On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 9:46 PM Mark Rousell mark.rousell@signal100.com wrote:
On 02/10/2018 18:46, Larry Martell wrote:
I got 2 years of work solving the year 2000 issue.
I don't think I've ever said this but I am very envious of all these people who had loads of work due to Y2K or were paid obscene amounts of money to tend systems over new year's eve/day.
I was working for an ISP at the time and got none of this. Nothing happened. I don't even recall any special precautions being taken (apart from below). No over time, no obscene amounts of money.
Admittedly there was a Y2K audit earlier in the year and so I presume that the consultants who did it got paid some obscene amounts of money. As I recall, they found very little except for one major system that we knew would need updating anyway. And I presume that the contractor who came in to fix the major system was rather well paid too.
But no money for me. <sulk> Wrong job, wrong time, wrong place, I guess. Perhaps I should be pleased the actual 99/00 changeover went so smoothly afterall.
It only went smoothly because there were people like me fixing the issues ;-)
I worked on Wall St at the time, and I got a reputation for being able to find and fix Y2K issues. Really all that I did was grep the code bases for 2 digit years, and code that blindly added 1900 to them. There were a ton of those cases. It was not atypical for me to find 500-1000 or more such cases at each site. The fixes were easy but the testing took a while. I did this for banks, hedge funds, brokerages, bond traders, etc.
At one place where I had fixed probably 700 cases, after Y2K came and went without an incident the CEO said "You made such a big deal about this, and then nothing happened."