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 one company I worked for at that time (one of literally the largest banks in the world - a firm that in the 1990’s talked about having $1T in assets under management) used y2k as an excuse to update internally written applications. We started the process with over 1200 internal applications (we had over 1500 full time programmers) this was in 1997/1998
They all had to test and certify their apps and all dependencies.
Unless they signed off that their app wasn’t critical
No takers
@mos_8502 in the end I wasn’t at the firm by Jan 1, 2000 (had left for another job about a year earlier) but it was impressive how seriously they took it - every app was tested and they had planned deployments and updates for any 3rd party systems that needed to be updated. This was at the height of Web 1.0 and they most definitely spent a lot on their developers and tech in general
It may have been an unusual case but also helped that when their apps failed they lost millions each hour
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I was bitter at the time because they didn’t let me even touch a computer, but in retrospect I see why. I was a teenager. I wouldn’t trust that version of me with access to an actual code repository.
@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.
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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.
@mos_8502 Oh, and now I have some y2038 problems to deal with...
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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 and if you do a very good job the first time 'round, it was obviously too easy, and not worthy of recognition.
If you write software that just runs, without any problems, people forget they're using it; they forget it exists.
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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 lesson is the world contains fools and liars.
But most people are not.
Those who are should not be given prominence. -
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 hardest thing is to make it look easy
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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 Or the classic 'Remember how we heard about the ozone hole and then it just went away'...AARGHH...Just ignoring the unprecedented global response then, huh?
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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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