Andrew Palmer
speaker
66 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 18 Jun
Andrew Palmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Have you ever been in a situation where you've done what you feel is a great piece of work?
And then your boss comes along, asking for things to be changed, making things worse.
You get the feeling that they're only pointing things out so they have something to do.
Andrew Palmer,
management.
Well let me tell you a secret.
There's a hack that can help you.
It's the idea of Atwood's Duck, the deliberate insertion of a redundant or incomplete feature whose only purpose is to be discovered and removed by the higher ups.
That way, your boss feels they've done something useful, but no actual damage has been done to the end product.
The phrase Adwards Duck comes from a video game, an apocryphal story about a programmer who added a pixelated duck to the character of the Queen in a chess-related game.
A producer reviewed it and asked for one thing only: get rid of the duck.
The programmer complied and the game was ready to ship.
I mentioned Atwood's Duck in a recent piece, and to my surprise, many of you emailed in to tell me about equivalence.
So here's one from construction.
Peter De Man wrote from Canada to say that in construction, this phenomenon is called leaving something for the inspector.
So when an inspector comes to look at something, if it's electrical, you leave the cover off a junction box.
If it's a building, you leave some piece of concrete out of place.
Something really simple so that this person will feel important, they found it, they've got rid of it, their job is done.
That's not the only example of a duck-based tactic.
Mervyn Taylor wrote from Dublin to say that Atwood's duck may not be a duck at all.
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