[rmunn]

Article published in the Summer 2001 edition of California Management Review, yet it never mentioned Y2K, the first thing I thought of when I read the line "fixing problems that never happened". Perhaps it was actually written in 1999 and took a while to get published, because otherwise that seems a very strange omission. The Y2K problem was very much over-hyped by the American news media at the time (no, at no point would airplanes have been falling out of the sky — I literally heard someone say that would happen once — even if no effort had been put into fixing the bug).

But in recent years I have seen people (elsewhere, not on HN) claim that Y2K was a big nothingburger, and all the money spent on fixing the bug was wasted. No, that's not true either. All the money spent on fixing the bug was why it turned into a big nothingburger. Sure, some of that money was wasted, by executives who wanted an "official" Y2K-certified certificate, issued by a consulting firm that had nothing "official" about it except their own say-so. And so they spent $2 million learning what their own employees could have told them for $2,000. THAT money was wasted. But a lot of banks were running old COBOL code that used 2-digit years, and needed to be fixed. The fact that in January 2000, everyone's bank interest was still calculated correctly, and not calculated as if it was January 1900? THAT was entirely due to the vast amounts of money spent paying old COBOL coders to come out of retirement and fix the 2-digit years.

The lesson I learned from that is that it's possible for a problem to be overhyped, even massively overhyped, and yet still be a serious problem. The other lesson I should have learned is that people rarely get credit (I won't go so far as the article authors and say "nobody ever gets credit") for fixing problems that never happened.

[armada651]

The problem is that a lot of people have a very binary view on life. Either something is a complete success or a complete waste of money, rarely do we accept that most projects fall somewhere in the middle.

[cortesoft]

And even worse, they don't think probability is a thing. If something happens, it was certain to happen and we just failed to predict it correctly.

So when someone predicts something will happen with a 90% probability, and then the 10% chances happens and the predicted event does not happen, people will talk about what a bad prediction that was and how they were clearly wrong.

It's the same logic that causes people to say vaccines don't work because they don't stop a disease with 100% effectiveness, or that there is no point to wear a seatbelt because people still die while wearing one.

[takinola]

My issue with this version of explaining the lack of severity of Y2K is that there were lots of countries that were being derided for not taking the issue seriously but did not seem to suffer any ill effects.

[akoboldfrying]

This is interesting, do you have any links?

A couple of possible confounding factors I can think of:

1. Plenty of countries use software developed elsewhere.

2. I suspect that the more recently you computerised your economy, the less likely it would be to have code vulnerable to Y2K.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Y2K is especially interesting because the fact that the year 2000 would one day occur was entirely foreseeable, and no less probable in 1990 than in 1999. I can hardly think of anything with closer to 100% probability of happening.

[alduino]

To be fair, there was a non-zero chance that society could have ended (or your company, or the tech became obsolete) before 2000, which would be higher the earlier before 2000 you were.

[rmunn]

The tech being obsolete is why Y2K was a smaller problem than it would have been otherwise. Most places were no longer running much COBOL code. But banks are famously slow to upgrade their tech, and for good reason much of the time, so most of the world's remaining COBOL code (and other code too, COBOL is just what I'm most familiar with, not that I'm all that familiar with it) was in banks and other financial institutions.

[Dwedit]

Year 2038 says hi.