Salary Survey Extra is a series of periodic dispatches that give added insight into the findings of our most recent Salary Survey. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.

There are almost certainly ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that depict slaves filling the royal salver at the court of Pharaoh with the finest sweetmeats from Jerusalem and Babylon. If you look closely, you can probably see court advisor Akhenaten (or maybe it's high priestess Anippe) furtively dipping a hand into the dish when palace overseer Mosi Ra's back is turned.

The point is that there is a proud and time-honored tradition of having a candy dish in the workplace. When medieval serfs would tend the fields, their feudal lord would often supply a trough of warm water and a bushel of seed husks. When Michaelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he had special scaffolding built to keep a bowl of fresh Corsican figs within easy reach.

There is even an undocumented legend that, after chocolatiers Joseph Fry and John Cadbury invented the first candy bars in Great Britain in the late 1840s, President James K. Polk immediately installed an icebox in the Oval Office so that he could keep a supply of the new barred chocolate on hand at all times to regale presidential visitors with a tasty new addition to the historic Old Ironsides treat platter.

In modern times, the office candy dish is often kept at the front reception desk, or on a table in the break room, and may hold anything from gumdrops (gross) and salt-water taffy (ick) to licorice (eww) and jawbreakers (blah). By far the choicest confection to be found is an assortment of miniature candy bars, the kind sometimes sold in variety packs, especially at Halloween.

The time-honored tradition is to take one mini-bar whenever you happen to be passing the supply, particularly when other coworkers (or a watchful receptions) are present. Most workplace professionals who have ever been near a candy dish, of course, are familiar with the temptation to clean out all the candy of a particular type when no one else is present.

And that brings us to the meat of today's digression into unreleased data from the 2020 Salary Survey. Yes, this is another trip (the last one this year, incidentally) to the annals of the Not So Serious questions that are placed at the end of the survey each year. We're confident that many a certified IT professional has undertaken a stealth mission to empty the office candy dish of a particular kind of treat.

Since, as we've established, the best candy dish treats are miniature candy bars, we decided to ask which of the many varieties available is most frequently the target of covert candy dish raids. Here's what we learned:

Q: Whenever no one else is watching the candy dish with the miniature candy bars at work, I always grab all of the:

Kit-Kat — 24.3 percent
Snickers — 20.6 percent
Reese's Peanut Butter Minis — 11.1 percent
Twix — 10.6 percent
Hershey's Special Dark — 9.7 percent
Milky Way — 7.2 percent
100 Grand — 5.1 percent
Nestle Crunch — 5.1 percent
Three Musketeers — 2.5 percent
Mr. Goodbar — 2.0 percent
Krackel — 1.9 percent

It's hard to argue with the clear favorite. Kit Kat bars, first developed by Rowntee's, a British confectionery established in York in 1862 by Henry Isaac Rowntree, are sold around the world. Swiss food giant Nestle produces and sells Kit Kat bars in every country in the world except for the United States, where they are made by H.B. Reese Candy Company (a division of Pennsylvania-based candy conglomerate Hershey).

Kit Kats are delicious of course, but they also provide entertainment, with even the miniature bars being segmented into individual chocolate dipped wafers. A good follow-up question for candy researchers to investigate someday would be to determine how many Kit Kat eaters break their Kit Kat into pieces before devouring it. Ah, the joys of playing with one's food.