Around the middle of 1997, my wife, a COBOL programmer who "retired" to be home with the kids, started getting calls from head hunters. She ended up getting some very lucrative work as a consultant. I'm talking over $100/hr. We rode that gravy train for a couple of years and socked a lot of money away. My 401k is much fatter today because I was able to max my contributions out during that time.
During that time I laughed at the Y2K "doomsters" but it is certainly true that corporations took rather strong measures to make sure their systems were up to snuff.