It's also a sign that your culture is able to deliver a fun feature, just for the sake of it. I've worked several places where things are so fragile nobody would dare make any change that wasn't strictly necessary. That's not a good sign.
Bearing risk in mind, there's probably a reason that it's acceptable to implement the DVD logo on the front-end client but poor taste to humorously update HTTP headers, for instance.
(That said, I tend to stay in the camp of "any path that can be hit, I'll eventually have to support.")
I think those little things are a part of Google DNA from the early days and actually have a huge impact on the brand perception.
I am pretty sure easter eggs were a significant part of what made Google a cool company 10-15 years ago to my young eyes. The answer to life, the hidden games in Android, the raptor game in Chrome. At the time, it was rare for public company to do those silly things.
It was NOT rare. Microsoft used to do a huge multitude of easter eggs. Most big companies stopped because there was fear that easter eggs would increase the attack surface for hacking. For one concrete example, the PHP easter egg was useful to tell which (usually vulnerable) version of PHP a site runs so that you can run exactly the script you need to attack it.
That seems like a ridiculous thing to say. That said, I actually came to the comments to wonder just how much total effort would have gone into this from proposal, through approval and sign-offs by multiple technical and non-technical teams, before finally getting through to production. Anyone have an educated guess? I’m really curious even though I don’t believe it should sway opinion on whether to do it or not. The value is spread across employee morale and however many millions of users have their day brightened a little.
That said, I actually came to the comments to wonder just how much total effort would have gone into this from proposal, through approval and sign-offs by multiple technical and non-technical teams, before finally getting through to production.
Who's to say it's not an internal training exercise? Someone(s) is learning to heard the kittens on a low-stakes project, someone else is learning to get the right sign-offs from the right teams/people, and the new test manager can spin her team up on this little project while they try the new workflow. And the intern gets to see their CSS tricks go into production to amuse millions.
