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Yep, and subsequent bust. Many many companies getting not significant cash inflows in the run up to 2000 which made their balance sheets look great, until the

• firebones 10y ago
  That's a great point that I had forgotten. In terms of y2k effort, it seemed to me to be a small amount of code change and a disproportionately high amount of testing. The ramp up in hiring for those changes and certification, combined with the lost opportunity cost, did contribute to a later contraction. Here's one thing that puts it in perspective though. The amount of code in the world that was Y2K-affected was considerably less than the total amount of code that exists today. And stepping outside the HN startup bubble (where code is relatively young and modernized) and into the types of companies affected by Y2K, there are many efforts that are as bad or worse occurring all the time. Stuff like regulatory changes (SarbOx or various banking reforms), technology uplift (e.g., 32bit --> 64bit, Win32-->.NET, platform ports, etc.) are as bad or worse based on the amount of legacy code it affects. But what Y2K did is teach a lot of these companies how to solve sweeping, codebase-wide problems.