December 31, 2004
HEARD ABOUT THE Y2K05 BUG?:
The legacy of Y2K (Michael Socolow, December 31, 2004, Boston G;lobe)
From the distance of five years, the Y2K bug now appears a manifestation of our anxieties about our dependence on technology. We didn't know then -- and most of us still do not know -- anything about the systems that keep ATMs working, airplanes flying, and traffic lights flashing. Once these communications systems threatened us with failure we were forced to acknowledge our faith in incomprehensibly complex technologies.That kind of questioning evaporated once our systems proved reliable. Our machines served us well, and our faith was restored. Y2K reaffirmed our confidence in the technologies of everyday life.
From today's perspective the Y2K fears seem humorous. Yet to dismiss the moment as meaningless is to miss its wider import. There is one significant, yet far less well-known legacy of the Y2K scare. In the late 1990s, as computer programming companies were hired to check literally billions of lines of computer code, they faced an impossible task. How could such large volumes of code be checked in a cost-efficient and timely manner? How could a work force be put together for such a technically skilled yet labor-intensive (and tedious) job?
The answer to that question is the true legacy of Y2K. That skilled and cheap work force was discovered overseas. Over the previous decade technical schools in India and elsewhere produced a dependable and talented labor pool from which American programmers began to draw. There was a large expansion in the H1-B visa program, as the best and brightest from around the globe assisted us in solving our computer problems.
That work force proved so cost-effective and reliable that technology companies took notice after the millennium turned. To save money they continued to use this work force; the economic downturn in 2001 intensified this outsourcing of computer work. High salaried programming and quality control jobs, previously filled by Americans, moved to other countries.
The other, unfortunately induplicable, legacy of Y2K was that it forced the modernization of nearly every computer system in the United States, which likely fueled much of the productivity revolution of the late 90s. It would be helpful to cook up a new scare every five years or so. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 31, 2004 3:17 PM
It also created unrealistic expectations for future growth thus the NASDAQ implosion. We've seen it before and we'll see it again but, we got the job done. Uninformed greed may just be the greatest attribute of free markets.
Posted by: Tom C., Stamford, Ct. at December 31, 2004 3:54 PMThe other side of this is that so many companies invested so much money in replacing machines that could not be certified Y2K compliant, that manufacuting capacity utilization is still low, and has been since 01.
Posted by: David Cohen at December 31, 2004 5:29 PMA few days after Y2K, my eldest daughter had this to say: Y2K was sort of like dodgeball. You hardly ever get hit by the ball you see.
Posted by: Roy Jacobsen at December 31, 2004 10:03 PMComputers use a base-2 number system. The real Y2K event will be on January 18, 2038 at 9:14 PM, when the 32-bit Posix time clock rolls over.
Posted by: Gideon at January 1, 2005 3:22 AMGideon;
Amusingly any Dark Empire operating system will be immune to that event as they use a clock that's good for just under another 60 million years.
It's also likely that POSIX compatible systems will have upgraded to a 64 bit clock by 2038.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at January 1, 2005 2:30 PM