this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Thank you, it was mostly very boring work.
About 50% of the job was reading and understanding source code and checking nothing went wrong with Y2K. We needed 100% coverage, with different steps like manually reading (two or even three eye principle), manual testing and writing small little test scenarios and scripts that could be gone through multiple times to check everything. Even when you had to check 5000 lines of code that did nothing with dates, it still needed to be check thoroughly by multiple people, tested, documented etc.
I thought it was insane to put so much effort into code that would work just fine after 2000. But my manager said the customer doesn't pay to fix the software, the customer pays for the check, for the signature as he put it. That made it still boring, but at least I could understand it better.
There was al lot of FUD around Y2K, a lot of companies could just have hired some programmer to get familiar with the code in December and put in some fixes as they occurred in January. But with all the media attention and buzz going around about THE Y2K bug, customers were getting anxious. They were told it would be pandemonium in January and getting hold of any kind of software developer would be impossible. The costs would be through the roof and companies would fold if they didn't fix their shit.
My first Y2K project was in 1997 and we had a team of 15+ people, with only 3 actual software engineers like me. The rest was legal staff, project management, administrative staff etc. With some projects there was actual hardware or firmware involved, but most stuff was pure software. Rates for Y2K projects were also huge, it was like some unwritten untold rule of software at that time, all Y2K projects get double the staff, double the price and double the time.
I've even worked on a project where we were the second team, a backup team if you will. Another company had done the work before us, but the customer wanted to make double sure, so they hired us to re-do the entire project. We only found out later this was the case, they told us nothing not to influence us. That seemed like a crazy waste of money for me, but in those days it was somehow possible.