I was a software developer at a financial institution in London in 1999. There were about eight members of the development team, split equally between permanent employees and contract staff.
Permanent employees had job security and a career at the bank, and they got paid vacations and a relatively low annual salary. Contract staff were hired (in theory) to work on specific projects for short periods and then let go again, were not employees of the bank, and therefore got none of the associated benefits (vacation time, sick leave, etc.) and were paid extremely well, by the hour worked.
I was a “permie”. I was working with people who were probably making twice what I was making for the exact same job, but at least I had the knowledge that the bank cared about developing my skills and knowledge as a long-term employee and that, therefore, I’d have interesting projects to work on.
This was particularly important in 1999, because as some among you will remember, in 1999, the world’s computers were all about to be killed by the Y2K problem. As a result, all the bank’s code needed to be examined and tested to make sure it wasn’t going to get confused and fall over on January 1.
I was quietly working away on whatever the h*** I was working on when two senior managers were fired. This was the beginning of much unpleasantness. The new guys came in, decided that it was bonkers to be paying the contract developers all this money, and immediately fired them all. Not employees, so no redundancy and a significant reduction in payroll. However, it was something of a shock to the contractors, at least one of whom had been working there “temporarily on three-month contracts” for at least six years.
The next thing they did was ask what was going on with Y2K testing. This was a slightly unfortunate order to do these things because it was the contractors who were just about to start on the Y2K testing. After all, they were the ones who were supposed to be doing the crappy boring projects.
Side note: If you’ve never done Y2K testing, thank your lucky stars. It’s as crappy and boring a project as they come. The developer literally had to go line by line through god knows how many thousands (millions?) of lines of code looking for date fields. Even if he knew there were no date fields, he still had to go through them for “compliance reasons”. It was like looking for an elephant in a haystack, but having to individually mark down each strand of hay as being “not an elephant”. Then, he’d have to try to run a test to prove that the system wouldn’t collapse when the date was set to after January 1, 2000. The problem with this was that the bank’s systems, as you might imagine, were extremely complex. When the developer set up a test environment with the date 1/1/2000, the programs would fall over EVERY SINGLE TIME. Not because of any date issues, but because some file would be missing, or missing data, or data didn’t reconcile, or for a million and three reasons that had nothing at all to do with the date. Just an incredibly tedious, frustrating, mind-numbing, skill-sapping, Sisyphusian task. I was so grateful that I didn’t have to do it; it was worth the lower pay to avoid that.
With the contractors gone, I had to do it.
All four of the permanent staff were moved onto the Y2K testing project. It was grim.
It got grimmer.
Suddenly, the business found they had no developers working on any other projects. They were, understandably, a bit miffed that the new software they’d been promised was no longer on the cards. They complained bitterly to the new management. The new management agreed that something must be done.
They hired new contractors at higher hourly rates. It was hard to find people in 1999 because everyone needed Y2K testers who didn’t know anything about our systems because they hadn’t been there for the past six years learning everything. They put those guys on the interesting business projects, while we permies got to keep the Y2K testing because we were the only ones who “knew where to look”.
I have little recollection of the next few months because my brain shut down fairly quickly after that. But a couple of things stood out, one of which was the pettiest decision I’ve ever seen. One of the perks of the job was that we were given company mobile phones — hey, it was 1999, so that was still a (small) perk then — so we could be on call twenty-four-seven in case anything went wrong overnight. Sometimes it did, and those times were frenetic and stressful because the bank’s overnight processing simply had to complete running before the bank could open for business the following day. In return for being on call (with no extra pay if we spent the night debugging some disaster), we were allowed to use the phones for (moderate) personal use and the company picked up the tab. Woo-whee.
New management decided that this was an unnecessary extravagance. “Return the phones,” we were told, and then, once we’d bought our own replacements, “Please give the number to overnight support so they can call you if they need you.”
This was the point at which we told them to f*** off. It was also around this time that I was called in to ask my views on how things were going and how morale was in the group.
I told them that we felt we’d been treated like s***, and if it carried on like this, the whole team would quit. If we wanted to work on terrible projects, we could all get new jobs in a week or two, for more money, and probably with free mobile phones thrown in.
It carried on like that, and we all quit. Three successive Fridays were someone’s leaving party. Another guy and I finished on the same day, the last Friday.
To cap the incompetence, the bank elected not to have any of our replacements start until the Monday after the last of us had finished. They didn’t have us interview any of the candidates, so they were hiring programmers without any idea whether those people could actually, you know, program. They really didn’t want to let us meet and talk to our potential replacements!
They then asked me to spend my last week documenting all of the systems so the new programmers would have some idea of how everything worked. If there is anything in the world more boring than Y2K testing, it’s documenting systems, and if they thought I was going to work my socks off for them… Well, let’s just say I did a basic professional job and included a note for the new guys wishing them all the very best of luck (they were really going to need it) and suggesting they didn’t throw away the number of the headhunter who’d placed them there.
