No. It was not. I was a software developer in a large US Bank at the time. We had already dealt with it years ago for critical systems. All the banks had.
It was a VERY widely held belief by the general public that Y2K only applied to real time clocks and wall time.
However arguably most dates in corporate IT work are involved in some level of forecasting and prediction and future planning.
In reality, starting in 1970 anyone writing an amortization table program for a 30 year mortgage had to work around Y2K. Anyone dealing in any way with the expiration date for a twenty year term life insurance policy had to start caring about Y2K in 1980. Even a mere net-30 business to business payment account either broke or not in nov-1999. Even on Dec 31 1999 it was hilariously charming how people all around the world thought all computers were located in THEIR timezone and thus any real time clock type failures would occur at precisely midnight local time where they live as opposed to where the computer is actually located. Due to the miracle of UTC time anything bad would have happened to our stuff early in the day while I was eating a late dinner, not when the operations center overstaffed during local timezone 3rd shift.
I was working at a telco at the time and we were very worried and overstaffed over Y2K, our stuff was fine, but we were pretty worried about rioters and such if anyone ELSE failed, like maybe the power co. Hilariously the power co people were probably overstaffed over Y2K, despite knowing their stuff was fine, they were likely worried about those telco goofballs failing thus losing SCADA links to their substations, LOL.
In the end it seems pretty much nothing failed anywhere, as I recall. Or the failure rate for that day, was no higher than any other average calendar date.
I was as well. Agree that the core systems were fine and extremely thoroughly tested, but all of the supporting applications/infrastructure were questionable. I had quit my job a couple months prior to go into contracting. They were one of my first customers, and the contract was contingent on me remaining on full time until after the new year weekend. Win win.
I had the same experience working in a large investment bank. There were a lot of very expensive management consultants involved who strung out everything for the sake of their hourly rate. I wasted months proving to their satisfaction that my recently written and robust code was OK.
Right, everyone was well aware. But I think there was a bit of "We don't need to worry because we're replacing the mainframe with the new ERP system in 1997", and then whoops the mainframe was still running.
