I worked on US national security Y2K issues for two years prior. Yes, it was real. The fact that so many people now think it was a big nothing means my team did its job.
Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
201–210 of 385 posts
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#202Yes it was a real crisis.
Yes it was well handled.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#203To 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…
I love these kinds of war stories of incredibly capable people. That was great planning for the unknowns.
The software maintenance research literature from 1999 to 2002 ish is littered with this kind of stuff as researchers got to embed in teams doing one off massive maintence projects to fix y2k stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#204To 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…
I love these kinds of war stories of incredibly capable people. That was great planning for the unknowns.
I generally hate being woken up at night or having to work at night. But there is something electrifying in the atmosphere when you get a bunch of smart people in a room at 2 in the morning to solve a major problem as quickly as possible. Some part of me really enjoys late night war rooms.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Even in flyover country the people I know tend to understand that it was only not an issue because of hard work on the front-end.
"Even in flyover country", ouch, you realize the comments earlier about Walmart's Y2K efforts were all driven out of Arkansas, right?
I'm from flyover country. There are talented people here, and well-educated people here. This is why I live here. It's cheap and the people are nice.
But I would argue that there is also a much higher proportion of individuals who do not understand technology and who are out of the loop on this kind of thing.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've worked in silicon valley for the past 11 years, in startups as well as two so-called FAANG companies. There are a lot of brilliant people out here. So that is well known. What's not well known is this: there are pockets of brilliant people elsewhere, including Bentonville, Arkansas. Especially in the years running up to 2000, I had the pleasure and honor of working with some of the most talented people in the wo…
Yeah...previous to moving to the west coast (working not for a FAANG, but a well recognized name that competes for much of the same talent, and offers comparable compensation), I was working in Atlanta. I would argue the caliber of people I worked with there, from no name universities, or known names, but not equivalent to many people (Georgia Tech vs Berkeley, say), was generally better there. It of course varied pe…
Indeed, there was a comment here a few years ago from someone who was rejected for an interview, the stated reason being "Sorry, we're only accepting candidates from top tier schools. We've never heard of Georgia Tech."
I was like "WTF? They've probably never heard of Waterloo either!"
(For anyone unfamiliar, these may not be household names, but they are definitely top tier CS schools.)
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#207In 1999 to 2000 I was working as a freelancer At a state agency. From the change from 99 to 00 I got paid 3 times a few days apart, always the same amount. Later turned out that the indicator that a person was paid was not working thx to y2k. So somebody clicked on payout a few times. They fixed it for the employees before but not for the freelancers. I gave back the money, which was difficult on its own as there was no process for it.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
I have a vivid recollection of reading a Scientific American article in late '98 or early '99 that claimed that no matter how much time and $ was put into fixing Y2K before 1 Jan 2000, there was going to be a disaster; it was just a question of having a bigger or smaller disaster, but even with best effort months. I have recently looked for that article, without success. Does anyone recall it/ have a PDF (image) of i…
Might be the October 1998 article "Y2K: The End of the World as We Know It", but its behind a paywall and I don't subscribe.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#209To 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…
I remember having to go into work at 4:00 AM to replace the shift that spent the night in the operations support center.
Fortunately, the guys that spent the previous year sweating the details got it right. We had one system that printed year 100 in its log which was only used by humans.
Unfortunately, I missed the party and cash the night shift got.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love these kinds of war stories of incredibly capable people. That was great planning for the unknowns.
I've worked in silicon valley for the past 11 years, in startups as well as two so-called FAANG companies. There are a lot of brilliant people out here. So that is well known. What's not well known is this: there are pockets of brilliant people elsewhere, including Bentonville, Arkansas. Especially in the years running up to 2000, I had the pleasure and honor of working with some of the most talented people in the wo…
I was in Minneapolis for Y2K... working release management/build engineering for a commercial ERP vendor, surrounded by Cray veterans (including my direct manager). The brainpower we put to Y2K was huge, but then again, we'd been selling product for a few years at that point as a "solution" to Y2K... just buy a new ERP system, and abandon your old in-house stuff rather than trying to fix it.
What a lot of Silicon Valley people don't get is that there are people just as smart as them everywhere.