I'm a programmer and an historian. So the title of this entry gave me a wrong first impression: there are more people like me! I'm not alone! Imagine the disappointment... ;)
I'm not an historian, but most of my friends are somewhere in the humanities fields, and two of them are historians.
But I quit the academic path due to economic reasons, i.e bad pay, and needing to apply to grants. I think unless you're explicitly acknowledged as an engineer/programmer it's hard to get anything remotely competitive.