Really. A coder is supposed to know that he should spend unnecessary resources (memory, mainly) to add a feature that will be needed in ten years for a program only expected to be used for five years? Most of the problems (that didn't happen is it turned out) with Y2K were because many programs that were expected to be replaced weren't. And before the mid 1990s RAM was seriously expensive, people did not buy more than necessary, "Just in Case".
If the software doesn't work with accented characters and it wasn't in the specs, do you blame the coder? Reading that common-but-not-currently-used-here file type? IPv6 support?
Maybe it's because I'm a coder, but if you want a building to withstand an earthquake, you gotta say so.
I suppose you've never used a fixed size data type (eg. int) as a primary key right?