Y2K Industry Closing Shop After Quiet Passage to 2000 Millennium: Technicians and doomsaying analysts say they're moving on. To where, they aren't all sure.

By ASHLEY DUNN, Times Staff Writer

Doomsday isn't what it used to be. As the year 2000 problem washed uneventfully across the globe, the vast army of computer technicians, economists and pundits that mobilized around the once-feared technological glitch has begun to disband and embark on the slow march home. At the height of the Y2K scares last year, hundreds of thousands of workers toiled to fix programs and equipment that could malfunction, all the while driven by a steady stream of dire predictions. But with the quiet passage of the moment through such well-prepared countries as the United States, as well as such meagerly prepared countries as Russia, the technological anxiety has faded--and with it, the huge industry built to counter the problem. The industry of Y2K is being dismantled as frantically as it was assembled. Analysts have begun to move on to other subjects, and programmers who commanded triple-digit hourly rates have had to swallow huge pay cuts to stay on the job. For many of those who dedicated years of their lives to Y2K, the passage of Jan. 1 was a bittersweet moment--one filled with a sense of accomplishment and relief that the grinding work of Y2K was over, but also uncertainty over what's next. Ken Owen was one of the thousands of people who left promising jobs at big firms for the chance to work on the Y2K repair boom. He had been the director of systems integration and consulting for Aliso Viejo-based Fluor Daniel, but jumped at the chance to become a vice president for a much smaller company that intended to launch into year 2000 work. For 2= years, he looked for business and negotiated deals for TAVA Technologies of Colorado and later TAVA/R.W. Beck of Seattle. "It was entrepreneurial and fast-paced," Owen said, already speaking with nostalgia. "It was like being a doctor during a war. We had the skills and the experience and helping on Y2K just seemed like the right thing to do." But he also found a downside to Y2K work. It was so specialized that it was difficult to break out of it. Others were promoted in the company while Owen said he had to stay in the trenches of Y2K. "'We just weren't available to do anything else," he said. "I tried to get out, but how can you when your customers depend on you?" With the passage of Jan. 1, Owen said that Y2K did not turn out to be the career boost he had hoped for. Owen said that working on Y2K was like a two-year detour--one that was neither a big plus or minus on his resume. Despite the task's complexity and the good results, he said there seems to be a general feeling that the work cost too much and caused too much upheaval. "A lot of companies suffered through this," he said. "They were at the mercy of these Y2K experts and that's never a good feeling." Jim Kalember, vice president for technology staffing for Professional Access, a New York City-based recruiting firm, said that demand for Y2K programmers began disappearing as early as the summer. At the height of Y2K-related demand last year, his company was charging $120 an hour for its contracted programmers. That has now dropped to about $70, he said. Kalember said two contract programmers willingly took a 25% cut in pay to continue working at a company on other projects. Many programmers who worked on Y2K have found work on e-commerce or other computer projects that have now become the focus of corporate technology budgets. Southern California Edison had more than 500 programmers and technicians working on Y2K at one point. Today, the crew has shrunk to about two dozen. The rest have been laid off or shifted to two large programming projects that were delayed by up to a year because of the year 2000, said Eric Trapp, SCE's Y2K project manager. Holland Pace, a contract program manager who worked on a Y2K project for the U.S. Postal Service for nearly a year, is one among the legions of programmers now searching for the next project. Y2K, he said, was a grueling job in many ways, not so much because of the work itself, but the constant aura of fear and suspicion. "You had this sense that people didn't trust you," he said. On Jan. 1, he stayed at home with his family and, as he expected, nothing happened. He has begun looking for new work, but he said he barely mentions Y2K on his resume because some managers see the repair effort as just tedious grunt work that required lots of time, but not much skill. "I certainly downplay my Y2K work," he said. "If I had three years of Y2K, it would be a minus against me." Pace said that even if it were a plus, he is tired of living, breathing and talking about Y2K. "I'm like everyone else," he said. "I'm tired of hearing about it, I'm tired of all the doomsaying." No group has dispersed more quickly than the doomsayers, a fact highlighted by the sale, on Internet auction site EBay, of one of the most popular Y2K Web sites. At the stroke of midnight Jan. 1, bidding closed at $10 million for the site name Year2000.com. That bid turned out to be phony and so did the second-highest. An EBay spokesman said the fourth-highest bid, at $2.1 million, appeared to be legitimate. EBay, which does not disclose bidders' identities in private auctions, is still investigating the third-highest bid. Peter de Jager, a programmer and well-known Y2K pundit who created the site, had guessed that the top bid was phony, but his desire to get out of the millennium bug business was not. "I'm packing up my bags," De Jager said. "Selling the site is my way of saying that we've done our jobs. My role is over and it's time for me to move on." Edward Yardeni, chief economist for Deutsche Bank Securities, was one of the most outspoken analysts on the Y2K issue, predicting the probability of a global recession. On Sunday, Yardeni had removed most mentions of Y2K from his Web site (http://www.yardeni.com). "We're working on the future, not the past," Yardeni said. Instead of global recession, he now predicts a 10% rise in the Dow Jones industrial average by year's end--as long as there are no serious Y2K problems in the coming weeks. "If there is another day or two of quiet, I'll have to scrap the recession scenario," he said. A few forecasters admit to a nibbling sense of embarrassment over their talk of world economic collapse, of stock market free falls and even of nuclear holocaust from malfunctioning Russian computers. Tony Keyes, a consultant in Maryland, had written one of the earliest alarm books on the problem: "The Year 2000 Computer Crisis: An Investor's Survival Guide." Keyes, who has already moved on to work as a consultant on how to start a business, had stocked his cabin in West Virginia with a month's worth of food and water. Now as he looks at his emergency stores, he says, all he thinks is, "Am I really certain I like beans and ham that much?"

-- Vern (bacon17@ibm.net), January 05, 2000

Answers

Hooray for a new year and no more y2k crap!!!

I am 3 for 3 with my e-commerce customers. We have been trying to do those projects all last year and they were hampered by y2k. Now the cosast is clear and things are rolling. This should be a good year for us...which we need since last year was horrible due to y2k freezes.

-- William R. Sullivan (wrs@wham.com), January 05, 2000.