
The Day the World Didn't End - etxm
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/the-day-the-world-didnt-end.html
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etxm
Pretty sure Geoffrey James is a dumbass.

I’d love to hear some tales of Y2K fixes.

~~~
fargle
Not sure if you are right or not about him in general. But he is spot on about
Y2K.

I was a sysadmin for about 500 person site of an engineering company, Solaris,
some Windows NT, and storage on some early NAS with a bespoke OS and hardware
RAID card. We knew about it, were patched, tested, and ready to go by Dec
_1998_. Yes, you can actually _test_ date changes up front and not wait till
midnight 2000! It was a about a weeks work, all told.

Then the corporate _idiots_ started panicking around June of 1999. They hired
a Y2K czar. He demanded reports! Plans! Contingency plans! He hired a dozen
people for a department that normally had three. The resultant bureaucracy and
meetings wasted 100% of now 16 people's time for 9 months.

And... Nothing was actually done, nor needed to be. Reports listing all the
patches that had been applied a year earlier we demanded and made. Of course
the answer "we're done, it's fine" was not conducive to career and empire
building. So we kept turning in reports that said "we're done , go away". They
kept getting translated into "we need to hire more managers because we can't
get accurate status and no progress is being made".

And you know, the only thing I worried about was the Unknown-Unknowns, like a
phone switches or alarm or power conditioners we didn't know about. Of course,
the Y2K commission didn't know they existed. Thankfully the intersection of
sets "things that even know the time" and "things that are hopelessly
unmaintainable embedded devices" ended up to be empty.

The corporation sent out dire warnings in December to it's employees that
their credit cards would stop working, they had to stock up on food, and quite
possibly not show up to work for the month of January if things went badly.
The engineers that worked there by then were having none of it and it was a
joke.

My actual contingency plans involved dropping by to make sure everything was
still alive on Sunday the 2nd, before everyone showed up to work on Monday.
One seldom used license on a flexlm server was broken, but that was because it
had an expiration date of 12-31-1999, not quite a Y2K thing. It was perpetual,
and shouldn't have expired. But it correctly used a four digit date and knew
what time it was. New license file was obtained in the next week. Nobody even
noticed.

That was _it_. File storage, makefiles, incremental backups. All fine.

Did the bureaucracy that got created for this great effort disband? Nope. They
continued the meetings for at least three months. They all got awards for
doing such a great job. They stayed on to help guide and run the IT department
indefinitely, due to such demonstrably good management. A short while later
the commission pivoted to "Security" and "Anti-Virus" paranoia. Oddly that was
the beginning of the decline in reliability and good IT at that site. Nothing
ever really worked well again. It wasn't Y2K, it was having a 20 idiot
managers instead of 3-4 guys that knew what they were doing. Within a couple
of years we all quit.

Now, I've always assumed that _somewhere_ there were actual hairy problems.
Perhaps in a government or banking mainframe. It was said you could get rich
writing COBOL. It didn't seem worth it.

But yes, it was a total non-event for workstation and PC based networks.

