6 ms·

I worked for about a year with a consulting firm that handled "Y2K compliance". Unlike this Andersen exercise in legal face-saving, it was a real job. Big compa

I worked for about a year with a consulting firm that handled "Y2K compliance". Unlike this Andersen exercise in legal face-saving, it was a real job. Big companies hired us to do a full inventory of their site equipment (this included manufacturing plants, Pharma stuff) and go line by line with their vendors and figure out which components had known Y2K issues, which had not been tested at all, and which ones were fine/had simple fixes. We helped them replace and fix what needed to be fixed. Y2K was a real problem. The end-of-the-world blackouts + planes falling from the sky was sensationalism, but there were real issues and most of them got fixed. Not trying to take away from this very interesting story of corrupt cronyism, but there were serious people dealing with serious problems out there. "Remember Y2K? Nothing happened!" is a super toxic lesson to take away from a rare success where people came together and fixed something instead of firefighting disasters.

victor9000 2y ago
I've seen this phenomenon play out multiple times in my professional career, where a considerable amount of effort goes into creating a robust system only for the effort to be minimized by management due to its stability. Somehow preventing a plane from crashing is not as valuable as digging through the ashes.
- deepsun 2y ago
  A lot of jobs are like that. Accounting, legal and security work is only visible when it was bad. Noone is being promoted for doing good job that prevented an unanticipated disaster from happening.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    That's why presentation and "sales" type skills can be useful. A bit of doom-mongering internal PR about the problem, then present the solution. Don't just solve it quietly.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    In agreement with your overall point, accounting and legal is different though. For accounting, it's not a simple cost center, and is at the front line to show the numbers. They can say how much it will cost to not comply with a rule, or how much they saved by creativity or ingenuity. Being that close to the money is a tremendous advantage. Legal is more distant, but there's a clear scale of how much is on the line. When you review a contract, it's pretty clear what’s at stake if legal work is botched. That's my main takeaway: if you care about money, you need to be as close to it as possible. At the same skill level, dealing with user security or financial transaction security won't pay the same.
- pflenker 2y ago
  „there is no glory in prevention”.
- hibikir 2y ago
  I have made a career if stabilizing systems... but the secret is that they have to be pretty close to on fire before I am ever called in.
  - pimlottc 2y ago
    And unfortunately sometimes you have to just let the fire smolder before anyone cares enough to let you fix it.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    This. Make problems ugly, any way you can.
throw0101d 2y ago
> "Remember Y2K? Nothing happened!" is a super toxic lesson to take away […] See perhaps: > Normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings.[1] Consequently, individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect them, and its potential adverse effects.[2] The normalcy bias causes many people to prepare inadequately for natural disasters, market crashes, and calamities caused by human error. About 80% of people reportedly display normalcy bias during a disaster.[3] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias Also maybe: > Optimism bias or optimistic bias is a cognitive bias that causes someone to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event. It is also known as unrealistic optimism or comparative optimism. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias
Terr_ 2y ago
I like the phrase "Self-unfulfilling prophecy", for when a prediction that is acted-upon often invalidates its future. There's also this annoying catch-22 which may be familiar to IT staff: 1. Things go wrong: "What do we even pay you for?" 2. Things go right: "What do we even pay you for?"
- Doxin 2y ago
  Place I used to work had a cycle of "Everything is working. We don't need quite this much IT staff." and "Everything is broken. Clearly we need more IT staff." How the people in charge of this stuff never noticed the cycle is beyond me.
- ASalazarMX 2y ago
  And this is why everything goes in writing.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    ...and 24 years later, after the paperwork has been filed away, someone will still write that the problem never existed. Y2K minimization and anti-vaxx sentimental are 2 symptoms of problems solved so successfully, the magnitude of the problem disappears from the collective consciousness.
    - smegger001 2y ago
      and then 2038 unix epoc will happen and this time everything is computerized and as cloudstrike showed no one bothers to test any of it anymore. Oops
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defeating_prophecy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defeating_prophecy
takinola 2y ago
> "Remember Y2K? Nothing happened!" is a super toxic lesson to take away from a rare success where people came together and fixed something instead of firefighting disasters. My cynicism about Y2K comes from the fact that there were a lot of snarky articles written about how certain countries or companies were not Y2K ready but nothing bad seemed to happen to those countries either. It seems like a natural experiment was conducted and the results indicate there was no correlation between good outcomes and the work done to be Y2K ready. I have no doubt that the armies of consultants did fix real issues but anyone working in software knows there is a never ending set of things to fix. The real issue is whether that work was necessary for the ongoing functioning of business or society.
- Marazan 2y ago
  When things got missed things went _badly_ wrong and that spurred businesses to take rapid action to respond. The first "Y2K" bugs where when banks' computer systems started messing up the calculations of long date financial securities/mortgages - decades before the millennium. Closer to the time Supermarkets started junking food that had a post 1999 Best Before date. Those were company ending problems if not fixed and so got overwhelming and rapid focus.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  "but nothing bad seemed to happen to those countries either." Bad things still happened everywhere, despite all our efforts. How bad depends on your perspective. Several people suffered a bizarre form of resurrection, which normally, Christians would be all over it and jolly excited. Pensions suddenly started paying out, tax bills became due from people long dead. If you were not a relative of one of those people it did not affect you and if you read about it, you'd have perhaps said "typical" and got on with life. Some devices just went a bit weird and needed turning off and on again. Who cares or even noticed? Someone did but again, you did not hear about those. I spent quite a while patching NetWare boxes and applying some very shaky patches to Windows workstations. To be honest, back then, timezone changes were more frightening than Y2K - they happen twice a year and something would always crash or go wrong. The sheer amount of stuff that was fixed was vast and I don't think your "countries that did and did not" thought experiment is valid. Especially as it is conducted without personal experience nor much beyond a bit of "ecce, fiat" blather. Nowadays time is so easy to deal with. Oh, do you remember when MS fucked up certificates and Feb 29 a few years back?
arp242 2y ago
> Y2K was a real problem Which only makes it more interesting. There are many takeaways one can have from this article, one of them is that: - Problem X is serious. - Y will address problem X Is incomplete reasoning, or even an outright fallacy. Just because it's claimed that Y will address X doesn't mean it actually will. Especially on high-stakes issues ("our business will collapse", security, safety) or emotive issues (social justice, security) this type of flawed reasoning seems to be a common problem.
QuantumGood 2y ago
A LOT happened, and was well reported, just not widely. It's more that the worst didn't happen, and that's what the media focused on.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
I'm really curious how 2038 is going to play out. I think it's either going to be a retirement plan for many who are young-ish IT people right now, or "optimists hoard gold, pessimists hoard cans and ammo" time with the pessimists being right. And a lot of this depends on how decision makers will remember Y2k.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Nobody is going to waste as much money on it as they did with Y2K and it's way more common for computers to actually use epoch time... but I think almost everything uses 64-bit time now and we're still more than a decade away. (Don't reply with examples of things that use 32-bit time.)
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
    I think 64 bit time is reasonably common in memory, but 32 bit time is common in serialized formats (both for storage and communication/exchange).
monkeydreams 2y ago
I got my first IT job doing Y2k compliance. About 20% of our systems broke with the date changed to 01/01/2000, including the PABX (continual reboot cycle) and the sales leads system which would crash every few minutes.
mlyle 2y ago
The fact that it went so well is not evidence that no original issue existed. On the other hand, maybe it's evidence that we over-invested a bit into diminishing returns. A perfectly fine-tuned response would have a little bit more to fix on January 1. Of course, expecting society to perfectly fine-tune the response for something poorly understood is hard.
aaronbrethorst 2y ago
Similar to the ozone crisis that was, and then wasn’t, but really was. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/rebuilding-ozone-layer-how-world-came-together-ultimate-repair-job https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/rebuilding-ozone...
asah 2y ago
That narrative is only in the uneducated public. Every Y2K perfect of course documented its many findings and fixes. In fact, the REASON Y2K got so much budget and attention were the early companies that started discovering the issues and alerted the others. Notables include IBM, General Motors, Citibank and American Express. Agreed it was a nice success. We also did pretty well in paperless office, the ozone layer and acid rain, automobile and airplane safety, and the war on cancer, and now obesity and diabetes.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  The public were not uneducated about this. If you remember how Y2K was presented to the public, it was ridiculously extreme - planes crashing, economies collapsing, etc. None of that happened, and not because all the bugs were fixed. You can't fix all bugs, so if the consequences really were going to be catastrophic then you'd expect at least a handful of catastrophes to sneak through, but that didn't happen at all.
  - alextingle 2y ago
    > None of that happened, and not because all the bugs were fixed. No one is in a position to assert that. We have very little idea how fragile our civilization is. Perhaps it's pretty robust, and networks of interconnected problems (like Y2K) stand no chance of snowballing out of control. Or perhaps it's really, really fragile, and surprisingly little stands between us and a profound collapse. It's very difficult to be certain, because it's such a complicated system, and one that we can't really test to destruction. Would all the Y2K bugs have caused a widespread systematic failure if they'd gone un-fixed? Probably not... but maybe? Just like all low-probability, high impact risks, it's very hard for us to reason about. How much money is it wise to spend on averting the risk of giant asteroid impacts? Hard to say. Probably more than you think, though.

victor9000 2y ago

I've seen this phenomenon play out multiple times in my professional career, where a considerable amount of effort goes into creating a robust system only for the effort to be minimized by management due to its stability. Somehow preventing a plane from crashing is not as valuable as digging through the ashes.

deepsun 2y ago
A lot of jobs are like that. Accounting, legal and security work is only visible when it was bad. Noone is being promoted for doing good job that prevented an unanticipated disaster from happening.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  That's why presentation and "sales" type skills can be useful. A bit of doom-mongering internal PR about the problem, then present the solution. Don't just solve it quietly.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  In agreement with your overall point, accounting and legal is different though. For accounting, it's not a simple cost center, and is at the front line to show the numbers. They can say how much it will cost to not comply with a rule, or how much they saved by creativity or ingenuity. Being that close to the money is a tremendous advantage. Legal is more distant, but there's a clear scale of how much is on the line. When you review a contract, it's pretty clear what’s at stake if legal work is botched. That's my main takeaway: if you care about money, you need to be as close to it as possible. At the same skill level, dealing with user security or financial transaction security won't pay the same.
pflenker 2y ago
„there is no glory in prevention”.
hibikir 2y ago
I have made a career if stabilizing systems... but the secret is that they have to be pretty close to on fire before I am ever called in.
- pimlottc 2y ago
  And unfortunately sometimes you have to just let the fire smolder before anyone cares enough to let you fix it.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  This. Make problems ugly, any way you can.

throw0101d 2y ago

> "Remember Y2K? Nothing happened!" is a super toxic lesson to take away […] See perhaps: > Normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings.[1] Consequently, individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect them, and its potential adverse effects.[2] The normalcy bias causes many people to prepare inadequately for natural disasters, market crashes, and calamities caused by human error. About 80% of people reportedly display normalcy bias during a disaster.[3] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias Also maybe: > Optimism bias or optimistic bias is a cognitive bias that causes someone to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event. It is also known as unrealistic optimism or comparative optimism. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias

Terr_ 2y ago

I like the phrase "Self-unfulfilling prophecy", for when a prediction that is acted-upon often invalidates its future. There's also this annoying catch-22 which may be familiar to IT staff: 1. Things go wrong: "What do we even pay you for?" 2. Things go right: "What do we even pay you for?"

Doxin 2y ago
Place I used to work had a cycle of "Everything is working. We don't need quite this much IT staff." and "Everything is broken. Clearly we need more IT staff." How the people in charge of this stuff never noticed the cycle is beyond me.
ASalazarMX 2y ago
And this is why everything goes in writing.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  ...and 24 years later, after the paperwork has been filed away, someone will still write that the problem never existed. Y2K minimization and anti-vaxx sentimental are 2 symptoms of problems solved so successfully, the magnitude of the problem disappears from the collective consciousness.
  - smegger001 2y ago
    and then 2038 unix epoc will happen and this time everything is computerized and as cloudstrike showed no one bothers to test any of it anymore. Oops
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defeating_prophecy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defeating_prophecy

takinola 2y ago

> "Remember Y2K? Nothing happened!" is a super toxic lesson to take away from a rare success where people came together and fixed something instead of firefighting disasters. My cynicism about Y2K comes from the fact that there were a lot of snarky articles written about how certain countries or companies were not Y2K ready but nothing bad seemed to happen to those countries either. It seems like a natural experiment was conducted and the results indicate there was no correlation between good outcomes and the work done to be Y2K ready. I have no doubt that the armies of consultants did fix real issues but anyone working in software knows there is a never ending set of things to fix. The real issue is whether that work was necessary for the ongoing functioning of business or society.

Marazan 2y ago
When things got missed things went _badly_ wrong and that spurred businesses to take rapid action to respond. The first "Y2K" bugs where when banks' computer systems started messing up the calculations of long date financial securities/mortgages - decades before the millennium. Closer to the time Supermarkets started junking food that had a post 1999 Best Before date. Those were company ending problems if not fixed and so got overwhelming and rapid focus.
gerdesj 2y ago
"but nothing bad seemed to happen to those countries either." Bad things still happened everywhere, despite all our efforts. How bad depends on your perspective. Several people suffered a bizarre form of resurrection, which normally, Christians would be all over it and jolly excited. Pensions suddenly started paying out, tax bills became due from people long dead. If you were not a relative of one of those people it did not affect you and if you read about it, you'd have perhaps said "typical" and got on with life. Some devices just went a bit weird and needed turning off and on again. Who cares or even noticed? Someone did but again, you did not hear about those. I spent quite a while patching NetWare boxes and applying some very shaky patches to Windows workstations. To be honest, back then, timezone changes were more frightening than Y2K - they happen twice a year and something would always crash or go wrong. The sheer amount of stuff that was fixed was vast and I don't think your "countries that did and did not" thought experiment is valid. Especially as it is conducted without personal experience nor much beyond a bit of "ecce, fiat" blather. Nowadays time is so easy to deal with. Oh, do you remember when MS fucked up certificates and Feb 29 a few years back?

arp242 2y ago

> Y2K was a real problem Which only makes it more interesting. There are many takeaways one can have from this article, one of them is that: - Problem X is serious. - Y will address problem X Is incomplete reasoning, or even an outright fallacy. Just because it's claimed that Y will address X doesn't mean it actually will. Especially on high-stakes issues ("our business will collapse", security, safety) or emotive issues (social justice, security) this type of flawed reasoning seems to be a common problem.

QuantumGood 2y ago

A LOT happened, and was well reported, just not widely. It's more that the worst didn't happen, and that's what the media focused on.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

I'm really curious how 2038 is going to play out. I think it's either going to be a retirement plan for many who are young-ish IT people right now, or "optimists hoard gold, pessimists hoard cans and ammo" time with the pessimists being right. And a lot of this depends on how decision makers will remember Y2k.

IshKebab 2y ago
Nobody is going to waste as much money on it as they did with Y2K and it's way more common for computers to actually use epoch time... but I think almost everything uses 64-bit time now and we're still more than a decade away. (Don't reply with examples of things that use 32-bit time.)
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  I think 64 bit time is reasonably common in memory, but 32 bit time is common in serialized formats (both for storage and communication/exchange).

monkeydreams 2y ago

I got my first IT job doing Y2k compliance. About 20% of our systems broke with the date changed to 01/01/2000, including the PABX (continual reboot cycle) and the sales leads system which would crash every few minutes.

mlyle 2y ago

The fact that it went so well is not evidence that no original issue existed. On the other hand, maybe it's evidence that we over-invested a bit into diminishing returns. A perfectly fine-tuned response would have a little bit more to fix on January 1. Of course, expecting society to perfectly fine-tune the response for something poorly understood is hard.

aaronbrethorst 2y ago

Similar to the ozone crisis that was, and then wasn’t, but really was. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/rebuilding-ozone-layer-how-world-came-together-ultimate-repair-job https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/rebuilding-ozone...

asah 2y ago

That narrative is only in the uneducated public. Every Y2K perfect of course documented its many findings and fixes. In fact, the REASON Y2K got so much budget and attention were the early companies that started discovering the issues and alerted the others. Notables include IBM, General Motors, Citibank and American Express. Agreed it was a nice success. We also did pretty well in paperless office, the ozone layer and acid rain, automobile and airplane safety, and the war on cancer, and now obesity and diabetes.

IshKebab 2y ago
The public were not uneducated about this. If you remember how Y2K was presented to the public, it was ridiculously extreme - planes crashing, economies collapsing, etc. None of that happened, and not because all the bugs were fixed. You can't fix all bugs, so if the consequences really were going to be catastrophic then you'd expect at least a handful of catastrophes to sneak through, but that didn't happen at all.
- alextingle 2y ago
  > None of that happened, and not because all the bugs were fixed. No one is in a position to assert that. We have very little idea how fragile our civilization is. Perhaps it's pretty robust, and networks of interconnected problems (like Y2K) stand no chance of snowballing out of control. Or perhaps it's really, really fragile, and surprisingly little stands between us and a profound collapse. It's very difficult to be certain, because it's such a complicated system, and one that we can't really test to destruction. Would all the Y2K bugs have caused a widespread systematic failure if they'd gone un-fixed? Probably not... but maybe? Just like all low-probability, high impact risks, it's very hard for us to reason about. How much money is it wise to spend on averting the risk of giant asteroid impacts? Hard to say. Probably more than you think, though.