Chess Players, Music Lovers, and Mathematicians - The Computer Boys Take Over - page 70

Although Brandon's evidence was strictly anecdotal, his portrayal of
the neurotic programmers was convincing enough that the psychologist
Theodore Willoughby felt compelled to refute it on scientifi c grounds in
his 1972 article “Are Programmers Paranoid.” 74 But whether or not
Brandon's paranoia was, from a strictly medical perspective, an accurate
diagnosis is irrelevant. The idea that “detached” individuals made good
programmers was embodied, in the form of the psychological profi le,
into the hiring practices of the industry. 75 Possibly this was a legacy of
the murky origins of programming as a fringe discipline in the early
1950s; perhaps it was self-fulfi lling prophecy. Nevertheless, the idea of
the programmer as being particularly ill equipped for or uninterested in
social interaction did become part of the conventional wisdom of the
industry. Although the short-term effect of this particular occupational
stereotype was negligible, it would later come back to haunt the pro-
gramming community as it attempted to professionalize later in the
decade. As we will see in later chapters, the stereotype of the computer
programmer as a machine obsessed and antisocial was used to great
effect by those who wished to undermine the professional authority of
the computer boys.
For the most part, however, the personality profi les that Perry and
Cannon as well as others developed simply became one component of a
larger set of tools used by employers to evaluate potential program-
mers. 76 According to one survey of Canadian employers, more than
two-thirds used a combination of aptitude and general intelligence tests,
personality profi les, and interest surveys in their selection processes. 77
The Situation Can Only Get Worse
Despite the massive amount of effort that went into developing the
science of programmer personnel selection, the labor market in comput-
ing only seemed to deteriorate. Many of the technological and demo-
graphic trends identifi ed at the Wayne State Conference in 1954 continued
to accelerate. By 1961, industry analysts were fretting publicly about a
“gap in programming support” that “will get worse in the next several
years before it gets better.” 78 In 1962, the editors of the powerful indus-
try journal Datamation declared that “fi rst on anyone's checklist of
professional problems is the manpower shortage of both trained and
even untrained programmers, operators, logical designers and engineers
in a variety of fl avors.” 79 At a conference held that year at the MIT
School of Industrial Management, the “programming bottleneck” was