At a very "lean" company that made power electronics (modular telecoms rectifiers and 1.5-5kW grid-tied solar inverters), I nominally worked as a test engineer

At a very "lean" company that made power electronics (modular telecoms rectifiers and 1.5-5kW grid-tied solar inverters), I nominally worked as a test engineer but I wound up doing a fair bit of EE/firmware work on the products too. Above my bench was that typical drop ceiling stuff like in offices worldwide, except mine had little singed bits of semiconductor packages stuck in it from where things had gone wrong in testing and blown up transistors and such. All of us who worked with open electronics (often necessary during development, for probing or whatever) had earmuffs and safety glasses at the ready, and a wood stick for pushing the on/off switch. AFAIK there weren't any real injuries, but there certainly was potential. My favourite near-miss was the result of a dumb EE experiment, not really code: I had built an 8kV surge generator to test against IEC 61000-4-5, and needed to test the generator itself. We spent an afternoon finding interesting components to blow up, at first under a shield, but the good ones would just make a satisfying snap or pop - not too exciting from a kinetic perspective. Then, I noticed a DVD... The surge through the foil in the DVD made one of the loudest bangs I've ever heard - easily louder than a gunshot - the foil vapourised and sent plastic shards all over the office. The surge generator itself was a glorious hack; it used a neon sign transformer to generate the HV, and the main switch was a trigatron I made from a couple doorknobs from a home recyclers in the same industrial park.