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To add a little nuance: A global retailer you've definitely heard of that used to own stores in Germany spent a lot of time preparing for Y2K. This was a long and painful process, but it got done in time. But problems still slipped through. These problems ended up not being that big and visible because a large percentage of the code base had just been recently vetted, and a useful minority of that had been recently u…
From someone who went through it and dealt with code, it was a real problem but I also think it was handled poorly publicly. The issues were known for a long time, but the media hyped it into a frenzy because a few higher profile companies and a lot of government systems had not been updated. In fact, there were still a number of government systems that were monkey patched with date workarounds and not properly fixed…
The simple reason is that any one company may have been liable for a very small portion, which if it failed, would not have caused much trouble. But that failure combined with many other failures down the entire chain of connected and unconnected software would have added up to something much greater than the sum of parts.
We saw similar stuff happen with Flash, Silverlight (which wasn't as reported a concern since silverlight usage was so low, but I saw it within my company).
The media pressure was a significant reason why every company needed to have a plan to deal with it.
We are lucky that the Y2k issue was so understandable by the public. I doubt we will have such luck addressing the Y2038 problem.
(Shameless plug, here is my humorous take on it)
I could see why people would be worried that banking software written in COBOL in 1983 would break and had to spend significant sums of money making sure it didn't. Since it was an extremely predictable problem with a specific, known, non-negotiable deadline everyone who had money to lose if there were a problem had plenty of time and incentive to prevent it.
I've also found myself musing on a similar question, but one where you may have a different temporal perspective at this particular moment: In six months, are we going to collectively believe that the Coronavirus was nothing and we massively overreacted to it? Because if we do react strongly, and it does largely contain the virus, that will also be "proof" (quote-unquote) that it wasn't anything we needed to be so pr…
Even if every other country has Y2K levels of success containing the Coronavirus, we can still point skeptics at the example of places like Italy to prove it was a real threat.
So, it's a mix. It was real, it was well-handled, but there was also some hype, and even some hype that served a real (covert) good purpose.
Just imagine if no one had ever lifted a finger to fix any of the bugs. We only talk about it being a scam because everyone collectively did such a great job mitigating it in time.
There is a certain class of work in the IT/software world that is utterly thankless - nothing goes wrong and people wonder what they pay you for, something goes wrong and the very same questions get asked.
Welcome to most enterprise IT shops.
To add a little nuance: A global retailer you've definitely heard of that used to own stores in Germany spent a lot of time preparing for Y2K. This was a long and painful process, but it got done in time. But problems still slipped through. These problems ended up not being that big and visible because a large percentage of the code base had just been recently vetted, and a useful minority of that had been recently u…
Why the generic description? Are you unable to say which retailer?