6 ms·

What kind of office was this person working in? Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-fil

What kind of office was this person working in? Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal. The company he’s describing is severely broken if everything he’s describing is true. Most of what he describes are not normal office problems. Some of them are even health and safety violations. Working from home will only distance him from those problems, but it can’t fix an inherently broken company that doesn’t care about employees. He should be searching for another remote job ASAP

refulgentis 6y ago
I believe they're describing a call center, and I agree vehemently: the title is broad and doesn't reflect the subject, someone on HN needs to hire this guy, not debate/agree with whether he needs to go back to the office
- intuitionist 6y ago
  No, the solution to this isn’t “this guy seems cool so let’s hire him at our FAANG team.” (I mean, do what you want!) The solution to this is that OSHA or the appropriate counterpart needs to get involved.
  - refulgentis 6y ago
    Ah, good point, I was speaking allegorically and that wasn't clear, sounds like it implied I thought he's cool and thus needs to be come a software engineer. Thank you for clarifying. Please do not try to launder him into FAANG! Passing someone to HR for interviews _certainly_ wouldn't be a way to help a call center worker :)
    - intuitionist 6y ago
      My point is not that OP doesn’t deserve to work somewhere better, but that his coworkers deserve that as well.
      - refulgentis 6y ago
        Heartily agree! You're right, my comment wasn't clear, I only addressed the article author rather than noting the workplace is unacceptable for _everyone_ at the workplace :)
- ryanmercer 6y ago
  >I believe they're describing a call center Nope, definitely not a call center. In fact only team leads and higher have phones. > someone on HN needs to hire this guy, I wish. GED + 15 years doing a job that doesn't translate to much of anything else doesn't help one's jobs prospects sadly.
  - refulgentis 6y ago
    Hate to inquire directly to your situation while you've been careful to avoid specifics about role, but: are you a programmer/coder/software engineer/whatever they call hackers these days? :)
    - ryanmercer 6y ago
      Sadly no, my LinkedIn is in the footer of the .com for anyone really curious though.
      - mikestew 6y ago
        OT: holy smokes, you'd have to be in pretty bad shape not to be able to ride a bicycle from your house to my old house close to Cascade High School. Both are a long way from our current home of Seattle. Anyway, I worked industrial/mechanical jobs in that area back in the day and about my coworkers often wondered, "do you live like this at home?" Now I write software in a different part of the country and rarely (but no never) brush up against such problems. Hopefully, you can continue with your WFH and not be bothered with it, either.
        ryanmercer 6y ago
        My wife is a teacher at Cascade MS!
        mikestew 6y ago
        Excellent, because if you doubt my story of living in the area, your wife can walk next door and see if the name of the track 3200m record holder matches my user name. It will also tell you how long ago it was that I lived there. :-) (Loooong time ago.) Anyway, best of luck with your current work situation and may it only improve.
l-p 6y ago
> Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal. I was told to suck it up and do at least 50+ hours (35h paid) when working at temps over 42c (110f). Both are illegal here, they don't care, they will always find a poor sucker in a dire situation needing the job.
- Fiveplus 6y ago
  >was I hope you left that shithole company and glassdoored their management hard.
  - HWR_14 6y ago
    >glassdoored I hope you meant reported to regulators
  - drenvuk 6y ago
    glassdoor is a fucking lie, use blind instead for real reviews. The coverage isn't as wide though.
    - pmlnr 6y ago
      Internet reviews are all becoming unreliable as f* to be honest.
      - ewmiller 6y ago
        This. Those with money and an interest in maintaining a positive appearance online can do so easily.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  Could you clearify “don’t care”? Because here you simply report the company anonymously. You even have a person among the staff, who is extremely difficult to fire, that can do the reporting for you. Companies will be fined for this kind of environment and the office will be closed if things aren’t improved. You can’t choose to not care.
ryanmercer 6y ago
>What kind of office was this person working in? An office on the property of an international airport. Our maintenance hanger happens to be behind our parking lot and immediately on the other side of it is an active runway. If you work at an airport, not in the terminals, you get used to smelling aviation fuel/jet exhaust. As far as the indoor temperatures, it's a leased building and the HVAC is just inadequate (my guess is when the HVAC was designed, the building probably wasn't largely an open office). The front of the building the HVAC works great, but it still has walls and doors blocking it from where the bulk of the staff is. The algae in the pex tubing coming off of the water filter is because, for some reason, there's a random tube coming off that just terminates which allows some water to not get circulated. The chalky white of the water is just pure hard water, if you put some water in a dark coffee mug and let it sit for a few hours then dump it out and let it dry the inside will have a noticeable white film. This will rapidly build up day after day and actually start to flake off from thermal shock. >Some of them are even health and safety violations. They aren't. You might think they are, but they aren't. If they were, any hanger or warehouse at any significantly sized airport would have long since been shut down. Yes, I'm sure there is some unacceptable level that once measured can have legal action taken but I'd bet my kidney that we aren't anywhere near those exposure levels. It's not like a turbine is backed up 3 feet from our door, with the doors wide open, spewing exhaust. That doesn't mean you can't smell it though, you can smell jet exhaust at considerable distances not unlike diesel exhaust from larger vehicles. Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life. We have it much better than our people working at our sort facilities, they're exposed to the elements with minimal HVAC for example. When I was 18 I worked at a cemetary, I had to wear a "backpack" full of diesel for a weed eater/whacker and trim weeds for hours at a time with no shade, then dig graves and cut grass with no shade. I'd go home sunburnt and smelling like diesel frequently, even getting sun poisoning at one point. My current job is so much better than that job 18 years ago, but it's also a far cry from what I saw a Y Combinator and Open AI a couple of years ago when I was visiting someone and I imagine that's how a lot of tech offices are like give or take some perks and creature comforts.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life. I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that what you’re describing is not “just life” in most developed countries. You’re not describing a normal office. Offices like you describe continue to exist because employees put up with it. The tech job market is very hot right now. I would strongly encourage you to explore your options. What you’re describing is not normal or acceptable. You don’t need to move to a Google type company with unlimited office budgets. Most companies are smart enough to know they need to address things like broken HVAC or not enough microwaves or unclean bathrooms by spending the relatively tiny amount of money to address the problem. It’s literally cheaper to address these issues than to lose good talent over such easily addressable frustrations. When you move to a company that treats employees decently, you’ll find that you also get along with coworkers better because everyone is not already miserable and dreading their jobs.
lvspiff 6y ago
I worked at a building that was right next to the runway under the flight path for a major international airport. We could wave to people in the windows. Our AC went out (In las vegas - it gets to 120+ some days in summer) and they brought in portable A/C units that were louder than the planes. Then they took our bottled water away. While these issues aren't normal they are out there and they are replicated by employers who don't value the sanity of their workers. Yes I got out of there. Yes I'm working from home now and agree with practically everything on this list. Especially the bathroom.
- zikzak 6y ago
  I'll bite. Why did they take away the water?
  - bradstewart 6y ago
    Not OP, but usually "bottled" water is taken away for environmental reasons, replaced by filtered faucets, which are often non maintained and cleaned properly.
    - zikzak 6y ago
      Wow, ok. To be clear, I'm a water bottle kind of person but telling adults they can't drink bottled water just seems disrespectful.
  - lvspiff 6y ago
    Most of us thought it was cost savings. It was at a university where even the cost of bottled water somehow would be pointed to as the culprit for why we needed to be furloughed.
mrweasel 6y ago
Yeah, I understand the benefits of not having to commute, the peace and quite you get when working from home, but the complaint here is that the employer suck. In this case, and depending on the country, working at this office is illegal. The assumption that working from home is better is a little naive. It’s a result of a terribly company, who will manage to make working from home equally terrible in the long run.
lsllc 6y ago
Regrading the jet fumes, yeah if you're within 3-5 miles of a major airport, there's definitely jet fumes drifting around. Source: Helped someone one weekend re-roof their house that was probably 3 miles from Logan Airport in Boston. You'd get waves of fumes slowly drifting down from the big heavy jets taking off one after another after another.
greedo 6y ago
My office building (the company owns it) is four stories. We have a backup diesel generator that is run every week during business hours for 1 hour. And every week the fumes waft upwards towards the air handlers on the roof. My first week I was shocked by how bad it smelled; kind of like a mown lawn that had rotted. After a few years, I stopped noticing it.
npsimons 6y ago
I've been at a job where projects have put us in vehicle bays with no insulation on the door, in Winter. Temperatures got down to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, there was no dress code, so I would wear my mountain Winter gear, but even so, it was really hard to get any coding done as my fingers were too cold. There are a lot of bad companies out there, and it's all well and good to say "find another job", but not everyone has that luxury.
ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
>Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes That point was clearly about his home "Working from home I: ... • Breathe jet exhaust..." Kidding aside, there's just not enough jobs in "not broken" offices for all the workers. I haven't seen an office which isn't broken in some way, even though I haven't seen many. And suggestion of looking for another job is just patronizing. If a person could done it easily, he would have done it long ago.
nso95 6y ago
Sounds like when I was doing contract work for the air force

refulgentis 6y ago

I believe they're describing a call center, and I agree vehemently: the title is broad and doesn't reflect the subject, someone on HN needs to hire this guy, not debate/agree with whether he needs to go back to the office

intuitionist 6y ago
No, the solution to this isn’t “this guy seems cool so let’s hire him at our FAANG team.” (I mean, do what you want!) The solution to this is that OSHA or the appropriate counterpart needs to get involved.
- refulgentis 6y ago
  Ah, good point, I was speaking allegorically and that wasn't clear, sounds like it implied I thought he's cool and thus needs to be come a software engineer. Thank you for clarifying. Please do not try to launder him into FAANG! Passing someone to HR for interviews _certainly_ wouldn't be a way to help a call center worker :)
  - intuitionist 6y ago
    My point is not that OP doesn’t deserve to work somewhere better, but that his coworkers deserve that as well.
    - refulgentis 6y ago
      Heartily agree! You're right, my comment wasn't clear, I only addressed the article author rather than noting the workplace is unacceptable for _everyone_ at the workplace :)
ryanmercer 6y ago
>I believe they're describing a call center Nope, definitely not a call center. In fact only team leads and higher have phones. > someone on HN needs to hire this guy, I wish. GED + 15 years doing a job that doesn't translate to much of anything else doesn't help one's jobs prospects sadly.
- refulgentis 6y ago
  Hate to inquire directly to your situation while you've been careful to avoid specifics about role, but: are you a programmer/coder/software engineer/whatever they call hackers these days? :)
  - ryanmercer 6y ago
    Sadly no, my LinkedIn is in the footer of the .com for anyone really curious though.
    - mikestew 6y ago
      OT: holy smokes, you'd have to be in pretty bad shape not to be able to ride a bicycle from your house to my old house close to Cascade High School. Both are a long way from our current home of Seattle. Anyway, I worked industrial/mechanical jobs in that area back in the day and about my coworkers often wondered, "do you live like this at home?" Now I write software in a different part of the country and rarely (but no never) brush up against such problems. Hopefully, you can continue with your WFH and not be bothered with it, either.
      - ryanmercer 6y ago
        My wife is a teacher at Cascade MS!
        mikestew 6y ago
        Excellent, because if you doubt my story of living in the area, your wife can walk next door and see if the name of the track 3200m record holder matches my user name. It will also tell you how long ago it was that I lived there. :-) (Loooong time ago.) Anyway, best of luck with your current work situation and may it only improve.

l-p 6y ago

> Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal. I was told to suck it up and do at least 50+ hours (35h paid) when working at temps over 42c (110f). Both are illegal here, they don't care, they will always find a poor sucker in a dire situation needing the job.

Fiveplus 6y ago
>was I hope you left that shithole company and glassdoored their management hard.
- HWR_14 6y ago
  >glassdoored I hope you meant reported to regulators
- drenvuk 6y ago
  glassdoor is a fucking lie, use blind instead for real reviews. The coverage isn't as wide though.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    Internet reviews are all becoming unreliable as f* to be honest.
    - ewmiller 6y ago
      This. Those with money and an interest in maintaining a positive appearance online can do so easily.
mrweasel 6y ago
Could you clearify “don’t care”? Because here you simply report the company anonymously. You even have a person among the staff, who is extremely difficult to fire, that can do the reporting for you. Companies will be fined for this kind of environment and the office will be closed if things aren’t improved. You can’t choose to not care.

ryanmercer 6y ago

>What kind of office was this person working in? An office on the property of an international airport. Our maintenance hanger happens to be behind our parking lot and immediately on the other side of it is an active runway. If you work at an airport, not in the terminals, you get used to smelling aviation fuel/jet exhaust. As far as the indoor temperatures, it's a leased building and the HVAC is just inadequate (my guess is when the HVAC was designed, the building probably wasn't largely an open office). The front of the building the HVAC works great, but it still has walls and doors blocking it from where the bulk of the staff is. The algae in the pex tubing coming off of the water filter is because, for some reason, there's a random tube coming off that just terminates which allows some water to not get circulated. The chalky white of the water is just pure hard water, if you put some water in a dark coffee mug and let it sit for a few hours then dump it out and let it dry the inside will have a noticeable white film. This will rapidly build up day after day and actually start to flake off from thermal shock. >Some of them are even health and safety violations. They aren't. You might think they are, but they aren't. If they were, any hanger or warehouse at any significantly sized airport would have long since been shut down. Yes, I'm sure there is some unacceptable level that once measured can have legal action taken but I'd bet my kidney that we aren't anywhere near those exposure levels. It's not like a turbine is backed up 3 feet from our door, with the doors wide open, spewing exhaust. That doesn't mean you can't smell it though, you can smell jet exhaust at considerable distances not unlike diesel exhaust from larger vehicles. Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life. We have it much better than our people working at our sort facilities, they're exposed to the elements with minimal HVAC for example. When I was 18 I worked at a cemetary, I had to wear a "backpack" full of diesel for a weed eater/whacker and trim weeds for hours at a time with no shade, then dig graves and cut grass with no shade. I'd go home sunburnt and smelling like diesel frequently, even getting sun poisoning at one point. My current job is so much better than that job 18 years ago, but it's also a far cry from what I saw a Y Combinator and Open AI a couple of years ago when I was visiting someone and I imagine that's how a lot of tech offices are like give or take some perks and creature comforts.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life. I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that what you’re describing is not “just life” in most developed countries. You’re not describing a normal office. Offices like you describe continue to exist because employees put up with it. The tech job market is very hot right now. I would strongly encourage you to explore your options. What you’re describing is not normal or acceptable. You don’t need to move to a Google type company with unlimited office budgets. Most companies are smart enough to know they need to address things like broken HVAC or not enough microwaves or unclean bathrooms by spending the relatively tiny amount of money to address the problem. It’s literally cheaper to address these issues than to lose good talent over such easily addressable frustrations. When you move to a company that treats employees decently, you’ll find that you also get along with coworkers better because everyone is not already miserable and dreading their jobs.

lvspiff 6y ago

I worked at a building that was right next to the runway under the flight path for a major international airport. We could wave to people in the windows. Our AC went out (In las vegas - it gets to 120+ some days in summer) and they brought in portable A/C units that were louder than the planes. Then they took our bottled water away. While these issues aren't normal they are out there and they are replicated by employers who don't value the sanity of their workers. Yes I got out of there. Yes I'm working from home now and agree with practically everything on this list. Especially the bathroom.

zikzak 6y ago
I'll bite. Why did they take away the water?
- bradstewart 6y ago
  Not OP, but usually "bottled" water is taken away for environmental reasons, replaced by filtered faucets, which are often non maintained and cleaned properly.
  - zikzak 6y ago
    Wow, ok. To be clear, I'm a water bottle kind of person but telling adults they can't drink bottled water just seems disrespectful.
- lvspiff 6y ago
  Most of us thought it was cost savings. It was at a university where even the cost of bottled water somehow would be pointed to as the culprit for why we needed to be furloughed.

mrweasel 6y ago

Yeah, I understand the benefits of not having to commute, the peace and quite you get when working from home, but the complaint here is that the employer suck. In this case, and depending on the country, working at this office is illegal. The assumption that working from home is better is a little naive. It’s a result of a terribly company, who will manage to make working from home equally terrible in the long run.

lsllc 6y ago

Regrading the jet fumes, yeah if you're within 3-5 miles of a major airport, there's definitely jet fumes drifting around. Source: Helped someone one weekend re-roof their house that was probably 3 miles from Logan Airport in Boston. You'd get waves of fumes slowly drifting down from the big heavy jets taking off one after another after another.

greedo 6y ago

My office building (the company owns it) is four stories. We have a backup diesel generator that is run every week during business hours for 1 hour. And every week the fumes waft upwards towards the air handlers on the roof. My first week I was shocked by how bad it smelled; kind of like a mown lawn that had rotted. After a few years, I stopped noticing it.

npsimons 6y ago

I've been at a job where projects have put us in vehicle bays with no insulation on the door, in Winter. Temperatures got down to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, there was no dress code, so I would wear my mountain Winter gear, but even so, it was really hard to get any coding done as my fingers were too cold. There are a lot of bad companies out there, and it's all well and good to say "find another job", but not everyone has that luxury.

ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago

>Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes That point was clearly about his home "Working from home I: ... • Breathe jet exhaust..." Kidding aside, there's just not enough jobs in "not broken" offices for all the workers. I haven't seen an office which isn't broken in some way, even though I haven't seen many. And suggestion of looking for another job is just patronizing. If a person could done it easily, he would have done it long ago.

nso95 6y ago

Sounds like when I was doing contract work for the air force