Moving a datacenter, it went bad.
The upstream ISP fucked us.
45 hours.
I drove home, it was the most dangerous thing I have ever done

I don’t work without rest. In fact, I rest during the work. I was once got caught by the director(3 level above me) while sleeping in my cubicle.

Longest I worked without rest: about 13 hours

Why: first job + young and stupid

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

"Longest you worked without rest + why?"

46hrs

2 x 14h shifts from 0400h on.
No breaks, toilet, drinks or food.
Intercepted by a removal and all the getting ready, getting there, preparing food and such stuff.

Quite common the 10-14hrs shifts these days. Logistics companies take pride on how they don't give a remote fuck about their employees. .. And! Regularly fucking up everything with their out of this world expectations and assumptions. Only thing stopping such madness? The reality of sailing the edge of bankruptcy.

Seconded by a university event that everybody fucked up and had to be pulled out of the mud with 44hrs straight.
Well. Intercepted by some booze.
Best part? My then time partner decided to throw an episode in my only free time. God I still hate that daemon. She must have committed a series of crimes against humanity by now. Easily could be responsible for the downfall of civilisation.

when I was an undercover informing on child traffickers I was also posing as a street guy, and didn't sleep for 72 hours because some local drug dealers made me think they were waiting for me to conk out so they could rob/beat/kill me.

Does this count ?

Last week, after ransomware hit. Whole week (including the weekend) just to sleep and get back to office.

The director's words still give me shivers "This is taking too long, can't you just write and pay them already?"

3 days 2 nights with only 20 min naps and max 1h of sleep in between. I was finishing my masters thesis. Then I handed it in the next day and everything felt like it is in slow motion? The printing, the going there to hand it in, etc. Couldn't sleep for that day either xD do not recommend. Start writing your thesis on time kids

30hr non stop programming during university. Self proclaimed "best programmer" did not have shit the day before the deadline while he said he was done 2 weeks before that.
He also proclaimed being the "best leader" and kept trying to take that role from the one we decided on before he joined the group.
He also proclaimed amd lied about making all the documentation to save his own ass and trowing us under the bus while we did not even mention saving his ass.
And much more.

My blood still starts to boil when i see the guy.

Four years without taking a vacation...

Staff shortage at prevous employer

Easily Hackathon,

About 2.5 days so 60 hours ish. Not worth, didn't win and company gets free code plus was a charity code for good event so rather they got charity brownie points and I'm sure they couldn't care less about charities. They were a bank. Complete waste honestly, food wasn't even good and was cold.

33 hours

My shift (9h, afternoon-evening) + a shift I had promised to cover for someone (9h, evening-morning) + a day full of lectures (seminars) (morning-afternoon)+my shift (9h, afternoon-evening).

I know that the lectures do not account for "working", but it definitely wasn't "resting" either. Hadn't time to sleep or eat at any point. I think I didn't even drive back home after the last shift - took the bus, because at that point I couldn't even remember where I left my car... And I don't remember getting out of the bus at my stop. No clue how I got to my home/bed. I must've ridden the bus standing to stay awake

48 hours.
We had 3 weeks of "manual data collection": pencil, paper and a dozen of people around all the offices of the company with the task to collect serial numbers of every piece of equipment used.
Then we had 3 weeks of data entry, a dozen of people copying all handwritten data to a custom made VB form.

And then there was me, the guy that was in charge of verifying, zipping and sending the data to the client. I spent 48h non stop to go through everything, finding, fixing or delete unusable data.
I had to delete at least 25% of the data because incomplete or completely unusable (serial numbers too short or too long, for example).
48h in the office.

The data was then delivered to the customer. 2 days after, when I finally woke up, everyone was in panic because:
- serial numbers were not matching
- addresses were wrong
- the number of delivered records was smaller than expected

What did I learn from this experience?
When your deadline is tomorrow, and you need 4 weeks to complete your work, ignore the deadline and inform everyone at any level that you are ignoring the deadline. And then resign and find a better job.

Ah, yes, pencils and paper are powerful tools, but rat poison too. You just need to use them in the right place. The only data collection that can be trusted when done with a pencil is the one involving checkboxes.

Proud to say 19 hours straight.

My uni has a infamous course work assignment which took about 27 hours to train on the lab PCs.

The issue was we only had a week to do it. So you had to code it, then run it and make it run first time to have a good time.

As we all know, that’s not realistic and I remember staying up the entire time to make sure I had sufficient time to train it. Was a nightmare but got a good grade.

Take a bath everyday, eat breakfast, and getting enough sleep.

Depends on the definition "without break".

Does taking a walk count as a break if I'm thinking about work during it?
Does taking a shower?
Would it be considered continuously working if I'm sleeping for a few hours every few days, but otherwise work even while eating and pooping?

So I could say I range from ~48h hours on the strictest mode to multiple weeks on the permissive one. I wouldn't recommend any of these.

"Longest you worked without rest + why?" (2)

Oh, I am an idiot 🙂! 7 hours isn't nearly the longest I've worked without rest (see my previous rant.) I just remembered working non-stop almost for a day in the past.
It was for an annual 48-hour hackathon where people gathered to make games.
It made me promise myself not to work excessively long hours non-stop. My creativity level was way below the ground, and during the after-party, my body sort of kernel-panicked, and I started to become incoherent. I had to call a taxi to find my way home that day.
For the following years, I made sure to get some rest (e.g., go home at night to sleep, spend the lunch break time actually having 'lunch break' and not coding while you're at it, etc.) because I did not want to wreck myself any further.

I used to work in the culture and entertainment field. Some work days during festivals and tours were long. It wasn’t uncommon for me to work 24h+ straight, but I think the longest uninterrupted work session was during the first iteration of a big music festival, where I ended up doing a 53h (to my recollection) day, then taking a 3h nap, and continuing for another several hours. Dev work is so much easier comparatively in that regard - and the money’s better.

It goes back two years ago, i was writing web crawlers with scrapy. i don't remember how long i worked, but i think it took a full day

why: because, web crawling is so much fun and also i was young and stupid

"Longest you worked without rest + why?"

Maybe around 7hrs or so? It may not be much, but the thing is that I had to work almost the whole night through.
I was about to show off a game at the school festival, and I had to finish multiple playable stages while not having a dedicated stage editor application; I was using Notepad as the stage builder. I had to work through the night before the event.
Ended up catching the flu after the event, but I don't regret it.

48 hours. But if we’re talking about long term stress, 9 months.

!dev

Currently, cause holiday camp for the children
Probably a good idea to collect some social skills there, as that's nothing that is required or learned with my dev job

Consecutive hours: ~24, it was a hackathon and not terribly interesting.

I did however have an exciting new experience this exam period; a 5 day crunch with strictly timed 6 hour sleep breaks, half-hour lunch breaks and the rest entirely populated by work. I live 5 minutes from the CS lab so this pretty much meant 18 hours of coding per day, 90 hours in total.

Think of this the next time you're trying to decide whether to announce that you aren't going to contribute to a group project.

Anybody knows what app this third icon from the left is for? I have all messenger apps installed and never saw this one.
It’s on a smsung galaxy.