Worst Working Conditions You Had To Write Code In? 1127
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."
Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Well (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Itsatrap!!! (Score:5, Funny)
You had water?!
That's your cue, geezers.
I got that beat (Score:4, Funny)
I'll go you one better - I once had to maintain Perl code.
Keyboard behind an industrial fan (Score:5, Funny)
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.
It was back in Nam. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Worst (Score:2, Funny)
Sorry, that sounds like Best to me.
Re:Laugher in cube next to me (Score:5, Funny)
Absolute worst? (Score:5, Funny)
My last Employer actually expected me to write code in the morning! We are talking pre 10am here. I still have nightmares...
Re:You call that bad... (Score:3, Funny)
If you're Tuesday afternoons are 20 days long... you're going too fast.
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I got that beat (Score:5, Funny)
I'll go you one better - I once had to maintain Perl code.
Oh yeah? I had to scale a Ruby on Rails application.
Ha! I have you all beat! (Score:5, Funny)
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
writing code in NASAs vomit comet (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
I worked for QVC (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Bah! That's nothing that headphones won't cure.
There was this one time when I was trying to code, and this gorgeous woman was fawning all over me. She kept taking articles of clothing off and cuddling up to me. I tell you, it was awful! Do you have any idea how hard it is to code with a beautiful naked woman throwing herself at you?
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
You had wolves and bears? We had to survive on macaroni and cheese!
Look, you're going to have to face reality (Score:1, Funny)
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.
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
My brother used to have a job like that, but the wolves caught up to him, and then the grizzly bears took him from the wolves. We didn't find out what happened until months later though. First there were the knawed bones and then some scatologist found a pile of grizzly dung and there, atop it, were the remains of brother's hand - still clutching the palm pilot. Dedicated coder that he was, he apparently continued to type even as he was being digested. His last line written was exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
Once had to code on a Vista machine (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why is this being posted everywhere? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Absolute worst? (Score:5, Funny)
pre 10am
Whoa, woah, woah...
Since when was there a 10AM?!?!?!
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Try sitting across from Sarah Palin, who keeps asking me if I'm going to run for president next year. I wanted to explain to her that not only was I not a politician, not a republican, and not old enough to be constitutionally eligible for presidency, but next year is not an election year. So I did. She said I wasn't thinking like a maverick.
Re:Absolute worst, as far as I am concerned. (Score:3, Funny)
That sounds like the one occasion when I worked from home.
And I didn't have any roommates!
Re:writing code in NASAs vomit comet (Score:5, Funny)
Thread closed, you win.
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
Meh. I had to debug some code on the set of a porn shoot. Before the viagra era. You want to talk about pressure to perform? God forbid you can't fix the code and recompile within about ten minutes... then your set time is wasted ($$$) & you need to bring everyone back in a few hours once the "actor" can perform again. That's when I learned you really need a stable of male performers ready to go.
Re:Not coding, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Evicted (Score:5, Funny)
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! [youtube.com]
Re:Room full of girls (Score:3, Funny)
I Once Had To Work In A Cramped Cubicle (Score:5, Funny)
I'm going to burn the building down....
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Itsatrap!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Prayer meetings (Score:5, Funny)
Blow Job (Score:1, Funny)
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
Re:I'm sitting in downtown Seattle (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Laugher in cube next to me (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, you could have just said something to us and we'd quiet down. Sheesh, some people...
Worst that that - female coworkers in heat (Score:5, Funny)
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...
The woes of 1999-2000 (Score:5, Funny)
UMMM (Score:5, Funny)
Try sitting next to Sarah Palin.
Try sitting next to Cowboy Neal.
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
It is concerning when macaroni and cheese stalks you.
Re:Itsatrap!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Writing mock lobster [phespirit.info] objects [youtube.com].
Re:UMMM (Score:1, Funny)
Try being Cowboy Neal and Sarah Palin's illegitimate offspring.
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Yes.
Re:My experience (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:I wrote code in the Army (Score:1, Funny)
This sounds an awful lot like working in Memphis, TN!
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:2, Funny)
Actually, yes.
But I've found that most women can't go for more than 3 to 4 hours. They'll be exhausted, and usually unable to speak or see straight, but have a huge smile on their faces.
So, take care of the distraction, and then you can get back to work. Just remember though, that was on your own personal time, so you'll have to work late to make up for it.
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Worst that that - female coworkers in heat (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Worst (Score:3, Funny)
Are you doing his mom?
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Doctor Baltar, is that you?
Re:Hmmmmmkay? (Score:3, Funny)
Sure it wasn't Michael Bolton? Did you ever get your stapler back?
Re:Why is this being posted everywhere? (Score:5, Funny)
Either way someone is really turned on about this.
Re:I wrote code in the Army (Score:5, Funny)
The use Exchange on the battlefield? Suddenly, I feel a whole lot less safe.
Re:Wow. (Score:3, Funny)
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?
back in the day (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Absolute worst? (Score:5, Funny)
My last Employer actually expected me to write code in the morning! We are talking pre 10am here. I still have nightmares...
But 10AM doesn't happen in the morning, it happens late at night when the sun starts to come up.
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
Well, in Soviet Russia....
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Hmmmmmkay? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Do you have any idea how hard it is to code with a beautiful naked woman throwing herself at you?
No.
Re:Worst that that - female coworkers in heat (Score:1, Funny)
I thought you meant a different kind of in heat.
Re:SARS Anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Worst Conditions - USAF Sub-Contractor (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I wrote code in the Army (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Three letters... (Score:2, Funny)
V. B. A.
I should be getting hazard pay.
Have you considered going into poetry?
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
Scatologist?
I think the search for the shittiest job is over.
Re:15 years or so ago (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:SARS Anyone? (Score:2, Funny)
Try coding for an 8 hour day in rubber gloves and a face mask!
German porn stars act for 8 hours a day under the same conditions. And you think you're special.
Black Mesa (Score:5, Funny)
I'll never go back. I've since landed a job with Aperture Labs working on a project called GLaDOS. Much better.
Re:UMMM (Score:3, Funny)
Impossible, except if you mean "next" in an astronomical sense. Like in "The Andromeda Galaxy is the next Galaxy.".
Re:Prayer meetings (Score:5, Funny)
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. :)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:1, Funny)
Bah! That's nothing that headphones won't cure.
There was this one time when I was trying to code, and this gorgeous woman was fawning all over me. She kept taking articles of clothing off and cuddling up to me. I tell you, it was awful! Do you have any idea how hard it is to code with a beautiful naked woman throwing herself at you?
Everything is hard when you have a beautiful naked women next to you eh?
Re:I wrote code in the Army (Score:3, Funny)
Coding Under Potentially Lethal Conditions (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
You want to talk about pressure to perform?
Not really, I find that talking about it only makes it worse.
Oops, TMFI?
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:3, Funny)
Do you have any idea how hard it is to code with a beautiful naked woman throwing herself at you?
No.
You say no and are (currently) at +5 Funny. Another poster says yes and is at +3 Funny.
The difference in moderation is... telling.
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:2, Funny)
*scribbles* "Yes" not as funny as "No"...
In Philadelphia. (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:My experience (Score:1, Funny)
Did you say Java?
Re:UMMM (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:4, Funny)
"There's another part of me that just wants to one up you by claiming to work somewhere that they required me to personally kill a kitten before every check-in."
The can-crusher next to the time clock works for me.
"Mrao?"
Ka-chunk!
"Mrao?"
Ka-chunk!
"I can has survival?"
Ka-chunk!
Re:Laugher in cube next to me (Score:3, Funny)
Paul,
I'm sorry. I'll clamp my cakehole shut from now on.
Re:Laugher in cube next to me (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:I wrote code in the Army (Score:3, Funny)
Lesson learned: if you're in the infantry, never admit you know anything about computers. You never know when some jackass is going to need tech support.
Re:UMMM (Score:2, Funny)
Aperture (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:3, Funny)
How about sitting next to a guy who can't stop bashing President Bush three months after he left office?
Doesn't Biden get a private office? Nobody sits next to him.
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Laugher in cube next to me (Score:5, Funny)
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"!!!
Re:Worst Conditions - USAF Sub-Contractor (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:1, Funny)
Try sitting next to Sarah Palin.
I'd love it! She WILL be naked, right?
Re:Laugher in cube next to me (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:4, Funny)
Try living in Russia, and having Sarah Palin looking across at you all the time.
Re:Laugher in cube next to me (Score:5, Funny)
I find it very endearing that someone felt the need to explain what Lynx is on SlashDot.
Adolescence. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Laugher in cube next to me (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:3, Funny)
A decade?
The U.S will run out of out in 2 years, and die in 3.
Mmmm... existential-ey.
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:3, Funny)
Splitters.