I've been lucky in a way - for the most part, I've been using Fox and Clipper long enough that Y2K has not become a direct problem for me. And if an application is old enough that Y2K *is* a problem, it probably needs an overhaul anyway, which can be potentially cheaper.
The greater danger is the perception that there is no "skill" to programming - that anyone can pick up a manual, learn the language du jour and write a bullet-proof application without the logical training of programming. At a previous employer, each programmer in the MIS department was let go in turn over a roughly four month period. I was the last to go, and the explanation given was that management had determined that an in-house programming staff was not required to fulfill the computing needs of the company. Within a month, I was called back by the company as a consultant, and I wrote several more systems as a consultant. Additionally, I saw a database that they had decided to develop - in MS-Access, and quite frankly, it was a mess - a disaster waiting to happen.
There have been articles written in the journals about showing our worth as professionals. By doing so, and keeping abreast of the best tools we can use, we can keep ourselves in demand.