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Worst Working Conditions You Had To Write Code In?
sausaw writes "I recently had to write code in a hot dusty room for 20 days with temperatures near 107F (~41C); having nothing to sit on; a 64 Kbps inconsistent internet connection; warm water for drinking and a lot of distractions and interruptions. I am sure many people have been in similar situations and would like to know your experiences."
Those guffaws are annoying.
I once had an office mate that LOVED Kenny G. I think those were pretty horrific conditions...
I once had to write code on a palm pilot while I walked 15 miles uphill in the snow while naked with a pack of wolves and two grizzly bears stalking me.
That's like a Tuesday afternoon for me.
The damp, dark innards of my parent's basement.
You had water?!
That's your cue, geezers.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I'll go you one better - I once had to maintain Perl code.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
You had to move your hands in between revolutions and very quickly type. No time for comments and indentation and occasionally it would cut your hands off.
I still have nightmares of those endless tendrils of code wrapping around my ankles... it's too hard to talk about, man. Just too hard to talk about.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Wow, what's it like coding on Mars??
At a client. Ok I was debugging something and to be fair they did warn me not to spend too much time there, but it took a while to set things up.
Nasy experience actually, I could feel my nerves being a bit frazzled even the next day.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Working in industrial automation. Installing a machine, and tweaking the code. An un-airconditioned plating shop in Oklahoma, in August, in a heat wave. So 100F+, near 100% humidity. Sometimes hanging above a vat of nasty chemicals while debugging with an oscilloscope.
Fun times.
Best Slashdot Co
..... windows. Nuff said. :D
Walkin' to school, uphill, both ways, in a blizzard.
No sig for you!!
My last Employer actually expected me to write code in the morning! We are talking pre 10am here. I still have nightmares...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
This identical question can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/741581/what-are-the-worst-working-conditions-you-have-written-code-in
A paralegal I worked with was sent to do a document review at a Client's industrial site. She was in a small, metal shack filled with boxes of old documents. While she was working away, half a dozen guys in full hazmat suits came in. They were as shocked to see her as she was to see them since the building was condemned and they were there to clean it out!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
No matter the physical environment, nothing is an intense and scary as the pressure that mounts above you as you attempt to code on a customer's premises, on production code, trying to find a problem you didn't cause and barely understand, with no connectivity and no source control and no opportunity for QA.
-mkb
I write automation software for sewage treatment plants, and sewage pumping stations. I could describe incidents that rival goatse.cx of old.
Floaters any one?
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I was having to write code to debug radar problems while on board one of NASAs P3 Orions (not technically The vomit comet but close enough)... in a thermal suit where the ambient temperature would go below zero at high altitudes then they would perform corkscrew dive maneuvers at some serious G-force to point the nadir looking antennas above the horizon back down to 300ft above the ocean where the temperature would spike over 100 degrees and the turbulence would throw you from the seat if not for the 6 point restraint. And the korean grad students were barfing their tuna fish sandwiches everywhere so the whole place smelled as can be expected. YOU KNOW NOTHING OF PAIN.
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
I once had to write code sitting on a metal stool in an aluminum rolling plant in Muscle Shoals Alabama in the summer. The background noise level where I sat was well over 80db, and the noise peaked at something over 130db when the machine was in operation. My connection to the embedded device was a 9600 baud serial line, and the code/compile/test cycle took 30 minutes on a 25mhz AT&T server running SVr3. Every time the guys on the rolling line wanted a break, they kicked the server until it reset and they had 15 minutes to go smoke. This would of course happen in the middle of me editing code.
Aside from the 110 degree temp in the plant, 100% humidity, and horrific noise level, I had to wear a dust mask to try and filter out the particulate matter from the grinding work down the line. When I'd shower at night the drain would turn a matted grey color.
My only memories of Alabama are horrible. Other than the ribs, of course.
As many here can attest, it only takes one bad boss to make working your conditions analogous to hell on Earth. I would argue that in the worst cases, your setup would be welcomed on a daily basis if got away from their boss that is not worth the dirt they walk on.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Not quite the same environmental conditions, for me it was working under a boss who is not responsible for the final product and gets bonuses for cutting costs.
I only did network and system admin stuff but it was QVC...there were TV's all over the floor tuned in to watch Joan Rivers peddle here warez in HD!!!!...oh the horror...the horror...
Think of your worst day - hot, dusty, grimy, no showers - now add the possibility you'll be shot at.
Punctuate that with actual gunfire.
Near you.
No, I'm not kidding.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And I could go for a 107 degree office and warm water right now. I'd even agree to sit on the floor. Weather is ridiculous here this year. Or any other year for that matter.
Coding deployment logic for cfEngine, in the raised-floor DC, immediately under the LOUD chiller, next to the obsolete SGI Challenge. I leaned against it for warmth.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I was on-site at a clients' place of business for a few months and I had to endure weekly prayer meetings. Not just the run-of-the-mill prayers, but the owner of the company would speak in tongues. I tried to skip them, but somebody would always come to retrieve me and I was told that they were mandatory.
If I wasn't a contractor, I would have sued their asses off for every nickel they're worth.
V. B. A.
I should be getting hazard pay.
You will have to move out of your Mom's basement someday, and there are worse things she can do than turn off the air conditioning and remove the furniture in order for you to get the hint.
It's for your own good.
My worst was three weeks waiting for the office furniture to arrive. We had old PC cases for stools, propped the monitors and keyboards on top of PC cases, and coded hunched over. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Must it be about places where we are actually typing, or can we include situations where we were writing a program in our minds for later entry? I sometimes wonder what people think as they walk by while I'm typing with my eyes closed.
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I was working for a car company on a project for communication between vehicles and infrastructure. The end-of-year demo was in Michigan in January. Because of the cold, I had to deal with car batteries failing, in addition to bugs cause by GPS inaccuracies. Oh and failing hands, because of the temperature. My boss, holding down the fort in California, was please that the demo was a success, but what really cracked him up was the fact that I came down with the flu after the demo.
It was terrible.
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
We work from home, so about the most hazard we experience would be a cat jumping on the keyboard.
OTOH, in the realm of just annoying, is that a device emulator we use frequently takes about 90 seconds to load and can't just be left running -- you have to restart it for each recompile. It's like the testing cycle is make as many changes as possible, compile, go get a beverage or take a pee, come back, it should be just about ready to run.
I once had to write code is a super-small stuffy room.
That's not so bad, but I had to share it with two people who smoked like chimney. I am serious, that was before all those non-smoking laws. The two smoked close to a pack a day per person. I probably "smoked" more with these two than ever before, or after... And I am a non-smoker!!
The stench was so bad that, when I arrived at the office, and I was usually the first person to come, I would open every single window in the office to make sure some of the cold tobacco odor would go out a little bit. And I did this religiously, no matter how cold or rainy it was outside, since the smell was so bad I was that close to puking every time I would go in that room.
To cut a long story short: I had -- in about six months time -- a bronchitis, followed by a sinusitis, followed by a bronchitis AND a sinusitis at the same time! Each time, my doctor would look at me, and practically plead with me to stop working in that place.
Thank goodness, that contract only lasted for about 12 months. Most horrible conditions I have ever worked in. My hatred of smokers started in that place.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
During the SARS outbreak a few years back, I was employed as a programmer in a hospital where there was a quarantined SARS area. As a result, the entire building was on lockdown and you couldn't enter or exit without a medical overview (they take your temperature, ask you a bunch of questions) and being suited up in a face mask and rubber gloves that were not to be removed for any circumstances... Try coding for an 8 hour day in rubber gloves and a face mask!
While working for the USAF developing a PTT (Part Task Trainer) for the new "glass cockpit" on KC-135R Aerial Refueler, my coding partner and I worked at the largest non-commercial airport in the US. Our office was a 6x9 closet. We were located by the fuel station, so every afternoon when the news choppers and flight for life choppers would refuel, the ventilation system pumped AvGas directly into the "office". It would get so bad that we would have to stop working from 3-5. After attempting to work through it at first, we would get dizzy from the fumes.
In living room. Two toddlers and an infant to manage. Years, but they became older as time went by so it got better and worse.
Drove me nuts. Wouldn't have missed it for the world.
The screaming German client on the phone with no tolerance or understanding for Thanksgiving holiday with infant on my shoulder and a toddler heading for the basement stairs was the best, ever.
For my first job interview, many years ago, I had to do a programming exercise (A graphical delphi app) on a borrowed computer in a *room full of girls drinking*.
Now, tell me if that isn't difficult.
PS. I got the job :)
Or does the summary sound like someone coding in their bedroom? Oh and you dont _HAVE_ to work anywhere, its a choice you make, shut up and put up.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I once had a job at a wireless ISP where I would regularly troubleshoot disfunctional rooftop routers located on an antenna mast. This sometimes left me balancing my laptop on top of a ladder in order to connect to the crashed device, which was particularly fun on high buildings during windy days. Every tried to troubleshoot and fix a kernel panic by tweaking kernel driver source code in a situation where you could fall to your death if you lost your balance? It would make an awesome geek extreme sport.
I recently had to write code in a hot dusty room for 20 days with temperatures near 107F (~41C); having nothing to sit on; a 64 Kbps inconsistent internet connection; warm water for drinking and a lot of distractions and interruptions.
We were evicted from our Hot Dusty Room! We had to go code in a lake!
I used to work at a Quarter Mile Drag Strip, and my office was about 70 ft from the starting line. The track allowed people to rent the track during the day, so you either had something like a mustang club burning out and going down the track every 30 seconds for the entire day, with the endless drone of engines and tires. Or there would be a top fuel team renting the track and there would be an hour of silence followed by 170+ decibel noise of the fueler burning out and launching. Getting surprised by that because I was deep in code led to quite a few bashed knees as I jumped out of my seat at that noise. My boss didn't believe in headphones, because we all needed to be able to answer the phone, and telecommuting was completely out of the question.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
My first job out of college was working as a web developer for the Walgreen Company at their headquarters in Deerfield, IL (just outside of Chicago). One particularly cold february, the heater busted in our building, and temperatures rapidly fell to around 55-58 degrees in the afternoon. First thing in the morning, it was barely 40 degrees in the office. We wore our coats and most people bought fingerless gloves (Dickensian fingerless gloves, that is) to continue to type.
The worst part was that management was totally silent about what was happening, and acted like nothing was wrong. We would literally schedule meetings because a conference room full of people was warmer. This went on for over two weeks. Finally, the pipes burst and everyone got a day off. Hooray!
You would not be in those conditions if you hadn't started those dumb lawsuits against IBM and Novell.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Back in the old days, we used to trudge 5 miles uphill both ways with a dagger in each of our thighs in six feet of snow just to get our punch cards into the EAM, all for tuppence a month. Come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky! And you try and tell the young people of today that... they won't believe you.
They had little work to do and so they spent their time chatting about who in the office was really hot. They really wanted the CEO. Go figure.
I once had to write code while sitting next to a massive injection molding machine, where the temperature was probably 110 degrees inside (surprised the computers worked), a blow-off air jet going nonstop on the other side and the plant manager coming out about every three minutes wanting to know why things weren't done yet. Job lasted about two weeks of pure fun.
System: TI-85
Location: In Class, 7-12th grade.
It was still more fun than paying attention.
OTOH, in the realm of just annoying, is that a device emulator we use frequently takes about 90 seconds to load and can't just be left running -- you have to restart it for each recompile. It's like the testing cycle is make as many changes as possible, compile, go get a beverage or take a pee, come back, it should be just about ready to run.
You poor things. My first job we got two test runs a day, and if you made a typo on your coding pad you had to wait in line for the one working keypunch so you could correct the cards without waiting for another run to the service bureau they had punching production cards for us in the name of "efficiency".
Kids today don't even know what "desk checking" is for.
I shit you not, they put me in a cube in the middle of an inbound call center. On top of that, they gave me a 1.2Ghz celeron as my dev machine (this was in 2006).
Right now I'm learning to code Java - it's pretty terrible.
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
I'm going to burn the building down....
Professional video game programmer. The worst I ever had to do was on a card table in the living room of the producer's apartment, with six other developers in the room. Austin, TX, 95 degree heat. On the plus side, we got a day off when a raccoon crawled into the ventilation system and died, making the apartment too horrible for even the boss to enter.
Yeap you heard me right :).
I work Help Desk for this company, and in my 'Spare Time', I'm building databases and writing code in Lotus Notes. Theres nothing that breaks your train of thought quite like "Yes, Hi, I forgot my password for the 3rd time today, Sorry!!" and "The power just went off and so did my computer, is that normal?".
Try coding in a language that MIT designed (LISP) that no one uses outside the classroom, with a bunch of college guys, up all night, no showers, in a computer lab, on monochrome serial terminals, when you are a commuter and home is better than half an hour away. AND, you have to work full time an hour away the next day. AND your attractive live in girlfriend is waiting breathlessly for you at home.... Torture that even Gitmo couldn't beat...
Back in the early 90s -- 100+ degrees (F) working on a cell phone prototype in a typical late Spring for Florida.
My a**hole employer, an Eastern European immigrant with a blimp-sized ego, faked MENSA membership, and the wildest anti-Semetic rants I'd ever heard, bought a window AC unit that was nowhere near adequate for the room and kept it focused on himself saying (I'm not making this up) "You do not understand Thermodynamics, and you will feel cooler if the vent is aimed at me."
For full effect, imagine that line in the accent of the "Wild And Crazy Guys" from the old SNL. That was the boss.
I once had to hack to a government system in 60 seconds while having a gun pointed at me, and a girl giving a blow job. And of course, I did it successfully.
Regards,
Hugh Jackman
this company that i'm contracting for put me at top floor of the loft so my head is level with all the florescent lights. i got light blasting into my eyes as i'm trying to code. second, the place is dog friendly. now, i got nothing against dogs and i understand you don't wanna leave the animals home alone but at least at home they can move about. these people force their animals to sit next to them all day, so the dogs start whining. lastly, since i unfortunately don't have an office for the duration of my contract, i get to listen to all the project managers cacklin like a bunch of hens about the most random of subjects. as if everyone in the office really wants to hear about karoeke last night.
I can't believe the lack of true hell stories.
I had to maintain a huge VB webapp where all the layout was hardcoded and then compiled into a DLL.
The "server room" was a poorly ventilated closet with a rack in it, and you had to hold the keyboard in your lap to type. There was a dehumidifier (which was required because it got nasty hot and sticky in there) and you'd have to change out buckets of scummy water every few hours, because it wasn't piped to the outside.
The "server room" itself could only be accessed by walking through a visitation room where child abusers and other types of nightmare parents who'd had their kids taken away, could visit with their kids/estranged spouses under the eyes of a social worker. There was a vent in the door that separated the rooms, and so you could basically hear everything that was going on in the room behind you.
So to sum up:
Nasty cramped hot humid room with carpal inducing keyboard positioning next to room filled with screaming/weeping/fighting people and their messed up kids.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Oh yeah, I once had to code without access to a foozball table. The horror.
Did some work in India once, thought it was alright.
The air conditioning was pumping second hand cigarette smoke IN to the server room.
No-one was smoking in the server room, but the smoke concentration was higher in there than the rest of the building.
It was the non-smokers who were huddled out side the building taking oxygen breaks.
Then when we finished for the day, the damn project lead slammed the car door on my hand.
Still, the food and wine were superlative...
I was coding in portable building, (looks like a shipping container), in high summer. No a/c, no breeze... I was working with two cute and VERY well-endowed female coworkers who decided to skip bras and wear the smallest cut-away T shirts possible. Oh, and thin summer mini-skirts.
They might just as well have been naked.
Now you try and debug a financial application written in uncommented RPG3 in that environment...
I was riding my Xooter around on the hardwood floors of our TriBeCa luxury office loft in my tailored suit, while on a conference call via the wireless headset. As I veered around the servers, Aeron chairs, and putting green, I stopped by the espresso bar in our giant kitchen only to realize there was no more organic fair-trade raw sugar! I xooted over to the PM & demanded an explanation. He gave me some lame excuse about there not being any at the store.. I told him if the situation wasn't rectified I was going to raise my consulting rate another $10! Needles to say, the next day we had the sugar, but I had to suffer such horrible indignity and it changed me forever.
Try sitting next to Sarah Palin.
Try sitting next to Cowboy Neal.
I once had a job at a wireless ISP where I would regularly troubleshoot disfunctional rooftop routers located on an antenna mast. This sometimes left me balancing my laptop on top of a ladder in order to connect to the crashed device, which was particularly fun on high buildings during windy days. Every tried to troubleshoot and fix a kernel panic by tweaking kernel driver source code in a situation where you could fall to your death if you lost your balance? It would make an awesome geek extreme sport.
Like Laser Obstacle Chess?
I once had to write code with yo Mama! :D
Worst programming place I ever saw was one I visited.
Arrived at the place to talk with the developers and see if we could incorporate their software at our location. The atrium to the place was nice, wide open area with plants and all nice. Going into the halls they had robots running mail and physical items between room, then we got to the programming room. It was a big white room with 3 columns, and around 5 rows, of picnic type tables and two programmers on each table, each with their own computer. At the front of the room was a raised platform where the managers desk was sitting.
Making it even worse was the manager, she would require that they get permission to go to the bathroom, get lunch, etc.
The only good thing about the trip was that I was with people who went up there a bunch of time so knew all the good restaurants, hotels, etc. So after talking with the developers for less than an hour the people I was with decided the software would not work for them so I had the rest of week free to do nothing; which kind of sucked becaue Indianapolis does not have much to do for a full week.
Worst working condition for coding was back of a van, in the winter with a gas powered generator for power and a home made ply wood table for a work station.... there were actually two of us
I recently had to write code in a hot dusty room for 20 days with temperatures near 107F (~41C)
Hot room? distractions? Hmmm, Why didn't you just take your computer and go work outside?
Customer site. There was already a contractual dispute. Entire company hated our guts (some because of the software, some because of the contract). Were perfectly happy letting us know how much they hated us.
Were in one room with company owner. Guy smoked cigars all day long. Had two PC's + keyboards + mice + documentation on a tiny six-sided table. Bad chairs.
Topping it all off, this was in an office with a view on my grandmothers house. She passed away while I was typing code in that damn office. Was taken to task by company owner for leaving work early that day. Asked for and received a transfer to another project after that.
before being allowed to enter this oil refinery that was our customer at the time. I was writing networking code and they had some kind of network problem that meant I had to fly there and see what their issue was. normally, I write code at a desk and almost never fly but I guess they wanted an 'engineer presence' and one that knew DECnet (yes, I'll admit to that. once.)
so I fly there and my local guy meets me and we drive over to the customer site. but then I have to sit thru a video tape showing the safety procedures and what you need to do if the place, well, has a need for you to leave it. quickly.
it wasn't that bad and they even gave me a picture ID card (lol) to prove I attended the mandatory safety 'training'.
all that just to run a protocol scope and notice that some field was wrong and needed to be updated.
it wasn't a bad experience, but it WAS funny to go thru that just to view a proto trace - that really could have been done remotely, anyway.
that job (and company) are now long gone, at least 10 years now. but I still have my ID badge and I still think of that 'training' I had to take. it might come in handy someday, you never know! ;)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The order-entry inventory control system is so screwed up that it was hard to tell where to start. With not enough rerun, compile and test time available, jobs were sent out to a local data center. That is, until the 17-year old driving the van flipped it on the interstate, dropping digital media all over the highway. Oh, and did I mention the bomb scares every other day?
well, not coding, but close. at a book wholesaler, we had a foxpro database to generate specialized lists of books for our bookstore customers. problem was, it wasnt user friendly, only 2 people understood how to use it, and one of them was our cranky pc programmer who kept a bottle in his desk drawer. buyers had requested help with a project, and had been told it was on its way, until they learned it wasnt. tough as nails female buyer reduced to tears over this, but purchased filemaker pro and created her own tool. i found out about this program, had it installed on our shared pc (our desks had remote terminals, no capacity to do other tasks), and played with it. i created a customizable database of our titles, in between phone orders (5-30 minutes work at a time, constant interruptions to go to my proper desk 30 feet away), without the main pc programmers permission, without the manual, with no experience in such matters. what i created rocked, but was limited in scope. pc programmer found out, was apoplectic, gave me a lecture about how we were migrating to foxpro because filemaker pro couldnt work with .dbf's, which was what we needed to use for a proper list generator(i was using a .txt file with very limited parameters: title, author, isbn). i actually agreed with him: if we were going to move entirely to foxpro, i would eat my own child. BUT, while playing around with filemaker, i discovered it could IMPORT dbf's, which he either didnt know or was hiding from me to be the big phallic symbol on campus. i then found the .dbf he had been using for his database, which had the books subjects and sales records. i then expanded my database (again, without support, training, manual, or anything but a wink and a nod from my boss, who thought the main programmer was a dickwad), and it was a total hit with customers, who finally got what they and i knew they needed. of course, it all failed miserably when i tried to offer the lists and got swamped with requests (list generation could not be automated), but the customers still loved us. this made me feel like a semi-geek (demi-geek?)
You hear about the person who didn't rely on anecdotal evidence to support his belief system?
I have you all beat. I got accused of not working on a project (which I was supposed to work on after hours with no overtime fixing code that someone else screwed up) when I was actually at the client site for 9 hrs. The emails between my boss and the bastard of a coworker were hilarious...especially when my boss believed that guy because "I didn't check-in code that day". After proving that I was at the client site on orders from MY BOSS, I didn't get so much as an apology for the accusations from the boss or the degenerate coworker.
After that I got moved to a 8 * 6 closet near the Sales team who take it upon themselves to shout and swear at the top of their lungs. I even got asked to "help" the sales people by traveling 250 miles to a client site to help them make a sale without any compensation for fuel or time.
The company also has a nasty habit of hiring people near the end of a project to meet deadlines and firing them within 2 months once a project is complete or the client is fuming because the work is late.
Needless to say, I still work there because I have no balls and I'm on a H1B. :-(
Unloading truckloads of paper for Johns Manville in a factory so filled with asbestos, the air was blue. They declared bankruptcy rather than pay all the medical expenses for their dying employees.
The paper was dumped into a hopper that went up the side of a vat where it was boiled with chemicals and broken down into paper gunk and poo. The poo was excreted from a large pipe, where it was put in drums and "taken somewhere".
Another hideous job was scraping gum off the floor of a large department store. That REALLY sucked. The boss was a dick. My fellow employees were idiots, theives, or (like me at the time) ne'er do wells stoner punks.
So, coding in crappy conditions is bad enough. doing bullshit in crappy conditions is worse.
The Waaambulance tag is appropriate.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
A hanger in Mojave, California without AC, dusty, 115 deg F outside, and windy as hell...
Sounds like my time in Sudan working on mapping with ArcGIS.
You get used to it after a few more weeks.
This one is easy.
On the factory floor at the Caterpillar Medium Engine plant in Mossville Illinois during the summer. Temperatures where I had to work exceeded 100 degrees regularly and there was no air flow to speak of in the area. The noise level was outrageous and there was a persistent mist in the air that you weren't too sure what it consisted of.
Nothing like trying to program and debug ladder logic when you can't think or necessarily breathe. If you screwed up in your programming, you brought down the entire production line for the plant.
Fun Times!
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
in a room behind the Biohazard sign, all the techs were wearing hazmat suits, we're in plain clothes. And while we're there they drop and break a vial of blood. Needless to say we were a little freaked out, they never said what was in the blood, hopefully not airborne.
Everyone here seems to be doing a lot of "one-upmanship" when all the submitter asked for is the worst working condition you had to write code in.
OK, here's my entry:
One summer, In an air-conditioned room I had to write C code in Emacs on a VT100 terminal connected to a VAX.
No, it's not that bad... but sorry...that's my worst.
Having to work on top of the Universal Studios Florida King Kong attraction tram car while moving around the track with guests in the cab below. It is way up in the air, a flat cement surface far below. As it goes around the track, it shakes violently as Kong grabs the car etc. (it's essentially a simulator ride suspended from above), and it's covered in leaking hydraulic fluid, making it very slippery on the catwalk. There are no rails. I had one electrical outlet up there, which I could either use for the power of my laptop, or a small AC light I brought, but not both.
...with naive freshmen, students of mine I dared not touch, desperate for friendship in a new place and approval from authority in the midst of their newfound freedom, hitting on me.
It was torture.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Bloody lugzhury.
We had to write "dent-code" in braille using a white-hot knitting needle on sheets of wet tissue paper of while being submerged up to our tits in lava.
The worst punishment of all? The only thing we were allowed to drink was shitty American megabeer.
My Human Gets Me Blues.
I had a job with a major telco where whenever there was a problem with the wireless broadband service they didnt trust us to actually fix the bsd servers via remote, during the winter that ment an 8 hour drive in a snow cat up the mountain, spending the night in the head end while debugging perl scripts and freezing my ass off.
One of my current clients has me troubleshooting in a literal closet with no chair but its a luxury compared to what I had to do before.
I got into computers 25 years ago so I wouldn't have to work under these types of conditions. And haven't.... In todays day and age, why do you have to be on-site? Dust, heat and computers don't normally get along very well. And no coffee...??
I once had to write code in a limited-storage environment. My poor code had to be shoehorned into 1024 bits, plus leave room for data. This wasn't even a device driver or kernel code.
And I learned to love every frustrating moment of the project.
To be fair though both myself and the computer were in decent physical environments.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
We were in a 7 rack server room about 20 feet by 12 feet. The AC unit had failed and the room was pushing 92 degrees. That wasn't the bad part. I was scripting some audit crap and my buddy was writing a web front end for the script about 2 weeks before Y2k. The AC guys needed parts and were waiting in there also. The DBA for some GODLESS reason decided to go get Taco Bell and a Dairy Queen dipped Cone. He ate the Taco Bell and the icecream. The SOB was lactose intolerant or something because between the TB and DQ the room smelled with a rotting stench that anyone "who has sat through an autopsy (twice here) on a dead guy who's refigeration unit was about 10 degrees too warm" could appreciate. Now any saine individual would have bolted for the door but as the DBA was cracking wind the AC guys had a ladder in front of the door while working in the dropdown ceiling. The room was boderline 100 degrees now and the worse possible thing happened. My buddy who was coding the web front end, couldn't take the smell anymore and threw up in the trash. Now at 100 degrees, Taco Bell stench, vomit stench, and the heat, I was starting to get dizzy.
After about an hour they (the AC guys) finally got the ladder out of the way and we hauled ass out of there. Took about an hour to get the room back to normal temp but I swear the DBA did that on purpose... the entire time that fat sob was laughing his stench ridden ass off...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
50 deg C ambient
Intermittent electricity supply
Intermittent water supply
No internet connectivity
Wild dogs in the streets
Wierd foreign food
Dust storms
Mosquitos
Toilets from hell
etc etc
Looks like this question is already answered at StackOverflow.com
Even though I do code in perl some.... that's a winning comment.
My worst job conditions? I was at IBW and my boss thought the best place to work was in a cellar room, completely bare except for a small desk right in the middle.No telephone, no internet access, and the worst thing of all - I had to code for Lotus Notes.
We only had zeros to program with, had to make 1s out of the 0s. And no fancy keyboards like today, had to make letters out switches.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Nope, your the only one. Evah.
I once had to write cryptographic software on a laptop without a display, using the keyboard LEDs to output morse code, all while the villains had me trapped in a cell.
One of my co-workers had to code in a cargo container on a ship, in 25 foot swells. The container had no windows, and he had to code standing up at a terminal. For 14 hours. Guy was green when he got back to the dock. I was lucky. I spent those hours with my feet up on a desk and with two 42" monitors in front of me.
Sure it wasn't Michael Bolton? Did you ever get your stapler back?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
My worst was a project during my Bachelor studies, where the server we had to work on stopped accepting telnet connections after midnight. We are working with 5 people to meet the deadline and one by one our telnet sessions that were opened before, started to time out. Talk about a race against time.
I never looked it up, but I guess even China was pretty happy with W.
ssh
I worked for EDS for two years. I still wake up screaming...
Over 100 degrees in a bedroom owned by a slob of a teenager.
With a monochrome display that was prone to collapsing the image to a single dot in the center of the screen.
With a 25 line, 40 column text display that wrapped upside down over the last two lines.
With 64KB of total memory.
Less to actually work with.
In assembly.
Of course the disarray of the room was self-inflicted.
Nightmare of nightmares... a very pushy project manager decided I was his star coder (I was) and that he needed "full access" to me. This mean that I needed to share an office with him. This gave him "full access" to change specs at a moments notice, look over my shoulder, disrupt my very slow morning routine, etc. etc.
Quit that job in a hurry.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Trying to code while under severe emotional distress is the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
Screw the stapler. I'm more concerned about the fact that I ordered my drink with no salt, NO SALT.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Last year I was working on my teams MATE ROV competition entry, and the electronics box onboard the submersible robot flooded during our first of two trials. I spent the next two days sitting on a concrete pool deck in beautiful, sunny, June California at UCSD trying to rewrite the embedded system's code, squinting at the screen to route around FUBAR'd components such as the onboard computer system that was supposed to handle networking with the dry side control computer.
:)
:D
We did win the guts and glory award though
It was so bright that even 10 feet underwater the cameras went blank white until we covered them with five layers of windshield tinting film
I've heard this before http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Yorkshiremen, "When I was a boy I programmed in a cardboard box by the side of the road!"
"When I was a boy, I programmed in a paper bag in the middle of the road!"
"Luxury! When I was a boy I programmed in a septic tank! Every morning, we would have to get up a half hour before we went to bed, to lick the sides clean!
" etc . . ."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Easy, GOTO riddled COBOL! :-P
No, the hardship wasn't doing Notes development, smartasses - I liked working with it. The truly fun part was when we went into a maintenance period and they started tearing up the deck above our office. Jackhammers going off on the ceiling all day, every day, for probably a week. You had to wear double hearing protection (plugs and muffs) just to be in our office. I'm sure the phones probably rang from time to time while we were in there, but it's not like we could hear or have a conversation anyway. Actually, you got used to the noise after a while - with that much hearing protection it wasn't a big deal at all. The trouble was you couldn't work together with anyone - having a conversation was out of the question, so you had to leave the room... and then you couldn't see the screen, obviously. We started trying to work together by passing notes, but that was of limited use.
Oh, and did I mention we were in a big steel box with no air conditioning during this period? In Norfolk? In July? That I never did get used to.
Ok, cue the Lotus Notes jokes in 3... 2... 1...
I used to work for a large US defense contractor back in the 'bad old days' (ie: the mid 80's), hacking Ada code elbow to elbow (literally) with 50 other software engineers on a VAX system that was design for about 25 users max. We were all crammed into a long hot closet they called the 'terminal room' containing two long rows of cheap folding tables covered with VT100's every three feet. The system was so slow that it couldn't keep up with the slowest typists, esp with everyone attempting to compile their bloated Ada programs. Lags of up to 30 seconds between pressing a key and seeing the screen respond were just considered normal. Management didn't care because our fat government contracts were 'cost plus', meaning they actually made a profit on every engineering dollar they could justify spending. Rather than spending money on new hardware (which would just have been an 'expense') they had us working 80+ hours a week to meet schedules. I've had to deal with plenty of other lousy programming environments since then, but nothing to compare with that one.
"When the going gets weird, The Weird turn pro" --Hunter S. Thompson
I once had to share a "cubette" with 2 other guys. By cubette, I mean 1/2 a normal-sized cube. Imagine writing code shoulder to shoulder with 2 other engineers. It was like flying coach class at the the window seat. Getting out required everybody to move.
We also know about the typical lack of hygiene exercised by most engineers.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
The company I worked for had software installed on a server kept in a customer's basement. During the installation there were a few problems that needed some changes; the telephone line hadn't yet been installed for remote access, so down I went. Half an hour later one of their employees came down and told me I needed to go back upstairs. I tried to tell him that I was fine and hadn't quite finished but he managed to change my mind - the building was in an area with a high concentration of radon gas and no one was allowed to stay down there for more than 30 minutes without protective clothing. Had I been told this before I started I might have thought twice.
We had a tornado that tore part of the roof off the building and water just poured into it. Did they replace the dry wall, or the flooring, or anything? Well, they did replace the roof. Black mold grew all over in the walls and in the flooring. I started coming down with ear infections quite regularly, and still get them to this day. They've been resistant to antibiotics, and are painful as all hell. Also, I tend to lose my hearing when I have them, but at least my left ear infection will run its course a few days before my right ear starts.
It must have *sucked* to have your interruptions and distractions load at 64 Kbps. I don't know if I could take that...
105 degree forge, 10 feet from an induction furnace, 120 DB background noise and im required to wear a respirator, earplugs, and fire-retardant clothing
while working on a machine with windows xp at 256meg ram...keeping an eye out for forklift traffic.
or this one: 40ft off the ground replacing an old IBM 10 port 10mb hub thats been duct taped to an i-beam in a foundry. balancing a laptop
on a drainpipe and the railing of a manlift at full boom extension and cleaning up vlan configs on the replacement 10 year old ibm switch.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I had an old ASP developer position for a tiny company, and I was in the server room with temperatures in the low 60s programming all day. It actually ended up working out well for me though, because I like the cold
My worst job was working for a boss that was not a programmer but thought of himself as smart enough to understand how programming worked. After trying to explain why we could not set foreign keys between 2 types of different databases, and why "bridging" database systems together was a no no....especially when the problem meant answering every question he had, and explaining the code to every program!
I quietly started looking for another job, and found one on the day he decided he was going to look elsewhere for contractors because, he thought I was not giving him enough "yes" to feed his ego.
"We could form a bridge between the Access database and that sqlserver database"
"No"
"Why not?"
"We could, but the fact that you have that Access file sitting in a folder on the network and
allow everyone to modify it , you have too many problems with people reading and writing to it, it would be much better to convert it to an actual real sqlserver db, and go from there"
"But every one uses Access, it is a good product!"
"Well, actually, if you look at any enterprise YOUR size, no one uses Access to run their company, they go with SQLServer or Oracle"
"That costs too much..."
"Yes, but you have no problems with integrity after wards when splitting the info amongst multiple
dbs"
"But we are making it work now..."
"Yes, until the day we corrupt the file and have to reset it with a back up..."
"A backup?"
"Yes, you do back up your Access file on the server?"
"I dont know, I think so..."
~thinking in my head~ This is where most people would jump ship!
I once had to update some code for the Department of Defense. Sitting in a vault in the basement of a building in DC, I was not allowed to look at the screen, let alone touch the keyboard as I don't have clearance. The guy on the keyboard had no coding experience so he had to read me lines of code while I told him character by character the changes that needed to be made. Hardest 2 days of coding ever in my life...
You whiny kids. We had no fancy scripts, compilers, guis, or operating systems. All we had were ones and zeros. And sometimes we didn't even have ones.....
I've got 2, one leads to the other...
1) Employer decides to cut 3 months from the end of an aerospace contract (coding and hardware integration with various surveillance hardware) which puts code completion, 1 month testing period, client training and delivery time all to take place in the same 3 week period. I ended up working 16 hour days with colleagues in a remote location for 20 days straight, cranked a grand total of some 180+ hours of OT (for which we didn't even get a thank you for until we went and saw some people about it) and actually managed to get the aircraft off the ground and working as mostly expected. As bad as that was, the worst part was the 0 testing time we were given. This led to...
2) Contract from #1 begins tanking in client country as appropriate time and due diligence was not given to the work in the first place. This leads to another 2 week stretch of 16 hour days sat inside a giant metal tube (an aircraft) in 40C heat and 90% humidity in direct sunlight no more than 12 North of the equator. I'd never ever thought it possible that one's FINGERS would sweat. I actually lost 10 lbs in 2 weeks...
To this day (more than 1.5 years after delivery) this contract is still tanking, the software department keeps turning over at a rate of 200% a year (mismanagement keeps it that way) and I've finally decided to abandon ship.
I once had to write code for a surgical robot... while it was doing a heart bypass... on me...
I had recently switched to Ubuntu and found, obviously, that my previous program was not compatible with it. So I spent the first 3 days of my project trying to figure out the new one. Boring.
I ran out of hot pockets once.
You work for IBM?
Not a coding job, but by far one of the worst I ever had.
In the mid 1980's, I worked in Reno as a houseman for a large hotel casino. Being a houseman was bad enough. Having to move furniture, sort the dirty linen, cleaning up rooms that the maids called "too dirty" for them to clean. But on one day, I was looking for a way to make some brownie points with my boss, when he asked for a volunteer to clean a room. I made the mistake of raising my hand.
Before I was sent to clean the room, I learned that the guest had blown his brains out with a small caliber gun. I was to clean the room and place any "biologic matter" in a special haz-mat bag they gave me.
I then was briefed by the detective on the case that the bullet had not yet been found. Part of my cleaning job was to "feel" each piece of brain matter as I bagged it up for them to look for the bullet. It was about two hours later, when I had finished cleaning the room that I learned from my boss that they had found the bullet. He didn't want to come up and tell I didn't have to keep looking for it, because the idea of seeing the mess make him feel sick.
I was so pissed that I tossed the bag-o-bits on his desk and told him to call the cops to ask for a pick-up.
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
About five years ago I was on a consulting contract at a large telco. One of the programmers I worked with was a fellow from India who worked in a windowless cubicle sized office with poor ventilation and next to a mechanical room.
After about a week, I asked him why he didn't complain about the abysmal working conditions. He shrugged me off with a non-committal "It's not really that bad." each time.
After one rant where I listed all things that were wrong with his workspace, he calmly looked at me and said "I started programming under contract with the US Army during Desert Storm. I was a local hire and wound up working on fixing systems on the front lines and under fire even though I wasn't supposed to be there."
He gestured around his closet called an office and continued "Any place where people are not trying to kill me or blow me up while I work is a blessing."
I kept my mouth shut after that and, after hearing how he had actually been wounded while working during desert storm, treated him much more respectfully.
In 2003 I did some consulting work for a family owned real estate business. The son was taking classes at the local community college. His dad insisted that the kid take part in the coding process because he was very good at it. The computers were running some ancient OS/2 based accounting package written in some REXX-like scripting language. My task was to convert the databases over to something from a recent decade and upgrade the hardware. I got referred from another consultant who couldn't take the job (I wonder why).
Throughout my two weeks there, I had to have this 17-year old kid shadowing me. The father told him to do this so that in the future he wouldn't need to hire an expensive consultant. Plus the kid was "good with computers." At first I didn't mind. Heck, I started in a similar way by shadowing my cousin at Gould. But this kid had no aptitude. He'd nod as if he knew what I was doing, but after three days was still having trouble getting a directory listing right and would mix up the Unix and Windows machine commands (he didn't write anything down either, so repeated lots of questions).
After a while, I tasked him with verifying some output between two files just to keep him busy. Mistake. His dad insisted that I cut my rate because the son was now doing some of the work.
These people smelled oddly. The office was filthy, no air-conditioning, dusty, food stains everywhere. And the attitude of the owners was that I was just trying to steal their money. They griped about everything. They tried to shove in extra work such as bringing in their home PCs. I've worked in more physically uncomfortable places before, but this place was the worst experience of my career.
Had to add Arabic and Indian calendar support to the Excel 2003 engine.
All 10-year old C, with comments everywhere that said, "WARNING!!! Don't touch this, we don't know why it works"
"I once had to write code on a palm pilot while I walked 15 miles uphill in the snow while naked with a pack of wolves and two grizzly bears stalking me" - AND I had to walk back "uphill in the snow while naked with a pack of wolves and two grizzly bears stalking me" WHILE shooting them with the cyborg control system connected to the robotic killbot that I was programming while "I walked 15 miles uphill", in each direction there and back again, "in the snow while naked with a pack of wolves and two grizzly bears stalking me"... so there... plus I was in Canada... to top it off...
Why didn't you climb up, attach a cable long enough to go to the ground, climb back down, fix the problem, and then climb back up to disconnect the cable? Wouldn't that be less dangerous?
Ol' Rick Dawson had a farm EIEIO
I used to do some crappy C# development for this tiny little company that lived in a small industrial town in the middle of nowhere. It was actually a family of companies, all owned by the same guy - the two main lines of business were making modular building panels, and running a limber mill. Here's a taste of what I had to go through:
1) My office was out of the modular panel shop, where I was one of two people not actively involved with making modular panels. I didn't drive, so I usually hitched a ride with some of the guys that worked in the panel shop. They were okay, except they liked to smoke weed and drink beer on the way in to work (at about 7:30am). So here I was, packed in the back of a truck, with 3 other guys getting completely wasted. Every day I went to work and hoped my boss wouldn't smell weed on me from sitting beside these guys.
2) On the way home, they would do the same, except they had also been working hard all day, and since I was sandwiched in between a bunch of these guys, I would inevitably walk off at the other end drenched in the sweat of other people. So I smelled like B.O and weed.
3) The owner of the company was about 84 and completely senile. He'd come into my office and ask for a parakeet with bananas and cryptocard access, and I'd have to nod politely and say "Right away sir!"
4) Every now and then I'd end up working from the lumber mill, which was far north and even more rural. This was interesting because the lumber mill had recently been on fire, so the whole place smelled rather mesquite.
5) The closest internet access from the motel they put me up in while I was visiting the lumber mill was the wifi from the lumber mill itself. But the mill was quite far away. My boss suggested I bring a Pringles can to attenuate the signal for better reception.
And the worst:
6) At the lumber mill, they piped country music through the PA system. 24/7.
I did some consulting for Visa for a week or so near Atlanta a few years back. 14 hours a day; not only was everything I did being watched by camera, but I had to do all my load testing, code review and reporting while standing with my laptop on top of a freaking wire spool because they wouldn't allow chairs in their data centers.
...I mean Alcatel.
...it wasn't for 20 days, and it wasn't coding, but eight years ago I spent a week in a 6x12 unventilated wiring closet (door locked and left closed for "security reasons") doing detailed firmware upgrades, configurations, and security audits and traffic tracing on network switching infrastructure, plus tracing a whole lot of wires. The temperature in the room was around 100 degrees, there was no chair so I had to sit on the floor... next to the gaping holes where the utilities entered the building. The customer told me: "don't worry about the rats, they are more scared of you than you are of them. And oh yeah be sure to wash your hands immediately when coming out of that room before touching anything."
Made me think that the "security reason" was "the receptionists are scared of the rats".
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
Coding on solid, old fashioned paper is not fun.
Foozball's from the debbil!
"I recently had to write code in a hot dusty room for 20 days with temperatures near 107F (~41C); having nothing to sit on; a 64 Kbps inconsistent internet connection; warm water for drinking and a lot of distractions and interruptions."
Tony Stark?!
Immolation is the sincerest form of flattery.
While working as sysadmin at a pre-clinical drug-development company, AFTER a 24-hour shift migrating from old back-end systems to new, I was assigned a 6-hour shift doing calibration testing on animal room workstations.
The testing wasn't much, a few lines of script and a lot of repetitive runs on various terminals, but we had to do it in the dark, by flashlight, in jump suits (with booties, bouffants, and masks), in 90 degree heat, in an ammonia saturated atmosphere, in rooms full of unhappy and flatulent dogs, rats, mice, or monkeys.
The only thing that kept me from quitting on the spot, instead of a month later, was that my boss and his boss were doing it with me.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
I have to write code in an environment where I can't choose the technology, but the managers are incompetent with regards to technology! They just listen to salespeople.
Office mate = boss
6am-9am Bill Bennett
9am-noon Laura Ingraham (since replaced)
noon-3pm Rush Limbaugh
3pm-6pm Sean Hannity
'nuf said
We were running a geophysical survey inside the Croton Aqueduct. The PC, a generator and the geophysical equipment were all mounted on a 7 foot cube shaped PVC cart. The custom software we were using didn't transfer the data to a backup disk properly, so the whole thing stopped about two hours into the project. We were a mile from the nearest entrance, I was in water up to my knees, with water dripping on the PC. The only lights were two shop lights which were hooked up to the generator. I had to cobble something together in DOS to scan the available space on the drive and to move the files when there was 10% left on the drive so we could keep working. A picture of me doing it was on the company web site for about 5 years.
I had to debug Visual Basic code!
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
I once had to code PHP on a keyboard where the shift keys didn't work. The IT policy for the place prevented me from bringing my own keyboard, and management had decided that purchasing a new keyboard wouldn't be cost effective..
Defective Logic
Nope. It was a tiny local company here in the Netherlands. I left that place a long time ago, though.
You didn't take the wireless router down from its mast first?!?
The worst condition I ever had to code in was severe drunkenness. I'll never code in that condition again. My comments make no sense!
in the sauna at my gym who's always staring at his G1?
Sitting at the desk with my wife on the left
Need I say more?
The worst place I ever had to write code was an on a Navy base as a contractor. The Navy does many things well and some things amazingly well, but it's hellish to work as a contractor in some of their offices. Everyone talks really loud, they dial with their speaker phones turned all the way up, people are constantly walking behind you and interrupting productive work. It was like trying to write music in a bus station. And for some of the female employees it was worse, especially if they were good looking. They were constantly pinged on by both military and other civilian personnel. Turn over among staff, particularly female staff, was quite high.
They also stifled productive work by layering byzantine access requirements and a continually more restrictive operating environment. Experimenting with new technologies was virtually impossible. You had to login to your workstation with a badge, so that meant people were constantly leaving their badge behind, making it difficult to get back on to the base. The politics were terrible. Incompetent civilian managers who would train in their equally incompetent lackeys. Excessive process, many times for the sake of process that added no real value.
Eventually we moved over with the research people. It was a lot quieter and more productive, but you never could completely escape the bus station office atmosphere. I have great respect for the job our service people do in every branch of the military, they really do amazing things. But I'd rather pin my hand to a desk with a bayonet than write code in another military office or try to maintain consistency in a programming team. The only way I'd do it is if the offices were off base.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
...a very large German owned company with a three letter name.
I actually got the job as an intern because they needed someone in the OS group who could "bridge the gap" between Solaris and Linux. At the time they were using SuSE 8 and Solaris 7. At the end of the internship they hired me, and I worked there for two years before they "reorganized". While things were iffy before, they were downright stupid after.
Post-hoc crap:
* The "secure" datacenter which we kept air force inventory control processes in was inside a cage - but the raised floor didn't have a cage.
* "secure" CAT 5 cable and fiber ran right along side the unsecured stuff - it was only a different color.
* They moved the sysadmin team to another building across campus. It was a good quarter mile walk between the buildings to reboot something.
* The loading dock used to let you into the datacenter without a keycard.
* the stairs used to let you into the secured or unsecured side.
* The elevator after the move was a constant fight. There was ONE elevator which went to the datacenter - but it was also the biggest elevator so all three other floors fought with the datacenter guys to use it. After they closed the stairs and the dock it wasn't uncommon to wait 15 minutes for a lift any time around 9am or 5pm.
After the reorg they gave the "UNIX/Linux" group a new leader who was this toolbox from Israel who knew all of nothing about how things worked. The open secret was that he was sleeping with the director. Within a year, everyone had left or transferred to a new group (including me) so he's the manager of a team of two. They also took Linux away from him and gave it to the windows group and the team is now "solaris legacy support". The other guy actually left the company for six months only to be fired from another hosting job, and since he didn't pay the company back for two weeks he forgot to tell them he was leaving, the only reason he didn't bail was because he owed the company money so he didn't want to rock the boat.
I was installing wireless gear in Athens Greece during August, 100+F 100% humidity. It was on a Greek military base.
Trying to mount some gear, I was standing on a 12' step ladder, which was on the roof of this barracks. The mount was at the edge of the roof and I'm hanging off it, one hand on the mounting pole, one hand on the device. Completely covered in sweat and grime and fumbling around with very small 1/4-20 screws, it was also dark.
Later on the same trip, I'm trying to do some coding to get this POS to work. I'm in the barracks (think cement shed), must be over 100F, sweat dripping onto keyboard. It's 9pm, my pass let me stay on base till 6, so all the military people are getting nervous and hovering over me. The contractors I'm working for are shouting at the military guys in Greek. So I have no idea what is being said, but they keep pointing at me. This is my last day in country and I get it to work or my company loses this account. It was nuts, but somehow found my zone and was done in 30 min.
Fun, yea, but didnt really want to do that again.
BTW, I went back 2 years later to upgrade, same shit, But worse this time, they started making threats against my family. After that I never answered any of their email or calls.
Try writing and debugging a code without a computer.
That's how I learnt programming. Horrible huh?
Once I had to program on a WINDOWS Machine...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
The worst environment I had to work IT in (granted, not programming, but a lot of similar processes and scripting) was in an old radiology room. It was on the outside of the building, with an emergency exit door that was not properly sealed. This was welcome during the summer months (it counteracted the 50F-ish AC - I tend to prefer a warmer room), but did nothing during the winter, with the -20F winds of the region blowing right through the crack.
Furthermore, the facility was undergoing extensive construction, and I was right at the heart of it. They were demolishing part of the old building (a large cement structure) at the time so they could put on a new wing. This meant there were jackhammers pounding the ground a good 20 feet from where I sat, or earth movers going back and forth. If I couldn't hear and feel the earth movers, my skin and hair was vibrating with the impact of the hammer.
That wasn't the worst of it, though. This organization was in a small town and culturally inbred like a chihuahua. I could count the men who worked there on one hand (out of maybe 150 employees total), all of which were doctors aside from myself and one other individual. Because we were not doctors, and we were IT, we got the (very) short end of the stick in terms of treatment from the largely-female staff. (Think: what happens in a family with multiple women, once a month?)
Finally, my boss was a hormonally imbalanced middle-aged woman who had been living with a boyfriend for the last decade who would neither marry her or stop sleeping around. She would come to work hung over almost every single day, and was cross and irritable until after noon. Furthermore, she got it in her mind shortly after I arrived that I was to be Eliminated (or so it seems): she would say one thing in a meeting, then countermand that instruction shortly thereafter in an email. It didn't matter which of the two things I did, it was still the wrong thing to do. And there was a slew of unspoken, irrational expectations which I also fell short on.
So glad I'm not there. Worse than being unemployed, certainly.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Had to teach progamming class at a tire plant. Our classroom was over the vulcanizing oven, so not only was it hot, but smelled of burnt rubber and sulphur. Just a little a taste of hell I never want to experience again.
Setting up a client/server retail installation for one of my clients.
First store I had extention cables from other stores to my server, and to one front computer at a time. Meanwhile i'm crawling on my hands/feet with construction still going on. Then they started painting and I had to remove everything.
Sadly, next installation wasn't any better (why they always scheduled painting/flooring for the same time as computer setup is just insane.) Just had the giant puddle of water in the center of the store where a floor was supposed to be.
So glad I mostly code, and rather leave setting stuff up to others.
* coding in a van on the way to a customer who was promised delivery (of the software, not of pizza)
* coding on a lorry while trying to balance the bloody laptop on one knee (OK, not actually coding but debugging the software running on the lorry's system)
* coding in the lobby of a cheap "hotel" in the middle of the night, because the customer was promised a bugfix for the next morning (at least they had a coke vending machine)
* coding in a laboratory with clean room standards because somehow the analytical software running there was acting up.
Yes, I love this job ;-)
(actually the above was at two different jobs)
None of the code I wrote was part of released code (so I felt a bit better about it's proprietary nature): I wrote test automation code and server-side code for mobile services.
The physical conditions were cushy (private office, etc.), but the mental anguish was pure horror: "Ohh! Your code has no bugs? Great fix these other people's bugs -- they can't find them... Oh dear, you had lots of bugs to fix last year, tsk, tsk: bad review for you."
I suppose some people thrive in an environment that rewards the political savvy to get other people to clean up their mess, but I don't.
There actually are a few good people there, doing decent research, but, from what I saw, very little trickled down to improve day to day development, or worse, it was misinterpreted and misapplied.
Of course, that's just my experience. No doubt some people like it there -- I just attribute my experience to a bad case of culture clash (That, and the "linux fish" on my car's bumper.)
In Liberty, Rene
It wasn't me, but I visited General Dynamics, Ft. Worth, in the '80s. The engineers desks were crammed together in the open bay of a big hangar. We took a tour of the simulator dome, where F-16 simulations were in progress. We had to step over a guy crouching on the floor with his keyboard and emulator. He was trying to work inside this dome with simulated yanking and banking going on, complete with sound effects, while people stepped over him.
Computers obey me.
This story isn't so much a coding horror story as it is a compiling horror story.
I had a math professor at college (who also taught COBOL) about the times he had to carry stacks of punch cards across campus in the dead of winter. Of course they had to remain in order so it was apparently very difficult to store them with rubber bands or in a bag (i can't explain that part, perhaps he made it up?).
Of course, the inevitable slip on the ice occurred one day, sending piles of cards scattering everywhere, ruining a major project he'd been working on. Unfortunately there was no beautiful woman who came to help him pick them up, resulting in kinky geek love. There was just bruised body and ego along with a borked project.
How does your fancypants 50 Mhz dev machine look now, eh? :)
-
Tags as of this writing are including "waaambulance" and "owned." Does the tagging system have trolls now or something? Additionally, since the genius who implemented them on this site decided it's better to pop up a fucking login box rather than display similarly tagged stories when clicking one, and because they seem to serve absolutely no purpose (many being inflammatory or simple hyperbole), I for one would delight in seeing the useless system stricken from slashdot forever. Count this as yet another vote to return to the classic interface, as well.
I refresh the front page several times daily and most of those reactionary or 'non-generic/mainstream' tags are deleted within hours by... someone... anyway.
Try coding in a cube next to an animal lover who would discuss in great detail with the vet, the wiggling worms in her 4th cat's feces.
...someone thought I was actually *RELATED* to Michael Bolton, that no-talent ass clown who started winning Grammy's.
I felt so bad for the poor people that had to sit near me on the plane home. No chairs there either.
Standing room only in an airplane - now THAT's rough!
I was once installing some hardware at Three Mile Island right after 9/11. It ended up that the hardware arrived unconfigured and without scripts installed.
Normally this would not have been a big deal and it would have taken at most a half hour to configure and install the scripts. I am not sure if it was because of 9/11 or if it was a union thing, but while I was at Three Mile Island, I was not allowed to touch my hardware. I was not allowed to connect my computer to it. I was not allowed to touch any computer connected to my hardware. I was not allowed to touch any wiring. I was not allowed to flip any dip switches. NOTHING.
In order to get this done I had to tell a guy step by step how to connect to the device, and how to configure it. Instead of uploading any scripts, they all had to be manually typed in with me telling him character by character what to type and then it all had to be debugged on the fly. Since this was part of a nuclear reactor (actually just monitoring it), saying anything like "we are just doing this on the fly" is really frowned upon.
This whole process was constantly interrupted with progressively more important people wanting to know what was going on and why we were doing it this way or thinking maybe we should wait until next year's down cycle...
Also, the whole process had to be completed in 24 hours, BUT the guy was union and did not work overtime, so later a NEW guy came in and had to be told what we were doing and why. I had to listen to him gripe and groan all night.
What should have taken 30 minutes, took like 15 hours.
GAH!!
I work with a fucking baboon, a creeper, some dude who has a bowel control issue and is constantly lets is rancid odors leak into our working air and the cast of Biggest Loser, the gaining years!
It was horrible, we had a hacker wreak havoc with the entire system and I had just spend all day trudging across the part, so I was dirty and sweaty. To make matters worse there was a velociraptor trying to get in the room all the while.
I was once 'invited' to a Barbeque at my boss's house on a Friday evening. When all of the programmers had shown up, he had us check out his new computer setup. We entered this little room with about a half dozen PCs.
He then LOCKED US IN and told us we could leave when the programming project we had been working on was finished.
Yes. You read that correctly. He kidnapped about 8 people.
I had no family at the time so I thought it was all great fun. But some of the married people were less excited to be forced to work the weekend. The conditions weren't terrible, but no one likes to work anywhere there is no choice.
No surprise but the upshot: Many programmers quit, boss was fired, company soon folded.
About ten years ago we had a military contract, workflow management web app for civilians working within one of the branches of the military.
For starters, we couldn't work at our office, we had to work at theirs. Their office (which right now is a hell of a lot nicer than what it used to be) was a 10-story or so hellhole somewhere in Alexandria, Virginia. Imagine two small office buildings surrounded by what seemed like 1/4 mile square of parking lots. If you took the metro, then you had to walk around the buildings because the "right" entrance for us to go through security was at the opposite end of the buildings.
During winter that little walk was brutal, because the way in which these two buildings, and some of the other structures across the street, were arranged created a natural wind tunnel.
The offices were broken into small cubicle islands, mine was big enough for a desk and a chair, which didn't really bother me since my real office at the company was a closet converted into a 3-desk office. There were three of us, two as web programmers, one as PM + DBA.
We had no control over either the database or the web environment, and we had to use their code repository. Every time we wanted to change the schema we had to sit through meetings in which seemingly half of the building took turns bickering over why a certain varchar column was 28 characters instead of 22 characters long.
On top of that, the people that ran the project from the customer's side kept rotating in and out of the job. They did a good job, so they got promoted and left, then the next person would be assigned and he/she would start changing things around to leave his/her mark until the next performance review cycle.
There was only one cafeteria to service both buildings, if you didn't race downstairs before 11:15 AM or so, and you didn't want to wait half an hour for your food, your only choice was to wait until 1:45 PM or so. The food was mostly good, but it was a bit expensive and it would take too long to go to any of the hundreds of lunch spots just a 1/3rd of a mile away in Alexandria.
It wasn't hell, but we could see it from there.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I was recently on a navy ship, working in the classified lab. It is kept at a cool 40F. It wouldn't have been a problem if anyone had let me know how cold it would be in there.
We had to make some patches while underway. The navy wouldn't let us put any media in any computers (even the unclassified computers that had unfiltered access to the internet). When I got the new files, it was the entire file. The time difference to home was about 12 hours, so I had to take my laptop with the original file, and sit it next to theirs to do a line by line, hand written diff (no printer allowed). I then took my hand written notes, and applied the patches once again. A 20 minute job ended up taking about 6 hours (cause they wanted it done NOW!).
The worst place I had to code is when I had to reprogram a microcontroller in place using a laptop while waste deep in sewage. We had to fix an issue and didn't have enough time to pull it out of the controller box and put it into a test box. So I coded and tested the patch on an emulator then trudged across in waders and types as fast as I could into the terminal window. Thank goodness it took the first shot. Other places we had to code micros... 110 degree utility shaft and a 20 degree roof in high winds. I love my office job now.
In God we trust, all others require data.
I had to write code to create a systems solution from requirements written by a group of marketing managers. The doc looked something like:
This place is infamous in Cambridge, and the rest of the world for the way it treats its staff. And not just this company, but is sister and acquired companies as it heads onwards in its quest for worldwide supremacy in the search market.
My web domain.
On a windows machine with - what do they call it - those double keystrokes enabled; 'e becomes e-acute. Couldn't turn it off either. Found out that there are lots of silly tokens in my preferred languages that way.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I once had to write code in punch cards. It filled 5 box's of cards at 10 pounds each and this was the pocket version!
Having to work in the cubical next to the guy who talks at 90dB. His job was to talk on the phone to support some sales people. Evidently he didn't understand that you don't have to yell for the people on the other end of the phone to hear you. Luckly I later managed to move to about 50 feet away from him. However, when he called the guy sitting on the other side of the cube wall from me, I could still hear him better than the person who was 6 feet away. It only made it worse that he was the kind of guy who couldn't give a yes or no answer. They all had to contian an intersesting story about his days at KU.
I believe the terms "shitty" and "American megabeer" are redundant.
I worked for a research facility out in the New Mexican desert for many years. It wasn't too bad until one of the teams farked everything up with a resonance cascade during one of their experiements. Damn alien sons of bitches... and then there were the marines... Horrors that you can't imagine.
I'll never go back. I've since landed a job with Aperture Labs working on a project called GLaDOS. Much better.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I once helped my brother modify some automation code which was running a slaughterhouse 'processing line'. Technically, we were in the next room, but still closer than I like to be.
Let's see. I was coming in to work and all the roads were blocked off. I parked a few blocks away and walked into work. When I got to the building, a deputy almost
whacked me. He told me to get in the office and stay there. Some nutbag had killed a policeman a few yards from the office.
We even debated whether the office windows were bulletproof.
That same year, we were locked in again when some nutbag decided to shoot up a bunch of classrooms.
This was more difficult than working with the cougar who kept talking about meeting me in motels near her house. I passed.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I was thinking about posting my war stories here, but after reading this I realize that I'm not in the same realm as some. Sorry, for your loss.
Freezing my ass off.
Forklifts, air compressors, air tools and loud metal working machines operating all the time.
And...a crappy chair
Get the smokers to empty and clean the ashtrays regularly. Whilst it won't solve the problem, it will help. If they refuse to do it then give them a hand by carelessly emptying them into (and around) the boss's office trashcan.
In a tent next to an artillery firing range (in use). Fortunately I could to stay at a hotel when the tornado warnings kicked in.
On several occasions I have had to make code changes while several miles underground in a coal mine.
The first time was really horrible because it was a start up and a lot of the niceties of the mine (proper drainage, an elevator to get in and out) were not in place, so I had to work while standing in gigantic puddles of muck with my laptop on the back of a mining machine. We had to go in and out in the same bucket they used to hoist the coal out of the mine. Not to mention the fact that the mine foreman was breathing down our necks the whole time.
The second time was a little better, but that only really meant that it was marginally less dirty and slightly safer (Though, the last day of that trip I didn't have to go underground because the ventilation system had issues and the mine filled up with methane, so go fig). This time I was there more to babysit, but that didn't make the experience any less miserable. I still had to stay in some backwoods motel, and I still had an equally as grumpy foreman constantly grilling me.
Soon after that I was interviewing at other companies and was able to get out without incurring black lung. I still get chills when I see TV ads for coal energy.
Last week my shade broke on a sunny day and caused a glare on my screen.
Then I found out we'd run out of mountain dew in the fridge and I had to walk downstairs to get more from the mail room fridge.
I wasn't coding, mostly doing inspections and updating the support design using this horrible buggy CAD software on toughbooks.
Except I'm in the (mostly) dark, breathing through an airstream helmet (with lovely huge battery to tote around all day), usually in a pool of water (underground is wet), above 500 m down. Toss in the fact that it's a uranium deposit (therefor a higher geothermal gradient) + any air that was getting pipped in was surface temperature (40C+), it got really nasty fast.
Still not as bad as the day they pumped the septic tanks in the underground mechanic bay. God, it stank for weeks underground if you got in any tunnels even remotely close to that place.
My worst environment was revising code on a UNIVAC 1230 in the late 1980s in a metal shack out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The source code had been lost years earlier, so one had to patch object code using toggle switches to enter data one bit at a time.
But it make this more challenging the tape decks were ex-Navy warship units - armor-plated and weighing over a ton. Unlike on board the ship, the drives were not bolted down to a metal deck, but just sitting on a plywood floor. Each tape deck unit had three tape drives that slid out. The kicker - you had to remember never to pull out more than one drive at a time, and to lock each in place when it was closed. Otherwise the armor-plated deck would tip over and crush you to death.
Oh, and there were rattlesnakes outside. The deadliest species - Mojave Greens.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I once coded in a frigidly cold Apollo era server room located underneath the pad B space shuttle launch pad. It was during winter break, so except for the security guard at the gate to the pad B grounds, I was the only soul around. It's either really crappy or really cool, depending on your nerd-level for these things.
No matter the physical environment, nothing is an intense and scary as the pressure that mounts above you as you attempt to code on a customer's premises, on production code, trying to find a problem you didn't cause and barely understand, with no connectivity and no source control and no opportunity for QA.
I don't care if this is personal time and you're gripping from the hotel WiFi. That contract brings in a ton of money and we in middle management will keep blaming techies and throwing them under the bus to cover our incompetence. Now get back to work! I've got hookers and blow to attend to:)
Sincerely,
--Your boss' boss
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
I worked in a 4.5 foot high cube, just high enough that you can't see over it when seated. The cube was at the end of the row next to two hallways.
Naturally my PC is located in the rear of the cube, so my back is to the entrance. To my right and rear is a hallway leading to the bathroom. To my left and rear is a hallway leading to the elevators. So pretty much zero privacy.
To my left front is the adjacent cube where my boss sits. The door to his boss's hard wall office is about 10 feet dead astern. The big boss's office (the CTO) is right beside it, about 15 feet behind me.
It was like Office Space with the addition that all the bosses were literally looking over my shoulder.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
For two weeks back in the 80s I wrote code standing up in an over-airconditioned server room, wearing a down jacket and hat and walking in place to keep my legs and feet warm, with earplugs to cut down the noise. The computer terminal was on a piece of scrap plywood placed across a gap between two of those giant old washing-machine size disk-pack drives. It was at a mortuary supply company.
I was the lead consultant on an industrial automation project. We replaced the old (mid 70's) hardware and assembler software with off-the-shelf hardware and all new software. I was warned at the beginning of the project that the original system was delivered three years late. The hardware was shipped to the client and the final software was completed on the factory floor, not far from a multi-ton drop press. I designed the control app to leave a trail of bread crumbs in a log file, so each time a problem occurred I could nail the cause. It took six weeks in that environment to finish the job. I knew going into the job that it is important to avoid getting "all done except for fixing the bugs." But I also knew that I had to allow for errors and practice defensive programming.
I have volunteered myself for one of the most difficult jobs. In these days of Internet piracy, someone has to constantly scan the Internet for violations of my company's copyrighted works. I have volunteered to constantly scan the internet for all potential copyright violations. Since I am the only person in my company with this charge, I am forced to work many long hours, both at work and at home. Since violations can be found on any site, I am often required to look at sites containing adult content. I am also required to read all posting on sites like Slashdot. My employer requires me to to this in addition to my other programming responsibilities. It is grueling work, but I guess someone has to do it.
Surely that is worse than anything yet posted.
Writing code in a SCIF sucks. You won't have Internet access and any code you write can't be taken out of the room unless there is a trusted download process in place (and even then, it isn't easy.)
Usually you are just patching code and debugging in a SKIF as opposed to writing tons of brand new software, but it still sucks.
How about sitting in a temporary trailer, in a parking lot, in Miami, in the summer, right in front of the door that had a spring not an automatic closer so the damn thing would bang everytime it closed, with people coming in and out constantly just because they liked our printer. The only consolation was the Cuban coffee shop next door. Now THAT I miss!
Obviously a masochist is doing a thorough job hunt.
Or a sadist in management looking to see what they can get away with.
The masochist says "Hurt me, hurt me" and the sadist say "No, I won't."
Developing / testing / implementing / commissioning HMI system in a steel factory.
HMI is also called visualisation. I displays what goes on in facility and provides means for Humans to give commands to control computers (PLCs) that run all the machinery.
I was sitting in a control room with operators that have been using computer I was trying to program for working with the facility. The control room was VERY busy as the facility was being "brought to life" gradually. The operators asked me often to let them use my [unfinished] system to operate some devices [fill some tanks with water for testing, check the temperature and flow of water, see if hardware regulators are functioning yet, move some piece of machinery, test a sequence of fail-safe procedures]. They have also been testing the stuff I have done so far and were suggesting changes that I was supposed to do so they could use those 24 or so large HMI screens to actually run the mill.
At least you could scroll using your mouse wheel!
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
The router worked fine on the bench; only acted funny when connected to the antenna on top of the building, on the wireless grid at that point. Had to debug the problem live to see it.
On my first business trip I went to Australia, left 90F weather for 45F. After 26 hours of travel I went right from the airport to the unheated warehouse where we were staging for a trade show.
Half of my equipment didn't show up so I had to recode my demo with the equipment that had arrived. The software package was buggy and if you did certain operations you'd lose your work.
The warehouse had 2 refrigerators, one with all beer. The other was all chocolate. /Ed
A serious entry to the question.
Working in Alaska we had an equipment failure at a microwave bounce station and I was the closest tech. I and a telecomm guy rode snowmobiles about 20 miles back to the site in practically balmy weather of only -10 deg f. However, the bounce station was on top of a 40 foot tower which was perched on rocky hill that rose out of the forest.
There was thermometer helpfully bolted one of the legs of the tower and it only went down to -25 f. It was colder then that.
We climbed to the top of the tower, where the wind was howling like a banshee, open the box... to discover a router that apparently had been missed when we run around upgrading all the equipment 5 years previously. One for which used proprietary embedded OS that I had no experience with. Fortunately, my boss did but she was on the other side of the state. So I jacked my serial cable in, called my boss on the radio, with my laptop randomly freezing and crashing in the cold, bitten by the Artic wind and with crappy static filled radio connection I laboriously reprogrammed the damned router frozen keystroke by keystroke. I took nearly two hours of hell to bring it back up but we did.
Gratefully we climbed down the ladder and prepared to journey home. The snowmachines wouldn't start. The details of fixing THAT is a tale for another thread.
*A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.*
This one time I had to work under heavy time constraints, in a night club, receiving fellatio, with a gun pointed to me head!
The whole operation the employer was running was a bit shady, but thankfully it worked out in the end.
Had to go spend the day at a client's once, to make some code changes. Couldn't smoke and there was no iced tea. Nearly died.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
I once had to write code for Windows.
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
Working in measurement automation (in C, LabVIEW is for wheenies).
Radiation sources, black sludge on the ceiling, vacuum pumps leaking oil and vibrating at close to 80 dB, one mercury spill is what comes to mind, but you get the idea. I'm lucky I only escaped with a temporary rash (I hope).
I was called mid-assignment in MI, by my boss who worked in TX, and told I was catching a flight to TN in 6 hours to write an Access 97 Application for our largest client.
There were few specifications other than make what they want, and, oh do it in 1.5 days or they're going to be pissed off and most of their need for it this time around will have passed. They chose me because I had experience with Access 97, unfortunately that experience had nothing to do with what the client wanted.
So I stopped at a bookstore and found a decent Access 97 book and hopped on the plane. The Client picked me up and we went to their temporary work site. I got rough specs for a reasonably simple registration information type database application that needed to be accessible from two workstations. They intended to use this application on their current registration and for future ones too.
They took me out to lunch and then I spent the next 14 hours cobbling together the application with them watching over my shoulder for 5 hours and the rest at a hotel on a crappy laptop. I went in the next morning, installed the application, let the users test it to make sure it did what they needed, then had them drop me back at the airport.
I only worked this job for another month after this incident (5 months total, and 5 months too long IMO) since almost every assignment was similarly crazy. Anyway, I don't know if the app continued to work for them at future engagements or not since I was gone by then, but I did get a few calls that I didn't answer or return from the Client contact over the following few months.
One of the wireless devices I needed to talk to in order to figure out what was going on had crappy serial port driver hardware for its debugging interface. It wouldn't drive a cable long enough to reach the base of the rooftop, too many transmission glitches to work right.
I once spent a summer at a folding table in the basement of a steel mill writing java code that needed to interface with a Sybase application server. On at least 3 occasions I witnessed a frog hop across the concrete floor from an external door toward the server room, then under that door. Makes one question a lot of things.
That reminds me of one of my jobs where I coded in a sun room for over a year. It was horrendously hot during the summer and I could barely see the screen from the sun glare. In winter it got very exposed and I'd sit there in my coat shivering. I don't know what I was thinking at the time. I'd never take a job like that now.
I had to work on a bug on some critical software on a small military plane. I had to drive through a bad snowstorm with the car full of equipment for a full day to get to the plane. The plane came in late and ended up losing it's hanger space. I was stuck on a metal chair outside the plane on the tarmac, in sub-freezing weather, using my computer for warmth. The power was being powered by a diesel generator that made thinking near impossible. I was told that, if I didn't have it fixed by the end of the day, I would have to fix it on the way to their assignment... in Bosnia! I worked late in the evening, freezing and without breaks, but finally got things straightened out. I hope to never go through something like that again.
Worst working conditions I've ever had to code in. Then again, never coded after that. Changed majors to English and never looked back.
Standing up, in a rebar factory without air conditioning at a specialized terminal running MS-DOS 5.1 while the rebar machinery was running in the Florida Panhandle during the summer.
I would spend hours out there diagnosing somebody else's software trying to get MS-DOS to hook up with a Win2K3 Active Directory (not exactly programming, but close enough).
I work for a defense contractor in Spain. I've been coding for 1.5 years in a crowded big place. Three industrial air conditioners working at my back makes the place even funnier. I've been ill ten times this last year and no one of my bosses gives a sh*t for me and i have to say i have too many bosses. The last time(that's today), my bosses told me they're going to buy me a jacket. They make funny jokes about me when I get cold and they use that place as meeting point where they decide anything about everything. A hell of place. I'm scared about losing my credibility for being ill so many times.
While I never did this personally there are plenty of projects that require embedded systems programming in field camps in Antarctica. You've been sleeping in a small tent for the last few months and you program in a slightly larger tent or right out in the middle of no where under some pretty extreme cold temperatures.
My view of the base post was displayed with a Collabnet ad; and I assumed the developer pictured, was the author.
1993, At Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio. My company was building an early version of a ticket-selling ATM... you could get your tickets for the park from the machine. Several afternoons I was there doing maintenance on the machines - as people were leaving, the park closing, etc. When we would do maintenance, we would turn the monitors around so we could see them from 'inside' the machine, where we were sitting (in the hot summer weather, inside a small ticket booth with a couple of computers). It looked remarkably like a garbage can when you did that.
As I was sitting there debugging problems, people would throw paper, gum, and yes, once even a half-eaten ice cream cone through the hole the monitor left. It would land squarely in my lap. One group of kids even discovered I was in there and thought it was 'funny' to throw stuff at me.
This is true. Bush really helped sell India nuclear power plants without having to sign the non-proliferation treaty. They love him here. I'm just a US coder in India on vacation. They love Obama but India is the only country I've been in where saying you're American doesn't instantly result in disgust. In fact, I even see college students that don't disguise themselves as Canadians here. Unprecedented!
Working in measurement automation (in C - LabVIEW is for wheenies).
Radiation sources, black soot on the ceiling (especially near the vents), vacuum pump leaking oil and vibrating at close to 80 dB, one mercury spill, and other things come to mind, but you get the idea. I'm lucky I only had a temporary rash (I hope).
Since then I've moved to code less and make more experiments (science works, bitches!) but the environment is pretty much the same. Did you know it takes an Act of Congress to build a new government building?
I love my job.
I once wrote an interface to a warehouse inventory program, where I had to work in the warehouse on a sawhorse table and no chair. But, the *worst* part was the forklifts flying by behind me driven by forklift operators who were keeping coolers of grain alcohol punch in the warehouse. I went to lunch with them and the waitress brought them "their usual", two shots of bourbon and a beer.
In college, I got a job as a summer intern at a small R&D company, writing code to run reports against the company proprietary database (row counts, histograms, ... simple stuff, but they hadn't written such a thing.)
It was a small privately-owned company, and they really didn't have a spot for me to work near any of the full-time developers. So they put me in the computer room (they called it a "data center" but I couldn't call it that today.) I wrote code on a folding table where the monitor too up most of the space. The keyboard kind of hung off the front of the table by about half an inch - it was that close. I developed RSI from that.
At least I didn't have a problem with glare, because there were no lights near me. So I worked in semi-darkness, with the monitor brightness turned down so it wasn't too bad.
I worked there for about 6 weeks.
Bah... at my hob we had to write dent code on marble slabs using wet tissue paper needles, while our masturbation-addicted boss sat there submerging us in something a lot less nice than lava. That was our drink too, I would've killed for a shit beer.
About 10 pm in a tent.
You can hear and see Burning Man from 5 miles distance.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I'm not a programmer, and programming for me is just means of getting my science done. However, I wonder why noone has mentioned sleep deprivation yet. I agree that there is a point where lack of sleep actually seems to help, or at least doesn't matter. But then, there is this second line, after which staying awake and doing demanding mental effort is just a pure torture.
I have various experiences with harsh coding (and, in general, doing science) conditions, but nothing comes close to that.
j.
I've certainly had worse *gigs* (ie. consulting for Microsoft etc), but the worst *working conditions* I ever had to write code it was Citibank's near freezing server farm. There were two monstrous cooling units directed right towards the desks they had us on for some reason. It was the middle of Summer in New York, and I was working in a suit, sweater, full length winter coat, and wearing a stocking cap and ski gloves with the fingers cut out so I could code. The only heat came from the occasionally fried NT box. I suppose the situation was made somewhat worse by the fact that I had been mistakenly hired as an engineer when I was a programmer - though that was somewhat alleviated by the fact that the gig (automating the roll out of about 10,000 workstations) was complex enough that it did in fact require the work of a programmer (at least according to the 5 engineers they'd hired previously who had been trying to do it with a batch program. But to run the whole shebang off of a CD but still have a GUI, I had to do most of it in VB3. This was in like 1998.
Ah you kids. Everything is just an oceanic optic fiber cable away.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I got your back buddy. I love how the responses are always, "Why didn't you try the most obvious thing that would have come into anybody's mind trying to solve that problem?"
I kind of wish they'd phrase it more like, "So what was it about the problem that was not reproducible under more a more controlled environment?"
"Old man yells at systemd"
My worst experience... a 36-hour debugging stint ... On a production test floor in Taiwan.
0) I was the vendor, and the second source -- I had no respect.
1) It was a "clean room" -- so I had to dress in an (unwashed) bunny suit... it was rank.
2) This was in the center of a test floor -- the noise pressure level was constant and about the that of a buzz saw... it was noisy.
3) I had to communicate remotely with a colleague -- and audio was almost impossible even with headphones I had to shout sometimes to be heard and so did she... relationships were strained.
4) The remote connection was horribly slow & slowed down my local interface too... It was agonizingly slow.
5) The air vent was right under my feet. At least I was successful in moving the workstation a little ways away from the vent so that I could stay somewhat warm... It was cold.
6) After ~12 hours my colleague just gave up and went to bed. After she came back & started debugging remotely, I went and crashed in a vacant meeting room. I had to stack the chairs up to get a couple of hours... I had little sleep.
7) No coffee allowed on the test floor... It was inhumane.
So for all that we still couldn't get one of the key things we wanted to get done done... we left the job half done & I had to fly home.
We found out a couple days later that the real problem was that our software was not the issue, but it was a hardware design issue that was causing our device to not get good contact. After that was fixed everything worked.
For all our "Heroic" effort, we didn't get the contract, but I later got a management gig with my company... And later I got a really decent job with my (then) customer. So, everything worked out OK in the end, but it sure was horrific going through all of that...
One of the locations we had to do consulting work at was a very small office. The phone wiring was located in the bathroom. When computers came along, that became the server room too.
We tried to schedule server maintenance when a terminal was open, but that didn't always work out. Going back into the server room after it's use was horrible. At least we were billing by the hour, so we were able to charge them for detention time.
The building was the research wing of a nationally known foundation. I'm not going to name them because I actually like the organization and admire their work. HOWEVER.....
When they bought the ventilation system for the researcher's fume hoods it was spec'd stainless steel with a draining gradient to prevent pooling of condensation. What was actually built was a sort-of-level duct system made from the same galvanized steel components as the HVAC system.
To save money on duct hangers, they stacked the fume ducts with the HVAC ducts, HVAC on the bottom. The guy in the basement was researching plant DNA, and for complicated reasons he used to boil skunk cabbage in fuming nitric acid from time to time. When he did this in the summer, the airconditioning in the HVAC ducts cooled the whole duct stack and the mercaptan-laden acid condensed into puddles on the more-or-less level bottoms of the fume ducts. Eventually, near the end of one hot summer, the acid ate through both layers of steel and toxic fumes from dozens of research experiments in six stories of lab building were comingled with the building atmosphere. The HVAC system was on a duty cycle and the fume exhaust system was on constant fan, and things got real ugly real fast; people vomiting and being sent to the hospital, itchy, burning eyes, the whole nine yards.
To fix the problem, the entire building HVAC was ripped out, stem to stern, over the course of a month or so. This left me (on the fifth floor) with no AC for the central computing system (a DEC mini that blew quite a bit of heat). With no external wall (since the new library wing got built over it) I had to chop a hole with a hatchet into the wall leading into the main hallway and install a household window air conditioner in order to get the payroll and other critical jobs run. This put the hallway at 107 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity like the amazon rainforest, and the computer room in the high 80s to low 90s depending on how often people sneaked in to cool off. It also necessitated turning all the lights and conveniences off because the AC unit overloaded the available electrical circuits.
You'd think that was bad enough. But actually it was OK once we got used to it; I ran extension cords and 20mA loops out to the roof and set a couple VT100s up there so my cow-orkers and I could work on the roof in the (relatively) cool breeze in t-shirts. We had smokes and tall drinks with umbrellas in them, it was OK as long as it wasn't raining. It was worse by far for the scientists who had to continue working in stuffy, unventilated labs and offices (did I mention that nobody stopped working for any of this?).
But the months dragged on, and the HVAC reconstruction did as well. Other crises came and went and various stumbling blocks were overcome, but in the middle of a freezing Philadelphia winter we had no heat but that generated by our trusty DEC mini! Since the building circuits were (still) inadequate, electric heat was reserved for offices and labs without heat-generating computer systems. I personally cannot type with gloves on, I had to periodically escape to the heated wings or rub my stiff fingers over the PDP's exhaust fans so I could keep coding. This was while re-writing the database software for a 12-million-object live database... you could see your breath in the computer room.
Nearly a year passed before the last wall was sealed up and the HVAC/fume systems were pronounced sound. During the course of the demolition, several walls that I had drilled and sleeved for cables were taken down, and when they were mortared back up the mason for some reason carefully separated each wire bundle into separate ethernet and 20maLoop cables, laid one down every foot or so into the mortar bed, and laid block over them. When you entered the wiring closet, the wires were growing out of the wall like bright blue and grey grass, over about a ten-square-foot area. It was dumbfounding. I discovered this when communications starting failing everywhere... the li
cubicle
20 days?! Stop complaining, dick. People do that kind of work all the time for years for minuscule pay. I'm sure you will go back to sipping java and browsing for porn ion no time.
Ha. I have a great story. My first programming job. $8.50/hour. In an office that had a stink from the previous tenants lettin their dog run around in the offices (complete with circular stains on the carpet). One of the bosses lived in the office on a couch in the back so the one working bathroom doubled as his own bathroom. So the place smelled like un-showered-guy + dog piss + unclean washroom.
I was the only girl among 5 other guys. The one washroom was not washed the whole time I worked there (over a year) and was getting pretty 'fuzzy' on the floor. No water machine so they expected you to get water from the washroom (I brought my own).
The computers and desks were nice... but I had a leak in the ceiling that would run down the wall behind my desk right where all the wires were.
My desk was FACING a huge window with no curtains so I had to put up cardboard and a blanket to block the sun.
Heat was sketchy in the winter and the only air-conditioner was blowing into the boss's office.
The one good thing I can say about that job is I gained a lot of experience in several different programming environments (including for blackberry), and the lead developer was hyper critical so I learned fast to write good code.
Ahhh memories. I love my current job.
I shared a windowless office for a couple years with a 75 year old 'employee' who stopped talking to me after he found out i voted democrat. I'm not sure what he was hired to do, but he spent all day trading stocks on his cell while giving me suspicious leers as he whispered into the phone. When he wasn't trading he slept at his desk. He also would stock pile the free lunch they gave out every wednesday and bits of rotting food would emanate from his desk and space. he'd also work the weekends to take advantage of the lunch the company would buy for employees who'd come into to do actual work. i wore earplugs or headphones all day, to avoid the distracting sounds of candy sucking, burping, and snoring. he also would print out reams and reams of paper for his stock charts every evening, which was funny since the department head was such a stickler for recycling printer paper. there's so much more i could write about but i'd need 5 more cups of coffee. i've since left the place and heard he got fired in a recent round of layoffs. good thing.
I spent a week at a customer's cable TV plant - they kept it so cold the people who worked there sat in sleeping bags all day. I hadn't brought any warm clothes at all (it was 100F outside) - I had to quit about 2:30 every day
I've heard the term "you can feel it in your bones" and in this case you could - my bones would ache for an hour after I had gotten back out in the warm
Did you say Java?
Just finished 3 weeks of RPG III training I've got a Job in a Truck Factory... I was assigned to maintain the Imports (Foreign trade) System... The first day, after being introduced to the rest of the staff, Two Manager (Foreign trades manager and Factory manager) called me because the system wasn't working, they sitted behind me and did'nt leave until the system produced the desired customs documents necessary to retrieve some engines from the customs deposit... It was 2 am when the printer printed the last page... That was my first day ... I was 19... Everybody I asked for help replied me "It's your problem boy..." I still wonder why the hell I didn't change career back then.
Having to work sitting in a datacenter must rate as one of the worst environments, especially when there's no tables or chairs and you have to stand up all day in a room that's either very hot or very cold.
Datacenters are designed for computers, not humans, humans should never need to enter them except to replace hardware... thats why serial consoles and console servers were invented, unfortunately lots of places like to run boxes with video hardware (ie workstations) as servers.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I had to code ADA will sitting in a rolled up newspaper in the bottom of a septic tank. I had to be at work at 10:15pm half an hour before i had to go to bed so it was a mandatory 24.5 hour day, and i had to pay the company for the privilege to work there. Oh yeah, my boss would murder us in cold blood each evening before we knocked off.
'nough said :)
I was in Croydon once for a few weeks. Oh man it was awful.
"I recently had to write code in a hot dusty room for 20 days with temperatures near 107F (~41C); having nothing to sit on; a 64 Kbps inconsistent internet connection; warm water for drinking and a lot of distractions and interruptions.
What were you doing coding at Burning Man?
'Twas my thought too -- "So why'd you have to do it up there?" not "Why didn't you take it down first?"
Maybe I've just seen too many weird things that only misbehaved in the field..
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Once had to fix software on machines in a chicken processing factory in rural Arkansas. The PCs had to have special screens around them so chicken feathers wouldn't get sucked in to the fans.
My "equipment" consisted of a commandeered (available due to lay-offs) 8088 IBM PC with a IBM/370 terminal controller card which I hacked in assembly in order to connect to the COBOL centric Mainframe for storage, and used IBM-BASIC to create a complete CAD/CAM GUI interface, and used paper tape I/O devices to transfer data (the only media that would survive there). Now the interesting part, that was what I did for "fun" during my off hours, just trying to "improve" things on the factory floor for others, before I even thought to became a programmer! That being said, you should have seen the conditions of my actual "paid" job... but then I wasn't programming so its off topic for this particular "ask Slashdot". 8*}
umm. perhaps i'm missing something, but why didn't you use a longer cable?
Sitting on a four-minus-one legged chair; in front of a massive 25 year old, 100db computer. But, the people there where very friendly.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I have to write code for Sharepoint.
I was a Y2K consultant and they put me in a small room in the back 8x6 with 2 other consultants, we each had a monochrome terminal and we were doing IMS and Cobol reports. Then we got to the main subroutine, over 40,000 lines of glorious speghetti that looped through with every keystroke. Then we got to the Fortran, and then the assembler. They still had a punchcard reader in the operations area. I'm talking crazy for 1999. Felt like 1969...
Once I had to code a trojan while having a gun pointed to my head and a girl between my legs giving me a blowjob... Oh wait! that was the Swordfish movie...
You had me at APL!
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia from 06-08 as an ICT (Information Communication Technology) Specialist / Education Volunteer. I had two primary projects - one was to teach software programming to students at the Gambia Technical Training Institute (GTTI) in Kanifing (which was a whole boatload of problems, let me tell you - just try teaching programming in a computer lab - WITHOUT WORKING COMPUTERS! hah! yeah, that's what I had to deal with for an entire semester, to say nothing of the intermittent electricity, crummy virus-ridden workstations, and students who classified as "advanced" by knowing how to use Microsoft Office applications.
anyway.
my second project was to create population statistics collection software for the Gambian government's Office of the National Population Secretariat. I decided to write the software using Java with RMI over SSL using a PostgreSQL back end, with a Swing front end. problem was, I didn't have a computer - last thing I thought I'd do in a rural West African country was to write software, so I didn't bring my laptop.
so I built one from spare parts at GTTI and brought that back to my place. it wasn't much, but it's what I used to start development on the software for the first 4-5 months until I could coerce another Volunteer who was visiting America to courier my laptop back with her, which she graciously did.
so then I had my laptop. but working conditions still weren't very good, in particular the heat (got upwards of 120 Fahrenheit in the hot seasons), all the fine particulate sand that blows everywhere and gets into everything electrical (especially with fans sucking it in the way it does), the intermittent electricity (thank you laptop battery and voltage regulator, surge protector, and hackneyed grounding setup!), NO internet anywhere near my place (I had to walk a couple miles to get to the nearest net connection, where I'd do my research, download files and whatever to a USB flash drive at a whopping 6-10k per second, and then walk home, clean the viruses off my flash drive that it had picked up at the internet shop (all running cracked copies of Windows without virus scanners, of course), and continue my development. Until I hit my next roadblock, at which point I'd do it all over again.
on the plus side, I didn't have anyone looking over my shoulder telling me how to write the software, which was really nice 'cause I got to try my hand as a software architect - think I did a pretty good job with it all.
by the end of my service, I had gotten the software to work, and work well - of course, the government office I was working for had neglected to follow my instructions to procure a server for the software to run on until the last week of my service (and even then it only happened because my APCD pulled strings with the Vice President, to whom she was related, to get the computer purchased). still, it was only enough time for me to install the software and then fly back home to the US. we never did pilot launch the client applications, sadly....
A Volunteer replace me there as I understand it, but he's not a software engineer and although I've offered to assist from here how I can, I'm fairly certain the project fell apart.
Oh well, c'est la vie.
if you wanna check out the software I wrote, search for "Population Tracker" on Sourceforge. or rather, here's a link: http://poptracker.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/poptracker/
Did Y2K testing for oil rigs and ships in the Middle East. The daytime temperature was 50 deg C, so the deck plates were at around 80 deg C or higher (water sizzled when it hit the metal). Was testing controllers for pumps, cranes, navigation equipment, everything. They had to shut down the rig or anchor the ships for the tests, so it was critical we get as much testing as possible in the shortest amount of time to minimize lost production, so there were 3 of us running from system to system to get the tests done at each location. Two critical systems of the hundreds that we tested failed, so I don't begrudge the time or conditions. We were just happy that nothing blew up or ran aground at the end of the year. [NOTE: I was there just for a couple of hours each time. The folks who work there were on those decks all the time].
I once had to debug a system on a computer WELDED to the wall in a ventilation shaft. This was a production computer handling access to the building. It was for some obscure security-reason put in the ventilation shaft.
It was cold as hell, and this was an old msdos 4.0 box so I had to use edlin.
I actually ruined the computer when I was done, because something shortcircuited when I unplugged the screen that I hade brought up there.
The company wasn't that big, so they managed without the computer, but it was still a bit embarrassing.
Constitutional eligibility seems to no longer be an issue in this country.
(edit) wait, why is my "confirm i'm not a script" word 'concede'..??
Speaking of water, I once had to debug code while crossing the ocean aboard Noah's Ark (yup, the original one). Talk about your godawful smells.
Holy S**t!!!
I worked for a company that moved to a new building (rented space) and needed some work done putting together offices and a server room. The work was done wrong, so the landlord put us up in a temporary space that was almost completely unfinished.
A dozen of us had to work with our desks facing a large (untinted) picture window with no window coverings. We were all in one large area with the sales guys yammering on the phone all day and every chair wheel and pen drop was easily heard on the concrete floor.
To make matters worse, the large air conditioning unit directly above me on the ceiling had absolutely no ductwork. So all of the cold air shot out the side of it and down the wall of windows...directly on to me! I wore fingerless gloves and a jacket all summer to stay warm and downed Tylenol every day to deal with the intense headaches caused from staring into the sun all day. Unfortunately, this was a job where I also put in twelve hour days on a regular basis.
I have to maintain a massive communications system written in C++ using the Agile Methodology. The Development environment is Visual Studio [which is not so bad] but the target execution environment is HP Integrity Series running HP-UX so we're cross compiling.. and HP-UX's cross compiler is crap. And since we're not using Microsoft's compiler that means no intelligent code features like "all references" "definition" etc.
And it's written following the (fr)Agile Methodology.
Would someone like to donate me a few semi loads worth of comments and documentation?
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Congratulations, you just discovered that you are a proletarian and that you are being exploited by the capitalists!
Standing up (no chairs) wearing full dust control and safety gear (disposable jumpsuit, shoe covers, cap over hair, rubber gloves, mask, goggles and hardhat). Must have escort at all times. No network connection. Water, bathroom, nearest area with cellphone on other side of checkpoint, so must remove all gear, then suit back up to take a break. The only consolation was that there was actually a good reason for all that , however unpleasant.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I once had to write code while in a partitioned penthouse located atop a building in West Hollywood. On the other side were Rose McGowan, Jessica Alba and Christina Aguilera, who had been partying hard all night while imbibing an assortment of aphrodisiacs. They kept banging on the adjoining door - begging to be let in so they could acost me. Sadly, somehow I still managed to finish that contract coding aassignment.......
I once had to code in a twin engine airplane as two thunderstorm systems converged on us. I asked the pilots for as much time as they thought was safe. I found the bug, re-tested, returned to base and taxied almost to the hanger before the air turned opaque with rain. It was actually very enjoyable.
You might want to take a personal day to coincide with Take Your Daughter To Work Day. I hear it can get kind of hectic there.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
LUXURY....!
I had to write BASIC on an abacus (in binary!!) in the middle of a ballpit, outside, while it was snowing!
I currently code in a warehouse dark, damp, warm cave with about 100 other people. All of the other people are actually in visual effects and play wow or watch the stock market all day. Whats the bad:
No light = eye strain = headache
Warm damp air = sickness breeding ground for everything.
Did i mention the tour groups that come in bumping the chairs and shouting and all? Oh and the movie room is right next door all day movies playing full volume. I'm just glad it doesnt rain too often, but when it does drip drip drip on my head. And this is assuming that the power spikes stay in check. There more but the keyboard is too sticky today
I had to write code while walking [to school] thru the snow uphill both ways!
The tool cage on the loading dock of a trucking company in winter with 5 degree weather inside when they opened the doors every 10 minutes.
And
Working with the boss that fired the entire IT staff because someone locked a file while writing to it.
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
i used to develop some software for truck board computers so programming and debugging inside a garbage truck was pretty much the worst working condition i had.
i cannot decide, though, what was worse, working in a garbage truck while the driver collects garbage through the city or working in a standing sewage truck with all windows open and the driver eating his lunch.
all in all it was a pretty shitty job.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Masochistic programmer seeks sadistic administrator for dirty debugging sessions.
Me: hate PERL and shell scripting and really don't wanna mess around with the kernel
You: Linux admin/enterprise system architect (both a +)
Us: Debugging 40 year old bank software in Detroit. Changing linux to show us where things install to without having to search a goddamn database or hit google or whatever. Writing ATI display drivers for X11.
I get a kick out of some of the comments here where people are making stuff up, but for the rest of you... Why in the world would you put up with that shit? Get some self esteem! No job is worth some of that, and if you are any good at what you do you can always find other work. There is *always* a shortage of smart people who can get stuff done!
In my previous job i had to migrate some servers. The shitty party was that the place where they put the servers was some sort of hole high up in the wall, like an air duct entry without the air duct, which could only be reached by standing on the tip of your toes on a table. It was in the midst of July, and no airco was available.
I changed jobs.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
I once had to hack into a government server with just a laptop in 60 seconds, and a guy pointing gun to my head, and girl giving me a blow job... .. and John Travolta was standing across me and laughing.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
This thread is kind of silly. Even on your worst day, you probably still aren't:
1. Dodging gunfire, war, or lawlessness
2. Hungry or living off of what you can find
3. Working dangerous manual labor that is likely to kill or maim you
4. Making less than, say, $10 a day
Which puts you firmly among the best working conditions in the world.
... we had two coders to a computer, we were that strapped for resources. When the first one collapsed/died from exhaustion the second would take over the keyboard.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It was here or thereabouts. If you follow the link, then you're looking at a loading facility at a coal mine. My job was to do GW-BASIC programming on an IBM PC XT. This was before the Internet got popular, so I had to do the debugging on site, in the middle of winter. My body and the PC were the only source of heat in the silo, so I was wearing a parka, along with ski gloves when I wasn't actually typing. The nearest motel was 90 miles away, and I had to be on-site whenever a train came through, usually in the middle of the night. Outside of the administrative offices, you had to wear steel-toed boots, and a hard-hat whenever you were outdoors. Everything had a thin layer of ultra-fine coal dust on it, which wanted to contaminate your food and drink. The next tower over had a guy who looked to be well past the mandatory retirement age. His job was to manually operate the equipment that loaded the coal cars (my job involved automating his job). If he overfilled a car, they stopped the train and he went out with a big shovel to remove the excess. I only saw him do that once while I was there, but it made me glad to be doing my job and not his.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
At least you had a needle and toilet paper! I had to sharpen my fingernail and write it on the cooling lava as it formed basalt! Whiner!
Hah, at first I thought you must have been on my team, but there were only three of us, and none were named Johannes (and there were no cigars)
Similar setup to your story -
At customer site. There was a major contractual dispute from day 1, AND the CTO who had signed the deal on the project was fired the week before we arrived. Everybody at the company from the QA guys, to the engineers, to top management hated our guts (they hadn't deployed our software yet, so it was mostly out of fear for their own jobs for the IT guys, and from management it was because they thought they'd been fucked for paying half a million dollars for a system that we had only half-built - because of course, our sales guy had lied flagrantly to them and refused to let me meet with them before the project started).
The Chairman of the company would regularly walk into our office (shared by our entire team) and re-task my engineer with re-writing our entire Java software platform in C# (which he described as ".NET") - because he had read that .NET was much better than Java. This engineer was a skittish guy, so I then would have to spend a half hour straightening him out and calming him down every time this happened.
In addition, we had twice daily project status meetings staffed with a "project manager" whose only job was to send a complete transcript of the meeting to the CEO (different fellow from the Chairman, and of course, they were both in charge of the project on their end, and would regularly issue opposing instructions). After every project meeting the CEO would come barging in and start berating me for our slow progress on getting the system up and running.
Oh yeah, I was supposed to be the lead developer in addition to managing the project, which meant I was doing all my programming between 5pm and midnight every night.
Their IT staff took over 6 weeks to provision a simple test server for us (this was intentional, of course, as their IT team was trying to make us fail), so we had to sneak in our own Linux box for test purposes.
Another nice catch - we had to replicate a module of their existing system, when there was no documentation of how the module worked, and one contractor who had built it who knew how it worked - and his entire $250,000 a year consulting gig relied on him having sole possession of that knowledge. And part of our job was to extract the information from him and replicate and document this module, so they could fire him.
All of this while my mother was hospitalized for surgery for stage 4 colon cancer (she did not die while I was on this project, thank god, because it probably would have pushed me over the edge - though she did pass away several years later).
Worst 4 months of my life, I have to say. Way worse than the first summer programming job I had at the age of 18 where I had to work in the server room.
Postscript:
The VP of Engineering for this company, not surprisingly, passed away from a heart attack a few years later, I heard. He was in his mid-thirties. The contractor with the $250k a year gig was promoted to a full-time gig as VP of Research and Development, paying even more. After about a year he was fired and then sued into the ground by the company because he insisted on trying to charge them royalties for the software he wrote.
And the engineer on my team actually went off to work for the Chairman's new company in California. Apparently some people like being abused.
I think the people EA games had it worst with 80+ hour end less working weeks.
I did a control system for a covered skid that contained three natural gas compressors. They had to pump it up to 3600 psi (245 atmospheres). It was for fueling vehicles. The pressure had to be that high so that the tank would equalize to a reasonable pressure / gas content in under 10 minutes.
It was 40 degrees F in the winter and 95 degrees F in the summer. Took about 6 months so I got to feel both. It also reeked of natural gas, was greasy, oily, etc. There were metal shavings and fumes from all of the machining and welding.
I also worked a similar gig off and on for about two years involving a circuit-board drilling operation. Imagine walking through a factory floor with acid baths and various machinery to work on scoring machines and massive computer-controlled drills. The drills were pretty serious (60krpm) and they each had a 1.5 ton block of granite just to dampen vibration. To this day, it's the only computerized machine I've worked on that required a pneumatic hook-up.
Here's a photo of the drills from the internet: http://www.cerambus.com/equip/images/4-MK%205%20DR.JPG
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
The area I'm in has a bit of a fly problem. As in I've bought a few venus flytraps, and they're thriving quite nicely. Still plenty of flies though.
I actually had a coworker tell me once that working on Maui sucked, because "everyone took off and went windsurfing at 2:30".
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day, and pay the owner for permission to come to work, and when I get done, my manager would kill me and dance about on my grave singing Hallelujah.
And you try and tell the young coders today that and they won't believe you!!
I wrote code in a moving vehicle in the middle of the desert in a moving Jeep over rough terrain. It was 115 degrees out and the Jeep AC only barely worked, and any benefit was canceled by the rack of servers in the back. At night, it was 95 degrees and it felt *nice*. This was during a test and debug session for one of the DARPA grand challenges.
I still consider this better working conditions than writing credit union software in PL1 in a cube farm, however...
...to break "the code" while John Travolta's thug held a gun to my head and some chick gave me a blow job!!
I was on a DARPA Grand Challenge Team (autonomous vehicle), and all members of the team would frequently code on the go, laptop on knees, sitting in the passenger or back seat of the vehicle as it ran autonomously. Others did it more often, but I did it twice. Once was on an unimproved (dirt) desert road. The road was full of ruts, the temperature was probably 110F, and there were six servers in the back of the SUV generating their own heat and fan noise, etc. And of course, the whole team is waiting for you to get your fix in as the sunlight is fading. The other time was on a prepared slalom course as the vehicle weaved this way and that. Autonomous vehicles are not known for the smoothness of their steering or acceleration. That time, we had twenty minutes on the test track and the code fix had to be in before we got kicked off. I'm not complaining - it was a great project to work on. Though each instance was short duration, I wouldn't want to code under more adverse conditions.
Standing in a puddle of dilute Nitric Acid, next to machines handling glowing-hot bars of steel, in an environment where every horizontal surface was covered in pitch-black, razor-sharp slag dust. I had to buy new shoes, and black stuff came up every time I coughed for a week or so. Steel mills may not be the worst possible place to work, but they're pretty awful.
...were the words that caught my attention while deploying an app I wrote for the telemarketing dept. Apparently someone snaked another guy's prospect. A blade was brandished but the security guard broke it up before someone actually got stabbed. First clue to be careful should have been the armed security guard, right?
I've done that.. The guy at the company was LASLO from real Genius. He acted like him, talked like him and chain-smoked so badly the room had a haze like an opium den and you could wipe any monitor with your finger and get a brown goo.
Super paranoid, He swore that X-files was based on real files at the FBI, kept talking how he is being watched and was abducted.
2 weeks later I told the client, I cant do this....
Suprisingly, they were expecting it. I was the 10th contractor they hired, many lasted 2 weeks, the best was 4 weeks, worst was gone in 6 hours.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I wrote code (bug fixes) on the production floor of a tire factory in Charlotte NC in the Summer. Horrible in so many ways.
Look, it's trying to think - Albert Rosenfield
Read this post full screen with diagrams and photos
As I tend toward fleeting obsession, and writing up this account of my poor work experience at UnnamedCompanyXXX hits the spot in the exact way that I only wish editing my resumé did (as Joey Cameau puts it, resumé writing seems largely an exercise in "listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least") what follows is a rather long explanation. For the short answer, just scroll to the image at the bottom. (The forum may crop the image, so use your browser to view the full image if you must.)
I'm hoping some day to find enough interesting artifacts from my work there (like a graph I built of the model schema) to make a really bitchin TDWTF submission, but to directly answer your question: It would seem from my research (which was quite painstaking given that that company's idea of revision control was a stack of CD-R'd ZIP archives of their Java Servlets project directory) that the original hacker to build their web-based business coordination platform understood relational databases and data access abstractions.
He or she wrote Hibernate XML model schema (a technology I thoroughly enjoyed learning to use) with logical relationships between different models, and when I ran the graphing program I wrote (produced a GraphViz DOT graph, which was transformed into SVG and then fed into ZVTM) that model schema formed very cogent, logical constellations showing at most two or three individual constellations -- everything else was well connected and sane.
The later person(s) to work on their platform, however, had no understanding whatsoever of databases, SQL, or Hibernate (I didn't know about Hibernate either, but I learned.) The "holes" I mentioned were in fact new unformalized relationships in the model schema: the programmer(s) had actually added fields like "employeeName" to, say, the Project model, and employeeName was actually a numeric key corresponding to the model called Resource, which due to the lack of documentation, evaded me for some hours as actually meaning freelancers who we may call on or have called upon in the past. Now you might even think that it was a good thing that one of the clueless hackers in between the first hacker and myself thought "employee" was a more intuitive term for this role, but in fact Employee was another model altogether! Extremely confusing!!!
The reason their system was even ailing to begin with was because some hacker(s) had actually written database queries without any SQL -- they simply pulled (often many copies of) every instance of a certain type of model in the database into the servlet task, and then filtered them down to whatever subset it was that they wanted in Java-land. A similar sort of reach-around was employed to bridge relational connections between different models without taking advantage of the programming abstractions for those either.
The first couple of weeks I spent setting up a second server, revision control, bugzilla, documentation wiki, and familiarizing myself with the code (I didn't get any documentation for months.) I spent an entire month mired in a protracted software upgrade side-quest to avoid only a few critical shortcomings in only a few software components: because the system had not been properly maintained in so long, every single software component was out of date by years and had a slew of dependencies that needed upgrading.
The very first change I committed to the new Subversion repository removed 4000 lines of code and replaced it with 14.
One day (long after it was very relevant anymore, unfortunately) they finally got the previous hacker (who was too busy with better paying work to work there anymore) to come in and help answer my questions about the code. I pleaded with him t
For a whole summer I've been coding in the "server room": a caged area on the mezzanine of a warehouse. The factory was in a big production ramp-up, and all day long people were removing big machines from wooden crates, using pneumatic guns (same as in the tire shops). Also to add to my discomfort, the speaker for the paging system was just above my head, so all day I was hearing: "Glenn line 1, Glenn line 1. Urgent" or "the winner for the half & half is Teresa in accounting". Hot, humid, dirty, noisy, for a very low salary.
Believe it or not, there are days where I sit in my quiet office with top of the line hardware, cool projects and great salary, and I miss that nightmare. There was something *real* about that place that I find lacking in the corporate world.
lucm, indeed.
I'm flying to Moscow tomorrow to fix some code for a stage automation system for the Eurovision song contest. In the stadium where it's held. During rehearsals. Oh, the horror...
(If you are European, and not gay, you understand...)
nuff said
At my first job after university I worked in the basement of a sailmaking company. So from upstairs I got the sound of hammering and sewing machines. From the room next door was the sound of the plotter-cutter. In the same room was an electric saw and drill, typically used for cutting metal poles. The basement wasn't insulated or air-conditioned, so I had to wear a scarf inside in winter.
As well as my actual job of programming (in a discontinued version of Pascal), I also had to do sales and tech support for our software.
Coding a Unix-like kernel from scratch near the arctic circle on a 386 with only a few MB of RAM. All without pay.
Just the opposite of your heat story...I was writing code in an unheated timer's shack on a ski slope in Mt, Abrams in Maine, in February, at about 4 below. Condensation on the inside of our CRTs caused problems, but our Compaqs were pretty though.
--Lee Daniel Crocker : http://www.etceterology.com My life is in the public domain.
"News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." How does the original post come even remotely close to meeting either of those criteria. It's not news, and it doesn't matter...
you just broke it.
I had to crack 128-bit government SSL in less than a minute with a blonde chick giving me a BJ in front of 10 people while I had a gun pointed to my head.
The worst part was that it was on a Dell laptop.
Hah, at first I thought you must have been on my team, but there were only three of us, and none were named Johannes (and there were no cigars)
Man, that sounds amazingly similar. Although the details that I left out do differ: there were only two of us, for one thing. And in our case, the software really did suck: the design (which was done by an external consultant) pretty much guaranteed that nobody would be able to work with it to begin with, and our implementation had significant flaws on top of that as well.
The external consultant, who also acted as project (micro-)manager, spent long hours each day just watching us work, and in at least one case dictated individual keystrokes to my colleague.
Other forms of abuse we had to deal with included such joyful events as people randomly disconnecting network cables in the building and blaming us for the resulting chaos, equipment and personal belongings mysteriously disappearing, and threats of bodily harm from the companies' staff.
The project finally ended when an 'accident' destroyed their entire dataset during nightly batch-processing. My colleague always maintained that it was an honest mistake - and who am I to argue with that? They honestly had it coming, after all...
Postscript: The VP of Engineering for this company, not surprisingly, passed away from a heart attack a few years later, I heard. He was in his mid-thirties.
I'm about that age (late thirties - all this happened when I was about 25, and it was my first job out of university), and one of my priorities in life is *not* being that guy... So far I'm actually doing a good job of it ;-)
The way he desribes it, I assume for the same reason you don't ride the chairlift back down the mountain.
I'm a consultant for a LARGE tech firm and am relegated to a cube in a generic farm to do my work. Unfortunately, there are not nearly enough private rooms, so frequently people take their calls on speakerphone. As if it's not annoying enough to hear multiple conversations constantly for hours on end, I am subjected to ... a new father.
I applaud his efforts in staying "connected" to his family with his daily video-conferences to his wife and baby, but I /really/ don't need to hear "E-I-E-I-O" and cooing in my cube farm.
One interview, at the behest of a crazy Scientologist, I had to hack into the âoeDepartment of Defense D-Base 128 bit encryptionâ in 60 seconds after drinking a shot of tequila and shot gunning another from the mouth of a beautiful blond model named Helga whilst Helga gave me a blowjob and a silenced pistol was shoved against my temple. That was a crazy day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUY8HysBzsE
A hot dusty room would have been very welcome at the East camp of the Vostok station, one of the coldest places on earth. I was working to support research at Lake Vostok. At various times, the outside air at the Vostok Station approached and a few times was colder than Dry Ice (colder than -78.5 C (-109.3 F)).
Life outside during the summer was livable (sometimes as warm as -40 C (-40 F)) when the wind was not too strong. But constant daylight made things dull, IMHO. I made better progress in winter and actually felt better during periods of constant darkness but with wind chill factor approaching -90 C (-130 F) you did not get to go outside much and enjoy the darkness.
One annoying thing was having to code and bunk near some potheads in a tiny room. The room was about the size of a three-person pup tent. It had a very low ceiling and just enough room for 3 people to sleep on the floor plus a small table. The table would have been OK for coding, but it had been taken over by the pot plant tanks. I had to code sitting on the floor where I slept.
BTW: They claimed pot helped them deal with the cold, but they left by the end of summer so I suspect they just liked to smoke. Even 6 months later I could still detect the odor in the room. These guys grew their plants in hydroponics tanks with grow lights. Even after they left I kept the tanks going because the plants added color to an otherwise mono-color room. My best moments where coding in the dark with the glow of grow lamps from the corner.
While the inside room temp was OK, the air tended to get stale. The station is high on the ice shelf 3488 m (11444 ft). Being near the pole, the oxygen level drops so the thin air was equivalent to 5000 m (16400 ft) in more common latitudes. So on top of the thin air, it was odd. There was a slight lack of CO2 (I was told due to the difference in partial pressure) that made breathing slightly irregular (according to the base doctor). The air at the station was very very dry (so the hydroponics tanks were very welcome in that regard).
During the summer I had to code on a "Billy Box" laptop. What a worthless pile of crap that XP development environment was! (Sorry MS fans, I don't mean to troll but it was one of the worst aspects of the job). Things got "better" when the laptop hard drive crashed. I managed to convince my boss to let me switch over to my non-Windoz laptop since the final target (a controller for an experiment) didn't care. Most of my work was backed up, but I still had to "code double-time" to catch up form the time lost.
The food was not great. I'm a vegetarian so veggie food was re-hydrated stuff. The pay was OK (and mostly tax free).
OK maybe it is not the worst coding conditions posted, but I'm guessing mine was one of the oddest (coding in the land way down under), driest (almost no moisture at all), thinnest air (equivalent to 5000m (16400 ft)), and coldest (reaching -80 C (-112 F)) at times with a wind chill of almost -90 C (-130F)) you might find.
Take your traveler checks to a competing resort already.
Sadly I have to go to a meeting with a couple of real life "Bob's" here in a few minutes, damn recession.
HE is definitely a Eunich!
The H.R. drone obviously misunderstood him when he said 'I'm a UNIX programmer.'
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
ZOMFG!!!! JEWS!!! Did they put stuff in your lunch so you'd fall asleep so they could take your blood to make Hominatashin cookies for their Purim ritual?
I bet they drank Starbucks all day too.. cause everyone knows that Starbucks is a part of the Zionist plan to take over the world as revealed in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO2NqMeOSuo
It's on the Internets so it *MUST* be true!
Hrm. Never knew Rorschach was a programmer.
I was actually sent to Sudan to fix bugs in my own application; hot room, electricity coming and going, 56K top speed, crap coffee, hot drinking water etc. It was a great learning experience, anything else would be a lie.
So what really made this the worst working conditions? The killing, raping and outright mutilation conducted in a nearby undisclosed camp a fifteen minute ride from where I was at. And knowing VIPs and NGOs would not be spared if something should occur. And that the project was futile if peace was broken. Which happened two weeks after my departure.
There's no such thing as normality in a warzone.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
I used to be the sysadmin for an elementary school with a 98% federal lunch program participation rate and a principal who didn't know anything about anything. One year: 2003-4.
My workstation was a P3/800 MHz. We were due to receive a shipment of P4/2.8 desktops for all the teachers, and the principal EXPLICITLY told me that I was NOT to have a new computer on my desk.
There was an empty room in the school that would have been perfect for my office. The principal declared that my "office" was to be a 2-foot U-configuration of desks crammed into the corner of a 30*30 24-station computer lab.
I left after one year on my own terms. Even though she threatened to get rid of me for interviewing for another job, she didn't...
I joined a startup, and there wasn't enough desk space for me and one other guy.
So we had our terminals set up in the conference room. Every time there was a meeting, we would go sit at the desk of somebody who was in the meeting and use their terminal.
Fortunately they got their second round of funding and we got our own desks after a month or so!
I had a similar, but opposite, experience. We were having wireless issues in our plant freezer, and the wireless access points were mounted to the ceiling 80 feet above the ground in heated metal boxes. The freezer was significantly longer and wider than a football field and was -5 degrees Farenheit. I had to get into a full winter snowsuit, gloves, ski mask, the usual protective equipment (hard hat, ear plugs, safety glasses, steal toed shoes, etc), and then put on a full body harness which they used to strap me to the arm of a very small two man lift. They then sent me up 80 feet on this swaying platform to open the cases and try to troubleshoot and replace parts on these access points, while at the same time trying to use net stumbler to figure out if my repairs were successful (not fun trying to find one MAC in a list of about 50 when you can barely scroll because of gloves on).
Oh, and I had to go out twice that day, because the lift wouldn't last long enough to complete the job in one shot. The hydraulics would start freezing up, and if you weren't careful you could get stuck up there. So while not exactly coding (though I do also code for my job), it was some of the worst conditions I've worked on IT equipment in.
I used to work in a short-order kitchen where the summer temperatures were about 127 degrees Fahrenheit! He grill wasn't the only think you could cook an egg on!
I am one of the employees who recently faced a tough choice
Can't match your sublime India experience, but I once had to stitch together a Windows NT 4 network in an office that was above the main sewage distribution pumps of a major antipodean city. The pump was the size of a small house, the well they retrieved it from was open. There was no air conditioning in the office (one outside wall was breached due to a bit of architectural rework) and it was a sunny,40 degree Australian summer day.
I never worked so fast in my life.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Coded for 10 years in the Army, MOS 74F Programmer/Analyst. Apple ][ 6502 assembly, maintaining someone else's IBM 370 assembler code, COBOL, C, etc. My 1SG wanted me to code a Commodore 64 BASIC application to manage the CQ roster. I wanted to code it because I could do something like:
if $name="El_Oscuro" then
next
else
print $name
Unfortanely, my suppervisor nixed that idea, so I still had to pull CQ dudy :/
Then the Army offered a golden parachute to all of their NCO programmers, so we took the bonus, and became the low-life contractor scum you see in the military these days.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
for the Government
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
I was consulting, and they couldn't be bothered to find me an office or cube. So they stuck me in a busy lab. In the main aisle. Close to the door. There wasn't room for me to sit while someone had to pass by, so every 3-4 minutes I had to stand up and let someone by. Lasted for 2 weeks before I decided the $80/hr wasn't worth it.
Another consulting job I had an incompetent micro manager. She couldn't understand what we were doing, couldn't even remember day to day what we were working on. Every 10-15 minutes she would pop into my office with a brain dead question (and it wasn't just me, it was everyone on the team). I finally convinced her to use email for these simple little questions. So what does she do? Pops into my office asking "did you get my email yet" just as I'm opening my mail app.
I actually lasted there for 8 months, loved the job but hated the boss.
I used to do my programming in a self-storage garage next to the airport. Then I was trapped at sea in a lifeboat with only a nuclear-powered rail gun to power my laptop. Every once in a while I had to duck a micro-filament razor wire at high speed. But boy did I crank out the code in those days!
At an ISP that I worked for in the 90's we would offer our customers, mind you this is in the hight of dial-up days, a few options for getting them connected. Over the phone support for free. They could bring their machine in and we would set it up in the office for free. Or we would send out a tech to their location for a fee.
The on-location setups fees went to the techs for their gas/time as kind of a bonus. So when one would come up we typically were OK with it. I took one at one point for an older man who I could just not get on-line. IIRC it was a Win3.1/Trumpet setup and just was not wanting to work not to mention I could tell that he just was not that computer savvy.
I get to his place and the poor old guy is in a wheelchair. So I think that well cool, I'm glad that he's embraced the internet. And then the stench wave of stale beer and cigars hits me. I step into the house and it's full on disarray. I mean I'm no stranger to living as a bachelor but I try to put my old beer cans in the trash, empty the ashtrays, and not leave my old pron lying around.
Yes pron. I get to the computer desk and there is even high concentration of Swank and Hustler there. The desktop was filled with links to various pron sites that I had to sift though to find Trumpet. I wanted to just fix it and get the hell out of there but Trumpet was hosed so I had to install the MS DUN upgrade which thankfully worked.
Some time later I had been promoted to the OPs Manager which meant I lead all of the techs too and we got a call from someone who needed to get back on-line. It was me and one other tech sitting in our support office and I was shamelessly eavesdropping on him as he went though the numbers trying to fix the guy. And it dawned on me who he was talking to. He got to the point where he offered to have the computer brought in or send one of us out to which we were asked to come out.
The tech turned to me and asked me if I wanted to go out. We had always tried to make sure we spread the wealth such as it was from such calls. I remember looking at him with a straight face and saying, "No man it's ok, you take that one." He was like cool and went off to fix the guy.
When the tech got back to the office I was unable to keep my face straight when I saw how he was looking at me. He said something to the effect of, "You knew!"
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
once i should code a dating-portal in a basement of an internet-cafe. the only furniture was an old ugly bed right in sight of a webcam. well, every evening there was pizza and as much coke, beer and cigarettes as i wanted...
when i remember right i participated in some beta test of a mmorpg that time instead of working, since the only salery was the never-ending food-supply... i released myself after the game had gone live and ended the free-test-phase ^^
let me add that the whole thing didnt smell right, but was funny after all...
We used to dream of having a corridor!
I worked for six months for a company in a live/work space in New York. This was a tight two-room space packed with tech support guys, constantly ringing phones, two dogs, and a useless manager. One of the dogs was mean-tempered and riddled with illness; several times a day, an alarm would go off with a synthetic voice reminding all of us that the dog required one medication or another. If ignored, the alarm would go off ten minutes later; if still ignored, it would set off a strobe light that would flash until someone addressed the issue.
None of this was as bad as the manager, who hired me to write a custom CMS, but constantly meddled because he needed to feel like a software developer. At first, he simply subjected me to endless meetings; then, he re-purposed me to writing business proposals (which I HATE doing) and spent his afternoons criticizing my writing; next, he subjected me to sitting in his office and essentially taking dictation as he spouted off one totally useless idea after another; finally, he assigned me to performing totally awesome tasks like making crappy pages in Lasso and developing ways to convert ancient Hypercard files into something readable by FileMaker. Needless to say, I did little worthwhile work on that CMS. My last day there, I was informed that my best work-friend had been fired while I was in the midst of hacking on some useless code in a ringing, strobing, barking office. I'm now self-employed and work from home, and it would take a lot to convince to work otherwise.
Need I say more?
Worked at a web company for a year and a half that was a front to sell weed. Place was maybe 600 sq ft, not somewhere that much smoke has anywhere to go. Half the day people were coming in to buy and they'd smoke up at a desk about fifteen feet from me. The sad thing was that the guy that was the chief seller was also the idea man. He was never given credit for his ideas, and his best ones were always shot down. The so-called "boss" kept shooting him down. He actually had good ideas, too.
I guess it wasn't physically grueling (besides the smell), it was just being mixed up in this stupid pot den while having to listen to a smart idea guy and a dumbass prick know-it-all go at it all day all day.
But then again, some of the stuff I saw go on in that place... well, it's the reason I'm posting anonymously :)
Ha! Not so long ago I worked for an Archeology company, coding for their database... in a construction trailer on site at an abandoned cemetery in the middle of downtown at least... sitting on a hard plastic chair with my laptop placed on a folding table and connected to cat-5 dangling from the roof... to top it off I was surround by actual human remains and towards the end of the project the trailer went all moldy on us and we mainly had water only from a tapped fire hydrant... and the bathrooms were either porta-potties (bat when it's over 100 out...) or a 3 block walk to a lesser known public bathroom ... oh and this was in the summer in s. az! Yeah beat that! Did that for over 6 months... now that's the real deal... Did I mention the heavy construction equipment outside the door? And this was pretty luxurious compared to other sits I visited and stories I heard!
Still funnest software dev job i'd ever had :) Heck I was almost expecting this article to be about that job lol!
...in the middle of summer with a broken air conditioner and a RAID whose power supply kept beeping loudly because it was sensitive to the fluctuations in voltage provided by our loud diesel generator parked just outside. I was coding up an interface to an Access '97 database on stripped down Win2k running on a very dirty laptop (mud made from the very fine dust I was breathing combined with the sweat dripping off my fingers would occasionally cause a key to stop working) in Perl using OLE, with *no* internet access and little documentation. Funny thing was, I actually was having a pretty good time.
"I am Dr. Freud, but you may call me.siggy."
There were two that are vying for the lead. The first was a desk that was jammed kind of in the corner, with no legroom, of a row of phone sales cubes. I had to put together my computer from some components that were lying around in the warehouse, and I did find a few spiders in the case. The monitor made a brain splitting high pitch whine intermittently. I wasn't allowed to wear headphones or listen to music as the sales people considered that highly taboo and would complain that it was distracting to them.
The other time was when we worked in this poolhouse on this upscale estate. It may sound nice, but outside, there were these kind of vicious guard dogs, it was next to a golf course so we had no shade and way too much humidity, the owner would come down in his robe and berate us, sometimes packing heat, as an awkward attempt to motivate us to work, and I would frequently have to wipe spyware off his kid's computers because we had to use the same network. Oh yeah, not to mention the flies. Nonstop flies, all the time. And it wouldn't have hurt the guy if he would have cleaned that pool. It stank, bad.
Being an electrical Engineer for a Power Utility that spans 100's K^2 miles territory, I have had to code PLC and RTU configurations in everything from Alpine winters with 6+ ft. of snow and blizzard like conditions to ,my all time fav., 112 degrees for a week IN THE SUN, with no shade in the desert at a series of pedestal, monolith cabinets with the closest water 35 miles away (if I ran out). I routinely travel to the worst places, why does it break? because the freakin 120 mph wind from that snowstorm blew the side off the substation.
Your "Stint" of 107 degrees is a training exercise for my job bud. heh ---Trade it? Not in a million years, can honestly say I LOVE MY JOB! and the $$ aint to shabby either.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
In the 70's, I had to live patch a running Univac 1100/80 system.
Someone had forgotten to record a critical file password, and I needed to disable all OS security for a few seconds to allow access to the file.
The system could not be taken down because it was real-time and mission critical, supporting at least two in-progress space missions and 2,500+ users.
We needed the patch within a few hours for a scheduled uplink to a spacecraft requiring new orbital parameters.
My job was simple: develop a patch sequence that would disable security, instruct operations to insert said patch sequence from the main console, disable the file password, and reverse the patch seconds later without bringing down the system or any processes.
This required searching through the operating system machine code listings, which consisted of well over 200 6" binders of MASM (Univac assembly) code.
I managed it, so it's a happy memory.... :-)
When I was young -- 10 to 13 or so -- I had a series of anxiety nightmares. I'd wake up and sleepwalk, semi-hyperventilating, until I'd scare my parents awake.
The last of the nightmares I remember: I was being held captive my mobsters, and they were forcing me at gunpoint to write some unimaginably complex (I was 12!) program on a Timex-Sinclair ZX-81. I woke up in a fugue-like terror, remembering the non-feedback of that horrible flat keyboard...
I guess one of the good sides of being a contract developer / consultant is how most companies will make sure you (generally) have absolutely everything you need / are comfortable and happy so as to be most efficient.
- Dan
What could be far more worse than working for this company called Tata Consultancy Services
I'd just like to say I have always liked these kind of articles which get stories out of other /.'ers
There's always some interesting folk posting here, not just the 18 - > 35 crowd but some of the older veterans with some great war stories of older hardware, cramped conditions and IT in it's infancy, those stories are often great.
More please.
(I'm only 31, the worst working conditions I've ever had was after the dotcom crash, I went from 24$ an hour and 30 minutes work a day literally, to 17$ an hour no internet access and working my ass off, they wanted me to WORK for the money, it was horrific!)
I was sitting under the open hatch of a mini-sub debugging C code in a blizzard at night.
Literally, in the bilge of a nuclear submarine. Basic and machine code for a Varian computer circa 1974.
The navigation system on early missile boats had no hard drive. The used a rotating drum. The drum was slightly conical so that an adjustment screw could raise it up/down slightly to change the distance between the drum an the surrounding read heads. If you went to far (we did) the drum would wipe out against the read heads. Then you spent a day disposing of a drum with secret data on it. Fun days !
I think your case is a special, but ive had other situations as a coder... its not so much for the things provided, but after all, coding, or brain work is not like switching something on or off, there are day to day differences in how your mind and brain works... alot of companies and customers tend to think that coding is like clicking the start button in windows, which one might also do, when having two double whiskeys behind him... i think we as a society need to learn alot till such things are outgrowing...
ever here of safety harnesses? They're usually required in situations like that.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I had to work on a deck in the the apex of a factory roof with blow moulding machines on the floor bellow. To say it was hot was a bit of an understatement - I lost track of how much water I got through and how many times I had to retreat to the air conditioned break rooms.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
25-30C heat and *nice* sunshine, work only a casual stroll away from the top class apartment I had (family size, all to myself), lunch costed peanuts if you knew where to go (plus I organised myself a discount card on the first day) which included fresh tropical fruits (although I got kind of addicted to carrot juice, weird), and weekends in the sun or swimming. Almost normal days (8-18) and business class flights back home every month for a long weekend.
Oh, and I had a faster Internet link in my apartment than I had at work..
The only two downsides were that it was in Singapore and it took 10 months, otherwise I hope this was enough to make you jealous.
If not, I also did a 2 week stint in HK for a *large* company (it was a panic job) which meant Virgin Topclass flights and 5 star hotels. I just didn't see much of HK that time :-)
For 3 months this went on. During this time everytime we complained, the office manager who worked on a different floor would say, "Oh it's not that bad".
Thanks D4 for my Dilbert experience.
Sorry my bullshit sensor overloaded.
The horror... the horror...
Working for a large international shipping company. I joined a 4 person team of people who had been working there for 30+ years doing other jobs besides coding. They all hated Microsoft because that's what they thought they were supposed to say to sound like they really knew their stuff. I had no control over "the server" which was a out of date bugged custom compiled apache version running on top of windows. My boss was a middle aged woman who knew nothing of the coding end of things and only knew how to be a demanding ball buster. I had functioning code already written for the latest stable php 5.0 version, but that was not what they ran on "the server". I even put the idea of running in a VM out there if they could not afford another server, but my boss told me there was no business case for that. I left that job. I am sick of my hands being tied in this industry. I am tired of having to patch and hack things that should not have to redone. Deadlines were important to this boss, but any technical roadblocks or obstacles with "the server" she had not the first idea of and quite frankly didn't care. Why should she care she doesn't have to write one line of code.
I had a summer internship in rural Japan. I knew little UNIX at that point and even less Japanese. Periodically, I would have to consult the UNIX man pages to figure something out. Unfortunately for me, they only had man pages in Japanese that were translations of the original English man pages. Now mind you, man pages can sometimes be a little hard to follow in English. Pity the poor summer intern who has to read a description in Japanese and then wonder "Is this hard to understand because it's a bad translation, because I'm bad at understanding Japanese, or because the original English was cryptic and poorly written in the first place?"
My first gig as a teenager was to tidy up some APL code that had been used to assess data from a Chinese census project concerning rural agriculture. During the day I had a terminal which supported the APL characters, but during the evening I had access only to a glass teletype with regular ASCII characters. IIRC the code itself was on IP Sharp, an APL time-sharing service based out of Toronto. Impressive for the era, but definitely not cheap.
The guy who hired me went "oh, come on, it's not that hard to figure out which ASCII character(s) represent which APL character". I think the APL overprinted characters had a ^H in the middle. Those who claim that Perl looks like line noise have never seen APL transliterated into ASCII. It says something about the density of APL that I could ponder the keyboard location of every keystroke for 10 seconds and still feel relatively productive. The time sharing fees must have been dollars per minute.
Can't complain too much, he kept his fridge packed with Heineken, my first experience of a beer not bottled (I won't say brewed) by Labatts or Molson. I came from a fairly dry household, so despite the coding conditions, I thought it was the best gig ever.
Him: So how's the data looking now?
Me: Half a dozen of these regions/provinces have more holes than numbers.
Him: Can you fix it?
Me: Not a chance.
Him: Well then, blow it away.
Me: Like, hundred of peasant-years of census data collection?
Him: Fire when ready.
Me: Sweet.
When I started programming - as a junior consultant - my first assignment with my new company was at a cigarette manufacturers - I'm a non smoker - but didnt like to object before I even started working at the site. I was placed in a portacabin in their parking lot with a room of 15 or so employees / consultants. All employees / consultants were given 30 free packs of cigs a month! In the portacabin where I worked I could barely see the person sitting opposite me due to the smoke - and my asthma attacks became frequent. At this site - they had ashtrays in the kitchens, in the toilets - bloody everywhere! It got so bad that after a month I had had far more than enough, and wrote a strong letter to my company demanding a new placement on health grounds alone - this wasnt an easy situation for me to get out of due to my junior status. These days I would not have set foot through the door in the 1st place.
I had to write code in vi once. It would have been easier to just use cat and a here document.
- St Ignutius
I had to write software surrounded by a bunch of PARANOIDS in an investment bank.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Sounds like a client i used to work for.
20 hour days in a server room cooled to 18C, with nothing but coffee and sugar coated pastries to eat, and a 14400 baud modem ( and no, this was not 1995. It was around 2005)
We had to do all our coding in 1's and 0's. And there wasn't enough 1's to go around ...
... You'd say here comes Roy right outta Grant's ear, because that was the style at the time. ...
> Grant's ear?
Oh, that was before your time. We called them a 'Grant's ear' back then on account of the first guy to use circles.
> And that was Grant.
What the--no! Not Grant, Steve. Grant? That doesn't even make sense!
> So Steve the summoner used blood from the ear of a guy named Grant?
Blood? That's unsanitary! No ol' Steve used sawdust.
As a (low-level) student, the working conditions were horrible: We had a small office for five students with a large window facing south onto a large flat roof covered with white, reflecting gravel. And no AC, of course, there was one for the computer rooms, for the profs and assistants and (later) even one for the room for the higler level students). In summer, our room was unbearable hot, even the fairly robust terminals gave up sometimes.
We tried to cool the room down, but they forbade us to do this after "smoke" billowed from under the rooms door into the hallway, causing someone to start a fire alarm. The "smoke" actually was mist from a bowl of water with dry ice leftovers in it...
The first office of my startup was in a shed in the back yard of a house owned by a former hippie in Berkeley, CA. It got extremely hot in there, but what made it worth mentioning here was that the land-lady was a little wacky.
At one point, we heard horrible screams coming from the house. Upon rushing in, we found the land-lady completely unharmed but with a self-help "screaming therapy" manual.
Later, a wasp-nest appeared under the roof of the patio, which we had to pass to reach the bathroom. When we asked the land-lady to remove it, she told us she couldn't until she had consulted her "healer", who was on vacation and wouldn't be back for another two weeks. The healer eventually advised the use of fly-paper.
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
I once spent 6 months working for an ngo in Indonesia where i was unpaid and broke, so before long i was living on less than 2USD a day and only eating every other day, but apart from that it was the best job ever !
Actual physical aggression is the worst. And I have to put up with it day in, day out. Sometimes I even get it not because of anything I did, but just because I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now if only my co-workers would stop tossing the sponge toys around already...
My worst job: Public Relations manager for Microsoft Vista...
"Nature bats last..."
It was about twenty years ago. Back then, a lot of telephone transmissions were carried state-to-state via microwave links. They would place a microwave tower on top of a mountain in the middle of noplace, and put a tiny building big enough to house the transmitters.
Except for "The Tower." It was a craggy peak, the only one like it in the area, and there simply wasn't room for a self-supporting tower and a transmitter building. So what they did is they got the largest tower they could and put all the equipment up on the tower itself, 200 feet above the ground.
And when the icestorm came, guess who was on maintenance duty? That's right. Me. So, to make sure every Virginian could call there granny that Christmas, I drove over to The Tower and climbed it to see what was wrong. What had happened was a hatch on the compartment that housed the site computer's tape drive had blown open, and the mechanism had frozen stiff.
Now, a little tidbit about this equipment. It was late 60s-early 70s era stuff. Unable to run the tape drive, one of the ancient computers had totally crashed. I was able to unjam the onsite tape drive, and the the operating system was fine but the boot block had gotten torn and was in ribbons half-froze to the tape hub. So the only way to reboot it and get everything back online was to crawl out, unprotected, onto the side of The Tower, and while clinging to the side, restart the computer and manually toggle in the boot block. I don't know it that counts as writing code or not, since I already knew the bootloader, but I think 200 feet up in the air in -15 degree weather in 20 mile-an-hour winds toggling in machine language should.
Do I win anything? ;-)
Hey, look on the bright side... at least it wasn't Corona.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
For me, it's the colleague who sits closest to me---in an open floor plan. He has a litany of annoying habits that keep my blood boiling all day.
Most of these complaints are aural in nature, and you might say, why not just wear headphones? Well, technically, I can, and often do, but I can't turn them up loud enough to actually drown out all his noises. Mostly because I don't want to damage my hearing, but more immediately, I have to be able to hear other people in the office talking (this is a trading company, and a problem with one of the programs generally means immediate action is required). So obviously the same goes for noise-canceling headphones.
For about a week I had to work on-site on the premises of an outgoing call centre selling things like insurance and cellphone contracts. It was possibly the noisiest place I have ever worked and when my time there was done I told my boss that I had functioned at about 0.001% of my normal productivity level. We no longer work on-site for said client.
I had better internet access on my Treo 600 than my dev machine - it had dialup but the line was noisy. I was writing "code" in Microsoft Access, because that's what they had.
That said, the food and the people were awesome, and there was a nice breeze in the office.
Yep. Had the exact same conditions in Iraq except I got shot at and bombed. Talk about hitting DEADlines.
I spend 3 weeks in Bangalore India trying to write code,
It was easily as hot 34c or more outside (July/April) and dusty too, Indoors it may have been even hotter. And the smell, well it makes the smell of a NYC subway seem pleasant.
I don't know how the locals do it, but they seems cool and dry while I was sweating so hard it looked like I had just falling in a swimming pool. I was worried about the sweat dripping off my finger into my laptop and shorting something out.
Oh and the mosquitoes are just everywhere, they don't believe in screens there.
Apparently there was some mosquito born illness rumored to be going around that would leave people paralyzed for like 2 weeks.
Intermittent 64K internet, check.
distractions, check.
From monkeys to rickshaws. And let's not forget intestinal discomfort and frequent bathroom breaks to a squat toilet. Not fun after knee surgery.
We had an automatic coffee machine, One day it dispensed a cup full of hot dead ants in water, yum.
Now add intermittent power where the USP would reboot everyone PC's even when power cam back on!
I had bought a generator but the neighbors companied about the noise.
By the end I was just plain loosing my mind.
India great fun when your not trying to get any work done.
Programming in ShenZhen China is slightly better but it's hot and humid there too.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Personally, I wouldn't allow myself to be put into a situation that was bad enough for me to write about it here. I'd take one look at it, and turn around and leave.
New Jersey.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I had to code on a busy trading floor for almost 10 years now!
Those were nice times.
Punch your code, hand over the stack for the overnight batch job, wait a day until you get the results ... only to find that a stupid bug produced corrupted data.
Ahhhh ... soon you find yourself debugging your code with a calculator and paper.
Sounds a lot like this post on Stack Overflow.
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Definitely Verizon
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dF-POFE30E
wrte code fr a sam launcher rom in a warszone on a tight crond
I did what you describe for 2 years in the U.S. Peace Corps. Funny thing is I enjoyed it. Of course, we shouldn't forget that this is a rather common occurrence for programmers in the developing world. The choice where I was was between air conditioning and running computers (both would overload the circuit, running on a generator). It got improved at times... but then termites would eat the network!
Hell, I did this once 120 feet up on a tower in Utah dust storm winds! All the while trying to maintain antenna alignment. Right after my (Imaginary no doubt) GF told me not to fall - I mean, what's a more sure way to make sure someone falls than tell them not too!
Hell, I had to slink antennas up on a tower with only two guy lines in the arctic at FMARS at -35C w/ a -55 windchill, but there was no coding or server admin, so I guess that doesn't count. I did eventually reconnect the third guy, so I guess it /really/ doesn't count.
Your Moon, Your Mission, Get involved! http://www.openluna.org
So I take it the doorbell doesn't work?
Jews are virtually all on the anti-genocide side.
Oh, wait, I get it! Hahahaha! virtually! As in, the opposite of canonically... that's pretty funny, man.
I guess the peoples of Og, Sihon, Canaan, Ai, Gibeon, Makkedah, Libna, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, Anakim, Penuel, Laish, etc. etc. etc. wouldn't appreciate your joke, but I liked it.
"I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."
Don't forget to smash the little babies on the stones, like Psalm 137 instructs. It's God's will, you know. Manifest Destiny!!!
Doorbell? I thought I was supposed to use this brass knocker!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
This reminds me of a story I read once about a programmer who challenges the devil to a programming contest. they battle it out on archaic machines, the heroic programmer using every available bit of memory and hardware... even stores some bits in a temporary buffer in the air between the speaker and microphone in order to get the most out of it... has anyone here read that story?
-John Fenley
My classmate once did javascript "interpreter" to his cell phone and then he wroted brainfuck interpreter (with macros) on his cellphone with T9 overnight
try this for size.
an old commy russian building in moscow still with bullet holes in it. summer. mad hot. hung over. had just had lunch in the commy "mess hall" consisting of a meat splat looking and tasting like poo and a potato mulsh looking and tasting of vomit and a coffee tasting of mud and cat vomit and dandruff. a 1.5 by 3 meter "office" with a bunch of russian distributers sitting on top of each other (and me) and looking over my shoulder while i try and get a unix app installed for a show the next day. with guts turning, sweat dripping from every pore and error messages being churned out in russian the office soon smelt of poo and vomit.
then...same office the next day, hungover and the smell of vomit and poo overwhelming. had to debug the apache module so that cyrilic wouldn't louse up the web app for the impending show. that one beat me.
dark days
Not sure how you'd do that, but that's gotta hurt!
I used to be beaten awake at 4am from my bed at the bottom of a lake by my CIO father who got me to work at 4:01am using a manual punch card machine to hammer out assembler with my arms tied behind my back while being whipped with CAT5 cable with a daily run to the PC in the local library to be whipped again if there was so much as 1 bug in the code which had to be production ready and implemented at 4:02am before the next assignment at 4:03am working non-stop until being allowed to sleep again at 3:59am the following morning after a meal consisting of a shrubbery.
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
The US could have given them a substantial part of Utah
Then there would be a "holy war" between Jews and Mormons.
--
Mr. Flatulent
Sounds to me like your glass was half-empty. :-(