Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
conform to the managerial goals of the corporation—is the real question
underlying many of these debates about labor shortages and other pro-
grammer personnel crises.
One of the perennial problems facing the computer industry, in the
1950s and 1960s as well as the present, was defi ning precisely what
characteristics or training made for a good computer programmer. As
was mentioned earlier, programming was frequently seen as a black art
whose success or failure was dependent on the idiosyncratic abilities of
individual programmers. This notion was reinforced by a series of apti-
tude tests and personality profi les that suggested that computer program-
mers, like chess masters or virtuoso musicians, were endowed with a
uniquely creative ability. Great disparities were discovered between the
productivity of individual programmers. “When a programmer is good,
he is very, very good. But when he is bad, he is horrid,” declared one
widely quoted IBM study of programmer performance.
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The same study
introduced the meme—which despite the original study's serious meth-
odological limitations and a general paucity of follow-up empirical
research, continues to be repeated—that a good programmer was at least
twenty-fi ve times more effi cient than his or her merely average colleague.
Whether the exact ratio of performance was precisely twenty-fi ve to one
(or a hundred to one—another commonly quoted fi gure) did not much
matter. What did matter is that whatever its defi ciencies, this study and
others seemed to confi rm plentiful anecdotal evidence that good pro-
grammers appeared to have been “born, not made.”
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It should be noted that computer programming is not by any means
the only technical occupation in which elements of both art and science
are seen as being inextricably intertwined. There is a large literature in
the history of science and technology that describes the role of intuition,
tacit knowledge, and craft technique in many technical industries.
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Computer work is different in the degree to which this blurry boundary
is perceived to be a central contributing factor to an ongoing crisis.
The administrative and managerial problems associated with fi nding
and keeping the “right” programmers was complicated by both the
newness of the discipline and the extent and duration of the early com-
puter revolution. The nascent computing professions were so pressed for
resources that they had little time to construct the institutional frame-
work required to produce and regulate software development. Almost
from their very origins university computer science programs were criti-
cized as being too theoretical in focus, too concerned with “playing
games, making fancy programs that really do not work, [and] writing
