[brightball]

One of my earliest bosses was the main web developer for a telco's marketing department. He would get everything working and ready the way that it needed to be, then prior to showing it to marketing would change something to be clearly wrong. In my example, he just put a red line down the middle of one section that looked out of place.

Marketing would review it and say, "Everything looks good, let's just change that red line there. Thanks!"

I asked him why he did that and he said that if he didn't give them something obvious to change, they would find something that was working that didn't need to be changed.

[miriam_catira]

At one point, we (lead dev (me) and lead designer) colluded to submit a terrible homepage design to a nit-picky CMO to buy an extra 2wks of development time.

She'd given us 6wks to completely rebuild a small corporate website, and we knew we needed at least 8 (it was still a nearly impossible rush). She exhibited a classic micromanager habit of the inexperienced: she needed/expected everything, including copy layout, to be pixel perfect in Adobe before any coding could start.

So the developers had the real design we knew she'd approve already in development while the design team showed her the version filled with ducks. She performed exactly as we anticipated and work continued as though she was never consulted. It was a risk, but she was extraordinarily predictable in her duck removal...

It's not something I'd do to someone with an opinion I respect. Thankfully she left right after that. Probably with a story of how she single-handedly saved the redesign herself, but whatever. ;)

[sambeau]

I have a friend who works in games who would secretly add a malloc to the initialisation code that would just hold onto a large chunk of memory. Come the point just before release, where everyone was desperately trying to fit the final assets into memory, and about to throw stuff out, he would do an 'optimisation' pass and free up the memory so they could ship without delay.

[groestl]

Oh, "the balloon". A quite common technique.

[sokoloff]

The 2007-02-02 Dilbert applies: https://assets.amuniversal.com/9df021106cc801301d50001dd8b71...

[mathattack]

And Scott Adams also previously worked at a Telco.

[begueradj]

That's funny and a good summary

[heisgone]

"The problem was that the women who were making the cakes didn't feel emotionally invested enough just adding water, he said. Eggs would make it feel more like baking. In later years, many would portray this as a pivotal moment in the history of cake mixes, the inflection point of a dramatic upward curve."

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171027-the-magic-cakes-...

[redler]

"We love the red line concept! Can you please work that into the rest of the design?"