What were interviews for programming positions like in the 70s and 80s?

Back in the mid-70's Manufacturers Hanover Bank used to give candidates a "Programmer Aptitude Test", which was basically an IQ test. If you passed you were hired, and they paid to send you to a 12-week class that taught S/360 assembler & COBOL.

I took Comp Sci. in college, but my class also had math majors, actors, and all sorts of other people. IIRC it was about 50/50 men/women.

Programming in and of itself was just appearing as a job field (outside of the business field with cobol or rpg). It was mostly done by the people with the problem as a secondary skill. Yeah, minicomputers in a larger shop might have an operator or two (now sysadmin). But it was chemists or physicists or whatever using Fortran on a mini, or assembler for performance. C and Unix were novel things appearing with Milnet -> Arpanet as the networks merged and tcp/ip replaced things like decnet and token ring.

So hiring was “do you grok the problem space, what have you done to show you can code?” The HS and lower hackers of the 60’s and 70’s were turning into the college and grad school hires. Unless they just skipped all that academic BS and just made $$. There wasn’t enough need for pure coding skill in the application areas to justify non-discipline experts. Those were at the research labs thinking up modern computing. And even those had to rely of a friendly or ambivalent management chain for continued funding.

Quants, for example, came out of the chemistry and physics fields with people who had done molecular or hydrodynamics or some other time-based modeling. Hell, computer science departments themselves were just organizing in the mid-late 70’s as math profs retrained themselves with the help of the rugrat hackers. Unless they came out of EE in an engineering school. Ivy League schools didn’t offer credit for “engineering” courses like CS to arts & science majors in the 70’s.

All my coding in the 80s was in assembly language. Interviews were more about low level hardware knowledge, not much about software algorithms. The way interviews are conducted now sucks.

Here's what I remember:

I had interviews in the 80s in Silicon Valley with technical firms. There were no quizzes. Typically, much of the interview was based on your resume. Interviewers were very good at drilling down on what you wrote. (There was none of the present fears about "but what if they lied on their resume?" Well, you asked good questions and you found out.) The resume served as a basis for discussion. The other half of an interview might be the interviewer describing the work they did, and seeing how quickly you caught on.

As far as general programming knowledge is concerned, one early Mac programming shop where I worked didn't bother asking Mac-specific questions in interviews, since the platform was so new, but they particularly sought out software engineers who had experience with two or more different programming languages, at least one of which used pointer arithmetic, and verified that you had used them. Even if you were going to be programming in C or Pascal, knowledge of assembly language was considered a plus. They wanted to see how adaptable you were to different programming paradigms, since you would probably have to learn a lot about the new Mac platform.

I don't remember there ever being more than two days of in-person interviews. Typically, the person who would be your supervisor would do the first interview, and then decide whether you were worth bringing back for more (and taking up other people's time). The second, longer, set of interviews would be with your potential co-workers, maybe your boss's boss, and someone from HR. Then, everyone would meet for maybe 30-45 min. and decide whether to make an offer.

"You're a programmer huh?"

> yes

"Your office is the one in sub basement B, paydays are every other Friday."

70's

Bowler Hatted Interviewer: 'Well then, what do you know about these new fangled things then?'

Kipper tie: 'Well I saw one once being used on Logan's Run, and it looked quite easy. I'm also really into Led Zeppelin.'

Bowler Hatted Interviewer: 'Well you sound perfect. When can you start? Only, that spinning tape thing over there stopped spinning 2 days ago and I'm awfully worried we won't get our reports out for month end tomorrow.'

In the 70s, nobody knew what made a good programmer so you’d find EEs, music, English, and philosophy majors…

Programming languages weren’t standardized, so different machines often had their own languages, and even companies would write their own language.

Things were a little more sane in the 80s, but even then software companies weren’t really valued highly because “the assets walked out the front door every night”.

I guess in that time it was not a position, and secretaries where expected to do the “compute” jobs. So mostly ladies learned programming, on the side as it where. They learned it on the job.

Programmer was not a career/job yet. There where no schools or papers yet.

So an interview would be about secretary tasks like calculus and bookkeeping, perhaps ask if you know how to type already. (Big deal back then) Source: my mom.

Thank you for all the comments and stories so far, it really brings new interesting insights on the software developer role evolution