[deleted]
Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
51–60 of 385 posts
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#52Perception is reality, so goes the Old Line.
It's certainly true an absurd amount of resources went into 'fixing' the problem.
Apply to this to any crisis du jour-- drugs/terrorism/climate/viruses etc...
Never let a Good Crisis go to waste.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#53Very anecdotal, but here is my take:
For the place I worked at (large international company) it was a G*d send opportunity. All the slack that had been build up in the past by "cost reducing" management suddenly had a billable cost position that nobody questioned.
Of course there where some actual Y2K issue solved in code and calculations, but by large the significant part of the budget was spend on new shiny stuff, to get changes approved and compensate workers for bonuses missed in the previous years.
We had a blast doing it, and the biggest let down while following the year roll over from the dateline and seeing nothing like the expected and predicted rolling blackouts.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#54I was working at a telecommunications startup in 1999. They were founded in 1997. A big part of what I was doing was fixing Y2K bugs. That said, none of the bugs would have been critical to the operations of the services. Everything was in the billing systems and I think if unfixed it would have been more of a reputation hit than anything. Also, "begs the question" doesn't mean what you think it means. https://en.wik…
I only noticed one manifestation of the Y2K bug myself. I had a credit card receipt that had a date of 1/2/100. Definitely not critical.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#55We are lucky that the Y2k issue was so understandable by the public. I doubt we will have such luck addressing the Y2038 problem.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#56It was like most other big IT problems that are properly anticipated -- a ton of work went into making sure it wasn't a problem, so everyone assumes there was nothing to worry about and all the IT people were lazy and dramatic.
But that couldn't be more wrong.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#57Yes it was real. My fav phrase to describe the work was 'KY2K Jelly - helps you insert 4 digits where only 2 would go before' :-)
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#58If you're driving down the road, see an overturned cart in your path, and safely avoid it, was the cart a danger to you? Nothing bad happened, so was the cart a hoax? The Y2K problem was, for a number of organizations, precisely such a cart, and it was successfully avoided to the extent nothing seriously bad happened as a result of the bug (really, an engineering trade-off which lived too long in the wild) so we can either count it as a victory of foresight and disaster aversion, or we can say it was all a hoax and there was never anything to it. Guess which conclusion will best let us avoid the next potential disaster.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#59Earlier 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…
I hope your colleague had a paper trail of the alarms he raised when it came time to point fingers.
For executives with limited IT experience I honestly don't know if there is a good solution, other than having them deal with the disaster and having a clear paper trail that points the finger in their direction. They won't make the same mistake twice.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#60No. It was not. I was a software developer in a large US Bank at the time. We had already dealt with it years ago for critical systems. All the banks had.
I was as well. Agree that the core systems were fine and extremely thoroughly tested, but all of the supporting applications/infrastructure were questionable. I had quit my job a couple months prior to go into contracting. They were one of my first customers, and the contract was contingent on me remaining on full time until after the new year weekend. Win win.