Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?

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.

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".

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

While dealing with a crying baby.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

More views on StackOverflow

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/741581/what-are-the-worst...

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.

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.

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...

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.

-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.

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.

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.

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

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.