Here's my story, from 10 years before an IMSAI-8080 was on my desk.
I was working in the back office of a stock brokerage as a figure clerk. We had an IBM 360, fed by an army of punch operators. I found out we had one guy whose entire job was to compute the commission on bond trades. He used a mechanical calculator, and every time a bond trade was done somewhere in the world by our traders, he would fill out a form with the correct commission.
I asked him what his procedure was. He had a very simple formula, not much more than A * B, lookup in a table, multiply by C, and there you have it. Next transaction...
Although my entire experience with computers was remembering not to spindle or mutilate my electric bill, it seemed obvious to me that a computer, even the lowly 360, could handle the job. So I went to the IT department and explained it.
Mr. IT boss thought it might be a good idea. He asked me to write down each step in detail so they could consider implementing it. He wanted something like "Take value A, multiply it by value B..." If I didn't do this, he had no interest.
I realized that I was being asked to program his IBM360, something that highly paid "priests" were doing in an isolated environment. So I applied for a job in the IT department -- if I was going to be doing their work for them, I wanted to be paid appropriately, and I envisioned a short learning curve.
I was turned down, since I didn't have a computer science degree, an absolute prerequisite. So I quit.
A few years later, I was offered a job at a large missile-guidance company as a Senior Software Engineer. I still didn't have that Computer Science degree, but I took it.
The moral? Some people think inflexible, obsolete job requirements are more important than innovation and initiative. The brokerage went out of business years ago.
