Although there has been a fair amount of popular writing on contemporary programming culture, there are very few rigorous and sustained academic studies of programming practice.  Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist at McGill University, researches and writes about hacker culture and communities, and her new book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking is out and available for purchase.  She was recently profiled in Wired.

I am a little biased, because Biella is a friend, but her work is absolutely fabulous.  She also has done an excellent job communicating her scholarly work to the general public, and has been widely covered in the media.

A recent article in the New York Times described an innovative vocational training program recently launched by Pathways in Technology Early College High School in Brooklyn, New York.   In this six-year program that provides both a high-school degree and an associate’s degree, students pursue an alternative path towards careers in the computer industry.  The curriculum was developed in part with help from IBM.

The idea that a traditional college degree was not necessary (or even appropriate) for training in the computer fields is not new.   From almost the very beginning of the computer industry, the pressing demand for programmers, and the unique nature of the skill-set that seemed to be required by programmers, caused considerable concern about how to train programmers cheaply and effectively.  Much of the Computer Boys book is, in fact, about the various responses to this perceived problem, which included the widespread use of aptitude testing and personality profiles, as well as the formation of vocational schools.  The resemblance of the history to the program described in the recent NY Times article is not the subject of this particular post.

What struck me most about the NY Times piece was not the article itself but the accompanying images.  All of the students in these images are either black or Hispanic.  In part this reflects the demographics of the Brooklyn neighborhood in which the Pathways High School is located, but the total absence of white faces is a reminder of one of the unanswered questions in the history of computing: namely, what about race and class?   As anyone who has studied any of the social sciences knows, race, class, and gender represent the holy triumvirate of analytical categories.  It is often productive to ask questions about any (and all) of this trinity, because interesting answers almost always result.

In recent years the history of computing has done a much better job dealing with gender.   Race and class, however, are still almost invisible.  When I present on my work on gender and computing, and talk about the ways in which the computer industry, in its infancy, at least, was unusually open to women, I will frequently get a follow-up question about race.  Presumably the same openness and lack of barriers to entry that made programming appealing to women would have made it equally appealing to other minorities, the questioner implies.  This is an excellent question, and I wish I had a better answer…

There is some evidence that computer programming was perhaps more open to non-whites than other technical professions.  Particularly for those who equated “programming” with “coding” (that is to say, low-skilled, largely mechanical labor), the use of ethnic minority workers (like female workers) represented a way to inexpensively increase the output of the “software factory.”  A number of high schools, often in the southern states, started vocational programs aimed at training African-American youth to work in the computer industry.  In fact, in 1967 the New York Times published a piece on a Commerce Department program that is striking similar to it recent 2012 article.  The target of the Commerce Department program was “boys from lower economic levels,” but again the accompanying photo was of a young black man.¹. A few years earlier, the Times had published another piece whose headline claimed “Computer Seen as a Boon to Negro.”²  The argument was that although automation might be disproportionately affecting African-Americans, it also potentially promised them new opportunities working as computer programmers: “Computer people are in short supply, and if a company needs a good programmer, they don’t care what his race, creed, or color are as long as he can do the job.”

The language of this last piece is strikingly similar to that used to describe the opportunities for women.   But whereas getting data on women in the computing professions is difficult, getting data on race is almost impossible.  The earliest data I have is from the 1970 census, which noted that, out of 161,337 total programmers, 5,837 (3.6%) were black and 3,559 (2.2%) were Hispanic.   For the formative first few decades of the computer industry, I have nothing but anecdotal data.

It is clear, however, that just as computer programming was made masculine over the course of the 1970s (in the sense that the idealized stereotype of the programmer was transformed from female to male), computer programming also became increasingly white (again, if not in numeric terms, at least as a cultural category).  The sociologist Ron Eglash has a beautiful piece on contemporary attitudes towards race and computing entitled “Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters” that I use all the time in my teaching.  But a larger history of race in computing has still to be undertaken.  Graduate students, be aware!

The chart above shows the Bureau of Labor statistics on programmer employment. I am not convinced that these numbers are at all accurate. Getting reliable data on programmer employment is surprisingly difficult.

To begin with, programmer is a vague category, and it is by no means clear that everyone who worked on “programming” defined themselves primarily as a “programmer.” Secondly, the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not beginning tracking programmers until 1972, and in 1983 and again in 2000 they adjusted their categories and methodologies. For the first ten years, three broad categories (“computer specialists”, “computer programmer”, and “computer analysts”) encompassed everyone working in computing.

By 2000, these categories had expanded to include Computer and information research scientists, Computer systems analysts, Information security analysts, Computer programmers, Software developers, applications and systems software, Web developers, Computer support specialists, Database administrators, Network and computer systems administrators, Computer network architects, Computer occupations, and “all other” computer occupations. This seems to explain the decline in the number of programmers post-2000. Some of them simply got recategorized.

… is the person who runs one.

I came across this advertisement for the Electronic Computer Programming Institute (ECPI) in the September 16, 1966 issue of Life Magazine.   It is particularly notable for the way in which it plays on fears of technologically-driven unemployment:   “For all the people the computer puts out of a job, it can put more people into new ones.”

During the mid-to-late 1960s, vocational schools offering training in computing sprung up all over the country, appealing to the massive growth of the computer industry and the desperate need for programmers to develop software for them.  Some of these schools were legitimate attempts to provide much needed training in computing; others were fly-by-night operations that played on vulnerable populations (the un- or under-employed, women seeking to reenter the labor market after taking time off to have children).  All promised a high-paying job after graduation.  Most relied on some form of aptitude testing as an admissions criteria (although many admitted students regardless of their scores, with the sole condition that they were able to pay).  Many did not even provide hands-on time with an actual computer, or at best provided an hour or two of time on a leased machine.¹

A brief excerpt from The Computer Boys Take Over has been published on Womens e-News.

In preparing a recent talk, I came across this image from a 1962 article in Life Magazine on IBM. It captures nicely the stylish enthusiasm and modernist appeal of the computer professions that are too often lost in the focus on eccentric and scruffy hacker-types. Computing in the 1960s was the place to be.

Here is another of my favorites, this from 1961, featuring an computer room full of female computer operators:

The Life Magazine archive in Google images is an excellent source for images of computer people.

The nerd news website ArsTechnica recently published an article by Mathew Lasar on the history of the UNIVAC I computer.  It’s a nice little piece that draws heavily on Kurt Beyer’s excellent recent biography of Grace Hopper and Paul Ceruzzi’s classic History of Modern Computing (one of the earliest of the books published as part of MIT Press’ History of Computing series, of which The Computer Boys Take Over is the latest entry).

Lasar highlights a issue relevant to the history of computer programming that I had previously not encountered (or at least noticed).  In discussing the female programmers that Grace Hopper had cultivated at the Eckert Mauchly Computer Company, he notes that after the sale of EMCC to Remington Rand, many of these women left to pursue other opportunities, largely because of the lack of respect they felt in their new big-corporation environment:

“On top of that, new management did not sympathize with EMCC’s female programmers, among them Grace Hopper, who by 1952 had written the UNIVAC’s first software compiler. ‘There were not the same opportunities for women in larger corporations like Remington Rand,’ she later reflected. ‘They were older companies, and the jobs had been stereotyped.’”

During the labor crisis in programming that emerged in the 1950s, these women had plenty of other opportunities, Lasar argues, and many departed for other, more enlightened employers.  Read the whole article.  A nice piece, and it is good to see this history get rediscovered for a contemporary audience (particularly in a venue as popular as ArsTechnica).

The 1960s were characterized by a perpetual “crisis” in the supply of computer programmers.  The computer industry was expanding rapidly; the significance of software was becoming ever more apparent; and good programmers were hard to find. The central assumption  at the time was that programming ability was an innate rather than a learned ability, something to be identified rather than instilled. Good programming was believed to be dependent on uniquely qualified individuals, and that what defined these uniquely individuals was some indescribable, impalpable quality — a “twinkle in the eye,” an “indefinable enthusiasm,” or what one interviewer described as “the programming bug that meant … we’re going to take a chance on him despite his background.”

In order to identify the members of the special breed of people who might make for a good programmer, many firms turned to aptitude testing.  Many of these tests emphasized logical or mathematical puzzles: “Creativity is a major attribute of technically oriented people,” suggested one advocated of such testing. “Look for those who like intellectual challenge rather than interpersonal relations or managerial decision-making. Look for the chess player, the solver of mathematical puzzles.”

The most popular of these aptitude tests was the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test (PAT).  By 1962 an estimated eighty percent of all businesses used some form of aptitude test when hiring programmers, and half of these used the IBM PAT.

Although the use of such tests was popular (see Chapter 3, Chess-players, Music-lovers, and Mathematicians), the were also widely criticized.  The focus on mathematical trivia, logic puzzles, and word games, for example, did not allow for any more nuanced or meaningful or context-specific problem solving. By the late 1960s, the widespread use of such tests had become something of a joke, as this Datamation editorial cartoon illustrates.

So why did these puzzle tests continue to be used (including to this day)?  In part, despite their flaws, they were the best (only?) tool available for processing large pools of programmer candidates.  In the absence of some shared understanding of what made a good programmer good, they were at least some quantifiable measure of … something.

One of the most significant developments in the computer industry during the 1960s was the perceived shortage of skilled “computer people”:

In 1945 there were no computer programmers, professional or otherwise; by 1967 industry observers were warning that although there were at least a hundred thousand programmers working in the United States, there was an immediate need for at least fifty thousand more. “Competition for programmers,” declared a contemporary article in Fortune magazine, “has driven salaries up so fast that programming has become probably the country’s highest paid technological occupation . . . Even so, some companies can’t find experienced programmers at any price.”¹.

The image is from an article in Popular Science from two years earlier. The programmer personnel crisis is the first of the many “software crises” that were proclaimed over the next several decades. The first published use of the phrase “software crisis” appears in a 1966 Business Week article on the “shortage of programmers.”²

Looking at the job advertisements for computer programmers in the early 1960s, it is clear that many programmers were concerned about the future of their profession.   On the one hand, there were many opportunities for horizontal mobility within the profession: an even moderately skilled programmer could readily move from company to company, and had little to fear in terms of long-term unemployment.  On the other hand, it was not clear the programmers had much vertical mobility: for a variety of reasons, programmers were often not seen as being managerial potential.  Many of the advertisements from this period appeal to this sense of frustration and insecurity.  The overall message seemed to be “come work for our company; we will treat you as being more than a mere technician.”