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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.
..... windows. Nuff said. :D
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
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.
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! --
Or a sadist in management looking to see what they can get away with.
Yes, yes, that's what the books and professors at the university try to teach you.
The reality... Well, it's kind of different, you see. The client did not know what he wanted when writing down the specs, the guys writing the spec were incompetent, the testers were lazy - and finally, it's you, who followed the specs to the letter, who has to hang above a vat of chemicals with a 'scope and a laptop and tweak the code to make it actually do what the client wanted, not what he meant and the spec guys understood. Ever seen this?
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
Try *being* Sarah Palin.
Seriously, you need to name names. You need to blog this one.
Trying to code while under severe emotional distress is the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
Coffee? COFFEE! The only java we got was in the machine we developed with and on top of it all, we had to use it!
Kids these days and their .net environment, y'all got it way too good!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As I have found out to my detriment: you can come back to the code later.
The woman, however...
My UID is prime. Is yours?
Sounds quite unbelievable to me. Vaporize ~15cm of flesh plus a femoral bone inside during a several second free fall? A damned good showcase of heat transfer.
Ezekiel 23:20
Hey, he said "maintain". Perl's fine for writing. It's trying to read other people's Perl that's often problematic.
Not that that's unique to Perl. I've seen C code that made me want to claw my eyes out (to be fair, the programmer had previously only known FORTRAN, and I don't mean the modern sort). I've seen spaghetti written in Python of all things.
And you haven't seen true horror until you've tried to make sense of a major software system built on a custom hand-rolled database and implemented largely in ksh. That one would have been made more readable by a rewrite in Perl.
So the guy that says yes gets modded insightful and parent not only can't get any, but he gets the useless "Funny" mod and no karma bump. Truly there is no justice!
Seriously? If true, your story is begging for more details. And, if possible without getting you abducted by the Mossad, names.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Sorry, but you can never have too many staples.
Right. 'Cause two genocidal sides make a war "holy," right?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
How about sitting next to a guy who can't stop bashing President Bush three months after he left office? Give it a rest, already and move on with your life, guy!
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I know this MAY be hard to believe, but (1) Muslims are NOT the only terrorists out there, (2) he never mentioned Muslims, (3) he seems to be saying they employed orthodox Jews not who the owner was, and (4) he said GENOCIDE, not "terrorism" (which he in fact did not mention once).
Let's not play the jump to conclusions game here...
That was my thought, too. Of course, to some people, everybody who doesn't think exactly like they do is evil, and it's fair game to accuse them of anything you can think of regardless of the facts.
It's a tad off-topic, but maybe the OP should consider that if Hamas vanished, the violence would end; if the IDF vanished, so would Israel.
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Very few Orthodox Jews contribute money to Islamic terrorists. Jews are virtually all on the anti-genocide side.
I gathered he wasn't talking about Islamic terrorists. "Genocidal war" is pretty open to interpretation, and shieldwolf's posts often seem pretty out there to me. It could be that they were funding a Jewish organization that sheildwolf just considers to be advocating genocide.
The problem arises when one has the conflicting goals of getting bugs fixed (so, everyone chips in), and getting a good review (which is based on having to fix few bugs).
In all fairness to Microsoft, I don't see the system intentionally designed to punish those who are effective problem solvers, and reward those who get others to fix their mess.
But, the review metrics are sometimes based on the assumption that one does not fix bugs other than in one's own code, and the development process in some departments involves load-balancing bugs across developers (sometimes very inefficiently in terms of a given developer's knowledge in the area of a particular bug).
And, there are some people who's greatest skill is hacking inconsistencies in process and review to their benefit.
In Liberty, Rene
"One mistake and you have to support it forever."
-=Maggie Leber=-
There's no way this statement could be true, but I can't come up with a counter example.
I can see the Andromeda Galaxy from my house!
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?"
That's easy - take a break and ravish her until her eyes roll back, then say "honey, I have to go do some stuff" and go do your work. Women just want some love, tenderness, and the occasional mad balling.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I would point to 1 Corinthians 14 and demand a translation. Crazy Pentecostals.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I call bullshit on the word "semetic" - it's apparently only used to incite confusion amongst people. Why not try something that makes more direct sense like "anti-Jewish" or "anti-Israel". WTF is "semetic" and why's it got any modern usage? Please remove the word. Maybe Jewish/Israeli people know what it mean, but most of the rest of the people in the world don't have a clue what it means.
Please remove semetic.
Well, that isn't totally fair. If Hamas vanished, there is a decent argument that Israel would continue to expand into Palestine.
IMHO, all sides in the middle east are in the wrong.
Disclosure: I'm reform Jewish and think the Orthodox types are nut-jobs.
I'm Conservative, myself. I respect the Orthodox, but not the hyper-orthodox or those keeping Glatt Kosher. IMO, they're just playing the "holier than thou" card. The big trouble is that (again, IMO) they have too much political power in Israel because their splinter parties can crash any coalition government if they don't get their way. I'd guess that most of the people in Gaza want peace and would have it if their "government" gave a damn about them instead of considering them as nothing more than cattle to use as human shields when their intransigence causes the IDF to mount Yet Another Punitive Expedition.
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If Hamas vanished it would be Egypt or Lebanon that Israel would be fighting. Israel is very much an expansionist state.
And maybe many people would do well to realize that taking over someone else's country and handing it over to another group of people with fairly major differences of faith and conduct, isn't a way to get the people from whom the land was taken to be peaceable and non-violent.
IIRC Palestine had actually given Jewish exiles from Russia a few chunks of land on act of good will.
Only if Israel vanishes will there be peace in the area (at least for the sort that such funding would be sent, just on the other side being "victorious"). See, as long as the pretend country exists, and everyone's favorite superpower keeps backing it up, there will be plenty of really pissed off people willing to fight. If that country goes away, those pissed off people will quit fighting it. If the US quits supporting that country, those pissed off people will quit being pissed off at the US, and leave it alone so long as the US leaves them alone.
Really, I have quite a few friends who are practicing Jews, and I've even taken part in a few customs and holy days with them. I love my friends, and I have nothing against anyone based on faith alone. Except child fuckers, and child fucker-uppers. But I do have a problem with the way the whole Israel thing has been handled. The US could have given them a substantial part of Utah, or even North Dakota, and everyone would have peace, and there wouldn't be bloodshed to the extent that there currently is over the issue. Hell, that whole planes into buildings thing probably wouldn't have even happened. I passionately dislike the fact that it did, but I'm not really all that surprised.
Jews are virtually all on the anti-genocide side.
That was my thought, too. Of course, to some people, everybody who doesn't think exactly like they do is evil, and it's fair game to accuse them of anything you can think of regardless of the facts.
To be fair, that accurately describes the way of lot of pro-Israeli people treat anyone who criticizes the treatment of the Palestinians or Israel's settlement policies. The word "anti-Semite" gets tossed at you a lot if you don't think Israel's systems of checkpoints and embargoes or its extremely high rates of "collateral damage" are the very milk of kindness and justice incarnate.
It's a tad off-topic, but maybe the OP should consider that if Hamas vanished, the violence would end; if the IDF vanished, so would Israel.
And that would end the violence too ... after a brief period of "adjustment," if we're going to fair.
Hamas is just a symptom of the disease of occupation, poverty, and disillusionment of Palestinians with the corrupt inefficiency of Fatah. Destroy Hamas, and another faction of angry young men replaces them. Saying that getting rid of Hamas would end all the misery in the Middle East typically ignores that the Palestinians have real, legitimate grudges, even though Hamas and its ilk pursue illegitimate means of redress. Until the reasonable issues are dealt with, the unreasonable ones will have popular support.
Personally, I think both sides need to grow the hell up. Playing this whole ridiculous blame game of, "You started it first!" or "Our claim is more legit than yours!" only continues this sad, sick circle-jerk of misery. The Palestinians need to stop acting like throwing a few crappy rockets and sending their kids off to blow themselves up in a market will suddenly make the world a shiny, happy place for them while dreaming that Israel has no right to exist, and Israel needs to stop acting like the Palestinians are just an inconvenient bunch of pests to be bug bombed every now and then to make room for their own fanatical, expansionist settlers while treating 1 Israeli life as worth 100 Palestinians. When both of them get their heads around the idea that the Middle East doesn't belong solely to them by decree of God and that the other side is made up of people too, we'll have some progress. Until then, it's ass-haberdashery all around with each side's supporters accusing the other of genocidal aims while turning a blind eye to their own sins.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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!!!