This team did an amazing job that will most likely go completely unnoticed if they are successful
(And also why a lot of people thought that the Y2k but was over-hyped, when there was a lot of background work which fixed the problems so few people noticed when it did come to roll-over time)
Parent is probably saying those things will most likely be disproportionally low for that kind of effort/impact.
- It failed, the people in charge must be incompetent;
- It works, it's probably routine and simple;
- What works? Is that a thing?
It really depends on the place.
Yes, lots and lots of background work went on. My grandfather made a nice chunk of cash from being able to work with some near extinct programming languages and assembly variants on obsolete machines.
But: the hypetrain wasn't so much focusing on glitches in banks and insurance companies, but on catastrophic failures in missile control software etc and embedded systems that often don't even have any concept of date.
Just not as big a hype (and of the wrong type!) as we saw.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/when-rus...