>It works on a deep psychological level to offer vast productivity improvements.
some other extremely effective methods used in [another organization where people are treated like sh!t] the Russian Army: blocking access to the exit door, restroom and/or food/water, gang-chaining and/to the utility pipes, forcing to wear gas mask [and if weather is warm enough - rubberized fullbody chemical weapons protective suite] ... until the task is completed/corrected,
and the best of the best methods is to having [only] your teammates [who have no connection to the error] being forced into the above described conditions until _you_ correct _your_ own error. After it happens once, your teammates would make sure that you wouldn't repeat the error ever ...
I can't seem to find where, but I remember reading about this a few years ago...
Some company had connected their Continuous Integration server to the exit door. Breaking the build would lock the exit door until the build was fixed.
Near the end of the day, some programmer would announce his big commit, and the rest of the team would rush to exit the room :)
IIRC, this practice was put in place by the developers themselves (not by management), as some kind of "productivity joke". Propping the door open would defeat the purpose.
I'm seriously annoyed that I cannot seem to find the original story...
As someone working in this office I must warn others of the constant fear this little device instils in you. It's like working at aperture science, the emphasis on testing is maniacal.
For simple things like build errors a local git hook was good enough to completely rid the project of those problems. For the Arora project I believe there were around 5 commits in the entire lifetime of the project that didn't build on one system and those were all cases were it built on the developers OS, but failed on a different OS. But man would it have been cool to have a USB missiles just sitting there waiting for the day they could launch.
Not a fan of the psychological torture here. Why is "breaking the build" such a major problem? If the tests don't pass, the commit should go into a "testing" branch. If the tests pass, merge testing into master. That way you can fix things asynchronously, rather than wear a dumb hat or get shot at by missiles.
Excellent stuff. I had a similar idea once, hooked it up to an irc channel and made a bot with commands to shoot people in the office by typing their name. Unfortunately I couldn't get the rocket launcher to be accurate as the same command sequence wouldn't always result in the launcher aiming at the same position.
Sounds like if range is limited you'd need an array of multiple launchers, strategically distributed around the office to provide the most efficient coverage.
I doubt anyone would be threatened enough by foam projectiles to try to circumvent it. Now, getting someone else attacked for no reason is a different story. That would be amusing.
Is that a generation or culture thing? Where I used to work, it was the one golden and unquestionable and holy rule: if you break the build, you have to buy a crate of beer for the team - so you get the "punishing" part and you get some team building too because we would drink that beer during office parties, other special occasions or just in the evening before going home or out or over a casual chat.. or during some Warcraft or DotA sessions and that team still sticks together even nowadays that the company is long gone and we are working in different jobs and countries. I really miss that place for its team spirit and the people there.
And I must say, I felt almost offended when in my new job when I found out they didn't have anything like this in place at all.
I love how people are worried about the possibility of deep, everlasting psychological scars.
I work at the OSUOSL. Some of our finer (read: less uptight) patrons occasionally donate Nerf weaponry. Getting shot at with Nerf guns is not uncommon, and really isn't that big of a deal. I do not constantly glance over my shoulder in fear of a Nerf raid.
some other extremely effective methods used in [another organization where people are treated like sh!t] the Russian Army: blocking access to the exit door, restroom and/or food/water, gang-chaining and/to the utility pipes, forcing to wear gas mask [and if weather is warm enough - rubberized fullbody chemical weapons protective suite] ... until the task is completed/corrected,
and the best of the best methods is to having [only] your teammates [who have no connection to the error] being forced into the above described conditions until _you_ correct _your_ own error. After it happens once, your teammates would make sure that you wouldn't repeat the error ever ...