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It's only hard to tell if you don't talk to the developers who were working in the late 90s.
by mathw 7y ago
It's only hard to tell if you don't talk to the developers who were working in the late 90s.
- slantyyz 7y ago>> It's only hard to tell if you don't talk to the developers who were working in the late 90s. I think you mean "working ON it". Talking to developers as a broad group from that time wouldn't necessarily produce any useful information. The person you replied to was himself a developer working in the late 90s. During the late 90s, I talked to a lot of developers, but only a small percentage of them were on Y2K jobs.
- sourcesmith 7y agoThere 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.
- dhosek 7y agoI was fixing Y2K bugs at a company founded in 1997. Unless you never touched date stuff, I can't imagine being oblivious to Y2K issues working in IT in 1999.
- slantyyz 7y agoThe startups I worked in around that time - we were using recent hardware with 4 digit years and unconcerned about Y2K issues. So while we were -aware- of the Y2K issue, it didn't impact any of us in a concrete fashion. We would talk about people we knew on Y2K projects, which were mostly mission critical legacy systems. So it's not inconceivable for devs in the 90s to have only cursory awareness of the -real- issues that the people who worked on Y2K projects were facing and solved.
- TedDoesntTalk 7y agoIt especially caused a boom for COBOL programmers, but not so much Java developers.
- DonHopkins 7y agoIt didn't turn out so well for some COBOL programmers... https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39
- VLM 7y agoWe were all on Y2K jobs, in the sense that for the decade of the 90s you'd get looked at very weirdly if you tried to produce code and systems using two digit years.
- slantyyz 7y agoI guess I have a different perception. If you were trying to produce code in the 90s using two digit years, the weird looks had less to do with Y2K than "why would you save incomplete data to save a couple of bytes"? For context, most of the devs I worked with at that time finished their CS degrees within the previous 10 years, and were not legacy systems programmers. Doing 2 digit years was inconceivable to them.