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.