You'll hear a lot of hysteria about the upcoming Year 2000 crisis, with people talking about the airlines, the government, and the banks becoming paralyzed by the problem. Realistically, there will probably be problems in all those fields and many more besides, but we'll make it through without major disasters. Society will not come crashing down around our ears - at least I hope not! As always, the best thing you can do is to clean up your own computer systems and make sure that you aren't the one with egg on your face.
This is not something to put off until the last minute, either. If you want a rough idea of how it's done, professionals will backup your system and test for Year 2000 compatibility by doing a dummy run with the system date set ahead, and see what goes wrong and what doesn't. Then your system will be restored and the detective work of tracking the source of the problems - before they happen - goes into gear.
You will have to get used to the inconvenience of typing a longer date. By now, all of your newer software should be prompting you for dates formatted like this: 08/16/1998 for August 8, 1998. Tell your data entry people to get used to it now, because it has to be that way. Start to make a note every time you type in a preformatted date field that has only the short date: 08/08/98 - this is one of the programs that will have to be fixed.
Planning and hiring programmers to clean up your software now will definitely save time, money, and possible disaster in the future. Programmers will be more and more in demand to fix these problems as the deadline approaches, and I know that we are working now to take care of our regular customers first.
The ComputerWorld magazine reported that Syracuse University, Cornell and other universities have reported that every one of their computer science people have multiple offers of real job opportunities. Some companies are actually luring computer science sophomores and juniors with $10,000.00 sign- on bonuses.
There is one fact that you as a business owner cannot ignore which is the current Informational Technology market is one where the demand for qualified programmers is high and unfortunately the supply of personnel is low.