Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#71

Post by cogman10 » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #43

wefarrell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It a shame that we as engineers can't just say "this maintenance is required to fix this known issue. It's not a huge deal but will cause trouble if it's not dealt with". Instead we have to be all doom and gloom and tell management that the company/world will end.

Colleague was just dealing with a clients of their who was still using TLS1.0. They're running classic ASP on Window Server 2008, and can't (effectively) migrate. Colleague had been raising the alarm for months (since they started on the project) that "this is going to mean all your systems will stop working in early 2020" but no one seemed to care or understand. They did, last week, put in ... haproxy as an SSL term…

Money, Money is the way you talk that makes business listen.

You say "If we don't solve this by X date, we are looking at losing the ability to take in revenue and possible law suits for failure to perform. It will take Y amount of time to accomplish this"

If you don't couch things in terms of time, money, resources, client impact. They will not care. You can say "Hey, it is super bad that we are running Tomcat 7.0.0 there are a lot of security vulnerabilities" and what they will hear is "blah, blah, blah, we can delay this".

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#72

Post by y-c-o-m-b » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

Like others have said, it was real and handled well. They knew about it for years before so there was time to fix the issue.

The panic was also very real despite not being proportional to the actual problem, but just like any other media-induced widespread panic, it served as a means to make lots of profit for those in a position to do so. Media companies squeezed every last drop of that panic for ratings... well into the year 2000 when they started spreading the story that Y2K was the tip of the iceberg, and the "real" Y2K won't actually start until January 1, 2001.

As an immigrant to the US, I got to see the weird side of American culture in how people tend to romanticize (for lack of a better word) post-apocalyptic America. Kind of like the doomsday hoarders of today are doing. It's like they think a starring role on the Walking Dead is waiting for them, except in real life.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#73

Post by davismwfl » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #49

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's less cause to use small data sizes for timestamps and date codes now. Storage has grown by orders of magnitude, the idea that a numeric data type would only be large enough to store a 2-digit year or that you would want to save disk space by abbreviating an extra 2 letters is foreign to a lot of new developers. And the 20-year-old systems are slowly dissapearing...

More importantly we have figured out algorithms for time that account for timezone, daylight savings time, different calendar systems, and probably something else I'm not aware of. These all work by counting seconds since a fixed date. Note that the algorithms were known since at least the late 1960s. Storage space even then shouldn't have been enough of a concern. However people still screw it up all the time.

This is the accurate point. We had epoch date tracking since the 1960s or so and the coding of a two digit year was out of laziness and convenience in most cases. And not bashing anyone, but most of the systems I saw using the lazy method were more business systems where there wasn't thoughtful engineering a lot of the time, but more just get it done. Those two don't have to be mutually exclusive IMO, but in the 70s/80's it seems a lot of the time it was, simply because IMO we had predominately really two classes of developers, scientific and business where business devs took less of an engineering mindset and more get it done in a specific timeframe so they "hacked" it out. Plus it was new, so stuff happens.

Sadly this stuff still goes on today, just in slightly different ways. Data type and data structure choices are critical, and it isn't as important to me that someone know how to write an algorithm for a RB-tree (or pick your DS), but it is critical an engineer knows which data structure/type to choose for specific use cases. This is one of my biggest complaints with the way a lot of engineering interviews are structured today, they want you to regurgitate known algorithms which is a waste of time and personal memory, find out if the person knows when they'd use a specific data structure and why the rest is easily researched. I mention this because to me the fundamental flaw of the y2k problem was one of data structure and data type choice.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#74

Post by codezero » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

I worked New Years 1999 when I was at Red Hat.

Leading up to the change over there was a lot of work to make sure all the systems would be OK, and that underlying software would also be OK, but keep in mind, auto-update on the Internet wasn't super common.

I ended up getting one call from a customer that night where they had a valid Y2K bug in their software, and since it wasn't in Red Hat's system, they moved along to their next support person to call :)

It was a thing, but much less of a thing because of the work put into getting ahead of it.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#75

Post by hprotagonist » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

Perhaps the definition of a successfully managed crisis is that exactly this question is asked after it was managed.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#76

Post by sourcesmith » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #25

mathw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only hard to tell if you don't talk to the developers who were working in the late 90s.

>> It's only hard to tell if you don't talk to the developers who were working in the late 90s. I think you mean "working ON it". Talking to developers as a broad group from that time wouldn't necessarily produce any useful information. The person you replied to was himself a developer working in the late 90s. During the late 90s, I talked to a lot of developers, but only a small percentage of them were on Y2K jobs.

There were a lot of Y2K related tasks in the course of many developers generally activity. Where I worked at the time, there were not developers solely dedicated to Y2K work. The Y2K issue pretty much caused an employment boom for software developers though.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#77

Post by tachoknight » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

I worked at a bank at the time and can say that we started working on it back in 1996, and all the systems were in place and tested by early 1999 so we had no issues. It was absolutely a crisis; back in 1995 one of the mainframe programmers did an analysis on her own and determined that, not only was it a problem, but that the system would be hopelessly corrupted if it wasn't fixed. They spent, if not seven figures, at least high-six figures to get everything ready. One thing that was drilled in from management was that no one was to talk about it because it might be perceived that "real" work wasn't getting done. :\

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#78

Post by joshstrange » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #48

Yes, it was a real crisis. This revisionist history that some are now saying it was no big deal. It was a big deal and many people spent many hours in the 90's assuring that the financial side of every business continued. I am starting to get a bit offended at the discounting of the effort put in by developers around the world. Just because the news didn't understand the actual nature of the crisis (Y2K = primarily f…

This is always such an annoying problem:

1. Shine light on problem and make sure people hear about it

2. People respond and fix it

3. Outcome not as bad as you said it could be /because it was fixed/

4. Some time later "That wasn't a big deal"

No, it wasn't that big of a deal because we worked hard to fix it!

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#79

Post by dhosek » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

jarkkom wrote: post #68

It was very much real, lots of effort was spent to make sure everything worked correctly, especially around older billing systems which used only 2-digit years in fixed width records. Because of all the preparation and upgrades being done, I think only incident we had when Y2k migration manager sent out "all clear"-email after rollover - Unix mail client he used formatted date on email as "01/01/19100" - though I sus…

Ah, bad Perl code, outputting a four digit year by doing "19" . $year instead of 1900 + $year. I fixed a lot of those in 1999.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#80

Post by criley2 » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #55

We are lucky that the Y2k issue was so understandable by the public. I doubt we will have such luck addressing the Y2038 problem.

>We are lucky that the Y2k issue was so understandable by the public.

As someone who was forced to spend Y2K in a "prepped" cabin on the side of a mountain with two years of supplies buried underneath, I think you might overestimate the quality of the public's response to Y2K.

The public did not maturely understand that software needed to be updated and everything was OK.

There was some real panic out there. It was arguably the biggest "End Times" event of the modern era, definitely IMO surpassing "2012" and other "apocalypse panics".

The Y2k preppers and panic, I think, was the foundation for the modern prepper movement and the public's desire to flip from conspiracy to conspiracy to predict collapse.