This has burned me in the past for frontend design.

I would add an obviously hideous element in order to get feedback and for a higher-up to make a decision, with the element being a temporary, WIP.

Instead, it is happily included in production.

I used to do something similar all the time as a designer--

Present the client with 3 options. Two of them were terrible. The third was the one I wanted them to choose.

It usually worked. Usually.

Oh yes. When you pick the most godawful colour scheme for your UI to ensure the designers actually make a decision, and it sticks around long enough for everyone to get used to it and become standard.

You should have added deliberation duck and not irony duck.

It's suspiciously similar to the "hairy arms" of Disney lore:

> So the story goes that probably a long while ago - probably in the '30s or '40s - they had a lead animators, but they also had creative directors. And when the lead animators would make concept designs, meaning, like, character development, they'd be so proud of these characters. And they would go to their art directors, and their art directors would change something constantly even though they thought it was their best work.

> So what they realized after working with these art directors - that what they hated the most was anything added to the character, especially hair on the arms 'cause this is, you know, '30s and '40s. Things had to look very slick. So what they did was to distract the art directors from making other changes, they would automatically put hair on the arms of each character.

https://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364760847/whats-with-all-of-t...

Though both stories could be true, it's also possible that somebody familiar with the Disney story created another narrative based on it. I'm not even sure that the Disney version is real, but I'd give it a higher likelihood.

Heh, my supervisor from a postdoc liked to call that a "shit magnet". Put something egregious in an article so the reviewers have something to complain about.

It sounds ethically dubious but if you think about it, it also makes some sense -- reviewers are engaged specifically to find problems in your work -- so if they don't find problems, they feel like they are not doing their job. So it's not in their interests to ever say, "this is fine, nothing to change." A shit magnet thus is not just to distract, but to legitimately give reviewers an "out" while saving face.

Happens in all different contexts. If you've ever had to take a car over the pits to get it re-registered or get a defect notice removed, you might have been given the advice to take out one of the tail-light globes. Then the inspectors feel useful because they have something to write down, it's trivial for you to 'fix', and everyone's happy.

Where I work the strategy is called "throwing a bone to the dog" during a technical review.

I'd bet on this strategy being independently discovered by frustrated subordinates many times through history. Not unlike birds, bats and bugs independently evolving flight.

That seems quite probable to me as well, but one or both of these specific examples might be fabrications with that still being the case.

The duck can be used for both tricking reviewers as suggest, but also for making sure the thing you asked to be reviewed actually got reviewed (if they don't find the duck, did they really review it?).

It reminds me of the Van Halen brown M&Ms story.

In the contract for a Van Halen concert, there was a line telling organizers that there should be a bowl of M&Ms, with all the brown candies removed. Otherwise the show would be cancelled at full price.

Even though it sounds just like another eccentricity from celebrities, the idea was that if brown M&Ms are present, it meant that organizers didn't read the papers, which also contained safety-critical points.

I have a reference to this in my CV ("watching out for brown M&Ms" in the "Outside of work" section). So far nobody has asked about it

Here's the snopes article on it, with a great example at the end from when the contract wasn't followed:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

I put a picture of “this is Sparta” in my portfolio. So far, no company has asked me about it. But if they did, they’d get extra preference from me, since they actually looked at my work.

I remember seeing that in a portfolio when I was reviewing candidates and thought you might not be serious about the job or that you made a mistake, which highlighted you as a risk. As such you did not make our preferred candidate list.

Hehe. I’m fine with that outcome. I think it’s a good filter for companies that are too stringent. Humor is an important metric in work-life balance.

There are plenty of jobs. Once we run into another recession, maybe I’ll put on a suit.

The legend is that this explains the scene in Buckaroo Banzai that includes a watermelon in a hydraulic press. It was added to see if anyone at the studio was paying attention, nobody noticed it, and they left it in anyway.

I hear about people doing this sort of thing, but I can't imagine it working on a regular basis. In my experience, if you show a person two options, and one of them you dislike, that's the option they're more likely to choose.

I played Battle Chess back in the day and I distinctly remember the duck with the Queen. So either it wasn’t removed or it was put back in?

I see no duck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Chess#/media/File:ST_Ba...

I would consider the possibility that your water-based memory is flawed, and you were already primed to think of a duck by the time you tried to recall the details of the queen's design.

Edit: or this could be an example of the Mandela Effect, and you just switched from a universe where the designer was shocked by their bosses okaying a superfluous duck!

Or it may have been re-added in one of the later versions. I remember there being several full-3D versions of the game (though I don't recall any idea of whether they were officially linked to the original shown here).

More likely it's a false memory created after hearing the duck story.

You know that’s what apocryphal means right?

To save anyone else from googling:

"(of a story or statement) of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true."

Well, sure, that's the story of its meaning.

Urban legend?

This is why I always add a sql injection vuln to my PRs.