This 418 stuff reminds me of a previous job where we had some arguments about putting emojis in our applications. I was against it and a coworker was for it. Like putting rocket ship emoji when an operation succeeds.

My main argument was that if you put things like that in your applications then people start having opinions about it and they want to discuss it and add more to certain places or remove from other places and bring it up when you are trying to discuss unrelated things.

The increase in communication is a big detriment in my opinion, especially if there is no user behavior tracking to see if those emojis actually improve any user-related metrics (this was a b2b application so we didn't do a lot of user tracking).

It wasn't even about professionalism or anything like that, just the fact that those kind of things are subjective (some people like, some don't, some don't notice, some like a lot and want more) created small-scale friction often enough that I was getting annoyed by it.

We just had a work party and they invited the whole staff. I was outraged they didn't do a proper controlled A/B test. Management will never know if having fun together was a good use of their money. Idiots.

The problem was people (including management) wanting to talk about where and how to put emojis once we added a few. The less I have to talk to management the better.

All those small discussions were essentially pointless and they happened often enough that I was getting annoyed by them.

Like, sometimes we would be showing "in development" stuff to clients and then they would interrupt and mention something like "nice rocketship emoji" and I am like "can you just focus on what I am showing you"

> All those small discussions were essentially pointless

Were they pointless, or were they positive feedback about a thing you personally disliked?

You're doing the thing he was trying to avoid. You want to have a discussion about this hypothetical emoji and make a bunch of statements about the psychology of the person who doesn't want to waste his life on it. Nothing like being accused of not liking "fun" when you don't want to do something useless at work.

Maybe not everybody likes goofy emojis, or Harry Potter references, or whatever easy nothing passes as wit for some people, and they think it makes everything less professional and introduces unnecessary maintenance. Those people have to make the choice to shut up about it, or mention it and have somebody tell them they're joyless.

edit: irt 418, it's historical and it has already imposed most of its maintenance burden. But using it when you're not a teapot is forcing the meme.

As a former engineering manager: no, I don't want to have a discussion about the hypothetical emoji. I want the engineer to put a rocketship in their commit message to have a slightly brighter day, and I want to acknowledge that someone else made a positive comment about it.

If you are genuinely at the point in your life where "people saying they like things" is the same as ... what you're describing ... please be aware of the emotional impact you're having on the people around you.

Because nothing brightens an engineer's day like putting rocketship emojis in commit messages

We need to talk about your flair.

Now, it’s up to you whether or not you just want to do the minimum.

But look at Brian over there! He has 4, sometimes 5 emojis in his commit messages! And a terrific smile…

possible reference to https://youtu.be/F7SNEdjftno?si=HgwhGPbwL8U8deOo

it wasn't about putting emojis in commit messages, it was about putting them in the application

It sounds like people really liked the emojis

People like novelty and engage on things they feel they can contribute an opinion on.

Been on many a demo in the past where all sorts of "magical" and complicated stuff is happening that ends up with "ooh I've never seen a date picker like that" or "wouldn't it be a lot better if it was blue and not red".

Often it's because they accept the other stuff is working or don't even fully remember what the demo is about.

This is actually selling me on using emojis

If they had not been paying attention to what you were showing them, then how would they have noticed the emoji?

Work parties. Worst thing ever.

Surely both having and not-having emojis could be just as likely to trigger discussions about whether to have or not have emojis?

Sometimes I feel like the opposite of your position happens: just add the damn emojis already to put an end to the endless discussions about whether to add emojis

> My main argument was that if you put things like that in your applications then people start having opinions about it

You can say this about literally any discussion outside the realm of bugfixes. And yes I do want to discuss the psychology behind this, because this is, IMO, a perfect example of the tendency for a certain kind of dude (usually dude, anyway) to ascribe "objective," "rational," or other such power-words to their own personal opinions and state them as though they are fact.

Emoji's are characters, my guy. That's it. And if the saying "A picture is worth a thousand words" holds any water... well, I think a thousand is pushing it, but I think an emoji can save you a bunch of words in certain contexts, and doesn't need nearly as much attention for localization.

The only pushback I see consistently on this is from old farts like myself who remember fondly the days pre-emoji and have feels about it. And having feels is completely fair, but trying to pass off your feels as facts doesn't fly.

Let me give you an example that actually happened. We had a rocketship emoji to indicate success in an potentially dangerous operation related to high voltage wires. Right before we made a final release (which we would do every 4 months or so) someone in the QA department brought up that having a rocketship emoji on something that can catch fire and potentially explode is not a very good idea.

This was during a meeting and that derailed the meeting by a few minutes or so, but we had to make new last-minute pre-release for testing to remove the emoji. This was right before a release so pressure was high, you only have to run into something like this a few times before you start to think that this kind of thing is not worth any "good feelings" it might bring.

This job was a high stress environment where we were always behind schedule. This kind of thing, happened often enough that it was really getting to my nerves.

Personally I don't really mind emojis in the software I use as long as it works as intended. What I mind is wasting my time with this kind of stuff. This HTTP 418 is in the same kind of situation, I have had 3rd-party APIs throw 418 back at me (presumably some fun a dev had at that company) and I couldn't even tell if my request was wrong or if that was supposed to be a 500. Software for controlling high voltage is not supposed to be fun, network protocols are not supposed to be fun.

So, it was swapped for a :thumbs_up:, right?

Whenever I catch myself having a discussion about having fewer discussions, I try to stop and just let it go.