I think the point of the article was that it used to be more common back in the 60’s and 70’s for programmers to work on data problems. From basic stuff like census tabulation or designing file systems, to creating trigonometry or t-statistic tables, to AI.

There was less specialisation, less of a divorce between programmers and users.

There also seemed to be a conflation of computing and AI back then. Lisp was considered AI. And the early computing pioneers and theorists were strongly interested in AI, logic, and mathematics.