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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."
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 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.
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
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
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'll go you one better - I once had to maintain Perl code.
Oh yeah? I had to scale a Ruby on Rails application.
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.
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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.
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.
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!
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'm going to burn the building down....
Why, when I was a kid, we had to write code while walking 20 miles to the computer building, in 12 feet of snow in the middle of winter. And it was uphill both ways! Course we couldn't wear gloves, because it was too hard to line up the hole punch on the punched card. They didn't have knapsacks in those days, so we just had to keep our card stack on a string tied to our belt. Now, a hole punch cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Give me five bees for a quarter," you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was I had a stack of punch cards on my belt, was the style at the time. They didn't have standard 5081 cards in stock, because of the war. The only thing you could get was graph papyrus, and you had to draw all the tables by hand.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Dude, you could have just said something to us and we'd quiet down. Sheesh, some people...
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.
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.
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 see the heat caused you to hallucinate...
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.
> The laughter is fine...As long as they are not doing your code review! :)
Any laughter is fine...As long you are doing it on the way to the bank!
True story:
My first industry job was 13 years ago building dynamic website stuff for a Public Television station. I was doing Perl-CGI, and all they gave me was a 2 foot by 2 foot junk table, an old wooden chair with peeling paint, and a green-screen DEC terminal in a noisy server room. To develop a web site! I had to debug my code using Lynx! (Text-only web browser.) The reason why I had this lovely setup was that I also had to deal with a redneck idiot admin who didn't understand the web and who thought that all of the station's online presence should be through the BBS he set up. So he was deliberately trying to sabotage the project.
Yes, definitely an idiot. He had no concept of process isolation on modern OSes. His understanding of C programming was along the lines of "magic." And he once was convinced he found a security breach in my code because he composed a GET request, making a pistol gesture and a "pow" sound. I had to point out to him that the CGI script was merely returning him to the home page because it had detected a nonsensical request, and it was designed to do exactly that! (I showed him the unless clause doing it.)
Well, in the end, the project was successful, and redneck idiot BBS man left the job. But his fundie contacts got him a 80k programming job in Atlanta. This is why I tell people, "any idiot can get an 80k programming job." (If they're well connected.)
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.
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"!!!
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.
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