One major issue in resolving the Year 2000 problem is that the work involved is not attractive for experienced software developers. It doesn’t require “new technology” that keeps them up to date in their careers.
There could well be a “market failure” when companies discover no one’s available to work on this project or that most developers would rather work on new projects.
This could give the computer industry, and software developers, a black eye or worse. Politically there should be a lot of people interested in seeing the problem resolved. Proving the importance of computers to the economy by way of a major system failure should not be allowed to happen.
Perhaps what’s needed is to train a lot of new software developers, who are going to be needed anyway. It’s not a difficult software problem–mainly tedious and labor-intensive. But it could be a good apprenticeship job for large numbers of newly trained software developers.
