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

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#361

Post by tic_tac » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

ZainRiz wrote: post #284

klenwell wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was also really difficult to detect bugs since no good testing paradigms had been established yet. This created an exploitable opportunity for the few who knew how to write automated tests. During the Y2K panic Sun Microsystems (IIRC) announced that they would pay a bounty of ~$1,000 per Y2K bug that anyone found in their software (due to the lack of automated tests, they didn't even know how to find their Y2K bug…

This should be its own post on HN! Great story.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#362

Post by mhewett » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

dwheeler wrote: post #30

Yes, 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 was a computer operator in the late 1970s and I used to read ComputerWorld which was the biggest enterprise tech "journal" (actually a newspaper) of the day. In the late 1970s they had a number of articles commenting on the need to fix the Y2K problem. So smart people were planning for it well ahead of time. On the other hand memory and storage were so limited then it was probably hard to get permission to allocate two more bytes for a 4-digit year. But people were definitely thinking about it for a long time before the year 2000.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#363

Post by blahblah12 » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

ZainRiz wrote: post #284

klenwell wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was also really difficult to detect bugs since no good testing paradigms had been established yet. This created an exploitable opportunity for the few who knew how to write automated tests. During the Y2K panic Sun Microsystems (IIRC) announced that they would pay a bounty of ~$1,000 per Y2K bug that anyone found in their software (due to the lack of automated tests, they didn't even know how to find their Y2K bug…

On another note, having listened to James Whittaker talk while at Microsoft, he was a phenomenal storyteller and speaker.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#364

Post by yarrel » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

This is a question that is asked by everyone, up to and including politicians who will have to tackle any future such crises.

Pre-Y2K I worked to fix loan systems that would have failed had their Y2K bugs not been fixed. Not getting a loan isn't accidentally launching a nuclear missile, but it affects your credit score and stops you buying a car.

Enough of this kind of failures would have had a severe effect on the economy, up to and including causing an economic crisis.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#365

Post by giaour » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

mbellotti wrote: post #358

marcus_holmes wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COBOL programmers were charging a fortune to be hauled out of retirement to work on this. There was a huge shortage of experienced COBOL devs. And devs who actually understood the specific legacy system involved were even rarer. If the company had customised their system and not kept the documentation up to date or trained new programmers on the system, well, they didn't have a choice. They had to replace it.

It's adorable that these answers are all in the past tense. This is still going on. Many of these systems still exist.

To be fair, I've met a lot of young COBOL programmers since starting to work on mainframe systems last year. I think the "elderly COBOL programmer coaxed out of retirement by dumptrucks full of money" dynamic that supposedly dominated the Y2K response is less prevalent these days, and companies that still run mainframe systems just realize they have to hire regular programmers and teach them COBOL and z/OS.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#366

Post by addicted » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #184

Diederich wrote: post #153

Earlier 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…

The problem is there is no GT equivalent around for states.

The coasts tend to have clusters of many top caliber technical colleges.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#367

Post by Psyladine » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

StaticRedux wrote: post #187

Psyladine wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not IT/software, it's in every field, it's called shitwork, that you don't get credit for, but catch hell if it isn't. e.g. "what do we pay all these janitors for when this place looks spotless?"

I don't think that's true. I've never heard that about any other industry. Certainly not about janitorial work. Doctors curing a patient, lawyers winning a big case, secretaries keeping the schedule up to date, teachers with kids who pass their tests, truck drivers who deliver on time. all of that is plainly visible. IT is a field in which few people see the results or understand the effort required.

it's true of any industry or organizational structure that is considered a cost center.

As for your examples, those are all boolean - they either do it successfully or they don't, and if they do, it's what they are paid for, and if they don't, they catch hell. There is nothing intrinsic about IT that differs.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#368

Post by DonHopkins » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #107

sourcesmith wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It especially caused a boom for COBOL programmers, but not so much Java developers.

It didn't turn out so well for some COBOL programmers...

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#369

Post by samstave » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

Diederich wrote: post #354

samstave wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah walmart is a really beautifully ugly beast of a company. On all levels, not hust tech... Ill have to look into kevin turner though, i dont know who that is.... Anything you’d care to share/point at?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Kevin_Turner is the guy but it doesn't give any mention as to why I (and many of my peers) believe that his tenure as Walmart CIO had a strong negative influence on ISDs trajectory. I don't have much time right now, but I'll share a moment when I saw him interacting with some people during a crisis. We got hit really hard with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) eve…

Heh, I had the same network back in that time too! 3640s all the way down!

I had to recover the password on one when i inherited that network. I will never forget that password: Feet4Monkey.

Ill also never forget my ix.netcom.com password that was initially assigned to me....

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#370

Post by pjmorris » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

Diederich wrote: post #199

pjmorris wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked with an F500 retailer who had Bentonville 'graduates' among their IT staff. Sharp people among other sharp people. It takes a lot to keep the lights on pretty much everywhere. Walk in to any big box store and look around for how many gadgets and systems there are.

> I once worked with an F500 retailer who had Bentonville 'graduates' among their IT staff. May I ask which one? Just idle curiosity.

Home Depot. Even ~15 years ago, they had an amazing amount of technology to support a single store, let alone the supply chain.

I once worked in Point of Sale (POS) at Darden and several POS vendors and consulting companies. Even 25 years ago, your average fast food or mid-range (e.g. Red Lobster) restaurant had a network of ~10 or more computers running various POS, inventory, ordering, scheduling, and other processes.