When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

We had a client visit our PH office to "hang out" and see the progress in this educational type game we were building for their private school (apparently, it's the one that Obama's kids went to).

Manager oversold the progress and actually guaranteed some features that we were still working on and estimated to finish in the next 3 sprints (2 week intervals).

Client was due to be in the office in 2 days.

PM pushes back and says we need to manage client expectations properly.

CEO got wind and sat the dev team down. Dev lead, two seniors, and junior me. He sat us down and asked us what we think.

Lead says we can do it.

Now to be fair, I know this guy to be very competent and an INCREDIBLE programmer. He is the person I consider to be the first real mentor I ever had but I really thought we were fucked here.

Next day and half was hell--for me, at least and I really couldn't see how this was all possible.

But then the fucker came through. This beautiful, majestic meganerd and the two other guys shat out 6 weeks of code in ~30 hours.

And the crazy part was it was all working. Bugs were caught in the next few days for sure, but the demo went flawlessly.

I never doubted this guy again.

Years later, I'd meet up with him and would talk fondly about those days and all he could say was "I don't really remember". He remembers the project and that we had a demo but he couldn't remember anything around those days.

Two of the most stressful days of my life and to him it was a fucking Wednesday. What a fucking champ.

This is something I'll never forget.

I'm a senior UI engineer. I was working at a digital agency at the time and got tasked with refactoring and improving an existing interface from a well known delivery company.

I open the code and what do I find? Indentation. But not in the normal sense. The indentation only went forward, randomly returning a bunch of tabs back in the middle of the file a few times, but never returning to its initial level after closing a tag or function, both on HTML and JS.

Let that sink in for a minute and try to imagine what it does to your editor with word wrapping (1 letter columns), and without (absurd horizontal scrolling).

Using Sublime at the time, ctrl+shift+P, reindent. Everything magically falls beautifully into place. Refactor the application, clean up the code, document it, package it and send it back (zip files as they didn't want to provide version control access, yay).

The next day, we get a very angry call from the client saying that their team is completely lost. I prove to the project manager that my code is up to scratch, running fine, no errors, tested, good performance. He returns to the client and proves that it's all correct (good PM with decent tech knowledge).

The client responds with "Yeah, the code is running, but our team uses tabs for version control and now we lost all versioning!".

Bear in mind this was in 2012, git was around for 7 years then, and SVN and Mercury much longer.

I then finally understood the randomness of the tabs. The code would go a bunch of tabs back when it went back to a previous version, everything above were additions or modifications that joined seamlessly with the previous version before, with no way to know when and so on.

I immediately told the PM that was absurd, he agreed, and told the client we wouldn't be reindenting everything back for them according to the original file.

All in all, it wasn't a bad experience due to a competent PM, but it left a bad taste in my mouth to know companies have teams that are that incompetent, and that no one thought to stop and say "hey, this may cause issues down the line".

My professor is currently promoting excel spreadsheets with add-ons as a front end for business intelligence.