Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Conclusions: Visible Technicians
Perhaps you've noticed that it's getting more and more diffi cult to locate and
then hire the best people. This isn't an illusion; it's real, it's signifi cant, and it's
only going to get worse. It is, in fact, the heart of the real software crisis: There
is more software to be developed than there are capable developers to do it.
Demand will continue to outstrip supply for the foreseeable future. Hence, more
and more software will be behind schedule, over budget, underpowered, and of
poor quality—and there's nothing we can do about it.
—Bruce Webster, “The Real Software Crisis,” 1988
Software's Chronic Crisis
In the closing minutes of the twentieth century, computer programmers
around the world sat huddled around their computer screens, awaiting
with bated breath the fl ip of a single digital bit. At stake was continued
functioning of the millions of computerized systems that they and their
fellow programmers had developed over the course of the previous half-
century, many of them considered vitally important to the continued
functioning of crucial infrastructure, both military and civilian. At mid-
night on December 31, 1999, it was widely believed, at least some of
these systems would crash as a result of the inability of their internal
clocks to distinguish properly between the years 2000 and 1900. The
possible consequences of this seemingly trivial programming error
included banks failing, airplanes falling out of the sky, possibly even an
unintended nuclear war.
1
“The Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent
of the El Niño,” the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense John
Hamre had warned a year earlier: “This is going to have implications in
the world . . . that we can't even comprehend.”
2
Over the course of the
months leading up to the year 2000, computer programmers in the
United States alone had invested more than $300 billion in last-minute
attempts to remediate the possible consequences of the so-called Y2K
