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Comment by boondoggle16 | Hacker News Reader

Sure they used their brains. But "brains behind the operation" is a term of art.

Is the McDonald's cashier the "brains behind the operation" because they count change as part of their duties?

Counting change accurately is very important to the continued successful operation of a retail establishment. But it's menial work.

Even Wikipedia agrees with me:

> Alan Turing described the "human computer" as someone who is "supposed to be following fixed rules; he has no authority to deviate from them in any detail."

I think the term "human computer" is extremely misleading without the cultural context behind the term, i.e. that these people were essentially doing 5th grade math worksheets all day. Reading numbers, plugging them into a calculator (yes, really), and writing down the results.

Usually we call these mechanical turks?

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“The reason that these pre-electronic computation jobs were feminized is they were seen as rote and de-skilled,” says Mar Hicks, a historian and author of Programmed Inequality. It wasn’t true, though: “In a lot of cases, the women doing these computation jobs actually had to have pretty advanced math skills and math training, especially if they were doing very complex calculations.”

The work could require superhuman endurance, though. “They had to keep working eight hours a day doing the same equation over and over again—it must have been mind-numbing,” notes Paul Ceruzzi, author of Reckoners: The Prehistory of the Digital Computer.

from [this](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...) article

If I take the words of Alan Turing then your interpretation of menial work, then programming is menial work too. You have fixed rules that you can't deviate from. Is all programming really menial? I would argue that it can be very mentally taxing, the same way math or any intellectual work can be.

From the same [article](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...) (during the space race)

At its bases, NASA employed nearly 80 black women as computers, says Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures. One of them, Katherine Johnson, was so revered for her abilities that in 1962, John Glenn asked her to personally verify the flight path of his first launch into space on the Friendship 7 mission. The astronauts didn’t trust the newfangled digital computers, which were prone to crashing. Glenn wanted human eyes on the problem.

“They had a tremendous amount of respect for these women and their mathematical abilities,” says Shetterly. “The male engineers often were not good mathematicians. So the women made their work possible.” Still, some friction existed. Women who asked for promotions got stonewalled or turned down: “For women who wanted to move up, who wanted to be supervisors—particularly if that involves supervising men? Not so much.”

The women wouldn't have been employed without the engineering work, but the engineering work wouldn't have been possible without these women. They were equally the brains behind getting things to space. A sizable number of these women later became programmers, because building the computers was seen as the really difficult task. Coding was dull work. Writing code that gets people safely to the moon and back was obviously trivial.

> But "brains behind the operation" is a term of art.

Which art?

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