Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
school graduates into the software labor market only exacerbated an
already-dire labor situation. The market was fl ooded with aspiring pro-
grammers with little training and no practical experience. As one study
by the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) SIGCPR warned,
by 1968 there was a growing
oversupply
of a certain undesirable species
of software specialist. “The ranks of the computer world are being
swelled by growing hordes of programmers, systems analysts and related
personnel,” the SIGCPR argued. “Educational, performance and profes-
sional standards are virtually nonexistent and confusion grows rampant
in selecting, training, and assigning people to do jobs.”
104
It was not just employers who were frustrated by the confused state
of the labor market. “As long as I have been programming, I have heard
about this 'extreme shortage of programmers,'” wrote one
Datamation
reader, whose husband had unsuccessfully tried to break into the com-
puter business. “How does a person . . . get into programming?”
105
“Could you answer for me the question as to what in the eyes of industry
constitutes a 'qualifi ed' programmer?” pleaded another aspiring job can-
didate. “What education, experience, etc. are considered to satisfy the
'qualifi ed' status?”
106
A background in mathematics seemed increasingly
irrelevant to programming, particularly in the business world, and even
the emerging discipline of computer science appeared to offer no practi-
cal solution to the problem of training programmers en masse. In the
absence of clear educational standards or functional aptitude exams,
would-be programmers and employers alike were preyed on by a growing
number of vocational schools that promised to supply both programmer
training and trained programmers. During the mid-1960s these schools
sprang up all over the country, promising high salaries and dazzling
career opportunities, and fl ooding the market with candidates who were
prepared to pass programming aptitude tests but nothing more.
Advertisements for these vocational schools, which appeared everywhere
from the classifi ed section of newspapers to the back of paper match-
books, emphasized the desperate demand for programmers and the low
barriers of entry to the discipline: “There's room for everyone. The
industry needs people. You've got what it takes.”
107
The typical vocational school offered between three and nine months
of training, and cost between $1,000 and $2,500. Students at these
schools would receive four to fi ve hours a day of training in various
aspects of electronic data processing, including programming but also
more basic tasks such as keypunch and tabulating machine operation.
What programming training they did receive focused on the memoriza-
