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."
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.
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.
Sorry, that sounds like Best to me.
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
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.
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.
Don't forget about the time our parents beat up a grizzly bear with a looseleaf notebook...
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! --
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We'd only be really impressed if you got the girls, but hey this is Slashdot....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
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!
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'm going to burn the building down....
Ah, but this place preserves my geekly pallor. :)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
So you enjoyed the VB part, then?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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
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
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
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.
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 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 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.
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
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.
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...
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
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.
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
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 $250k a year gig was promoted to a full-time gig as VP of Research and Development, paying even more. After about a year he was fired and then sued into the ground by the company because he insisted on trying to charge them royalties for the software he wrote.
And the engineer on my team actually went off to work for the Chairman's new company in California. Apparently some people like being abused.
I wrote code (bug fixes) on the production floor of a tire factory in Charlotte NC in the Summer. Horrible in so many ways.
Look, it's trying to think - Albert Rosenfield
I was actually sent to Sudan to fix bugs in my own application; hot room, electricity coming and going, 56K top speed, crap coffee, hot drinking water etc. It was a great learning experience, anything else would be a lie.
So what really made this the worst working conditions? The killing, raping and outright mutilation conducted in a nearby undisclosed camp a fifteen minute ride from where I was at. And knowing VIPs and NGOs would not be spared if something should occur. And that the project was futile if peace was broken. Which happened two weeks after my departure.
There's no such thing as normality in a warzone.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Need I say more?
I'd just like to say I have always liked these kind of articles which get stories out of other /.'ers
There's always some interesting folk posting here, not just the 18 - > 35 crowd but some of the older veterans with some great war stories of older hardware, cramped conditions and IT in it's infancy, those stories are often great.
More please.
(I'm only 31, the worst working conditions I've ever had was after the dotcom crash, I went from 24$ 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!)