
Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in? - saurabh
There are good times and there are worst times. I recently had to write code in a hot room with temperatures near 107F; nothing to sit on; warm water for drinking and a lot of distractions. I am sure many people have been in similar situations and would like to know your experiences.<p>PS: I asked this question on StackOverflow but it was closed.
======
phugoid
Well, I nearly killed myself with a line of bad code. I made a silly change to
a flight simulator's "unusual attitude" logic. Unusual attitude training
consists of putting the aircraft in a very difficult orientation (45 deg nose
down, 60 deg left bank, etc.) and training pilots to recover.

Here's what the simulators look like:
<http://blafsen.net/photos/simulator.jpg>

I changed the code, and brought the simulator up on motion to test it... and
the machine started bucking like a horse and tossing me around the cabin. I
had the instructor console right in front of me, and for a while it was
physically impossible to hit the freeze button - I was being tossed around too
badly.

That day I learned a lesson about testing: first check it with motion OFF.

~~~
quizbiz
It's still incredible that you controlled those massive machines. I would love
to hear more about that.

~~~
phugoid
(blush) thanks. We use these simulators for training - it's cheaper/safer than
the real aircraft.

\- The pilots and instructor inside the cabin manipulate
controls/switches/CBs/panels, sending signals to an bunch of interface cards.

\- The interface cards convert voltages to values, and move them into a big
chunk of shared memory on the host computer.

\- The host computer recalculates the new state of the simulation, updating
everything in the shared memory, 60 times a second.

\- New values in the shared memory are sent to the interface cards.

\- The interface cards convert values to voltages, driving the instruments,
sound, visual and motion systems.

It all happens so fast that the pilots never sense the latency between their
action and the effects in the cockpit. The host computer is the brain of the
system, that's why a small bug there can be dangerous.

------
dbrown26
Back in 2000 I was working at a startup in Washington, D.C. and we had been
working 80-100 weeks for nearly 1.5 months before management finally brought
in some contractors as reinforcement. All of the developers were in a 20x20 or
so room working at folding tables. One of the contractors that they brought in
had a form of Tourette's that caused him to make this noise that I can only
describe as a loud squawk at random intervals, about every 60-180 seconds.
Combine that with the pressure, lack of sleep, and the effort to concentrate
and it became my own personal version of Chinese water torture. I truly think
I came close to having a nervous breakdown during those two weeks.

~~~
azrealus
dbrown26 why did you stay there so long?

------
trapper
Not working conditions per se, but debugging a legacy bioinformatics program
written in perl. Comments were in french which I do not understand. It took
three days to run and exited with:

"Error - good luck finding the bug".

~~~
wlievens
I've heard stories before specifically about the bioinformatics academic
circles... biotech researchers who think writing code is trivial so they never
even bother to have a software engineer look at it, until it's too late.

~~~
trapper
It's true. And for some reason they all love perl.

------
wallflower
This is not my story of course but the story that immediately popped in my
memory when I read the title.

Steve Wozniak's story about rewriting floppy drive low-level software the
morning of a big demo:

>I got it to where it was writing data on a track, reading the data on a
track. Then I got it to where it was reading the data in the right byte
positions. Then I got it to work with shifting tracks, and we wanted a simple
program where we would say "run checkbook" or "run color math" and it would
run the programs that were stored on the floppy disk. So we went off to Las
Vegas, and Randy and I worked all night and we got it done to where it was
working. At the very end, it was 6:00 a.m. and I said, 'We have to back up
this floppy disk." We had one good disk that we prepared with the data hand-
massaged to get it just right. So I stuck it in the floppy and wrote a little
program, and I typed in some data and I said "read track 0," stuck in the
other floppy and said "write track 0, read track 1, write track 1." There were
36 tracks—I had to switch floppies back and forth.

When I got done, I'm looking at these 2 floppies that look just the same. And
I decided that I might have written onto the good one from the bad, and I did.
So I had lost it all. I went back to my hotel room. I slept for a while. I got
up about 10:00 a.m. or so. I sat down and, out of my head and my listings,
recreated everything, got it working again, and we showed it at the show. It
was a huge hit. Everybody was saying, "Oh my God, Apple has a floppy!" It just
looked beautiful, plugged into a slot on our computer. We were able to say
"run color math," and it just runs instantly. It was a change in time.

But the real eureka moment for me was the very first time I ever read data
back. I wrote it on the floppy, which was easy, but read it back, got it
right. I just died.

I think that Steve's entire interview is probably one of the most inspiring in
Founders at Work:

<http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html>

~~~
faredoon
Truly inspirational. No complaints (I guess) if you're working in the
trenches, it always helps if you're onto something great.

------
tjake
Wrote custom test-set software in a clean-room. Bunny suit, mask and rubber
gloves for 8 hours a day. It was a windows box connected to a x-ray
diffraction machine so I had to be in the room.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I was a grad student who worked in a fab. I found that after a couple of years
wearing that bunny suit, mask, and rubber gloves for 6-8 hours per day (or,
more likely, per night) I was completely used to it.

I used to catch myself surfing the web in the clean room after hours. "Wait!"
I would say to myself, "I could be doing this _outside_ the clean room, where
I could take off this silly suit!"

But they are stressful places to work. The noise is quite troublesome and the
ergonomics are generally awful.

~~~
tjake
yeah, no tunes, and i just couldn't get used to the sweaty hands from the
gloves. i forgot about the mask. those dark red lines in your face, i much
prefer my aeron chair and office now :)

~~~
mechanical_fish
There are these cloth glove liners. They worked well for me, although everyone
has a different reaction to these things.

------
zackola
Pales in comparison to your story but I worked in a basement office, with
awful fluorescents, no natural light, with 95.5FM a top 50 hits station
blaring through the overhead system, in a open space for a man who was a
pretty dead on 50/50 mix of Michael Scott from The Office and Buster from
Arrested Development whose puppy would love to run around and shit in the back
corner of the office near the server room. Other than that, it was a pretty
sweet first job :)

------
markessien
When I started programming I used to work taking care of paralysed people.
This was a night job, and you had to stay awake for the entire night and
listen in case any noise came from the bedroom, in which case I had to go
check to see that the person had not moved to a position that could be
dangerous for him.

Since there was nothing else to do apart from listen, I wrote code the entire
night. The problem was that writing code can get very mentally taxing after a
few hours in the night, and combined with the thought that spacing out can
result in a persons death, it was a very demanding task, particularly in the
period from 4am to 6am.

~~~
tigerthink
You could have bought one of those noise-amplifying toys, stuck its microphone
inside the bedroom, attached headphones to it and turned the volume up.

~~~
sr3d
Or write a program that analyze the noise level from the recording device to
detect any motion and alert you. Hooked up with Growl and IM and now you have
a dead-alert system. However, since it's a life-or-death situation and you
couldn't focus 100% your commitment into it, I'm glad that you move on to a
different job now. Working on your startup or side projects and you may end up
killing someone isn't the kind of thought you need for the rest of your life.

------
nl
A hot, noisy hotel room, dial-up internet, 4:00am writing in _VB6_ to connect
to some weird COM+ service that used VB calling conventions, then a C++ COM
wrapper for that, then a C wrapper to connect to a Java JNI service. At 8:00pm
I didn't know VB, either. And it had to work by 9:00am when some system it
interfaced to started up. Oh - and I couldn't actually test it against
anything but stubs.

~~~
wallflower
How did that turn out? What was your margin of safety? I hope they appreciated
the heroic effort you put forth.

I haven't done anything that crazy but have debugged (and fixed) a few
memorable, painful, stressful software (usually system integration) problems
on frantic conference calls mere hours before the paid-for-and-scheduled on-
site training on the software commenced.

~~~
nl
Worked fine, stayed in production use for years - might still be there for all
I know. And no, it wasn't appreciated of course....

"Safety margin"! What's that? ;)

------
nolanbrown23
While I was in the Navy, I coded in my 2'x 6.5' rack on my ship while deployed
and while the AC in my berthing was broken. It was 105 degrees inside my
berthing (that I shared with 25 other guys) and the AC motor had caught fire
so we were out of luck in terms of that comfort. I don't recommend doing this,
it wasn't exactly a good idea to be coding in such heat and misery.

------
ivanstojic
Working as a tech team-lead for a large international company, I was assigned
to a team that was a year behind schedule on an 8 month project. I rallied the
people, we worked for 14-16 hours every day (weekends) and managed to get the
code in production in about two months.

I was proud of my team, that is what got me through the days.

After that my boss denied my salary raise with the suggestion that if I don't
like the salary, I know where the doors are.

I was insulted by the insolence. That was what got me through the door.

------
npk
80 hours a week for two months in the Antarctic "Pig Barn." The heat was
turned off for about three weeks.

<http://stratocat.com.ar/bases/41e.htm>

------
Zarathu
Coming to work from 8:30 to 5:30, sitting in a cubicle with a forced dress
code, while writing in... _sob_ PHP.

Rails freelance is awesome.

~~~
quizbiz
Does php really deserve a sob?

~~~
jcapote
Have you ever been forced to program in PHP?

~~~
etherael
Yes, and then someone forced me to code in ColdFusion and run _EXCEL_ imports
into a really bad CF ORM with SQL server on the backend.

I now freelance django / RoR and PHP and I do not complain about any of them,
ever. ColdFusion is the language one should be forced to work with whenever
they complain about any other language, it will fix their aversion to the
language in question very, very quickly.

------
nirmal
-15F, fixing bugs in code that ran on a small wearable computing device strapped to a soldiers wrist. The best part was where I had to interface with the GUI to debug instead of a shell on a handheld tablet. That meant using a tiny stylus on a tiny screen while asking a soldier to stand still in 30 mph winds.

------
amastilovic
I underwent surgical procedure and removed a pilonidal cyst located at my
lower back. Because of the surgery I was under heavy dose of pain killers, and
could not sit, stand or lie on my back.

So I had to implement a "will take only 15 minutes but is extremely important"
feature, lying on my stomach with laptop on the floor, with my head dizzy
because of the pain killers and a bloody butt.

------
joshu
Committing code changes to a production trading system while passing a kidney
stone.

I had been out for a week waiting for the stone to pass, I hadn't slept more
than 15 minutes in a row in more than a week -- and those 15 mins were from
sheer exhaustion and vicodin. I was hallucinating continuously and vigorously.
Hadn't been eating either.

Good times.

------
orangebanana
On a balcony overlooking Western Baghdad figuring out why our (old and pretty
well tested) network code didn't see fit to push packets. Was outside because
we suspected the sat terminal was causing the problem. Only ended up taking a
couple hours but it was probably my least favourite coding/debugging session.

~~~
BigZaphod
You win. :)

~~~
wallflower
These stories are so incredible they might be able to compile a real "Extreme
Programming" book

------
memorius
By far the worst: on site doing commissioning / systems integration testing of
warehouse automation systems - cranes moving pallets around, boxes trundling
on conveyors, etc.

The automated equipment we were debugging (and volume testing with things
moving around continuously) was the least of it... the huge site was still
under construction. All around me there was racking being cut and welded,
electricians installing stuff, aromatic concrete floor sealant being applied,
various random drilling and banging.

I had to write large amounts of new code on the spot as we found problems
(missing features, mostly) during testing, while the automation engineers
stood around annoyed and waiting.

When I first got to the site, I didn't even have a laptop - had to lug a
desktop PC and CRT monitor there and back every day (carrying it across half
the site and the loading dock) for the first couple of weeks. For part of the
time, this involved carrying it across iced concrete, since it had been
snowing.

Oh, and there was the engineer from one of the third-party equipment
suppliers, an Italian company - nice chap but he didn't speak very good
English; the noise level didn't help the already poor communication, and when
we started our testing, we discovered he had developed his control software
from an interface specification three versions old and half a year out of
date.

------
Femur
I am a contract Oracle DBA. One month long project I spent working in a gutted
out strip mall that had card tables and Ethernet cable strung about.

There was free coffee though.

~~~
adammarkey
Did that strip mall happen to be in Canton, Ohio?

I was there too!!

------
cool-RR
Not coding, but editing video. It was for a start-up I founded, and it
happened 2.5 years ago. I just moved into a new apartment and had little
besides my Pentium III computer and an approaching deadline. It had a bad-
quality 14-inch CRT screen that I salvaged from somewhere. I mounted the
screen on the computer case, sat on the floor with keyboard on my folded legs,
and started working.

------
mahmud
Having my server in California crash while I was in Siem Reap Cambodia, and
the only way I could get to work was turn off the AC in my room to get a
better signal coming from the WiFi at fancy-hotel next door and opening the
window.

It was 3AM and I had sweat dripping down my palms and wrists that I had to lay
toilet paper over the keyboard and mosquitoes buzzed at my ear and neck
nonstop. I had to fight with an aggressive postfix filter that kept sending
mail to a lisp process and did no error checking to see if Lisp ran and
processed the mail. I had to remove the filter, and manually rebuild stuff
later after I had the system running around 12PM the next day.

It was one day in hell, taught me that the unix errno and process exit status
can be a fucked thing to debug if you're forking multiple process from a
script.

[Edit: right now I'm coding sitting on the toilet seat, with my pants on,
because I'm a moody SOB and like to move around the house as the day passes
:-]

------
Jakob
I worked at home in my living room for the last year. Rented an office again
this year. In retrospect working in your living room was very unhealthy for
me.

------
stonemetal
Industrial automation controls programming at a tire factory in Georgia. It
was 90 degrees outside and you're in a large room with row after row of tire
ovens that run above a few hundred degrees. We had machines with thermal
sensors set to fault out at 120 and ac units on their enclosures and they
still faulted regularly. They spray the tires with lube so they don't stick to
the ovens so there is a layer of black crap on everything. All the machines
running made around 100DB of noise. I got put on the project towards the end
as it was way past due and they wanted to appear to be doing something so they
decided 24hr on site was the way to go so I was working 8pm to 8am.

------
epi0Bauqu
While dealing with a crying baby.

~~~
BigZaphod
That has been my every day for 4 months. I work from home with only a 4 month
old baby and a couple dogs to keep me company. (My wife works out of the home
all day.) The numerous random outbursts utterly destroy concentration each
time they occur. I'm honestly not sure I can do it this way much longer. I
wish daycare wasn't so damned expensive...

------
agotterer
In 2002 I was working with a startup (that later failed). The office was in
the basement of a warehouse, because they got cheap rent. The office itself
wasn't terrible, decent offices and equipment. Since it was a basement there
were obviously no windows. We were working 80-100 hours a week, often sleeping
in the office. We had a really bad flood a few weeks before our launch date.
We got (most) of the water out, but the walls started molding before they
could get everything fixed. I bought my own hepa-filter and eventually "took a
break" because I couldn't take anymore.

------
SingAlong
I'm still yet to graduate and feeling the goodness of working freelance at
home.

oh my! you guys scare me off. I've always dreamed of an office for my startup
where we work in a really nice garden full of trees and green grass, sitting
on bean bags and chairs (freedom of posture :P) Maybe I should just do this.
It's going to be really cheap and comfortable considering the temperature in
my location is around 20c-24c during normal days.

I hate air-conditioned rooms. there's nothing better than the smell of green
grass and evening wind blowing your nose. And listening to soft music in such
an environment is really cool. But I would have to opt for a silent area for
the office (which is far away from traffic jams) which would mean compromising
the utilities/accessibility of the city center. When you have sounds of
sparrows and pigeons in place on that soft-music, it sounds even more cooler.

I'll also have a huge hall to run for shelter incase it rains :)

And also I'll plant an umbrella kinda thing above every fella working, coz I
don't want them to waste time washing them or their notebooks of crow/pigeon
shit :D

P.S: anyway it's a dream office for my startup and sounds a do-able task :)

------
jsmcgd
Reminds me of my experiences at university. One of my friends referred to the
labs as the 'blast furnace'. This was due to a lack of air conditioning and a
great many computers being used at once in a relatively small area.

Also the 'quiet room' was anything but - if only one person wasn't being quiet
then you would hear every sinlge syllable they uttered. Very distracting.

------
nreece
Had to write code in Sanskrit on a banana leaf in an isolated island... but
then, it was just a dream.. that may come true someday.

------
IgorCarron
I had to change some code on some of our data acquisition system while we were
flying on NASA's KC-135 (also known as the vomit comet) back in the early
90's. Some water condensation was dripping from the ceiling on the keyboard
while the other experimenters nearby were barfing their brains out. I've been
in more optimal situations.

------
hellweaver666
My current job - I sit next to the marketing manager who spends his day either
talking loudly on the phone in German or asking me stupid marketing questions
that have no relevance to my job because he can't be bothered to walk across
the office and ask the right person.

In addition, behind me is the CEO's office. The wall is glass and everytime I
open my web browser to do some research he comes and asks what I'm doing - as
far as he's concerned I should be doing nothing but writing code.

Also, to my left is a door to the office balcony where the smokers do their
thing, so every five minutes during winter I get an icey blast and the stench
of tobbaco when they open the door to go out and again when they come back in.

Finally, directly above my desk is an AC chiller unit that blows cold air down
my back from spring to autumn making my hands so cold I can barely type.

------
mannicken
Working with back-open cubicles, loud sales shouting, people talking, and a
goddamn "Sold!" bell ringing each time there was a sale.

Seriously? You need to get me out of zone just because you have succeeded to
sell another piece of software?

Freelancing kicks ass.

------
abyx
Had to write some code in a servers room, which of course was really cold.
Other than that, I couldn't sit down, and had nowhere to place the keyboard
on, so a pal held it up while I was typing...

------
dmillar
I had to write code in a run down house that had been converted into a make
shift office. There was no AC, and my desk was fit for a kindergartner (no
exaggeration). My chair was a metal folding chair and my boss was a sales guy
that had no idea how to write even an Excel function. I wasn't there long.

------
rrhyne
Sitting in a dusty concrete building, deep in Baja, down a 180 mile road dirt
that takes 4 hours to traverse at 45-55mph, in a town with the best right hand
point break on the west coast.

Hard to get work done with that right point firing and visible from the
window.

------
saurabh
More views on StackOverflow

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/741581/what-are-the-
worst...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/741581/what-are-the-worst-
working-conditions-you-have-written-code-in)

------
sdp
Not so bad compared to the rest of the stories, but I still work as a
developer/tech support. I have to drop whatever I'm doing to troubleshoot
student tech problems, so the interruptions are frequent.

------
zandorg
Compared to my cosy abode with a Linux/Windows laptop, I'd have to say writing
Java on a Sun workstation at University in 2003...

------
ojbyrne
8' x 8' glass walled room - 6 developers (2 facing each of three walls), the
fourth wall had the door.

------
banned_man
Trading desk, as a research quant. The office was open-plan, there were
constantly people passing behind me, and expletive-laden interruptions related
to market conditions were frequent.

For the first 6 months, it was very exciting, but eventually the sensory
overload and taxing environment got to me, and I started having health
problems. In retrospect, I think the open-plan office was much more of a
contributor than the noise, which could be tuned out pretty easily. Open plan
=> needing to pay constant attention to how one is perceived => anxiety =>
diminished productivity => more anxiety => immune system fails => very sick.

I think 107 F is worse, though. I stop being productive around 90, and I'm
pretty sure I'd die after 8 hours in that heat.

~~~
lallysingh
Etymotic HF-2s (or similar) noise-blocking earbud headphones. People know that
they'll be distracting you when talking, and they reduce the outside noise
quite a bit.

As for the perception issue, that's more of a showmanship issue. For people
who aren't in your field but do judge, I find a few stereotypes work out well.
At my last job, I filled unused screen space with random API references. The
busier and more technical my screen looked, the busier and more technical I
looked as a result. It's the game you have to play when people don't let good
work speak for itself.

~~~
banned_man
I definitely had the screen set up as you described, but I still found working
with constant open-back visibility to be pretty terrible.

As humans, though we share this with most animals, we have a strong desire to
do important things (eating, defecating, sex, spiritual journeys) with at
least some degree of privacy. Work, at least of the mentally taxing kind,
falls square into that category.

------
erlanger
1\. Hm...in the front seat of my car, waiting for the traffic officer to
return for 45 minutes.

2\. In a dorm room for a year with 10kb/s internet, tops. FTP was impossible
without net2ftp.com. SSH and most other traffic would not get anywhere either
(SVN, IRC, etc.), and I was working many hours on web projects. No Windows VM,
so all IE6-7 testing had to be through BrowserShots. But I had a bunch of
great Mac software which eased the pain.

------
csomar
Ok, at home, my parents and my sisters are really kind and they don't do
noise. Also my mother understand that I need some concentration when i'm on
computer, although she don't know what the benefits of 'sitting for long hours
in front of a screen with much gadgets and text!!'

The worst time is at school, when my friends (tech-savvy people) ask me for
questions in a very noisy way that I loose concentration. So I agree with most
of you about concentration, we can class it then

Concentration

Computer bugs and speed

Screen (if u sit for long hours)

Mouse and Keyboard (especially for those cheap laser mouses!!!)

Computer noise (if it's an old dirty one)

your girl friend (if u got one!!!)

Those are all factors that can affect your programming or whatever you are
doing if it's mind related, like Math or Physic calculations

Also I posted it in SOF, no the question was not closed

