What was your most uncomfortable programming experience

Question

I made this a wiki because I think that some people may think it's too "thready" but I had to share and it wasn't appropriate on my blog.

I've had a few, but I think the strangest was once I was on an interview (when I was consulting) and it was my first interview. I wasn't 100% familiar with the position, I knew they wanted to utilize my experience with SQL server to import and archive older data.

Well, I was in a man's office, we were alone and he closed the door on the way in. After a few questions he looked at me with a total straight face and said seriously "So, do you have any experience with Wang?"

Those unfamiliar with American slang should google (or not), but I was frozen silent and beet red for about 30 seconds before he said "It was a database machine in the 70s."

I'm sure that other people have funny stories, sometimes we nerds can be awkward.

Answer 1

Joining StackOverflow and realizing that there are hundreds of developers out there who have already mastered subjects where I am still a newbie (e.g. Linq). Also, realizing that I've forgotten an enormous amount of stuff that I used to know really well when reading articles on Lisp, lambda functions and functional programming. Sigh

Answer 2

I was demonstrating my team's new web application to a group of potential users. I took a few minutes to talk about all the cool stuff the Google Visualization API can do, since we were using it heavily in our application. To demonstrate, I decided to graph a few sets of data we have collected previously. It was intended to convey the message: "Look how easy it is! Regular people can make good looking graphs using our product."

As luck would have it, the Google servers that hosted the Javascript files necessary to use the Visualization API decided to stop working midway during my presentation. I sat in the chair, staring at the screen, mumbling to myself "but... but they're Google... their servers can't go down". The team tried to laugh it off, but everyone realized at that moment how dangerous it can be to rely on any third party (even one as big as Google) when it really counts.

It was uncomfortable mainly because (1) our product relied on this seemingly broken technology, and (2) we had planned other demonstrations later in the presentation that relied on the Google Visualization API. The whole thing came back up a few hours later, but the damage was already done.

Answer 3

While I was consulting we had a meeting with all of the client developers, dba's etc. We were discussing how to move data from a table in one system to a table in the new system. One of the dba's, an attractive female dba, said, "I can do it, but it's gonna take a hand job."

I instantly had to weigh the possibility of rupturing my internal organs by holding in the laughter versus laughing out loud and risking the contract with the client. I chose the latter. I might have been the first to laugh, but I wasn't the only one.

We referred to the dba as Spanky the rest of the project.

Answer 4

When I was working as a consultant, I turned up on a client site after having been briefed by the sales person that the client was just looking for a bit of help with one of their .NET applications. When I was greeted with "so I hear you're a BizTalk expert, here to help with our architecture" it was rather uncomfortable... mainly because at that point I had never even installed the product. Somehow I managed to bullshit my way through the day, and ended up learning BizTalk at home at night for the next few months, just managing to keep ahead of the game, but it wasn't much fun at all.

Oh yeah, then there was the time when I turned up on a client site after having been briefed that it was a simple performance tuning exercise of a web site. And it turns out that it was actually a massively in-depth SQL Server tuning exercise (I am not a SQL Server expert by any means) and that actual performance consultants from other companies such as Microsoft and the SAN vendor had already been down and done their troubleshooting, so all the low hanging fruit had already gone.

I really didn't like being a consultant at times.

Answer 5

I once implemented the polygon-fill algorithm (given a polygon, it selected all the nodes of this mesh that fell inside it --- don't ask) in MaxScript (part of 3ds Max), which is a horrible, disgusting bastard child of Basic and JavaScript.

• no lexical scoping to speak of
• fast and loose type system
• referencing an undeclared variable declares it as undefined, which is fine until you realize that it just messed up the scope of that variable.
• really really slow

Seriously, check this shit out (given that ( and ) are used to control blocks/scope):

(x=5)
=> 5
x
=> undefined
(x=6)
=> 6
x
=> 6

Answer 6

Some years ago, I was working at a company called Focus ..., and we had built a survey micro-site for a large client (large like global).

Somebody did an update to the form part of the way through that made it not insert the respondents phone numebers.

This caused the phone numbers to be lost for many, many, many thousands of survey respondents, which was particularly hairy, because the purpose of the survey was to get peoples permission to call them.

After learning of this,verifying that the numbers were indeed not stored anywhere, and freaking out, I went to tell the CEO (it was a small company) about the problem.

He sat there for a minute or two, looking thoughtful, and then told me...

"Ok, go generate random 7-digit numbers, prepend valid area codes, and insert them in place of the lost phone numbers, then don't ever mention this again."

Disturbingly, we later heard from the call-center that it was one of the most accurate lists they'd ever had.

Answer 7

This is a parable about test data.

A long time ago (back in the early 1990s) I was leading a consulting team on a large project for a large company who's initials are not HAL. One aspect of that project was automating some standard typing and editing procedures with WordPerfect macros. We wrote one to automatically insert headers into the current document by pressing ctrl-H. One of my guys thought that it would be funny to end that macro with a message to the screen saying, "Thank you for the good head". (We were very mature.) Everyone thought that was funny and harmless, existing only on our test system.

Time passes.

Another branch of the same firm comes to us and asks for essentially the same system. In order to make sure that the new client got a perfectly working copy of the software, we LapLink-ed (remember LapLink?) our test system to her production system. What could possibly go wrong?

More time passes.

One day I get a phone call. It's the new client. She says, "I was looking for the online help and pressed ctrl-H..."

Embarrassing. Very embarrassing.

The moral of this story: Test data always escapes. Beware.

Answer 8

The company I work for has an annual conference where we demo the new features we're working on infront of representatives of our user base - usually over a hundred users attend.

For the first user conference I was to attend I had to finish working on an application which was scheduled to be demoed there. A few days away from the conference I noticed that I was getting a vague error whenever I saved my code in the IDE (Delphi 7). "Damn Delphi, time for a restart" I thought. After I restarted I reopened my project and all the files I was working on were blank!! It turned out I had completely ran out of disk space and whenever I went to save a file it just ended up blanking out the file! I felt sick.

I had a backup but it was about 10 days old. I finally summoned up the courage to tell my boss, who replied "Well I guess you'll be working through lunch".

I did manage to catch my code back up to where it was but it was a very stressful week! Of-course I've since learnt to automate daily backups, lol.

Answer 9

my first job was writing code that would interrogate a PABX system , and get from it call info , like calls waiting , longest one thats been waiting, etc. That was ok for a few years .. then the company decided to record more info. Like the names of call centre employees who logged into a certain phone , how long they'd been logged in for , how long they'd been in a "do not call me" state, etc.

Getting that other info was simply a case of getting the first program , and making a few additions to it, to get info from a different place , or use a different API. It was up and running pretty quickly. Then came time to test it. So I went out on site somewhere that had the right PABX, connected the laptop up to the network, and started getting info. To verify that someone had just finished a call , I went over and asked what I thought was that person whether they'd just put the phone down.

And it was only then that I'd realised that I'd written software that spied on people. I felt horrible after that, and didn't stay in the company for long afterwards. (go ahead and abuse me for not realising it earlier , I deserve it. Funny how managers constantly asking "are you finished yet" make you forget the big picture...)

Answer 10

I was working for a small Internet company back in 1995. My boss wanted to develop an service that would alert lobbyists via pager when legislation had changed status as it moved through the political process. (For example, a bill gets introduced, goes through committee, gets voted on, etc.) This was in the early days of government being on the Internet. The application I developed polled the legislative FTP servers and would alert lobbyists when the record indicated that something had happened to the bill. Because it was all based on public records, the service would be cheaper than the nearest competitor.

I busted my butt getting a prototype working within just a few days. We called a meeting with dozens of lobbyists to show the service, complete with catered dinner. During the demo, it quickly became apparent that the basic premise was incorrect: lobbyists don't want to be alerted after status has changed; they want to be alerted before. If a bill has already been voted on, it's too late for the lobbyists to do their work. Unfortunately, there was no way for us to obtain status information about a bill until after something had happened to it.

The product was, from that moment, doomed to failure. I felt awful that users were pitched a product that didn't do what they wanted at all. That didn't stop my boss from continuing to sell the product -- at very high prices -- for a couple of years.

Answer 11

I was based in London UK as a Junior Developer.

Once I was asked to install the application developed by our senior staff to a customer in France and lo and behold: on arrival it was clear that the CDs I had with me, were not the correct version..

(later I found out Gremlins did this to me.. yes they are real)

Luckily:

1. This was mostly SCO and Linux based technology, the customer never knew what was going on.

2. We had ssh and scp access to our !development! environment.

After setting up a few hops to get away from the customer's very restrictive firewall (via http based remote desktop sessions to even my own personal computer and all sorts of crazy things) I was able to download the correct binary packages...

I was able to look relaxed as if it was all "normal" but inside I was cursing the lives of everyone I knew back at H.Q.

(and thanking my lucky stars for having all sorts of stuff set up at home for home based software development)

Answer 12

In the spirit of Sara's original story:

My best friend and I were working on tech support desk for college's computer center. To give the context, imagine us: 18 year old freshmen, 100% stereotypical geeks, with a fairly heavy accent to boot (~1 year in USA).

We supported students on 3 environments: VAX running VMS, DEC Alpha (Ultrix) and a bunch of PCs.

So this older (from 18-year-old perspective :) lady comes in and asks for help with some program she can't run (as usual, doesn't bother specifying any details).

My friend tries to narrow down the problem, checks which OS she's having trouble with: "Is it a problem with VMS?" (seeing the last 3 problems came from VAXland)

The woman, uber-indignantly and shrilly: "WHAT KIND OF A DAMN BUSINESS OF YOURS IS IT?!?!?!?!?!"

Silent scene.

The two girls managing the help desk are literally under the desk, laughing their head off and trying to not make any noises doing it. My friend and I standing there looking like the woman's completely mental. The woman looking like she might hit someone right now...

I don't recall who was more embarrassed: my friend who finally figured out what the lady thought he asked, or me, who had to be clued in by cute help desk manager girls 10 minutes later.

Answer 13

I hadn't done any programming/security work for a few years, mostly due to legal troubles. One day a women came to my home saying that she had a man who wanted me to do a single day of consulting for a hefty fee of $50,000. After mulling over the proposition for a few minutes, I reluctantly agreed.

Let me just say, that was a huge mistake!

Everything about this mans operation seemed shadey and illegal. I was escorted into a backroom and was told to code under a tremendous amount of pressure. If you think coding while people watching you is bad, you would of been really stressed out at this interview. I was really "under the gun", so to speak.

Not only was there a strict time limit, but I was under constant distraction from another female consultant from a different profession. I really thought I was going to blow the whole thing.

In any case I ended up performing the task just in time and was given the job. It ended up being a lot of trouble but it came with a big paycheck so I guess everything evens out.

Answer 14

I had just started at a new company and I had got involved with a small project for a large multi-national customer. We had scheduled to visit the customer that day to deliver an update. Things were not going to well with certain bug fixes and I was assisting the team lead to try and track down some of the problems. As the scheduled appointment time approached, the team lead packed up his laptop, complete with an application that still did not actually compile, and said,

"We can't be late, that would be political suicide. We'll fix the rest of the bugs when we get there."

Once we arrived, I sat there in shock as my co-worker continued to debug and fix the application in front of the customer.

Answer 15

In my first month working for a company, I forgot an instance of SQL profiler open for 2 days. Because of that, the DB server for the development stage resulted overloaded and inaccessible. And the entire development team was trying to get connected to it.

Nobody knows that.