Ask HN: What Was It Like Working in IT 1 Year Before Y2K?

2 points by devrob 1 year ago | 7 comments

Was it a rolling panic and tension or did things only really escalate 4-6 months leading to the new year?

dargopolis 1 year ago |

In the last half of the 90s, I was working on a project to move (redevelop) a bunch of mainframe applications to a client-server architecture. It was known that there would not be time to redevelop some of the required applications in time for Y2K, so they had to be updated to support 4 digit years instead of just 2. I don't recall any real panic as the work was started years in advance and probably completed with several months to spare. I had previously worked at that location in 1990 and by that time they already had a standard that any new development was to use 4 digit years (it was part of the code review checklist). It was only the oldest, pre-1990, mainframe systems that needed the fix before Y2K.

dargopolis 1 year ago | |

Re-reading my original comment half a day later, I realize that it is wildly inaccurate. I do remember the Y2K mainframe changes part of the project being kind of chill. However, that is only in comparison to the rest of the project. We were redeveloping all the other mainframe systems (and building a few new ones) for a completely different platform and it had to be done ASAP because Y2K! Though it was ultimately successful, it was a classic death march. Good times.

JohnFen 1 year ago |

In my sector of the tech industry at the time, there was no serious concern at all. The whole issue, while certainly real, was dramatically overblown from the start and everybody in the industry knew it.

I know a couple of COBOL programmers who made very seriously large amounts of money remediating software being used by companies in other sectors who were panicking, though.

ahazred8ta 1 year ago |

Most of the Y2K glitches were just frustrating, not catastrophic. There were PCs that rolled over from Dec 1999 to Jan 1980 and had to be manually reset to Jan 2000. Library computers were affected and they joked about 20 years of late fees. The big annoyance was javascript-based webpages that proudly reported the year as 19100.

billybuckwheat 1 year ago |

Where I worked there was a bit of concern, but no panic. The development teams at my then employer spent a few months (not full time) looking for potential problems; they found a couple and quickly fixed them. But it wasn't full-on running around in terror.

jonahbenton 1 year ago |

As I recall our consultancy had one or two projects in the mid/late 1990s where it was an issue, and we knew folks who were more directly grinding away on affected systems, but for the majority of the people in the industry it was a noop.

Keep in mind that the industry itself saw a huge influx of workers starting in the early and mid-1990s as part of the first Internet boom. There was a ton of new cultural energy around tech related to the Web, and none of the tech under/around any of these jobs/businesses/etc had any Y2K issues. I recall it being pretty clear from a "vibes" perspective by mid-1999 that the turnover was going to be something the kids now know as a nothingburger.

taylodl 1 year ago |

No panic at all.

Mortgage systems were already fixed in 1970 (think about it).

Other loan management systems had to be fixed well before 2000 - you get a 5 year car loan in 1996 and guess what?

Embedded systems, which is what I was working on at the time, don't really give two shits about clock time. They care about interval time: i.e., the time between two events.

Most of the impacted systems were regulatory reporting systems - you know, the end-of-year, end-of-quarter, end-of-month type reports.

Yes, there were some issues, but it really wasn't that big of a deal, and most of the work to resolve the biggest issues had already been done years earlier. But it was a great press story! :)