She had to fight to convince people that programs could be written in English-like words, her colleagues thought the idea was absurd because "computers don't understand English."
The hardware was the prestigious work, the programming was considered clerical.
That framing took decades to reverse.
The transition period where patch cables and stored programs coexisted is one of the most interesting eras in computing history.
I kind of think she was at White Sands at the time, so... maybe look at what White Sands was using for missile trajectory calculations around 1954 or 1955?
Programming the IBM ASCC (a.k.a. Harvard Mark I) was much closer to the programming a modern computer in comparison with ENIAC, as it had an instruction set and programmers wrote a sequence of instructions on punched tapes. However even ASCC had some panel where it was possible to rewire some of the execution units to change their behavior, i.e. to change what some of the instructions from the instruction set did, but that was not the primary means for programming the computer. In ASCC the rewiring was akin to the microprogramming available in some later electronic computers, where you could change what some instructions did or you could add custom instructions.
Among the programmers of the IBM ASCC, Grace Hopper became later famous due to her contributions to the first high-level programming languages.
Therefore the profession of programmer has not started with ENIAC, even if the ENIAC programmers were among the first programmers.
They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself.
It took another decade before FORTRAN (1957) gave programmers a way to write instructions in something resembling human language.