Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

by Dame Stephanie Shirley

  I hate to think what some of our blue-chip clients would have thought, if they had fully taken in the fact that the expensive, sophisticated, state-of-the-art computer programmes they were buying from us were being created at home by women surrounded by babies and nappies. Yet there was a steely professionalism underlying everything we did. Just because we weren’t versed in the suitbound conventions of the male workplace, that didn’t mean that the intellects involved were any less incisive. And although our processes were improvised and homespun, they were remarkably rigorous.

  The freelance programmers, briefed by us, would write their programmes on coding sheets, as a series of numbers. (These would usually use the numbers 0 to 9 but would occasionally be in binary.) All they needed for this was a pencil, paper and “access to a telephone” (as we put it in our application questionnaire) so that they could resolve any queries with our managers as they went along. These hand-written numerical programmes would then be sent by post to an independent data centre, whose employees (also female, on the whole, but unconnected with us) would sit and punch the data on to punchcards or paper tape. This would then be verified by a different data centre employee, punching the whole thing again; after which the verified card or tape would be taken to a separate computer centre to be tried out. (Younger readers may find this hard to imagine, but hardly anyone had their own computer in those days.) As often as not a problem would arise at this stage, so where possible we would try to send the original programmer to the centre to fix it on the spot, rather than wait for the results to come back to us by post. An experienced programmer could often tell what was going on inside a mainframe computer just by listening to it.

  One crucial regular freelancer was a woman called Ailsa Turner, who wasn’t a programmer but, unusually for a woman in those days, had a car. She would act as a courier for important programmes and, when necessary, programmers, even doubling up as a mobile babysitter if the programmer needed to leave a child in the car while she worked briefly in the computer centre.

  Our system for managing our growing “panel” of freelance programmers had a similarly improvised, homespun feel. Each programmer would be represented by an index card, with a series of holes punched along its edges. Each hole represented a different kind of skill, either technical (along one side) or more general (along another). So on the technical side there would be holes representing different computer languages - FORTRAN, Cobol, BASIC, and so on - and on the general side holes representing areas of experience such as scheduling, or transport, or payroll. The holes that applied to that programmer (i.e., representing skills or experience she possessed) would be extended, so that they became open indentations. The rest would remain closed. All the cards - and there were getting on for 75 by the end of 1966 - would be kept in a shoebox. Then, when we wanted to find programmers with appropriate experience for a particular job, we would take them all out, put a knitting-needle through the appropriate holes for the entire set, and jiggle the cards vigorously. Those with the right combination of open holes (for example, representing knowledge of Cobol 3 and experience of distribution systems) would fall out .

  It sounds ridiculous now, yet I remember our card system fondly: not just as a symbol of my company’s modest beginnings but also as a neat demonstration of what I mean by systems. A system can be anything from a computer programme to a physical arrangement of objects but is often somewhere between the two: in effect, an arrangement of ideas or concepts that facilitates efficiency. As Freelance Programmers grew, so, increasingly, the “product” that we sold became systems rather than mere programmes.

  And one unexpected benefit of not having a conventional office and a conventional hierarchy - and thus having to create our own systems from scratch - was that, as we learnt to organise ourselves more efficiently, so we became better able to advise others on how to organise things. I don’t think the phrase “management consultant” would have meant anything to me in those days, but I do remember thinking, after one visit to the Mars factory, that what they were paying me for was not so much my programming expertise as my insights into how their operations worked. This struck me as a rather exciting development.

  As with any business that thrives, success created its own momentum. Word spread through the small world of the computer-literate that there was a company in Buckinghamshire that offered interesting, flexible, rewarding employment to women working from home. Highly qualified people began to seek us out. Some were more suitable than others; and some more available than others. Some wanted work only seasonally. (I had one very good programmer who ran a boating business in the summer but wanted something else for the rest of the year.) Others were available subject to something better not turning up. (One of our best programmers had aspirations to be an opera singer, which meant regular absences for auditions but, luckily for us, few big parts.) On balance, however, the supply of workers seemed to match our demand for work. By 1966, we had relationships with (as I have already mentioned) about 75 regular freelancers, of whom some were working more or less constantly while others were happy to go for long periods between assignments. This meant that we never had to turn business down because of lack of capacity - a huge bonus for a growing enterprise. The only job I can remember turning down was a proposal from a company called EMCON (Economic and Mathematical Consultants) for designing an automated fingerprint recognition system. I simply couldn’t see how it could be done (and, indeed, it would be 20 years before anyone else cracked the problem).

  It worked in our favour that there was scarcely any other part-time work available in those days that offered the slightest intellectual challenge - and most women, then as now, had at least a stage in their lives when part-time work was the only kind of work they could do. For intelligent, numerate women in mid-1960s Britain, Freelance Programmers was a godsend. (And not just in Britain: I even had an enquiry from a Middle-Eastern potentate wondering if we had any opportunities for women in his harem.)

  One key recruit around this time was a case in point. Ann Leach (later Moffatt) had been working as a programmer for about six years, mostly for Kodak, for whom she had programmed a Ferranti Pegasus (the same early computer that I’d used for testing ERNIE) to determine optimum strategies for streamlining production process, locating distribution centres and optimising products to match market demands. She had also worked on loan for Ferranti themselves, for whom she had helped create the pioneering operating system for the Atlas computer (the forerunner of the IBM 158). She was, in short, one of Britain’s top programmers. But she had become disillusioned when, as she saw it, the traditional male managers at Kodak realised what an impact computerisation was having on the company’s balance sheet and began to muscle in on the territory that she had opened up. Programmers like Ann were in effect pushed down the hierarchy, to be ordered around by self-serving corporate types who knew far less about software than she did. She had left Kodak when her first child was born, in early 1965, but now was looking for interesting work again. Freelance Programmers met her needs perfectly.

  But she met our needs perfectly too. We had just been given a large contract by GEC to write programmes that would analyse the “black box” flight recorder for an exciting new aeroplane, then under development, called Concorde. The software - for two purpose-built computers - needed to perform statistical analyses in the outputs of some 40,000 different instruments on the plane. Ann was one of the few people in Britain capable of leading such a project, and she did so very successfully, completing the £40,000 assignment on time and slightly under budget.

  Our programmers weren’t especially well-paid on an hour-for-hour basis. But the quantity and the quality of the work meant that they generally did well out of the relationship. One very respectable lady was suspected by the Inland Revenue of being involved in some kind of vice: they couldn’t imagine how else she could earn what she was earning without leaving her home. In fact, Suzette Harold - who would later play a cru
cial role in the company’s growth - was one of the most upright and respectable people I have ever met. But the Inland Revenue was even more male-dominated than the computer industry. Both groups of men were too blinded by prejudice to notice the obvious: that many of Britain’s most brilliant and reliable programmers were female. This general blindness was our opportunity.

  In fact, not quite everyone who worked for Freelance Programmers was female. One valued early employee was Jim Hawkins, who had previously been personnel manager at CDL. A former Army officer, he had left that job after suffering a nervous breakdown, and had feared that, despite his subsequent recovery, he would never work again. But I had admired his conscientiousness and honesty, and when I needed someone to oversee staffing matters I offered him a job. He was deeply moved and repaid me with three vital years of dedicated and sometimes inspired service.

  Another male employee was John Stevens, whom I hired in 1965 as our first full-time project manager. John was a would-be Liberal politician who had taken up programming because he thought it would provide him with employment in between elections. I had first met him when I needed a crash-course in FORTRAN for the Castrol project. He now became an influential colleague and friend. A passionate believer in the extension of share ownership, he contributed a new strand of idealism to our already rather utopian enterprise, opening my mind to the idea that there were other ways of structuring a company beyond the traditional top-down proprietor-staff relationship. Ultimately, the ideal of staff ownership that he explained to me would become as central to the company’s ethos as the empowerment of women, although this was still many years away. But John’s radicalism, combined with my innocence, did mean that, even then, our company worked in a very different way from what was then the norm.

  Elsewhere in the industry - and indeed in British business generally - people were still clocking in and out, and having their pay docked if they took too long over their lunch break. We paid people for the work they accomplished rather than the hours they put in. Compared with a conventional company, we were treating our freelancers like adults: trusting them, as intelligent, motivated people, to make the best use of the time available to them in order to achieve the goals they had been set. In modern management-speak, they “owned” the projects that had been assigned to them - which was a relatively small step from the idea that they should also participate in the ownership of the company. We introduced our first profit-sharing scheme in 1966.

  I think my receptiveness to John Stevens’s idealism may partly have been prompted by guilt at the changes that I had been forced to introduce to the way we paid people. My instinct still told me that it was fairer to pay people once they had completed the work they had been hired to do, rather than “gearing” the payment of their fees to the clients’ payment of our fees. I knew that there was no realistic alternative to gearing, but I felt better about it when I knew that our freelancers also had a stake in the financial well-being of the company.

  I suspect, however, that the most important factor that shaped Freelance Programmers in its early years was, simply, my naivety. Deep down, I still didn’t know what I was doing. Not knowing what the rules were, I was free to innovate - as, indeed, was everyone else involved. Our long-term patterns of flexible home-working and remote management came about not just from theoretical idealism but also from practical necessity. They evolved because they were what worked. Paying for work done rather than hours worked made it easier to cost projects in advance; trusting people to manage their own time was not just effective but considerably easier than trying to keep control of every detail of every project remotely. It helped that there were so many high-powered programmers out there, who were available simply because more conventional companies disliked employing women with dependants. It also helped, I think, that they were women - who traditionally take responsibility for running family and home and, as a result, tend to develop finely honed self-management skills.

  We had a collective naivety, too, which on balance worked in our favour. Pointed musings by potential clients about cars and holidays fell on deaf ears because none of us realised that they were intended to elicit bribes. We didn’t get the business in question, and we were better off without it. Another time, we blew the whistle on a senior civil servant who explicitly asked for a bribe while we were negotiating for a contract with the Department of Health; it was a long time before we got any more work from that quarter. It never occurred to us to behave otherwise. We were normal, decent people, and no one had told us that, in business, many people feel that the normal rules of decent behaviour don’t apply. The consequent short-term loss for our balance sheet was more than off-set by the long-term gain for our reputation. Another time, we were bidding with IBM to a major government department that then asked us to team up with ICL instead. We refused - and IBM were so impressed by our loyalty that they went out of their way to partner us on a number of other projects.

  It is startling, looking back, to think how many of the characteristics that came to define us as a company evolved by accident. For example, we were one of the very first companies to allow job-sharing - something for which we were later much admired. We did so for the simple reason that a husband-and-wife team suggested it. “Why not?” we thought; and another innovation was added to the Freelance Programmers repertoire of employment practices.

  But that was what made it such a rewarding company to work for: a lot of the things we were doing were things that had scarcely been imagined before, let alone done. None of us knew where the business - or the industry, for that matter - was going. We never looked further than the next project, asking ourselves: “How could we do this?” or “How could we do that?” And that was one of the main reasons for our success.

  Of course, the more projects and programmers we took on, the more scope there was for things to go wrong. Inevitably, the bigger the projects that we took on, the more I worried that a small slip might lead to disaster. (The Concorde black box project was one that concerned me particularly in this respect.) But one of our accidental strengths was the fact that our lack of resources forced us to be relatively conservative in our use of software. We tried to keep abreast of new programming developments, but we couldn’t keep training people in every latest cutting-edge innovation. So our software tended to be tried-and-tested rather than experimental; and, as a result, we acquired an enviable reputation for reliability. We might not have been pushing back the frontiers of computer science, but we knew how to design systems, we knew how to control the quality of our work, and we knew how to run projects efficiently.

  But the possibility of programming errors wasn’t the only thing we had to worry about. There was also the fear that a small mistake in costing might plunge us into the red. One such mistake involved a project for Sheffield Regional Hospital Board, who paid us £16,000 for a project and were very satisfied with the result. Unfortunately (because we had agreed a fixed price, while they had kept changing their mind about what they wanted), our direct costs for the work came to more than £24,000. A few more satisfied customers like that could have killed the company off.

  There was also the question of getting our customers to pay up in a reasonable time. The Concorde job for GEC was a particularly bad example of the problems we faced. They took so long over part of their payment - £20,000 of it - that eventually I was reduced to visiting their headquarters in Mayfair and demanding to see Arnold (late Lord) Weinstock, their managing director, who was notorious for being a slow payer. I made a considerable nuisance of myself but didn’t quite succeed in getting into his office. But I did persuade a senior executive to take a message into him and, later that day, received his reply: “Tell Mrs Shirley that £20,000 is a significant sum for any business and that if she cares to come round tomorrow there will be a cheque waiting for her.”

  There was. So that was that problem sorted out. But GEC’s contract was just one among many, and I really could have don
e without devoting whole days of my time to debt-collecting.

  There were times when I simply lay awake at night worrying, but at least I was able to alleviate such worries by putting in place more rigid and robust systems - for monitoring progress, for checking quality and for controlling costs. Luckily, we were still at a stage in our development when it was relatively straightforward to do this. And, in the meantime, most of the debts came in more or less on time, income just about exceeded outgoings, and the feared disasters never materialised. Imperceptibly, Freelance Programmers Limited was beginning to acquire the solidity of an established, reliable company.

  But that was by no means the end of my sleepless nights. Unfortunately, it was not just the company that I was worrying about.

  9: The Lost Boy

  The catastrophe had crept up on us. It must have been in early 1964 - when he was about eight months old - that we first began to worry, on and off, that perhaps Giles was a bit slow in his development: not physically, but in his behaviour. He was slow to crawl, slow to walk, slow to talk; he seemed almost reluctant to engage with the world around him. These concerns took time to crystallise - as such concerns generally do - and the first time I went to a doctor about them I couldn’t even admit to myself what was worrying me. Instead, I asked about the “funny shape” of his head - which at the time was rather flat at the back - and I remember the slightly odd answer: “It will get worse before it gets better.” This turned out to be correct. It was, however, a red herring. What I was really concerned about was not the shape of Giles’s head but what was going on inside it.