What job would today's IT professional have had in 1954, 1904?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I work as an IT professional, and am surrounded by lots of people in the same field. I usually work in buildings with floor upon floor of IT professionals. By any measurement it is a fairly new field in the history of the world. I can’t help but wonder, what job would someone like me have gotten in 1954, or 1904? In those eras, what jobs would a bright, technically minded person have done? I suppose the general area of “engineering” would have been close (mechanical, electrical, building, etc. - not-information system specific), but we still have plenty of people doing that, and it would seem that the demand for all of those disciplines hasn’t declined.

Something to consider is that everyone going to college is a somewhat modern phenomenon. In earlier eras a smaller percentage of the brightest went through higher education. So, there was a slice of people then who were smart-ish but, depending on their circumstances, not moving into higher education and professional careers. I see a lot of folks in IT who seem like they might have been in that slice in earlier times.

Any ideas?

2

I happen to be an IT professional as well, and I ask myself the same question now and then. As a gal, I assume my career in 1954 or 1904 would have been wife, but if we ignore my gender I have to assume I would have been in some kind of craftsman’s position–which isn’t really as big an industry any more due to the automatization of manufacturing.

The itch that coding scratches for me is the “Let’s build something from scratch and see it work, and then do it better next time” sort of thing, so I would have probably made clocks, or something like that.

3

I suspect a lot of people who are currently in IT would have had careers as accountants, engineers, actuaries, insurance underwriters, electricians, math teachers/professors, or other technical or quant fields. Or they would just be doing whatever jobs were popular at the time. A lot of people only do IT because it pays well and there are plenty of jobs available.

Also keep in mind, while corporations have been around for centuries, I think the modern concept of a “corporation” as a 30 story office tower or sprawling office park filled with cubicles is a product of the last 100 years or so.

4

I would have been in insurance. The family was in shipping at the time and had connections with Lloyds of London and as I was physically unsuited to going out on the boats would likely have started as an errand boy rising to an actuary.

5

But we still have many of those jobs and plenty of demand for them to continue. I suppose a great number of accountants have been replaced by computers doing the work, and the IT folks making the computers work.

What guess I’m looking for is a large category of identifiable jobs that would have absorbed the current IT workforce, based on the profile of a typical IT worker.

6

I would imagine some of them would have had a very difficult time in 1904, jobs tended to be more physical, agricultural employment was much higher. I would think someone who had great ability to do very well in an IT field or something similar, but was physically lame, or had asthma, might have been relatively useless back then.

The shift to a service economy is a relatively recent thing. I tend to believe that the amount of employment success someone has has as much to do with the soil as with the seed, it’s nothing I ever really studied in depth though.

7

Having spent 30 years in IT and being aware of the often unique personalities, I have come up with two possibilities for each year:

1904

  • Telegraph operator
  • bicycle mechanic/builder.

1954

  • various radio/television occupations
  • accounting, especially with mechanical calculators

All were relatively solitary, high tech tinkering in their day.

I found it interesting that in my small home town, the first (and expensive for the day) automobile (steam powered) was purchased in 1902 by the railroad telegrapher in town. He must have had a good income and leading edge technology interests.

8

I kind of suspect we’d be in normal jobs- factories, dairies, banks, etc… and tinkering with stuff in our garages on our own time.

I say this because one of my grandfathers was a stereotypical IT guy, at least in the fascination with technology and interest in building things and seeing how they work. He was very socially adept and not weird in the least though, except that he was intensely interested in whatever passed for high technology at the time- aircraft in the 1940s, and electronics/television in the 1950s and 60s.

He worked as an operator at a chemical plant that made polyethylene for his post-war career.

9

I’ve been an IT consultant for 30 years now; the majority of jobs I’ve done I could have taught to somebody with no experience in IT in just a few days. So, I think you might need to lower your expectations for the bottom end of the industry… I’d say the majority of us would have been working in farms or factories, back in the day.

Anecdotally, using my father & grandfather… in 1954 my father was working as a staff sergeant in the Air Force, editing the base newspaper. In 1904 or shortly thereafter, my grandfathers were a lineman with Pacific Bell and a diesel mechanic for a railroad. So, all those labor-saving improvements that the IT industry brought about? They also eliminated a whole pile of labor-intensive jobs.

10

Interesting you should say that. I have been in the bicycle industry for years, and by far the most common field for mechanics to go into when they are older and want to live above the poverty line is IT. I’m going into accounting(or at least trying to anyway), I feel that working in the bike industry actually made the accounting class easier to understand.

11

In the 50s there were all sorts of tinkering jobs–think of the repairman who used to come to your house and fix your TV, or your washing machine, or your refrigerator. Nowadays if something breaks you throw it in the trash and buy a new one. I mean that pretty literally, the cost of having a guy come out to take a look at your washing machine, figure out what’s wrong, get the new part, take apart your machine, put in the new part, put it back together, and drive to his next customer can be hundreds of dollars and there’s no guarantee that it will even work, and brand new machine is only slightly more expensive.

There were all sorts of services that sort of still exist, but barely, because new goods are so cheap today and hourly wages are so high. In the 60s and 70s my mom sometimes used to sew her own clothes, nowadays the fabric alone costs more than a finished piece.

So most “computer dude” guys would have been working at some blue collar job back in the 50s. Maybe in a factory, or as a mechanic or builder or tradesman or delivery guy. And that was because most people worked at blue collar jobs. My dad was an electrician for the phone company, but by the 80s they weren’t hiring any more guys at his level, everyone was slowly replaced by computerized systems and modular parts. He never really learned to use computers, but if he had grown up with them today he’d probably be in the IT trenches as a grunt.

Go back a bit farther and most people are still working on farms. Maybe the guy who likes to tinker is the first guy in his area to try mechanized methods instead of mules. Or maybe not, that takes money and everyone is scratching to survive. Plenty of people in those days were happy to take brutal jobs in factories so they could get away from dirt farming.

To look at the trajectory in my family, my great grandfather was a farmer, my grandfather was a carpenter/builder, my father was an electronic tech, and I’m a software QA dude. So those are the jobs I’d probably be doing 50 or 100 years ago. Back in those days you might get a job because you were particularly good at that kind of job, but more likely you got a job that paid the rent and did it well enough not to get fired. Oh, you’ve got an aptitude for mathematics and abstract problem solving? Congratulations, now get on the line and keep inserting tab A into slot B until your shift is over.

12

Thanks, Lemur866, I think that is a likely broad scenario - that in the past a lot of bright folks were probably underutilized.

jasg, I think here you might be overemphasizing the stereotypical computer geek with 7 monitors running his own servers.

I’m more focusing on the day-to-day developer/DBA/infrastructure/security/application folks that fill up office buildings.

13

I’m thinking radio repair or working at a newspaper wouldn’t be that different than IT

14

I think probably accounting or banking. I like numbers :slight_smile:

Looking at it from the other end, my father (who died in 1990) would almost certainly have been an IT guy if he’d been born later in the 20th century. As it was, he went from IED disposal to fixing televisions to electrical engineering. My mother would have made a great web developer with her design/drafting and commercial art skills.

15

Watch and clock repair and design of machines run by clockworks were big. Those old systems were very complex. I was amazed when I looked inside a 100 year old cookoo clock and saw how it all ran by clockwork. Making a clockwork machine run is essentially programming.

16

One field of work that was quite big in 1904 and has now largely disappeared is domestic service. It might not have made the best use of the talents of someone with an IT aptitude, but, well, tough, people often do not get to choose jobs they like, or even jobs they are good at.

17

I came into IT through a background in advertising design, graduating from college just when everybody was making the switch over to Macs and WYSIWYG design. I imagine if I’d been around in 1954 or 1904, the equivalent would have been working as a layout, copy, or paste-up artist - a whole lot of scutwork for little money and no respect.

Of course, it might have been a little easier to get and keep a teaching job back then as well, in which case I wouldn’t be in the IT equivalent.

18

Yeah, pretty much everyone of middle class and above had some sort of maid, housekeeper, or nanny of some sort.

But back then I think the average Mom could spend 40 hours a week on kitchen chores just cooking and cleaning up. Also laundry was an all-day task.

19

My former boss and mentor’s career is an interesting example. He started with a hitch in the Air Force doing electrical repair on B-52’s. He then went to work for Watson Sr. at IBM as a field service tech for 400-series tabulating machines. He ended up spending 40 years there until he took a buyout under Gerstner.

Before the Air Force, he pushed a mule at his father’s tobacco farm.

20

Some IT professionals would have been computers. :smiley: