Always surprised when basic observations from the disparity toolkit gets boosted but I forget not everyone does social science 🙂 when you work with education data, achievement data, and anything STEM education these kinds of effects are pervasive so of course they show up in software communities as well. I have a great bookmarks folder for studies on these effects I named Gender Delusions lol I should share that syllabus sometime.
@mononcqc@RainofTerra thank you for your patience, my brain is SO not great at remembering names online 😂
This is so lovely and means the world to us. Thank you for bringing your writing, thinking and time to this and being a model for how to open up that convo with teams!
@CSLee will be thrilled. "It's not just you" is really the heart of this whole line of work.
@RainofTerra@mononcqc@CSLee I think there is a need for a lot more work on what staff/principal etc engineers experience rather than just being like "they should know everything" I mean GIVING feedback is also very hard and shouldering so much mentorship responsibility is also something that deserves psychological support
I stumbled across this post while looking for our workbook and omg! What a very thoughtful and understanding summary of our code review anxiety paper, model, and takeaways. I don't know this person to tag them but 👏👏👏
A public service announcement with an expiration date: if you've loved my writing and science, I have a book proposal+sample chapter out on submission right now. The pitch is "The Psychology of Software Teams": a general audience, warmly human, accessible book for teams, leaders, and curious minds, filled to the brim with practitioner stories AND the new empirical social science of technology innovation. 🙌❤️
Let me know if you know editors who might be interested in this uniquely cool project.
"Developers may subsequently procrastinate on code reviews and limit their cognitive engagement and receptiveness to feedback (e.g. by “rubber stamping” or skimming through feedback quickly instead of thinking about how they can learn from the feedback) as they “check out” to reduce their anxiety in the moment (avoidance)."
I can't figure out if mastodon is a high context culture or not. People seem to be expected to give long introductions and do a lot of identity/positionality disclosure, but also an enormous reply guy culture which is defined by low context drive-by. Conversational turn-taking is extremely low compared to other platforms ime, but depth-seeking is high. What an interesting mix.
*obviously, these experiences are all situated within my own network effects, and I'm not well networked here.
"Using relevant personal experiences, employees collect information regarding trade-offs between safety and productivity issues, attending mostly to situations presenting a conflict between the two. Practically speaking, if productivity is favored across a variety of situations, implying a higher priority, it will promote a poor safety climate, leading employees to align their behaviors accordingly."
"When people are treated unfairly, for example, when they are not allowed to have input into decisions that will affect them, or when they are not given good explanations of why certain decisions were made, the symbolic message may be that the organization does not think highly enough of them (to provide input or to be given good explanations)."
There are however two sides to this -- much research on organizational fairness concentrates entirely on the "top-down and static approach" (Brockner & Sherman, 2019) of how managers impact their direct reports, but not how direct reports influence their managers. Particularly in knowledge work where technical credibility testing is high, I believe those bidirectional relationships are very impactful. Vicious or virtuous cycles make all the difference
"one way to fulfill the promise of onboarding employees in a self-affirming way is for organizations to allow for job crafting (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001), which refers to employee-initiated changes in how they do their work." - Brockner & Sherman
I've been noodling on this for a long while, since thinking about the role Agency plays in Developer Thriving (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10491133 ) -- it would be cool to measure how much job crafting folks feel like they have or don't have on software teams
"Messages from managers are impactful not only during the hiring process, but also throughout employees’ tenure. Managerial trickle-down effects have been found in several literatures in organizational behavior (e.g., Wo, Ambrose, & Schminke, 2015), which show that managers at lower levels tend to treat their direct reports similarly to how they have been treated by their own bosses." - Brockner & Sherman, 2019, again
The overall literature on how employees contextualize and interpret trade-offs between potentially conflicting goals seems like...a big one for software to start to understand better. Safety/productivity trade-offs and conflicts are well studied in other areas, and there are even tested interventions -- e.g., improving the communication between management and direct reports in manufacturing! I suppose software considers itself above such areas of psychology
"to foster positive work attitudes and behaviors in their direct reports managers have a dual fairness challenge: (1) to treat their direct reports fairly, and (2) to create conditions in which their direct reports treat one another fairly.
Indeed, the findings of Bendersky and Brockner suggest that the failure of managers to do the latter may counteract the success they achieved by doing the former." (Brockner & Sherman, 2019)
Organizational fairness exists upwards and downwards, but critically: LATERALLY. Peers can be a source of *protection* and *repair* after negative mistreatment from authorities, but conversely, mistreatment from peers can also undo the good done by fair leadership (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/job.2441). We are all in it together, no one is separate from this
This is good for individuals, not just organizations: for example when individuals are able to exercise compassionate interpretations of their managers ("perhaps my boss never had the training to deal with this situation and he doesn't have the information I have") they are more likely to intervene, self-advocate, and also suffer fewer harms to themselves because being able to go through reappraisal can de-escalate the stress and burden of a situation (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-45081-001)
It's 2024 and I still can't accurately represent the health conditions I have because of covid in a regular primary care pre-screening. Wild. Just like every complex patient my data is shunted away into text boxes that are probably never read and certainly never included in the research that scrapes through pre-defined categories on forms like this.
Social & Evidence Scientist. Defender of the mismeasured. 🦄🏳️🌈 she/theyI do #psychology and #measurement theory and #research with #software teams on how developers thrive. My focus areas include how people form beliefs about #learning and build strategies for #resilience #productivity & #motivation. Quant Psych PhD (but with a love for qual) and VP of Getting Tech to Do Real Open Science.Founder of the Developer Success Lab ❤️Neighborhood Cool Science Aunt