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.
Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
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Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#22Wrote 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 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…
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 :)
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#231. 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.
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#24Had 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...
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#25Working 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.
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#26-15F, 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.
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#27Wrote 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.
Finally, a keyboard that is free of bits of dirt. :)
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#28Trading 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…
Funny, even hearing these stories, some of us would kill to have that job.
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#29When 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 wr…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?
#30Reminds 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.