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LinkedIn Testing 1970's-Style No-CS-Degree-Required Software Apprenticeships (mercurynews.com) 200

Posted by BeauHD from the blast-from-the-past dept.
theodp writes: The Mercury News reports on REACH, a new software apprenticeship program that LinkedIn's engineering team started piloting this month, which offers people without Computer Science degrees an opportunity to get a foot in the door, as Microsoft-owned LinkedIn searches for ways to help diversify its workforce. For now, the 29 REACH participants are paid, but are only short-term LinkedIn employees (for the duration of the 6-month program). LinkedIn indicated it hopes to learn if tech internships could eventually be made part of the regular hiring process, perhaps unaware that no-CS-degree-required hiring for entry-level permanent positions in software development was standard practice in the 70's and 80's, back when women made up almost 40% of those working as programmers and in software-related fields, nearly double the percentage of women in LinkedIn's global 2016 tech workforce. Hey, even in tech hiring, everything old is new again!
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LinkedIn Testing 1970's-Style No-CS-Degree-Required Software Apprenticeships More

LinkedIn Testing 1970's-Style No-CS-Degree-Required Software Apprenticeships

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  • theodp hates this idea. These people and kids who are learning from Code.org are going to take his job.

  • Slow news day (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:03AM (#54311783)

    Most companies already don't require a CS degree, or any degree, for programming jobs. Your GitHub activity carries more weight. Show me what you can do, not where (or if) you got a piece of paper.

    • Yep I know people with CS Degrees that can't even write an excel macro

      • Same, actually I don't know a single person that can.
        In my field of work, no none is doing it. I avoid Excel like the plague.
        And: in case you have not realized it in your decades of carrier in IT: Excel macros don't run on Bash command lines, as Services in a Java backend or as Greasemonkey scripts in a web browser ...

    • Re:Slow news day (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DuckDodgers ( 541817 ) <keeper_of_the_wo ... inus threevowels> on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:12AM (#54311815)
      In the 1970s, you didn't even have to prove that. An older cousin of mine worked as a secretary at an engineering firm, and every few months they would ask for secretaries who wanted to switch to engineering. She signed up, and went from making coffee and typing messages for a manager to being an assembly programmer. They taught her what she needed to know, and she worked at it until she retired with her pension.

      The reason Silicon Valley wants H1-B visas is that the idea of hiring someone and training them for a few years is alien to them. Forty years ago employees had the promise of a pension holding them to the company. "I might be able to get 20% better pay at the other place, but if I stay here another 22 years I can retire on 60% of my retirement age pay. Woo hoo!" Since you can take a 401k with you when you quit a job, now a company that trains someone for two years is likely to lose them to a competitor that pays better.

      See, supply and demand is good when it works in favor of the shareholders. When it operates in favor of the workforce, that's bad and laws need to be passed to import foreign labor and fix the problem.
      • IBM used to have a bunch of aptitude tests for entry-level technical jobs. I was recently speaking to a retired alumna at my college who applied to their admin track and after doing the tests for that was asked if she'd be willing to try the technical track tests. She did well in those and stayed with the company for 10 years, helping to design System/360 and 370. She was particularly smug about the fact that her boyfriend at the time had failed the same aptitude tests.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by nojayuk ( 567177 )

        The reason Silicon Valley wants H1-B visas is that the idea of hiring someone and training them for a few years is alien to them.

        Many companies have the lifespan of a mayfly and can't train properly anyone since they won't be in business in two years time. As for H1-B visas they constitute a tiny part of the total tech employment market in the US and don't noticeably depress salary levels but they're a good scapegoat for some folks who can't find that perfect 200k a year job churning out basic DBA apps for

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by wed128 ( 722152 )

          a good scapegoat for some folks who can't find that perfect 200k a year job churning out basic DBA apps

          This is so exactly right. I've never had a problem finding a job in software, it seems there's plenty of demand. People love to make excuses.

        • If your company only has a few months to get the job done, then of course you don't have time to train your employees. So then, instead of importing cheap labor pay market rate.

          Between the H1-B visas and the collusion between Intel, Apple, Google, Oracle, and a host of other companies there have been illegal, unethical downward pressure on engineer labor. You shouldn't get a 200k job for building financial services software unless you live in some place like Mountain View where $200k gets you a one be

  • Not lost (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:14AM (#54311819)
    Oh the irony of a website that presents its members as basically a resumee decides to ignore resumees....

    • TFA ignored obvious facts (Score:5, Insightful)

      by s.petry ( 762400 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @09:51AM (#54312405)

      In addition to your irony, TFA ignores some pretty important facts. In the 1970s we had Math, Engineering, and Physics. There was no such thing as a CS degree. One learned to code because it helped your education, not because it was seen as a cash cow specialty. The successful coders may not have all completed a degree, but were all the brightest of the bunch in College. If they left without a degree it was by choice, not because they lacked aptitude to finish.

      Let me use a Basketball analogy. Linked in believes that anyone can be Shawn Kemp, or another player that never played college ball and was not highly educated. In reality, the Shawn Kemp like people are extremely rare. About 1 in a billion.

      Can linked in find people "good enough" to get a job done without? Probably, but I would rather have people better than "good enough" as a hiring manager.

      • In addition to your irony, TFA ignores some pretty important facts. In the 1970s we had Math, Engineering, and Physics. There was no such thing as a CS degree.

        That's because you didn't have a computer on every desk. Things change when a scarce resource becomes a commodity item.

        • You didn't have a computer on every desk. But more and more, in the 1970s, you saw the universities buying terminals. And before we had a computer on every desk, computer scientists would work out programs on paper and implement them via punchcards. Parent is wrong about there not being a CS degree. It wasn't as common as it is now, but all the major tech schools had at least started a CS department by 1970. In the US, things like the Cold War made computing a pretty high priority, so there was lots of fund
      • Sounds like you think that Shawn Kemp's can only be found at collages..
        • Its simply a numbers game, if 3 out of 20 can become good programmers will the cost to train the 20 vs hiring 3 experienced programmers who are paid more be cheaper. To go back to the basketball analogy 1.1% of college players are drafted in the NBA while 0.001% of high school players were drafted. There is simply a much higher probability of finding a good player in college.

      • Let me use a Basketball analogy. Linked in believes that anyone can be Shawn Kemp, or another player that never played college ball and was not highly educated. In reality, the Shawn Kemp like people are extremely rare. About 1 in a billion.

        A better sports-related comparison might be Daniel Tosh's joke-not-joke about Babe Ruth playing before they let black people play, and before they were testing for juicing [dallasobserver.com]. It's a whole different sport today.

      • You are completely wrong about CS degrees. The first computer science program began at the University of Cambridge in 1953. In the US, Purdue University started their CS program in 1962. Universities adopting a CS program increased pretty rapidly through the 1970s. If you were an engineering school in the 1970s, you had to have a mainframe. And if you're gonna bother to invest in a mainframe, you might as well set up a proper CS department to make the most use of it. The intel 4004 microprocessor came out i

  • EE Degree (Score:5, Interesting)

    by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:28AM (#54311863)

    I find this interesting. I did an EE degree, but only did two papers on software, and to be honest, they were pretty basic. I had taught myself programming before hand but was much more interested in hardware and circuits rather than software. However, as my career progressed, I basically just became a full time software developer. For some reason, having an EE degree is considered the same (or for some people better, if you have software experience) than a CS degree, because supposedly I know how computers work at a gate level.

    In the end I use almost nothing that I learnt in my EE degree to do software development, and certainly none of the really hard math/sig pro stuff, and I can't see why someone who has gone through all the self taught/on the job training I did to learn programming wouldn't be able to do what I do now. Of course there is causality - if you can finish an EE degree you can probably do anything technical if you put your mind to it, but it does seem a bit pointless spending all that money and effort to get a piece of paper.

    • In the end I use almost nothing that I learnt in my EE degree to do software development, and certainly none of the really hard math/sig pro stuff

      Maybe you've simply demonstrated your ability to handle advanced mathematical thinking in general, and therefore do have a grasp for less specific mathematical properties of programs? Which, after all, are just complicated representations of mappings, so being able to intuitively handle situations like "if I write is like this, condition X never occurs" or "if I write it like this, cases A, B and C handle possible inputs exhaustively" and such are helpful.

    • Re:EE Degree (Score:4, Insightful)

      by malkavian ( 9512 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:43AM (#54311905)

      It's a piece of paper that says "You can work hard, study, make your own mind up and evaluate things critically, research and a whole host of other extremely advantageous traits while operating in a field of rigor and discipline". Coupled with the experience that also says "I can do the job you're asking me to do as described".

      It's a piece of paper that says a lot...

    • I have an ME and I spend my days programming. Everyone in my group is as ME or EE and all we do is make control algorithms in Simulink. Write low level C for compiling that to our embedded systems. Python for the dSpace hardware in the loop testing.

      I don't use any of the Thermo, Statics, Dynamics, or 90% of the classes I took. For most of the stuff I do day to day (and are overwhelmed with work doing) I would love a 15-17 year old high school student that was interested in cars to take on as an apprentice.

      T

    • I did an EE degree

      I think they mean somebody without any degree at all (or some really easy degree like journalism or philosophy). I've never heard of anybody passing over a candidate because they "only" had an EE (or math or physics or chemistry or something else difficult to complete) degree. If anything, that's usually sort of a plus, since CS is a tad easier than EE or math or physics.

    • I had a college roommate who graduated with an EE in the mid-1990's. Made some great money until the Great Recession and took out student loans to get a MBA while out of work. The only work he could find was IT support, flying back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He's bitter at me because I make more money than him for doing the same kind of work. I'm not the one who mismanaged my career and then took out student loans.

    • For some reason, having an EE degree is considered the same (or for some people better, if you have software experience) than a CS degree, because supposedly I know how computers work at a gate level.

      I have a physics degree, so supposedly I know how everything works ;) Most of my research/development work has been some kind of programming, but presumably that's how everything is done today. For example physics and chemistry simulations rather than lab work.

      In my experience, one thing you get from advanced studies better than practical work is an abstract, systemic understanding of things. A way to look at the big picture and realize it's still only a special case of a humongous picture. For example,

  • The obsession with degrees hold good people back. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bungo ( 50628 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:42AM (#54311903)

    I drop out of university in the 80's. Went on a 4 month government run programming/job placement course at a different university learning to program COBOL on VAX/VMS. I was found a job doing C programming on Unix, where I was giving on the job training and sent on courses. I've gone on to have a successful career, with the last 20 years running my own consulting business. Without this opportunity and taking a chance on me, I would have never had my career.

    Since then, I have gone on to get 2 degrees, Bsc in Math and Post-grad in Computer Sci, but this was after I was already established, had changed jobs a few times to better positions and didn't need the degrees to be looked at.

    After learning math, and studying Knuth, learning Java, database theory, Lisp, Prolog, sure I have a better understanding now than when I started, but lack of the knowledge didn't stop me from getting started.

    One of the best programmers I work with had a degree in English.

    A lot of people, who could either be talented or good enough would miss out if only Comp Sci degreed people were considered.

    • If degrees are so meaningless, why did you bother getting a "Bsc in Math and Post-grad in Computer Sci" later on?

      I think that, whatever your answer, it proves that there is a good reason for them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ranton ( 36917 )

        If degrees are so meaningless, why did you bother getting a "Bsc in Math and Post-grad in Computer Sci" later on?

        I think that, whatever your answer, it proves that there is a good reason for them.

        His answer to that question can be found in the title of his post: the obsession with degrees in the society. My career path was similar, where I started working with no degree and then received a BS/MS after about 10 years in. I learned nearly nothing in the BS, and barely anything for my MS (my thesis research project was a good experience), but those degrees had a big impact on my career. Not because of what I learned but because they check off boxes for HR and for hiring managers who like their software

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        You apparently flunked logic. First, he did not claim degrees are useless at all. He said they are unnecessary for programming. He went on to say that he then chose to get 2 degrees to further his knowledge. Indeed, a degree program is a valid way to do that. It is not the only way to do that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bungo ( 50628 )

        The same reason why I also got an associate's level degree in accounting, and why I want to do a degree in Astronomy (now that I have the math background)..... I don't know what the reason is.... but it's the same reason.....

        My wife says I'm addicted to learning, as I've been formally studying something ever since she's known me.

    • Good story, but I think that stories like yours are the exception rather than the norm. This kind of seems like survivor bias [wikipedia.org] to me. Of all the people who entered similar government run programs there's probably a large number who just couldn't make the cut and we'll just never hear about them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bungo ( 50628 )

        For sure, on the course, I think only 3 of us out of 12 got jobs from their placement program. A couple of the people had no hope of getting a programming job. I know that I was chosen to be on the scheme as I had already completed one programming course at Uni before I dropped out - I had already programmed in Pascal on a VAX, before being taught how to program COBOL on VAX. I had previously taught myself DCL (VMS scripting). By picking people who already would have had a chance on getting a job helped the

    • Interviewing is expensive. An easy way to tell if somebody is relatively stable is to look for a college degree. That works great when the economy is in the toilet due to offshoring and rampant Visa abuses. As an added bonus it makes it easier to abuse Visas. Sure, once in a while you miss a good employee, but odds are they're not stable anyway. Again, odds. In a large company you're always playing the odds when you hire.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by bungo ( 50628 )

        Yes, it has certainly become a tick box exercise. When I tender for contracts, there is normally a requirement for which degree is held. I can tell you, having a BSc in Math fills the box ticking, but doesn't make me more competent in my field.

        I know the theory behind PKI, and could create my own poor implementation, but why would I, when there are teams of professionals that can do a far better job than me.

        The only thing the Math degree has been good for is getting me upset at the reporting of statistics i

    • In my experience not having a degree hasn't been a big deal. My Dad worked for a large corporation and always crowed that they only considered college graduates with a B average, but that was a rural area. There are plenty of companies in the big cities that only care about what you can do.

      I started programming computers in second grade and got a job in industry during my sophomore year of college. It's amazing how many people out there don't start learning their trade until college and who graduate wit

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dave562 ( 969951 )

      This is a good post. I have a similar story, only I dropped out of college in the late 90s and got into consulting right before the big dot com crash. I had developed my own basic computer skills as a kid, and was fortunate enough to find an employer who was willing to take a chance and train me. In my case, aptitude plus opportunity equals success. I am never going to be rich at the rate that I am going, but I am making comfortable money at a stable company.

      My dad was a programmer in the mid to late 70

  • I can understand (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thyamine ( 531612 ) <.thyamine. .at. .ofdragons.com.> on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:19AM (#54312021) Homepage Journal
    I have a CompSci degree from a few years back, and it was heavy coding/dev/math. There is no way you could have gotten through the degree and been unable to program. I have run into recent CompSci graduates who have a hard time or can't write code, and don't even like coding. What has changed in the curriculum? Has CompSci become the catchall for 'I want a computer degree'? With that sort of expectation, I can see why I'd rather hire someone excited about dev work, than someone who has it on paper but no urge or drive or skill.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kwerle ( 39371 )

      About 1990 with 4 years of CompSci under my belt. Solid stuff - lots of math, theory.

      Our awesome TA asks the 20+ of us in the group "who is here because they like to program?" My hand shoots up.

      I look around. I'm the only one. In a class that is only taken by CompSci students.

      I dropped out shortly thereafter. I'd learned lots. I was already working a solid coding job. These were NOT my people.

      There has never been a shortage of folks in computers for reasons other than the love of the art/science.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • There are basically 3 kinds of CompSci programs, they can be identified by what school they are taught out of: Engineering, Math or Business (in general, in decreasing order of their quality).

      CompSci people that graduated out of a business based CS programs are about as useful as MBAs.

      Math based can be good if you're looking for a theoretician, but cut out the middleman and just get an applied math PhD. Go to the nearest university and shake a tree, watch out they don't hit you when they fall out.

  • just in general for diversity and to break the back of the whole "Bro..." culture.

    Good on ya Linkedin!

  • I don't have a CS degree, and few than 50% of people my age (mid 40s) in the industry do (in the UK). Few of the most technically impressive senior people I've met had CS degrees, and only about half of them had technical degrees.

    When I hire developers, I don't require ANY degree, much less a CS degree. What I require is the ability to write software.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:32AM (#54312081)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Turnover must slow down for this to catch on (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:47AM (#54312125)

    Employer/employee loyalty is the thing that has to improve first -- then OJT will move beyond an experiment. Back in the good old days, employers would take recent college grads and even recent high school grads, knowing they were only getting raw material, and train them to their standards. Now employers see employees who will jump to the competition in 6 months or less just because they're upset about something or will get a small raise. Because of that, training is a liability and they'd rather hire consultants who may or may not have lied about their level of experience.

    Employers need to come to the table too. We need to stop the constant cycle of layoffs and offshoring and maintain a reasonable level of steady employment. If employees feel safe in a job, they'll worry less about finding another one and worry more about doing a good job in the current one. This is one thing from the old days I'd like to see come back -- employers would have to think very hard about hiring someone because they'd at least have some sort of commitment to them.

    Training on the job and starting in the bottom of an organization aren't totally dead. I know a lot of people who work for the state university system. Here in NY, university professional staff are effectively tenured the same way faculty are, after a long probationary period and having to convince your department to nominate you. Training is an accepted part of life in this environment because they're keeping the employees whether or not they're skilled up. In this case, it makes perfect sense to invest in employees because you'd rather have a good loyal employee than one who knows you can't get rid of them and doesn't advance their career.

    Also, CS degrees are probably overkill for most web programming jobs that LinkedIn typically hires for. You may need a CS degree to write their deep learning algorithm that maps your connections and mines them for data, but you don't need one to be a JavaScript monkey cranking out the front end stuff. I'm in IT, with a chemistry degree, and the only thing I use from my degree is the ability to methodically break down a problem and troubleshoot. It's helpful but I know plenty of older iT people who have no degree or a completely unrelated to CS degree, and they do well.

  • Diversify? (Score:3)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @09:45AM (#54312373)

    ...as Microsoft-owned LinkedIn searches for ways to help diversify its workforce.

    as Microsoft-owned LinkedIn searches for ways to help Microsoft make H-1B irrelevant by churning out new American programmers until programming becomes a low-wage commodity-class skill. FTFY.

    That's not to say they will, or even can, succeed in that goal - but I'm pretty sure 'diversity' is just a politically-correct red herring.

  • CS degrees are overrated (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Foxhoundz ( 2015516 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @09:51AM (#54312403)
    I say this simply because as a developer with no CS background. I've worked with graduates who could belt off different concepts from definitions they've memorized but don't know how to implement it or more importantly, don't know how to spot errors. My job interview consisted of maybe 1-2 minutes of discussions on my background before a 45 minute long whiteboard session where I had to hand write various algorithms and solutions to problems the interviewer would present.
    • So, if a CS degree is overrated, why isn't college in general overrated? If college in general is overrated, why isn't high school overrated? What you're saying is that education is pointless, and everybody is born with an inherent talent set that can't be improved upon.

      • So, if a CS degree is overrated, why isn't college in general overrated? If college in general is overrated, why isn't high school overrated? What you're saying is that education is pointless, and everybody is born with an inherent talent set that can't be improved upon.

        That's a horrible conclusion. Education is very important.I simply stated CS degrees were overrated.They don't prepare you for actual work conditions. The various principles of computer science be self-taught and practiced in the age of online content. Programming was not something I did by sitting in classes listening to lectures. I wrote what I knew with my limited knowledge. It was an organic process for me that lead me to discover things by realizing the inadequacies in my own code first hand. When

        • So... education is important for everything _except_ programming, which can (apparently) only be learned through doing rather than a combination of doing and learning (like everything else)?
      • Sweet reductio ad absurdum. The issue is that there are spectrums to every job. Not all jobs in the same field require the same level of knowledge or technical skill. And some fields, those who need a higher level of knowledge or technical skill might be the majority, or the minority.

        Personally, I've worked at two very different EE jobs. One of them is very demanding, and required application of many of the advanced concepts I learned from college, and I had to learn things even beyond that to stay eff

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      CS degrees are overrated

      I say this simply because as a developer with no CS background.

      I always hear people who don't have a CS degree bash on it. If you have no CS background, how are you qualified to comment on whether a CS degree is useful? Do you even know what getting a CS degree entails?

      I've worked with graduates who could belt off different concepts from definitions they've memorized but don't know how to implement it or more importantly, don't know how to spot errors.

      Why are you comparing yourself to graduates? They'll get a 50% raise as soon as they get a few years of experience. You also didn't say anything about the schools they came from or their GPA. How many were from MIT or Stanford vs. Trump University? How many had > 3.0 GPA?

  • So, the qualifications used to be "has a CS degree". Now they're "has a CS degree or isn't a white male". Good to know.
    • As a white male, I never encountered that problem. Of course, I do IT support. The most important question recruiters ask is not my ethnicity but whether or not I'm available.
  • After I graduated from community college with a A.A. degree in General Education, got kicked out of the university for playing too many games of Magic: The Gathering into the wee hours, and worked three years as a restaurant cook, I still didn't know what to do with my life. A roommate suggested that I applied for an "internship" (translation: "not enough money in budget to hire fulltime staff") at his company as a software tester. That six-month internship was the beginning of my technical career. Next job

  • Bloomberg L.P. Has been doing this for years. (Score:3)

    by plague911 ( 1292006 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @11:55AM (#54313377)
    Very successfully. They hire intelligent people with a variety of backgrounds and train them how to program. New hire training was I think 6 weeks for people with a C.S. background and 16 weeks for non-cs individuals. There are some* dev positions with esoteric considerations that would really require a C.S. degree. Most however can be filled by a smart person with who understands the basics of programming. I would also like to point out Bloomberg has been turning profit at about 2.5 million per developer per year for the last 20 years.

  • Easier to teach an engineer to program... (Score:3)

    by tbuskey ( 135499 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @12:17PM (#54313557) Journal

    ... than a programmer engineering.

    My degree is Mechanical Engineering. I've been mostly Sysadmin in my career but did data analysis when I started and now do DevOps with more dev than sysadmin.

    I couldn't do the development I do now w/o my sysadmin experience. Engineering made me learn to look at larger systems with an analytic eye. Programming was part of the degree; I had to write a FEM sing Chebychev differentiation to find the optimal spacing for fins on a plate for heat transfer. It was calculating values on a NxN grid with initial guesses of the initial values at the grid points. Each time through the N^2 calculations, you'd get converge. When the difference between n and n-1 values was close enough, that's be your approximate answer.

    I wouldn't expect a CS programmer to be able to come up with the formula, though I would expect them to be able to code it once it was broken down.

  • An apprentice under a master is a good way for someone to learn. The problem is there are almost no masters and way too many cargo-cult programmers in the industry that will be passing on their superstitious religion of how they think programming works. A master knows when not to use best practices. A master should be confident enough in their abilities that they can safely ignore the warnings of other masters, but obviously wise enough to know when to take good advice. Or as one master said(paraphrased) ~"

  • Many computer scientist do programming, some didn't even like to program at all!(Edsger W. Dijkstra) . Real computer science degree programs hardly focus on actual programming, it is more related to theoretical math. Rarely do you ever find someone that just learned to programming that has spent the time to understand computer science.

    But I can see just having some programming grunts for the mundane tasks. Anything that is little more involved can quickly turn into a clusterfuck really quick. Worse items I

  • Baking is all about chemistry. However, most jobs in baking do not require a degree in chemistry... in fact, a degree in chemistry in most cases wouldn't help get the job done.

  • All the easy jobs have gone (Score:3)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:37PM (#54316435) Journal
    No need for dictation, short hand and smart staff with the skills to spell engineering, legal or medical terms.
    Professionals do their own work with their own powerful computers.

    Printer, fax machine, punch cards still need support per department? Accounting paperwork? Staff going to the bank during working hours?
    Computers or outside contractors have taken many of the roles that normal working class staff could expect in the 1970's.
    Legal is now a lawyer not a vast in house legal department with all its own support staff.
    A real coffee machine has replaced a canteen full of staff to push a trolly around with coffee.

    The phone system that needed a human to take a call, direct a call and keep messages is now a professionals own smart phone.
    The role of poor people with no or few skills is not needed in vast numbers to support a few professionals or experts all day.
    Working for a computer company in the past was doing maths by hand to get the work ready for computer programming, programming a computer by creating punch cards, ensuring the printer had paper. Waiting for the computer to print out why it failed, looking at the math by hand again and trying to work the complex math with on the computer again. Low paid staff had to help with getting the computer ready again.
    Ordering more paper and punch cards, ensuring the supply of paper and punch cards was always ready for a larger project.
    Keeping accounts on paper. Entering paper accounts in to computers, then paying bills on time and ensuring the generated paper work matched the computer records.
    Connecting calls, taking messages, making coffee, greeting visitors and guiding them past departments full of support staff to meet the expert staff.

    So a lot of people could claim they worked with "computers" or "programmed" a computer as a "job".
    Doing the same "math" on "paper" all day to help a computer expert was not programming or a job with much internal advancement or good pay.
    A few experts back then did all the real work like in 2017. Many other people with much fewer skills and low pay just ensured everything was ready for the complex tasks.

    Tax rates and political import controls also helped. A company had to do all the complex computer work within their own nation or factor in complex import tax issues or for security reasons. Now a gov, mil contractor, the private sector can buy much cheap support globally.

    The CRT allowed one expert to see and correct their all their computer work without staff having to prepare and load up the computer again.
    So lots of low wage staff got to work on vast projects that only ever really needed a few smart people and better computers.

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