What is the worst thing you did or had to do under pressure?

Question

... which you probably wouldn't have done or done much better if you wouldn't have been under time pressure or basically any form of stress? What did you do? What were the circumstances that caused stress and pressure, and how it affected your judgement/behavior? What was the outcome or repurcussions?

Examples:

• You wrote a terrible "won't touch this ever again" piece of code you end up extending and supporting the next 3 years.
• Yelled at a fellow coworker, only to find out it was your fault all along.
• Quit your job in affection over a dispute of coding style or the use of one API over another.
• You had to come in to fix a severe bug only hours before your honeymoon flight was scheduled for take off. Did you still catch it?

I know this question is similar to Confessions of your worst WTF moment, but I'm only interested in the stories that were caused by working under pressure, and what was actually causing the stress and pressure.

Answer 1

I've wrote so much code, and made so many design decisions under pressure it would be hard to choose - but harder still because it normally takes some time for the chickens to come home to roost.

I know it sounds like dodging the question, but it happens so often to many of us, that it has become almost routine.

You don't always get to choose your working environment; you just make the best of it and when you do screw up, you learn from it and move on. Hell... even when I'm not under pressure I usually cringe when I look back at code older than 6 months.

PS: RE - Honeymoon flights.... don't make any changes a day before you go on holiday. People would rather you told them to wait a couple of weeks for a fix, than to be lumbered with a hastily bungled fix. As a general rule, don't make any changes unless you will be there the next day to pick up the pieces.

Answer 2

For me it's not decisions that I made under time/bugs in production/"just fix it now, we're losing money!" pressure that are the problem, it's the ones I'm having to make recently where although I know what the client is doing is madness, for the sake of keeping my contract I have to go along with the madness and not rock the boat. It's really getting me down :-(

Answer 3

I had a big database archive script to do automaticly at the end of the year. I wrote everything very fast (it works) because I had not time and I thought it won't be me that will have to run it... but it requires some change every year and the task is not simple... now the year is ending (well in 2 months) and all looks that I am the one who will execute the archive! If I had less pressure I would have done it to make this task pretty much easier!!!