Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
services of over two hundred thousand private contractors and military
operators.
A major component of the SAGE project was the real-time computers
required to coordinate its vast, geographically dispersed network of
observation and response centers. IBM was hired to develop the comput-
ers themselves but considered programming them to be too diffi cult. In
1955 the RAND Corporation took over software development. It was
estimated that the software for the SAGE system would require more
than one million lines of code to be written. At a time when the largest
programming projects had involved at most fi fty thousand lines of code,
this was a singularly ambitious undertaking.
27
Within a year, there were more programmers at RAND than all other
employees combined. Overwhelmed, RAND spun-off SDC to take over
the project. By 1956, SDC employed seven hundred programmers, which
at the time represented three-fi fths of the available programmers in the
entire United States.
28
Over the next fi ve years, SDC would hire and train
seven thousand more.
29
In the space of a few short years the personnel
department at SDC had effectively doubled the number of trained pro-
grammers in the country. “We trained the industry,” SDC executives
were later fond of saying, and in many respects they were correct; for
the next decade, at the very least, any programming department of any
size was likely to contain at least two or three SDC alumni.
30
In order to effectively recruit, train, and manage an unprecedented
number of programmers, SDC pursued three interrelated strategies. The
fi rst involved the construction of an organizational and managerial struc-
ture that reduced its reliance on highly skilled,
experienced
programmers.
The second focused on the development and use of aptitude tests and
personality profi les to fi lter out the most promising potential program-
mers. And fi nally, SDC invested heavily in internal training and develop-
ment programs. In a period when the computer manufacturers combined
could only provide twenty-fi ve hundred student weeks of instruction
annually, SDC devoted more than ten thousand student weeks to instruct-
ing its own personnel to program.
31
The engineers who founded SDC explicitly rejected what they called
the “nostalgic” notion, common in the industry at that time, that pro-
grammers were “different,” and “could not work and would not prosper”
under the rigid structures of engineering management.
32
They organized
SDC along the lines of a “software factory” that relied less on skilled
workers, and more on centralized planning and control. The principles
behind this approach were essentially those that had proven so successful
in traditional industrial manufacturing: replaceable parts, simple and
