Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
skilled machinists with unskilled machine operators in the automobile
factories of the early twentieth century, these new software workers
would require less experience and training than their predecessors,
but the availability of large numbers of them was essential. The mass
production of computer programs necessitated the mass production of
programmers.
As will be discussed further below, it is questionable whether the SDC
vision of the software factory was ever truly realized—by SDC itself or
any of its many imitators. But for the time being it is enough to say that
the aptitude testing methods that SDC originated and then disseminated
throughout the industry assumed programming to be a well-defi ned,
largely mechanical process. In the words of Thomas Rowan, the person
primarily responsible for the SDC personnel selection process, program-
ming was only “that activity occurring after an explicit statement of the
problem had been obtained.”
42
Specifi cally excluded from programming
were any of the creative activities of planning or design. In other words,
SDC had redefi ned computer programming as exactly the type of skill
that aptitude tests were meant to accurately identify: straightforward,
mechanical, and easily isolated. The SDC aptitude tests were not so much
an attempt to identify programmer skill and ability as to embody it.
IBM PAT
Despite the seeming inability of the SDC aptitude testing regime to accu-
rately capture the essence of programming ability, similar tests continued
to be widely developed and adopted, not only by SDC, but also increas-
ingly by other large employers. Of these second-generation tests, the
most signifi cant was the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test (PAT). In 1955,
IBM contracted with two psychologists, Walter McNamara and John
Hughes, to develop an aptitude test to identify programming talent. The
programmer test was based on an earlier exam for card punch operators.
Originally called the Aptitude Test for EDPM (Electronic Data Processing
Machine) Programmers, it was renamed PAT in 1959.
43
Over the next few decades, IBM PAT would become the industry
standard instrument for evaluating programming ability. By 1962 an
estimated 80 percent of all businesses used some form of aptitude test
when hiring programmers, and half of these used IBM PAT.
44
Most of
the many vocational schools that emerged in this period to train
programmers used PAT as a preliminary screening device. In 1967
alone, PAT was administered to more than seven hundred thousand