What are some of the most challenging work scenarios you’ve encountered? Let us know for the chance to appear on DevDiscuss!

Dealing with an absolute toxic work environment. I unfortunately (or fortunately) landed up in an org where there was always a massive fire raging on, and I was handed out "support" of the system (even when I knew 0 of the codebase). Every day felt as if I was meat visiting a butcher shop.

It took me some time to deal with it (and the depression accompanying it), and with the help of a great mentor and a supportive family, I managed to turn it around and left for a better workplace.

I hope this qualifies as a challenging work scenario.

Coding device drivers in LabVIEW, a visual programming language if you didn't know because I certainly didn't lol. I had to upgrade a ton of LabVIEW code to be compatible with this new network analyzer, but the previous dev left no notes and wrote no comments. I couldn't find the programming manual online so I had to access it directly on the network analyzer itself which had horrible UI. There was no way for me to test my code without the anaylzer, but the device itself also required external connections to other devices like oscilloscopes.

Also, the equipment was incredibly expensive and I was always stressed that I was going to break it.

One client had their Dev who was working with us to manage their e-commerce platform. The dev sent us the link to two wordpress plugins he wanted to install. We looked at them and said their was no issue installing them and that it would not affect other plugins or the website.

He installed them and then few days later their google ads account got suspended because a malicious URL was detected on the website. The company came at us very hard and strong blaming us and then asking us to hurry to fix it.

Upon investigation I found that the wordpress installation had been compromised by the dolohen malware. The client's dev had installed cracked versions of the plugin instead of the 5$ versions. The malware had copies of itself in the database, other php files and would not add its code for users logged-in the platform. The code would only inject the malicious links if the users were guests (pretty smart)

Until we pinpointed the issue and were it came from the relations were very tough and complicated.

I did a full write up on my old blog:
web.archive.org/web/20191016173625...

Working with a 3rd party to integrate our software into their product via API. I was working in a different state than them (luckily in the same timezone). Most of the other devs at the 3rd party company spoke English as a second language, and there was a power imbalance because their company was much larger than ours, so a lot of politics involved. Aside from the obvious technical issues of integration, just getting everyone on the same page was incredibly difficult and time-consuming. Large companies have their own problems with internal communications and getting them to give us resources outside of the department we were working with was next to impossible, which effected our technical solutions. Needless to say it was a slow and arduous process.

Communicating details of a technical solution. How do you keep it succinct without glossing over important details? Especially in the world of remote work and Zoom/Teams and more dependency upon written explanations.

Microservices + distributed transactions + Node.js