Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
The laughter is fine...As long as they are not doing your code review! :)
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
If you're Tuesday afternoons are 20 days long... you're going too fast.
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 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...
Obviously a masochist is doing a thorough job hunt.
Sounds like the beginning of an interesting porno...
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'm going to burn the building down....
You expected different working at Apple?
Dude, you could have just said something to us and we'd quiet down. Sheesh, some people...
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.
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.
Are you doing his mom?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Either way someone is really turned on about this.
The use Exchange on the battlefield? Suddenly, I feel a whole lot less safe.
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.
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.
Hello... computers can get viruses too!
Yeah, a four hour flight with no chairs is pretty bad, even if the guy standing next to you doesn't smell like jet fuel.
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'll one up you on that. One of the investors at a company I worked for introduced the mandatory prayer rule before meetings. This same investor came into my office one day and told me that you couldn't really understand code, or even basic logic, unless you were saved by Jesus Christ.
I just smiled and nodded.
But that wasn't the most interesting story about my employment there. The company finally folded because:
1) The CEO only wanted investment money from "good Christian men"
2) The potential investors had to be familiar to him from personal prophesy. Yes, they had to be ordained by god via his pastor.
3) The CEO eventually was tried and convicted in federal court of HUD loan fraud from business dealings at a previous company he founded. In the days before he was hauled off to federal prison he told me how this was persecution sent from god to test his faith.
Given all of that, it was a net plus for me. The work was really fun and interesting. :)
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
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
Paul,
I'm sorry. I'll clamp my cakehole shut from now on.
Being able to compose an HTTP GET request just by making a pistol gesture and a "pow" sound definitely requires some serious "skillz." No matter how much I tried, I couldn't replicate this on my PC. I tried every conceivable pistol gesture and permutation of "pow," "ka-blooey," "Muad-dib," etc. It wasn't happening for me.
Wait a minute, you're telling me you don't have a water gun pistol with a wii-mote strapped onto it and a custom bluetooth driver installed? Get with the times!
Now anything I do gets done with a "pow" sound. Click that link: "pow". Go back: "pow". Stop: "pow". Close windows: "pow" "pow" "pow". Are you sure you want to leave this page? Hell yeah! "pow". Do you want to debug? Hell no! "pow".
I even threw out my keyboard and use the on screen keyboard. Now programming in Java is actually fun. Just to type "System.out.println();" takes 24 "pow" with no mistakes! And changed my mouse cursor to a cross hair, set all the event sounds to a "pow" sound, and the window theme to the "High Contrast Black".
Best of all is when something doesn't work or when a page takes too long to load: "pow" "pow" "p-p-p-p-pow". Double and tripple clicking is equally fun: "p-pow!" "p-p-pow!".
Working with computers is so much fun now. You wouldn't believe how much fun I had posting this. "pow" "pow" "p-p-p-pow"!!!
Does this work on a http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/?
I had to debug my code using Lynx! (Text-only web browser.)
I find it very endearing that someone felt the need to explain what Lynx is on SlashDot.
Havoc Video