Alternative Halloween: 13 terrifying nightmares that keep programmers awake at night

[51CTO Translation] The annual Halloween is approaching. If you want to make your software developer friends truly feel the horror atmosphere, then don't use the cliché tricks of witches, ghosts or serial killers - the following situations will definitely scare them out of their wits.

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Tomorrow is Halloween, and once again, we're going to dig deep into our hearts and find out what scares us the most - just for fun, of course! For most people, the things that scare them are still the same old things: ghosts, spiders, and crazy people wearing hockey masks and slashing people around. But for a certain group of people, their fears are not so traditional.

For example, software developers are one of the typical types - of course, there are other special groups, but technology websites are not interested in those guys. If you ask your developer friends what they are most afraid of, the answer may have nothing to do with witches, black cats or other dark and deadly things. Yes, they may be more afraid of the semicolon key on the keyboard breaking or a Microsoft product crashing again. This Halloween, we asked developers for their opinions on this topic in online forums, and these programmers gave the following 13 common answers when faced with the question "What is your worst nightmare?"

The Internet Can't Answer My Questions

Developer FAQ websites such as Stack Exchange have become an indispensable resource for technology practitioners. Of course, there are many other Q&A websites and developer forums that can help software developers solve specific problems encountered in the programming process. But in a few cases, developers may still encounter a terrible situation that makes them feel cold all over: the seemingly endless programming knowledge reserves on the Internet still cannot answer their questions.

Crowd opinion: "The worst thing is to open Stackoverflow and see someone else posting the exact same question you were asking. The scary thing is that it's been over a year and no one has responded yet." Jorge Irun

“My fear is that the best answer on StackOverFlow doesn’t actually work (it happened to us too)!” Ramchand Rajasekaran

“I searched Google for solutions to my architectural challenges, only to find that the information I found was six years old and described the exact same problem—posted by me.” Steve Traugott

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The most important keyboard keys are broken or missing

It goes without saying that keyboards play a huge role in a programmer's daily life. However, not every key on a keyboard is or can be equally valuable to a developer. Some keys are used more often than others, depending on the language being programmed - for example, the semicolon is very important in JavaScript, Perl, and Objective-C. Programmers also love to use a lot of shortcuts, which save time and joint strain from repeated actions instead of using the keyboard, mouse, or trackpad. Given this, we can imagine how panicked and desperate a developer must feel when they wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about beloved keys disappearing from their keyboard.

Crowd opinion: "My worst nightmare is when my semicolon doesn't work." Ali Akbar

“Spacebar doesn’t work” Vivek Patel

“Was working on a large coding project when I suddenly found that the Control key was not responding…” Nikesh Shetty

“CTRL+Z does not work properly for undo :( :(“ Nirwan Dogra

#p#

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The Internet is down — or malfunctioning

It’s one thing for a site like Stack Exchange to fail and not answer programmers’ questions, but it’s another thing for the Internet itself to fail — and that’s far more terrifying and even debilitating. After all, the Internet isn’t just about answering questions, it’s also filled with other valuable resources, like open source software and code snippets. Not to mention that without the Internet, you won’t be able to access remote or cloud-based servers, communicate with other members of your distributed team, or even use your favorite streaming music service. So if you want to really scare your coding friends, you’ll have to come up with something that’s actually shocking — like “The Internet is down, and everything is down!” And if your friends are foaming at the mouth, remember to wipe it off.

Crowd opinion: “The StackOverflow website is currently down for maintenance.” Mahanthesh Shadakshari

"Google servers are permanently down." Anonymous

“If the internet and Google are no longer available, we’ll just go back to the dark ages. We’ll be stuck, not knowing how to deal with specific problems when they arise.” Thoriq Firdaus

"Seriously, if the internet itself went down, developers would stop working and start gossiping. Oh my god... this would be horrible!" nanda

#p#

A serious bug that cannot be reproduced

To fix a bug, software developers must first be able to reproduce the behavior that caused the bug in a development or test environment. Then, they can only hope that the root cause of the problem can be diagnosed and re-tested before it affects production systems. Many developers are most afraid of seemingly random bugs that are almost impossible to accurately reproduce in a controlled environment. For such bugs to work, it is best to choose the most appropriate time - such as before running a demo for a particularly important customer. Believe me, if you can successfully complete the above deployment, your programmer friends will definitely wet their pants.

Crowd opinion: "…the bug never showed up in the wild, but only in the public demonstration in front of 500+ attendees." Jeremy Friesner

"A blue screen issue that we couldn't reproduce internally was repeatedly occurring on a key customer's equipment." Joe Wezorek

“A bug that only occurs outside of my own computer, and only in production—cannot be reproduced in a test environment.” Jaimie Sirovich

“The application/website that worked perfectly on our local server started to become extremely unstable once it was put online. It felt like the server was playing tricks on us and we could only let our excitement sink into the abyss of sadness and helplessness.” Ankur Agarwal

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Lack of complete documentation (or no documentation)

Understanding existing code without good documentation or code comments is extremely difficult. It is even more difficult to understand when there is no documentation or code comments at all. This is not limited to code that was written by another programmer, but even worse, they may have written the relevant fragments a long time ago and did not keep proper documentation at the time. Such undocumented code is a very scary thing no matter who wrote it.

Crowd opinion: “The worst part is debugging code without proper documentation or comments for some meaningless identifiers. It’s like cleaning someone else’s ass. It’s unbearable.” Pratyush Kumar

"The most dreaded role on a project is to be the successor. Trying to decipher another coder's gibberish with poorly written comments is an impossible task." Sam Brody

"The worst thing is maintaining code that is more than a decade old and has no documentation to refer to. I have had nightmares dealing with this kind of work." Sam Sartor

“I would go into a state of hysterics when I found myself writing undocumented code in other projects years later. ‘Why did I do that?’ ‘Did I really write that?’ It was like being lost in your own house.” Alok Sharma

#p#

The Manager from Hell

No one, programmer or otherwise, likes managers who are intrusive or incompetent. But this is especially true for software developers, who are most afraid of non-technical people asking them questions about their code. Managers often exaggerate what a project can accomplish, greatly underestimate how long it will take to code, and make outrageous promises that programmers will complain about in their sleep.

Crowd opinion: "Incompetent upper management and ignorant decision makers impose their own incomprehensible discussions on developers." randcraw

"I am most afraid of non-technical managers who always think they are qualified to interfere - in fact, all their understanding of coding is outdated from more than ten years ago." Anonymous

"My worst nightmare is the nitpicking manager who thinks they are overqualified for their position and wants to meet any and all client requirements by a deadline. This type of person treats programmers like slaves, and real working code should pop out of a stone like the Monkey King." Rachit Agrawal

"My biggest fear is being forced to rewrite an entire system... again... in a different language and with a completely different set of tools/frameworks... all at once rather than in phases (replacing one part at a time, then another part when it's done)... simply because some senior management thinks their idea is the best and everyone else's established approach is wrong and needs to be immediately rejected." RHSeeger

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Clean up other developers’ code

Software developers don’t want to deal with code written by someone else; after all, code written by another programmer can never be as good as your own, right? Even well-documented third-party code can be a headache for new developers. Programmers often react to the idea of ​​debugging, refactoring, or modernizing someone else’s code, even if it was written just a few months ago, with a heartbeat that’s often a bad idea.

Crowd opinion: "...my biggest fear is when my boss asks me to rewrite or modernize a project that I 'have source code' for, when 'have source code' really means 'it's written in Fortran on this messy, gargantuan pile of punch cards'." bta

“…I think the worst situation a programmer can face is inheriting source code from a previous developer—code that follows no standards or best practices.” George Alexander

"What I fear most is being asked to 'find a bug in C++ code related to X', when the only available material is a pile of paper records (20 pages of code, about 2000 lines of commands) instead of code that can be directly compiled, run and debugged." Giovanni Idili

"The majority of programmers today are rookies who got into the industry through Hour of Code, and I'm the one who ends up cleaning up the mess they leave behind." Chip Frank

#p#

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Change project requirements

Whether using traditional waterfall project management or user-centric implementation in an agile environment, what software developers need most is a set of clear, reliable, stable project requirements that can guide the coding process. But in reality, these requirements often change during the work process - sometimes for good reasons, and sometimes just because of stupid project managers, senior management or customers. In any case, when this happens, programmers will fall into a panic that is difficult to get rid of, especially the fear of last-minute requirements adjustments before the end of the project.

Crowd opinion: “The change request came via email just one day before the project was to enter the sprint phase.” Basav Nagur

“Especially when the requested changes have an impact on the database landscape, this is worse than having your neck broken.” Kunal Suri

"Everything had been tested and was ready for production deployment the next day, when our boss informed us that the original requirements had changed and all work had to be completed today." Yinso Chen

"My biggest fear is the client who doesn't know what he wants but changes his requirements regularly, and will blindly dictate until the technical team completely collapses." Dave Cahill

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My code disappeared

No matter how much time a developer spends writing software, all that work can be lost if that code unexpectedly disappears. Source code can disappear in the blink of an eye for a variety of reasons, including forgetting to save a file properly, some particularly nasty (and cruel) bugs, and just a cruel twist of fate. Whatever the cause, and no matter how careful a developer is, the fact is that programmers live in constant fear that the work they have been working on for a long time will disappear in an instant.

People's opinion: "Hard-written code can be lost due to power outages or personal negligence." Philan James

"By the time we realize it, poor code management practices have resulted in running programs being wiped from the file system (and possibly affecting the code of other developers who were working on our work)." Simon Hayes

"What I fear most is that I will be in a hurry to restart the system, and make a mistake when facing the prompt of 'There is unsaved work, do you want to save it (yes) or (no)' given by the IDE. Although we are sure that our mind is thinking of 'yes', sometimes our finger has already clicked 'no' - which makes us want to chop it off directly." Sakthi Prasad

“My biggest fear is typing rm –r * in the wrong directory. And that’s it.” Ayush Sekhari

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Internet Explorer

All programmers have their most feared and least confident technical areas, but web developers feel this more strongly and directly - that is, they are disgusted and even resist building projects on the Internet Explorer browser. Although it is still one of the most popular browser solutions, IE has also become the target of many code writers. What's worse is that older versions of IE not only have more problems, but also have a larger user base. For this reason, developers have to include it in the support list, and its support period is often longer than other more developer-friendly browsers. Let's make this analogy: if Jason in the movie "Black Friday" wanted to scare a team of web developers out of their wits, it would be best to put an IE logo on his hockey mask.

Crowd opinion: “The most terrible thing is that customers use IE browser!” Cem Kaan Kösalı

"Developers often spend four to three times as much time developing their web applications to run smoothly on IE 6 as they do on other modern browsers such as Chrome or Firefox." Thoriq Firdaus

"My biggest fear is writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript specifically for IE 8 when the normal code will work fine on every other browser known to man." Arvind M. Raman

"My biggest fear is developing in a Windows environment with only IE installed... there are so many issues to deal with..." Madhu Agrawal

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Injury or illness

Programming isn't a physically demanding job, but like most jobs that require you to type on a computer all day, it's hard to do your job if you have problems with your arms, hands, or fingers. In addition, if your vision and logical thinking abilities are affected, it can be a serious hindrance to your daily work. Given all of this, it's no surprise that the typical software developer has nightmares about having one or more parts of their body stop working and preventing them from completing their development tasks.

Crowd opinion: "...what I fear most is cutting my finger or losing my sight... then I won't be able to write code anymore." Aitjcize

"My biggest fear is that my brain has developed some serious disease, so that I can no longer think as fluently as before, but I still have the relevant memories of my smart and wise life - it would be too painful." Daniel Super

"My biggest fear is carpal tunnel syndrome, cubital tunnel syndrome, and anything else that would take away your hands." Matt Nicolls

"I woke up in the morning to find that someone had stolen my fingers during the night. Typing with my elbow is really hard." Kelly Draper

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The vulnerabilities I left behind during development caused harm or even killed people.

No software developer wants to have vulnerabilities in their work. Of course, not all vulnerabilities have bad consequences - some are annoying but harmless. Some may cause financial losses to companies or customers, or even cause the relevant people to lose their jobs (such as the programmers who need to be responsible for them). The last thing programmers want to see is that the software solutions they build will cause physical harm or even kill users in actual operation.

Crowd opinion: "My biggest fear is that something will go wrong with the control system for the gas rig I'm currently developing..." Kjetil Seim Haugen

"My biggest fear is that a bug in my software could cause physical harm to someone else." Jeremy

"The worst I can think of is someone programming a traffic light that doesn't work properly and causes a car accident with a lot of casualties... or some medical scanner that doesn't properly control the radiation and kills people... or some military GPS system that mistakenly directs pilots into enemy air fire..." Mark2008

"My biggest fear is when a software bug takes away someone's personality - it has happened before." Jon Kannegaard

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Segmentation fault

Another common nightmare for developers is finding a segmentation fault during runtime. This error is usually caused by an intrinsic access violation, where the program attempts to access restricted memory or perform a restricted operation. Typically, the memory management unit notifies the operating system in these cases, which in turn notifies the process involved and eventually crashes the program - which is a real headache for developers trying to find the cause of the problem. Given this, it's no wonder that many programmers' biggest fear is seeing these words on their screen.

Crowd opinion: "Segmentation faults are the worst nightmare!" Supratim Samantray

“Unless we run debugging tools, these types of problems could have hundreds of causes and we have no idea what’s going on.” Zeina Shajahan

“‘Segmentation fault. Code dumped.’ When we accidentally use the wrong pointer and cause this kind of problem, it’s like a lot of alpacas running through our heads.” Gomathi Sunder

"Any error can be fixed in minutes by an experienced programmer, but a segmentation fault or an unused loop cannot... R.I.P." Gaurav Jain

Original link: Frightening to the core: 13 things that give programmers nightmares

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