I'll add my own little data point to the pile. I changed jobs in 1998 so I fixed problems at two companies, small to mid-size. At each place they would have had problems if they weren't found and fixed. At second company they asked for volunteers to get paid extra to stay the night, eat pizza, watch movies and be prepared to fix things if they went south. They had enough volunteers that no one had to be voluntold. They weren't needed.
Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
251–260 of 385 posts
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#252Yes, it was real.
Keep in mind that it was also used as a significant contributing factor to replace a lot of major legacy IT systems (especially accounting systems) at big organisations (a lot of SAP rollouts in the late 90s had Y2K as part of the cost justifications).
The company I worked for ran a Y2K Remediation "Factory" for mainframe software - going through and change to 4 digits, checking for leap year issues, confirming various calculations still worked.
I worked on a full system replacement that was partially justified on the basis of (roughly) we can spend 0.3x and do y2k patches, or spend X and get a new system using more recent technologies and UIs.
There were still problems, but they were generally in less critical systems as likely major systems had been tested, and were remediated or replaced.
Keep in mind that there was often much more processing that occurred on desktop computers (traditional fat client) - so lots of effort was also expended on check desktop date rollover behaviour. Once place I worked at had to manually run test software on every computer they had (10's of thousands) because it needed reboots and remote management was more primitive (and less adopted) at the time.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#253I personally worked in Y2K support at the time on PC hardware. Most motherboards we tested worked, but some needed BIOS updates and one model needed a new BIOS fix which didn't exist. We swapped out the bad motherboards, updated software, and had no problems.
In the UK, there were some medical devices (my memory says dialysis machines) that malfunctioned over the issue.
There is an important lesson about the behavior of the media in this. They whipped out people into a survivalist, doomsday prepper frenzy over an issue that could be solved simply by updating BIOS, software, and/or hardware.
With that said, the effort was very expensive because so much software and hardware needed to be audited at every company.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#254Yes, and the Y2038 crisis is real but just like last time we are working on fixing it early instead of waiting for it to become a problem.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#255I'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…
I assume that we'll have a fairly decent idea as to what worked, and what didn't, as the differing responses mean we're effectively carrying out multiple experiments at once.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#256yes, I was working in the airline industry at the time (the logistics side) and there was a bunch of stuff, across multiple vendors, that had to change or it would've broke. It would've effectively grounded airlines
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#257Yes, the y2k crisis was real, or more accurately, would have been a serious crisis if people had not rushed and spent lots of money to deal with it ahead of time. In many systems it would have been no big deal if unfixed, but there were a huge number of really important systems that would have been a serious problem had they not been fixed. Part of the challenge was that this was an immovable deadline, often if thing…
I remember hearing a story on NPR years ago years after Y2K with someone knowledgeable on the subject that addressed this question. He gave basically the same answer you did: a lot of effort went into avoiding disaster and a lot of people treated it after the fact as if it was hype or hysteria. I recall the interview because it changed my significantly thinking on the subject. (I wasn't in the industry at the time of Y2K.)
He also noted that a lot of American firms worked with Indian firms to resolve it. Indian engineers were well suited to the problem, according to him, because they had been exposed to a lot of the legacy systems involved during their studies.
He said an interesting consequence of this was that many American companies concluded they could use lower wage Indian engineers on other software projects so it helped initiate a wave of offshoring in the early 2000s.
I couldn't find the story I heard in the NPR archives, but they do have a number of stories reported right around that time if you want to see how it was being discussed and treated by NPR at the time:
https://www.npr.org/search?query=y2k&page=1
I did find this NPR interview with an Indian official from 2009 that notes Y2K's impact in US-Indian economic relations:
But I think the real turning point in many ways in the U.S. relations was Y2K, the 2000 - year 2000, Indian software engineers and computer engineers suddenly found themselves in the U.S. helping the U.S. in adjusting itself to the Y2K problem. And that opened a new chapter in our relations with a huge increase in services, trade and software and computer industry.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120738...
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#258It was real, and there was very little fallout b/c tens of thousands of IT staff worked for years leading up to 2000 to fix the bugs.
The Indian IT outsourcing industry was effectively created by the Y2K bug. Those companies did a large amount of the bug fixing.
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#259It was real, and there was very little fallout b/c tens of thousands of IT staff worked for years leading up to 2000 to fix the bugs. The Indian IT outsourcing industry was effectively created by the Y2K bug. Those companies did a large amount of the bug fixing.
More details / sources on the outsourced fixing?
Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?
#260There are really a couple of issues in this topic. First, was there a potential problem due to dates? Second, was the massive scare campaign justified?
The answer to the first question is yes. There was a potential problem. However the companies and government departments that were affected had started planning in the early 90s, and they prepared during the decade. Many took the opportunity to embark on huge system upgrades. It was just one of many issues CIOs dealt with.
The answer to the second question is no. The huge disaster scares were not justified. Banks, airlines, insurance companies and government departments had already fixed their systems, just like they fix other problems.
What happened was that consulting companies, outsourcers and law firms suddenly realized there was a huge new market that they could scare into being. They started running campaigns aimed at getting work from mid size businesses.
The campaign took off because it was an easy issue for the media and politicians to understand. It also played into the popular meme that programmers were stupid. The kicker was the threat that directors who failed to prepare could be sued if anything went wrong. Directors fell into line and commissioned a lot of needless work.
In summary, there was the professional work carried out by big banks, airlines etc, generally between 1990 and 1997, and the panic-driven, sometimes pointless work by smaller firms in 1998 and 1999.