Nathan Ensmenger is a historian of computing and Associate Professor and Chair of Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, where he also holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. He earned his PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (MIT Press, 2010), a landmark social and labor history that shifted the story of computing away from machines and famous inventors and toward the largely anonymous programmers, systems analysts, and technical workers who actually built it. He is also co-author of the widely used textbook Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Westview Press), and has written extensively on the gendering of technical work, including the essay "Making Programming Masculine" and "'Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism': Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions" (Osiris, 2015).
In this conversation, we trace one of the sharpest and most unsettling arguments in The Computer Boys Take Over: that the familiar stereotype of the antisocial, mathematically-gifted male programmer wasn't simply discovered by the computer industry — it was manufactured, through a decades-long feedback loop of unvalidated hiring tests and personality profiles. We talk about the 1960s programmer shortage that made mass psychometric testing feel necessary, the strange science behind instruments like the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test, how a hiring apparatus quietly became a gender filter, and why that history still echoes in the whiteboard and take-home coding tests of today. ATT #003 — Aryan Talks Tech
