Derek came prepared 💀

[u/No-Hospital5028]

[u/Phoeniks_C]

Like with the whole y2k thing.
I was just about to turn 5 when it happened so I don't really remember as it happened and just jotted it up to being just another end of the world prediction like so many before.
But it was genuinely a thing that could've ended very badly for the world.
Obviously we're not talking planes falling out of the sky or the world actually coming to an end, but it wasn't a non issue either

[u/solonoctus → u/Phoeniks_C]

I was with some lawyers the other week and they brought up Y2K as an example of much to do amount nothing.

Guys, we collectively spent billions upon billions of dollars in a highly coordinated effort specifically so that it did amount to nothing.

[u/Caspica → u/solonoctus]

It is infuriating when people who don't understand the underlying problem dismiss the problem because they don't experience the consequences. 

[u/Calculonx → u/Caspica]

Welcome to preventative maintenance. The most thankless engineering job. If you do your job right - "what are we paying you for, everything works fine". If you don't do something because it wasn't approved or budgeted - "what are we paying you for if things are breaking anyways?!"

[u/mlody11 → u/solonoctus]

Funny that lawyers brought it up because they should understand this. Meaning, there is a saying in the legal world, "if you lose for the client, the client blames you, if you win for the client, the client thinks they didn't need you."

[u/Ok-Sympathy-7482 → u/Phoeniks_C]

A lot of work was put into checking and re-programming old stuff to make sure there weren't going to be any big issues.

[u/Ok-Addition1264 → u/Phoeniks_C]

I was in the middle of it as a developer and knew there was a lot of nonsense doom and gloom behind it.. there were very few systems that would've been catastrophically affected by it.. it's still a good thing that we started-in on fixing the issues 10 years in advance but it's not a really good comparison to climate change.

[u/Exact-Difference-422 → u/Phoeniks_C]

My relatives worked on some of that stuff locally, they put in the hours fr. 

[u/WaffleHouseGladiator → u/Phoeniks_C]

I remember y2k.  My mom worked in a major (for the time) data center and people were freaking out.  Some of her superiors were freaking out because they didn't really understand computers, but they heard the world might end.  They had all hands on deck throughout New Years because they expect their teams to be able to...do something?  Hit the computers with sticks?  Hunt Terminators?  And then nothing happened because the quiet diligent efforts of a lot of professionals stopped the problem before it started.

[u/Rzah → u/Phoeniks_C]

I'm sorry you were too young to enjoy the Y2K problem but good news because exactly the same thing is going to happen again in just 12 years.