The first time I was almost fired from Apple

Incident, Risk, and 1990s Apple Context

• Commenters debate how serious the Easter-egg incident was: some see “just” hidden text in resource names, others stress real risk of copyright litigation and costly CD recalls.
• The physical-media era and Apple’s then-precarious state are highlighted: a late discovery could have meant destroying or recalling discs, which helps explain management’s fear and intensity.
• Prior lawsuits against Apple over much smaller IP issues are cited as making legal extremely risk-averse.

Management Response and “Education” Through Mistakes

• Some see the manager’s reaction as a disproportionate berating where a clear “don’t do that again” would have sufficed.
• Others argue that deliberately adding unauthorized code with copyrighted text is closer to a judgment failure than a normal bug, so a harsh response was plausible.
• Several comments frame this as an “expensive education” case: the company already paid the cost of the mistake, so firing the engineer wastes that learning.
• There’s disagreement over whether retaining someone after a big blunder is smart investment or sunk-cost fallacy.

Culture, Fear, and the Chilling Effect

• The author’s transformation into a cautionary tale is seen by some as optimal policy dissemination; by others as the moment “the culture died a bit,” pushing people toward strict spec-following and email trails.
• Multiple anecdotes underline that serious technical mistakes (dropped tables, outages, etc.) rarely lead to immediate firing if they’re honest and owned; lying is treated as the real red line.
• Several note that younger engineers often overestimate the risk of being fired for a single mistake, influenced by layoffs and online horror stories.

Easter Eggs: Soul vs. Professionalism

• One camp praises Easter eggs as expressions of pride, craft, and delight that signal small, human-scale teams and “products with attitude.”
• Another camp emphasizes QA, security, and legal risk, arguing for a strict no–Easter-egg policy, especially at scale.
• Some report that Apple later allowed only declared and tested Easter eggs, then banned them entirely; the broader decline of Easter eggs is seen as both understandable and culturally sad.

Engineers, Product, and Ownership

• The story is held up as an example of an engineer deeply understanding and shaping product (the color picker) without heavy product management.
• Others counter that dedicated product roles exist because most engineers lack domain context, and large products exceed any one person’s mental capacity, necessitating division of labor—even if PM practice is often flawed.