated the work it would provide the boss with an easy target/change to make, thereby allowing the boss to show that he “did something” to improve the program while not requiring any big/unnecessary/complicated/stupid changes that might otherwise create considerable headaches for the programmers.
Has anyone else heard of this before and is there a name for this type of ‘boss management’ strategy?
This wouldn’t have to be a software only thing. An HR team could for instance devise an employee manual and include a lot of reasonable well-thought out ideas, but have a ridiculous *‘step 15: employees in the office should wear red ball caps to build a sense of teamwork and inclusion’ *knowing full well the idea will get torpedoed by the immediate supervisor.
A friend of mine who actually built his own house, was told by the electrician who helped him with the wiring that required work to be done under guidance of a certified electrician - Always leave one or two obvious things that need fixing, so the building inspector can ask for them to be fixed and thus it looks like the inspector is doing something useful and being diligent. Otherwise, the inspector is liable to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb until he finds some nits to pick on.
After all an inspector who never finds problems with the work he is inspecting may appear to his superiors as not being thorough.
Yes, that’s the essence of what I’m talking about. Just thought of another example in fiction, there was a sci fi book (Heinlein or Asimov, maybe?) about a revolt in a totalitarian state in the future where the protagonist is told by a co-conspirator to leave a gambling odds table in his locker. The protagonist points out gambling in the barracks is against the rules and he’ll get in trouble. The co-conspirator responds, the powers that be are already suspicious of two people meeting in private. This way when the security people search your locker they’ll find something wrong immediately. The difference being gambling gets you a slap on the wrist, whereas treason gets you executed.
Back when my husband used to do drafting by hand, he and the other drafters would put some easily-found anomaly in their drawings. That way, when they took the drawing to the engineer to be checked, the engineer could feel good about himself for spotting the error.
It’s a disease that most engineers have. As an engineer I can recognize it in others but probably have it myself.
I once worked for a senior engineer along with another engineer at my level. The other engineer would put together a report with all of the correct info/conclusion/recommendations. He would also copy that report and change something on it to be an obvious error. He would then send the erred report to the Sr. engineer.
The senior engineer would correct it and send it back for revisions. The other engineer would then wait two days and submit the correct report.
His method was so simple and smart that I adopted his methods. Saved me a lot of time.
Leaving small errors in for others to find also ensures that the people supposed to be checking your work are actually checking your work.
You may also be leaving errors in unintentionally, which is the actual reason for people checking your work. If known errors are not being corrected, then you have to assume unknown ones aren’t either.
This was mentioned in another thread how filmmakers will deliberately put in scenes or shots they know will not get past the censors so they will have something to remove and leave alone the slightly less objectionable material they actually intended to be in the film.
There’s an older story about the junior architects in Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio always putting porches on all their house designs just so the Master would have something to delete, and leave the rest of their work alone.
This is (was?) a recommended practice in software development. If the tests don’t find the inserted errors (which you hope to remember to remove before releasing) then the test team isn’t doing their jobs.
My dad, an engineer at the World’s Second-Best Selling Commercial Airplane Company, used to put an error in the center of the first sheet of his drawings, to appease one boss who just had to find something wrong; otherwise the boss would make him change something else (which didn’t need changing).
Yeah. I once read an article about the old Jack Benny show, where the writers mentioned doing this. It backfired on them once - they had a joke they figured wouldn’t get past the censors, but really wanted it, so they wrote in 4 terrible toilet jokes for the censors to remove. The censors didn’t object to any of them, and they wound up blue penciling the horrible jokes themselves. One wonders if the censors didn’t get wise to the game, saw a really blatant example, and decided to call their bluff.
Another example from Heinlein - Jubal Harshaw, from “Stranger in a Strange Land”:
“You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.”