The lesson of Y2K was this: if you fix the problem and do a very good job, you will be treated like you didn’t do anything and that the problem wasn’t real to begin with.
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@hkz @mos_8502 See also https://terriblesoftware.org/2026/03/03/nobody-gets-promoted-for-simplicity/ I always try to talk publicly (within the org) about hidden success; that refactoring you did months ago that means changing some code now is trivial, the work you put it to a deployment to ensure it is (as close as) invisible to end users etc
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The lesson of Y2K was this: if you fix the problem and do a very good job, you will be treated like you didn’t do anything and that the problem wasn’t real to begin with.
@mos_8502
The biggest problem with IT people is that their wisdom to intelligence ratio is near zero. -
The lesson of Y2K was this: if you fix the problem and do a very good job, you will be treated like you didn’t do anything and that the problem wasn’t real to begin with.
@mos_8502 and this is why you let things crash horribly first, then you get to be a hero for your fast response to the catastrophe (cause you've been quietly preparing for a while).
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The lesson of Y2K was this: if you fix the problem and do a very good job, you will be treated like you didn’t do anything and that the problem wasn’t real to begin with.
@mos_8502 the sysadmin’s dilemma; balancing the ideal of invisibility against the need to justify your employment.
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@mos_8502 and this is why you let things crash horribly first, then you get to be a hero for your fast response to the catastrophe (cause you've been quietly preparing for a while).
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@mos_8502 Yeah, I got roped into a little bit of Y2K work. In my case, the corporation had hired a contractor who had been individually going through the software for a few months now.
I was new, and they were looking for things for me to do while I came up to speed. They pointed me at the Y2K work. I quickly discovered that most of our different software had copy/pasted date handling routines and that I could just create one patch that could be applied to N pieces of software.
I was quickly, and quietly, reassigned to other tasks... I'm not sure why (I was too young and naive), but it's possible I had somehow embarrassed somebody or something.
Anyway, yeah, the work got done, and now too many people think it was all ridiculous.
@cstanhope @mos_8502 they might have intended to spend a quiet few months fixing them all one by one.
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The lesson of Y2K was this: if you fix the problem and do a very good job, you will be treated like you didn’t do anything and that the problem wasn’t real to begin with.
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@mos_8502 Proposed solution - let some thing go to shit as a lesson to everyone else. Presumably this is the purpose of Trump.
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D drajt@fosstodon.org shared this topic
