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."
In the same room as an ultrasonic cleaner (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not coding, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Factory floor... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Spare me. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My experience (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Prayer meetings (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Write code or do programming? (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolute worst, as far as I am concerned. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
SARS Anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Worst Conditions - USAF Sub-Contractor (Score:4, Interesting)
The best of times, etc... (Score:1, Interesting)
In living room. Two toddlers and an infant to manage. Years, but they became older as time went by so it got better and worse.
Drove me nuts. Wouldn't have missed it for the world.
The screaming German client on the phone with no tolerance or understanding for Thanksgiving holiday with infant on my shoulder and a toddler heading for the basement stairs was the best, ever.
You were in a room? Luxury. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Coding at a Drag Strip (Score:4, Interesting)
Walgreed's (Score:2, Interesting)
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!
Re:15 years or so ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Working in industrial automation.
I can attest to this. Although I am not a programmer, and don't know the parent personally, I once spent some time as an industrial engineer.
I've seen programmers write pieces of code using nothing but a piece of plywood across the top of a garbage can for a desk. Keep in mind, many factories don't allow chairs on the factory floor, so all the work was done standing up. Not to mention the other horrible working conditions that come with factories.
Although, I do seem to remember those programmers most of those programmers going freelance and making some big money.
My heart bleeds for you... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I wrote code in the Army (Score:5, Interesting)
Maintaining a deploy of an app built on an MVC framework with a replication database backend... now thats coding.
Re:I wrote code in the Army (Score:3, Interesting)
mostly windows/exchange even on the classified stuff
you have to know how the army works. everything is a task, with the more complicated tasks being broken into sub-tasks. everything is assumed to be simple to do since it's just a task.
Re:Under pressure (Score:5, Interesting)
Somebody mod this guy up. The customer is pissed at you because you represent the company, your boss is pissed at you because his revenue will go down, support is pissed at you because they have to stay late, and R&D is especially pissed at you because everything works in their lab.
Then again, if you do fix it, you get to be the hero. Not sure how many years that kind of stress takes out of your life though.
Re:Prayer meetings (Score:3, Interesting)
"and I was told that they were mandatory"
Did you still attend even though you were a contracter? Doesn't matter if you were or not, I'm sure that trying to force you to attend is highly illegal...
Re:Under pressure (Score:3, Interesting)
How about doing this the week before Christmas, with the flu and 104 fever, debugging assembler code, on the customer's machine, with a printer that took an hour to generate a listing?
Fortunately, the customer was very understanding, but I probably gave everyone in the office the flu. Not to mention their families, since I was invited to their Christmas party the morning I left.
Place I visited but never worked in. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:In the same room as a... smoker (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I had to take 'training' for safety before (Score:3, Interesting)
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! ;)
Re:Under pressure (Score:2, Interesting)
Pressure can be caused by all sorts of things, and sometimes it's not really any one person's fault.
My worst scenario actually happened when, technically, where was "no customer". I was in charge of one aspect of a service, which at the time, was a single-point-of-failure. The setup was in its first stages, and there wasn't enough redundancy in place. At that point, murphy's law kicked in, and 2 unrelated, improbable events took place. The first was a remote DB service going down, and the second was the local cache getting wiped (Think of a dam getting cut off from its source of water flow, and at the same time the reservoir regulation system messes up and drains most/all of the "standing" water).
At this juncture, I was the only person with hands-on experience with that part of the service, and while this part of the system was down, the entire system couldn't function. At that point, I had 4 other developers sitting around and gawking at me, through no real fault of their own, since each was in charge of, and was versed in, one aspect of the system.
Yes, this is the very definition of "poor planning", but that observation wasn't useful at the time. Eventually, after a couple of hours of "crisis management", the DB service finally became accessible, and I was able to restore functionality.
It couldn't have been over 2 hours, but when you're in hell time appears to move rather slowly.
Whatever deadline-marathons I had to put up with before or since, it didn't match the pain of that incident.
Notice that I said "not really any one person's fault" up there? Depending on your point of view, the reality in this case was that it was either my fault, of everyone's (since everyone in the team was aware that this was something that could possibly occur).
"hard-learned lessons", and such...
Re:15 years or so ago (Score:5, Interesting)
- Spending two weeks doing Y2K updates to four laser markers at a tool factory in 90+ degree heat, grimy, filthy conditions, and with management breathing down my back since they demanded all four machines be done at once, which totally shut the factory down. They backed off a bit when they saw that happen. Oh, no chairs too.
- Spending four days doing the same Y2K update on two laser markers in a bearing factory. It was winter so the heat wasn't bad, but you could literally see the kerosene mist in the air, and it took a few days for it to work itself out of my pores to where I couldn't smell it anymore. I felt so bad for the poor people that had to sit near me on the plane home. No chairs there either.
- Several clean-room environments in chip fabs when writing on-site updates to the laser machines that correct mask defects. I hate the suits, and depending on where in the fab you are, you might be subjected to the most God-awful yellow light for extended periods of time. Also, it never fails - you spend 15 minutes getting suited up, walking through the air showers, up however many flights of stairs, and through other protective measures, then right as you sign in to get into the protected area of the fab, you realize you have to pee and the nearest bathroom is where you suited up.
My Worst.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:15 years or so ago (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked for a company that put flock on polypropylene ribbon - the fuzzy velvet lined ribbon that you buy at Christmas. That crap is all nylon fibers, cut a couple thousandths of an inch high and dyed. It's then electrostatically charged and deposited onto the substrate, which has had glue applied. Because the substrate is an opposite charge, it stands straight up. The glue is nasty, the fibers are EVERYWHERE. The line workers are basically covered in red 'dust' (actually nylon fibers) at the end of their shift.
And, of course, we had to do this all in the summertime, in order to fulfill the orders for the following Christmas...
My job was to maintain the server, which was on the shop floor. In a closed room. I don't pretend it was sealed, because the server was an odd tinge of red as well. The network hubs were there too.
The horizontal wiring was all silver satin cable - the guy who did this (the 'chief engineer') must've gotten an incredible deal on it somewhere, there were reels and reels of this crap. No way would he let me put in twisted pair, and he was always complaining about server performance and demanding that I put in more memory and that would fix it. One day I went into a closet in the front office and found the silver satin cable terminated with wire nuts. I swear to Christ it was wire nuts. That is the day I printed out my resignation and left it in my wallet for the day I found something better.
Re:15 years or so ago (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked as a programmer / all around tech in a steel mill years ago
I've heard BAD stories about steel mills. One that sticks out:
After hearing that story, I decided I will never work in a steel mill.
My worst (Score:3, Interesting)
...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".
jackhammers and bitches (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
One word: Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Coding at a Drag Strip (Score:3, Interesting)
My best worst story (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Off site (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I wrote code in the Army (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:In the same room as a... smoker (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:1, Interesting)
I write code for industrial micro-controllers, mostly for the water/wastewater industry. One particularly smelly project had me working in a hot room that had previously been flooded (about 4 feet up the walls) with sewage, and had since dried in the summer heat and particles were dancing around in the air. You get used to the smell in treatment plants, but breathing this stuff in and tasting it as it dripped down the back of your throat was too much. I got sick and left after a couple of hours, my company insisted that the general contractor bring in a pressure washer before I went back. True story, beat that.
x_Warmotor
Re:Itsatrap!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
That's nothing. Imagine listening to Aphex Twin's Omgyjya Switch 7 [youtube.com] on one day, and German schlager [wikipedia.org] versions of really really cheesy songs on the next day, while working uncomfortably close to the only toilet in the building, at a weather that makes you sweat trough your pants in 30 minutes, with two fat geeks (one young, pimpled and arrogant, one old, hairy as hell and fat), in a fuck-ugly industrial building with concrete, pipes, fluorescent lights and nothing else to see. Owned by one of the big evil media publishers. With the text "HELL" written next to the elevator button for the floor where you work. From 8 in the morning to 8 in the evening. And then coming home, in a city that always sleeps, with no entertaining place within reach, and totally boring and narrow-minded people, in a region, where the traditional dish looks and tastes like something that would be called vomit in other places.
In case you want to avoid it: Never go to Gütersloh in Germany (home of Bertelsmann [BMG, RTL, Mohn print, ex Lycos]). Even if they offer you huge sums of money. It's not worth it. You literally completely lose that time in your life, and will be too weak to get out by your own.
ATM Ticket Booth at Amusement Park (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I wrote code in the Army (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks for an interesting bit of history.
A little Googling tells me that the 637/Sturgeon-class subs were all built during the late 60s and early 70s. Core memory was still pretty big then. I was learning to program on IBM-360s with core memory. Though minicomputers with LSI memory were beginning to appears. Cheaper but slower.
Apparently the UYK-7 got phased out in favor of the UYK-43 (with solid-state RAM? can't find specifics) around 1984. This in turn is only now being replaced by the UYQ-70. So I guess the product cycle for naval warfare computers is about 20 years. Is that how long it takes the Pentagon to change specs?
A lot of UYK-7s must have got installed on 688/Los Angeles-class subs before 1984. Most 688 subs are still in service. I wonder if any of them still have UYK-7s?
My worst experience Coding/Debugging in Taiwan (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
I got one (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:15 years or so ago (Score:3, Interesting)
Plywood on a garbage can? Thankfully on only a couple occasions, I haven't even had that luxury. While tied by a too-short serial cable to a controller or HMI, I've had to hold my laptop computer up with one hand, and use the other to diagnose the problem.
And the place I'm going to next month.. it makes fish feed. The smell is just vile, and it gets into everything.
Re:I wrote code in the Army (Score:3, Interesting)
How quickly they forget! In 1961, when the Marshall was launched, almost all information technology involved gears. And gears should not be sneered at: precision mechanical engineering is one of humanity's greatest achievements. The industrial revolution wouldn't have happened without it.
Integrated circuitry didn't even exist until 1958. If somebody had a "computer" it was most likely the analog kind (digital computers being few and heartbreakingly expensive). An analog computer was usually something that modelled its calculations using electrical circuits, but gears were not unknown. And there were a lot of "computers" (in the broad, pre-von Neumann sense) that weren't called that had some kind of mechanical basis: thermostats, accounting machines, etc.
This was really sophisticated technology. If you're used to a world where even cheap toys use tiny computers, it may seem klunky, but that's an illusion. In some ways, digital technology is often less sophisticated. When you have millions of transistors to throw at a problem, you're not nearly as careful with the solution.
One last historical note: the submariners of WW II wiped out a good chunk of the world's merchant marine using these "primitive" computers.
Re:In the same room as a... smoker (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
A real answer (Score:2, Interesting)
I wrote code (bug fixes) on the production floor of a tire factory in Charlotte NC in the Summer. Horrible in so many ways.
Re:15 years or so ago (Score:3, Interesting)
unfortunately you can live for too long crawling around in molten steel and there is nothing that can be done.
I met a guy once who had a large steel ingot land on him (hit his shoulder) at a temperature of say 7-900 degree's C his job was to direct the manipulator operator at a Steel Forge which means being stood in front of a massive anvil as a 10,000 ton press squeezes it. What really got me is he was doing the same job when I met him.
brave or mad I don't know which.
Wire drawings another bad one I heard about one guy when hooking the wire got it wrong and it went into his leg not only that he had to stand there while it passed through if he had moved it would have wrapped round him and probably killed him.
Luckily about the only dangerous story I actually had some involvement in was a near miss, The company I was working for made rolls for cold rolling mills these are what can turn a big ingot into razer blades car body sheet or foil. To do the job they have to be very hard. Over 723 degrees C there is a phase change and quenching produces a denser crystaline matrix than slow cooling. quenching the outside is easy enough but the inner part of the roll will cool relatively slowly forming a less dense phase. In simple terms the inside is trying to be bigger than the outside. As you can imagine there are huge stresses within a forged roll. It's been known for a roll to have completed its service life gone for scrap and been stored to explode (luckily in that incident it demolished a warehouse wall at a weekend) anyway this particular roll was experimental and was using a new technique, but after hardening and what's termed a make safe temper over the weekend it was hardness tested by fred at 900 vickers about 50 vickers harder than the usual 800-850 that was at about 12, around 1 oclock it exploded one of the journels (drive ends) broke off and launched itself across the shop floor (probably about a ton and a half of steel) it missed the back of freds leg by inches.
The really scary places are foundrys, you may have heard of the lost wax process essentially the pattern is made in wax which is subsequently melted and molten metal poured in your typical model car gets made that way, very precise and not much work to finish the item. A friend of mine related a tale where they had been experimenting with polystyrene pouring the molten steel into the mould and the polystyrene pattern would just melt for a kilo or so pattern it was ok so they decided to try it out on a big one. unfortunately the trapped air caused the moulding sand to break apart molten steel going everywhere luckily no one was hurt with that one.
That place you know, in Sudan (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Offtopic but on topic (Score:3, Interesting)
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!)
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
"Well, that isn't totally fair. If Hamas vanished, there is a decent argument that Israel would continue to expand into Palestine."
Really? I'd love to hear that far-fetched argument.
"IMHO, all sides in the middle east are in the wrong."
Classic weak response. There must be a middle-of-the-road, balanced, position between the two extremes, and all we have to do is find this mystical utopian alignment and all will be right with the world.
Let's try another point of view.
a) In any war-like situation, all sides do things that any of us would consider "wrong". So sure, it's easy to cop-out and say both sides are wrong, but it's still a cop-out.
b) The Israelis gave land back to the egyptians for peace. They now cooperate with the Egyptians to the extent they can. So there's plenty of evidence that they will deal for real peace.
c) Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist. I'm not talking about word-games and so on, I'm talking reality. Hamas is fundamentaly against a Jewish state in the region.
The stupid part is that to win, all the palestinians need to do is to commit to peace in the same way that Gandhi did: completely. They would need to teach peace in their schools, and practice peace on the streets. Anybody who violated the peace would be given up on the spot. This doesn't mean the would be pushovers, they would simply use every other means they could to the fullest, taking the high road even when sometimes the low road appears to be entirely justified.
If the palestinians did that, they couldn't lose. Once a few years go by no hard-line government could win in Israel (remember, the current one is just barely in charge as it is). Eventually Israel would be forced to recognize more and more fundamental rights. It would simply be a question of time.