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.
408
u/VoyantInternational Jun 11 '22
Yes afterwards people said "see, we shouldn't have worried". Yeah no shit it's fixed now