Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
identifi ed rather than instilled. Good programming was believed to be
dependent on uniquely qualifi ed individuals, and that what defi ned these
people was some indescribable, impalpable quality—a “twinkle in the
eye,” an “indefi nable enthusiasm,” or what one interviewer depicted as
“the programming bug that meant . . . we're going to take a chance on
him despite his background.”
67
The development of programmer person-
ality profi les seemed to offer empirical evidence for what anecdote had
already determined: the best programmers appeared to have been born,
not made.
The use of personality profi les to identify programmers began, as with
other industry-standard recruiting practices, at SDC. Applicants at SDC
were fi rst tested for aptitude, then interviewed in person, and only then
profi led for desirable personality characteristics. Like other psychological
profi les from this period, the SDC screens identifi ed as valuable only
those skills and characteristics that would have been assets in any white-
collar occupation: the ability to think logically, work under pressure,
and get along with people; a retentive memory and the desire to see a
problem through to completion; and careful attention to detail.
By the start of the 1960s, however, SDC psychologists had developed
more sophisticated models based on the extensive employment data that
the company had collected over the previous decade as well as surveys
of members of the Association for Computer Machinery and the Data
Processing Management Association. In a series of papers published in
serious academic journals such as the
Journal of Applied Psychology
and
Personnel Psychology
, SDC psychologists Dallis Perry and William
Cannon provided a detailed profi le of the “vocational interests of com-
puter programmers.”
68
The scientifi c basis for their profi le was the Strong
Vocational Interest Bank (SVIB), which had been widely used in voca-
tional testing since the late 1920s.
The basic SVIB in this period consisted of four hundred questions
aimed at eliciting an emotional response (“like,” “dislike,” or “indiffer-
ent”) to specifi c occupations, work and recreational activities, types of
people, and personality types. By the 1960s, more than fi fty statistically
signifi cant collections of preferences (“keys”) had been developed for
such occupations as artist, mathematician, police offi cer, and airplane
pilot. Perry and Cannon were attempting to develop a similar interest
key for programmer. They hoped to use this key to correlate a unique
programmer personality profi le with self-reported levels of job satisfac-
tion. In the absence of direct measures of job performance, such as
supervisors' evaluations, it was assumed that satisfaction tracked closely
