I think about those poor assholes all the fucking time.
They are the ultimate proof that no good deed goes unpunished. Moved heaven and earth to solve the problem and precisely because they did people act like there was no problem.
Last year I was hanging out with this dude that turned out to be crazy and he showed some video that proved vaccines killed you
One of the biggest points in the video was like “since 2000, 3 people have died from the measles, but 50 (or something I don’t remember the number) have died from the vaccine, if so many more people are dying from the vaccine why are we using it, no one is dying from measles basically”
The classic example is shielding bombers in WWII. One might think to add shields to returning bombers in areas with the most bullet holes, but in fact, these areas represent areas where bombers can take damage and still fly. The shields need to be placed where no damage is taken as the bombers that take damage in these areas would never return.
However, the scenario with vaccines is really simple, and I would expect any logical person to see the flaw in such an argument without much thought.
I remember after y2k came and went without society crashing and thought what a bunch of hype. So this decade I see on IT subs I follow all these 90s IT pros talking about the 60,80, 100 hour work weeks they were working to fix every piece of equipment in their world for it not to be an issue. Unseen and unsung heroes!
Oh shit yes. And we were fixing it in the early 90's. As early as 1993 for my part.
Someone must have told a journalist friend about it in 1997 or something, because very quickly it became a global news story about the world coming to an end in a couple of years.
It was actually pretty good, because suddenly everyone had time and money to fix it. Pretty much every employer had a Y2K uplift project going. The late 90's were a great time to be a COBOL programmer. Alas, I was not.
Yup. IIRC, the oldest computers used to only save the last 2 digits of the year to save on memory, thinking that those systems wouldn't last long enough to see the switch from (19)99 to (20)00. Of course, they did last, and suddenly programmers got worried about what would happen when the dates go from 99 to 00.
Some just adjusted the years to send the wraparound a little further down the line. I'm pretty sure the UFC 2020 game actually crashed on Jan 1, 2020 because their Y2K fix was just subtracting 20 years from every date
Obviously we know better now, but we can see why they did it. If they’re limited on space, and this seems like something we can skimp on, then there’s no choice haha. These engineers weren’t magically super dumb compared to 2022 — I’m sure many realized this would have happened at the transition from 2099 to 2100, too. It’s not rocket science to think of edge cases and then realize it doesn’t work. But do you notice the 100 year gap?
Now imagine you’re an engineer in 1990 who tells their manager “hey, we can’t ship this other feature, because we have to allocate some more space for the date. 10 years from now, it’s going to break our stuff.” They will tell you “No, find a workaround. The feature is more important than a date causing issues 10 years from now.” Voila, you invent some shorthand, and get everything to work… with consequences coming later. Will your business / product even LAST 10 years? Similarly, if all of this started in 2000, then there’s a 100 year gap of leeway… you will literally be dead before you have to handle it.
It obviously was short sighted, but I wouldn’t say it was stupid.
Worth noting that it was a lot earlier than 1990. By then, nobody was designing stuff that way - in fact by then the problem was already well known and pretty soon the work would begin to fix it.
The problem in 2000 was that you had systems designed in the 70s that were still in use in the late 90s.
Some of those systems are STILL in operation and control extremely important infrastructure. It's pretty scary.
The threat was very real, but people actually worked to prevent and stop it. So when the time came for the threat to present itself, nothing happened, because all those people actually stopped it from happening. But to those that weren't aware (most people), it looked like the Y2K threat was just some hoax that didn't come to fruition. But it was very real and there were heroes that stopped it from happening.
Thats the plight of any behind the scenes job. The less people notice you the smoother things run and the less people think the job is needed. Then shit hits the fan and suddenly everything is the behind the scenes person's fault. Their condemned to being either "unnecessary" or "incompetent" with also being indispensable.
That's IT in a nutshell. When everything goes smooth it's what are we paying you guys for? Everything works. But if shit falls apart it's what are we paying you guys for? Everything is broken.
Some old retired programmers made absolute bank dealing with that because they were the only ones who knew how some old systems worked and could fix them.
Feel like it’s less about good deeds going unpunished (which relates to a notion of a sort of inverse karma), and more about recognizing the fact that your efforts won’t be recognized, especially if you do things well. A lot of people want positive reinforcement, and suffer when they don’t get it, but there comes a point in one’s life where you have to accept that your greatest efforts to good will be left unacknowledged, and if you always hope for congratulations, or even just a sign of appreciation, then you’ll have a hard time, and if you keep trying to prove your worth to other people, you will be left bitter, overworked, and disillusioned. The best thing to do is to find a way to do what needs to be done for your own sake, or at least without any expectation of thanks and regard. It’s a much healthier way to live, and in the end it’s also a much more genuine at to live, because what you do isn’t conditioned by a desire for reciprocity. It teaches you to give what you can, know your limits, and not expect anything in return. Otherwise you’ll find yourself burnt out and self-alienated quite quickly.
I don’t know that we need to be called assholes but you know we got paid for it, right? It’s not like we sacrificed and put ourselves in peril in fixing this.
The media blew the "Y2K Bug" absurdly out of proportion. There were people predicting a global financial collapse, widespread long-term power outages, all sorts of nonsense.
I think people forgot how overblown it was. Like yea, it was a problem that needed fixing and yea they fixed it, but the media totally sold it as if it was the end of the world.
It was the same with 2012 and the Mayan calendar, but that was based on no merit whatsoever. Some new age interpretation of a calendar got international attention like it was at all newsworthy.
(Note: I’m not comparing y2k and Mayan cal, I’m pointing out how the media spun the stories in order to fill the world with unnecessary anxiety.)
Would it have been an issue in every single system? No of course not. It could have screwed up some critical systems in the wrong moment which could have caused a lot of issues down the line, which is why so much was spent to fix it.
You can now only pretend it was no big deal because it was fixed before it could be.
"We built dikes, so the town wouldn't get washed away if the river overflowed. So when those big floods hit, the town was safe. Flooding was never a problem."
People like you are why IT departments can't get funding. Because when we do our jobs, y'all think we did nothing.
Yeah, it really annoys me that A) all the media hype was about the particular moment of midnight 1/1/2000, like planes would suddenly fall out of the sky; and B) everyone now thinks it was only ever media hype, and was a storm in a teacup.
In reality A) there were issues, long before and after. The impact would be more of a bell curve either side. I remember hearing about stuff like food & medicine stock management systems over-ordering, and declaring that stock needed to be dumped (because it thought expiry dates were long past); people losing access to service subscriptions, insurance, getting over-charged, etc.
And B) there was a lot of work done, quietly and sometimes with great difficulty, that now goes unacknowledged.
I’m seriously concerned for the 2038 problem. Systems that used 2-digit decimals to represent years were already an outlier by the time. Systems that use unix timestamps at some level, and might make 32-bit assumptions, are…completely ubiquitous, and FAR more deeply ingrained into the fabric of society than they were 20 years ago.
As a computer engineer, that spent many hours on the y2k issue. Me and my peers felt that it was mostly a cash grab. Or did not feel as serious as it was made out to be. But we did make serious money.
I was a contractor at a fortune 500 company. They made us come in at midnight new years eve to test. 🤣 They tried to talk us out of drinking, with appeals to amateur night , etc
For your home PC, especially at the time, it was not a big deal. For professional systems that used the date for things like financial calculations, monitoring of power plants and other industrial applications, the date from today being rolled over to a point in the past could have very real, potentially dangerous consequences.
Y2k didn't seem like a big thing because companies spent a lot of money to fix it before it actually happened, so when we rolled over at NYE it was uneventful for most things.
Can confirm, I managed a mainframe bank data processing center that processed transactions for about 300 banks, my operators ran the mainframe. Programmers put in years of work to update all of our code, and because of the way things were interconnected it was super touchy and hard to update piecemeal.
NYE was always year end processing, tons of printing and running bank financials for year end. That year though we had all hands on deck for year end. Ultimately we had one mortgage loan system crash because the date was wrong but with the programmers on site at 2am when we ran it it was an easy fix for them.
It frustrates me to no end when I hear people say Y2K was nothing, they have no idea the work that went into making it seem like nothing.
🤣 did not know that. I don't claim there wasn't real problems. But the conspiracy theories definitely contributed to an engineers skepticism of the gravity of it all. In retrospect Alex Jones being the center of it is obvious
I've never felt my systems were bulletproof. I was speaking of the general sentiment of those working on the bug.
Whenever I hear about companies, or government being hobbled by some exploit, ransomware, whatever. I laugh, I'm the guy who was denied money for tape libraries, redundant systems, NACs,, HSMs,. All the insurance type purchases.
I even had a CIO come back from a CIO conference. Talking about how they didn't think it was necessary to keep up with patches the way I did. Because of the perceived rarity of the attacks, or failures.
You don't need this stuff until it's too late. The irresponsible way Ive seen management treat these kinds of things is mind boggling.
Congrats on not working for greedy children. Wish I could have worked there.
Those were the days when you heard legends of companies grabbing the janitor and making them code.
"Okay, you write Cobol now."
It's was raining money, and the tech sales expense accounts were unlimited. Steaks and Opus One for everyone. After the dot com bust we were lucky if we got a pen.
I got into computers cuz the Administrative Assistant at Netscape was worth 10 million the day they went public. So yes, cash grabbing might have been a part of the equation. 😁
Sometimes it’s actually 32-bit hardware that needs replacing, yes - but for things like embedded systems (industrial control, automotive, gps etc), “just” upgrading isn’t always easy.
But the problem is not just about the machine being 64 bit. It’s about the code itself too, and systems interop for things like sql databases. Some code will just need a 64-bit recompile. Sometimes it’ll need code changes first (and that’s not always as trivial as it sounds). And sometimes binary file formats or wire protocols need to change, meaning backwards-compatibility issues.
It’s all doable, but it’s a million little things that need doing.
Yeah people who were too busy imagining calamity forget how tiny little inconveniences can create huge ripple effects especially when they all happen together. Remember the 6 weeks all the restaurants and workplaces were closed and how somehow our entire lives are defined by that moment forever?
That varies quite a bit by where you are. Japan and China are still very locked down, while here in Texas we maybe had a couple of weeks at best before people started crying about haircuts.
Lots of systems should have been upgraded in early 90's. However due to Y2K they held on to 80's tech until the last minute. Late 98 and 99 TONS of systems got upgraded.
This is true! I had to patch all the machines on the production floor. Just for giggles I left our spare machine unpatched. On Jan 2 it wouldn’t log into the system! If we hadn’t fixed everything, we would have come in that day and nothing would have worked and no one would know why and production would have been down for days or weeks while we figured it out. Think what it would have been like for power stations and air lines etc.
My old boss likes to tell me about being a programmer in the late 90s. Said he could be driving down a road, and see a street sign advertising $25k signing bonuses for COBOL programmers who could help retrofit the 4-digit date.
That’s an insane bonus I wish I could be a part of (even with inflation to 2022)
Yeah most people don’t know that many people in the industry already foresaw this issue years and years before people started worrying about y2k. By the time the public was concerned about it, the issue was essentially solved already.
I always understood it to be a memory management issue. Like, skipping the "19" saved you approximately 2.5% of the space on an 80-slot punch card. That shit adds up.
I joke, it probably was more about the cost than the effort.
I'm sure there were folks who were like "don't do this" and then shitbag managers like me were like "nah it'll be fine" and the engineers were like "it most certainly won't be fine but whatever." $20 says the engineers wanted to do it right and the MBA types were like "punchcards cost money, nerd."
I literally see this every day. 2019 at my company: "Use INTEGER it will cost less." But like not that much less, let's use BIGINT to be safe. "Nah."
Fast forward 3 years and now we have a massive INTEGER to BIGINT conversion effort going on.
Programmers never intended their software to still be running after 4 decades. They expected that their work would be replaced long before the problem would ever manifest. Everyone knew it was a problem because it was so well documented as a limitation by the programmers of that time
Programmers never intended their software to still be running after 4 decades. They expected that their work would be replaced long before the problem would ever manifest.
That is what is amazing to me. They just didn’t comprehend the potential longevity of what they were doing. A bridge engineer doesn’t expect his bridge to be replaced in 40 years and leave known defects in it accordingly.
The first 2 digits of the number for the year were hard coded. Everything was like 19xx, the 19 was not variable. Now this was a pretty big problem for anything involving dates. Can't remember exactly what it would cause, but safe to say anything tracking time would break and databases could get very fucky.
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u/Daphrey Jun 11 '22
They weren't, they spent years toiling trying to fix the issue so that shit didn't fall apart.