Y2K: don't play it again, Sam

Judging by how many Year 2000 press releases cross the author's desk each month, making software Y2K compliant is a booming business. Warnings of calamity mixed with promises of an easy fix-its the same old tune over and over again. How much faith would you have in the legal profession, for example, if legions of attorneys aggressively sought to take on cases that involved suing their fellow lawyers for malpractice? Yet this is uncomfortably like what many in our industry do today: bill clients to fix problems caused by other software developers. If we are ever to be taken seriously as a profession or engineering discipline, we must look past the Y2K hype and hysteria to determine how the problem emerged, why it emerged, and what we can do to avoid similar situations in the future.