Notices by Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)

I have been thinking a lot about how the purpose of much tech Conversation -- all these blogs, all this content production -- is not so much to propose actual solutions to anything, but to provide a certain form of social credentialing to its players

@aral appreciate you ❤️

More on Ashley's work here: https://ashleyjuavinett.com/

Also just appreciate the support from my community here. Every day we have been feeling the threat and loss (many things I can't post publicly about given the need to prioritize so many people's safety right now and all our scientist community's very real fears of being made a target). Just knowing that people still see and support both of our work is really helpful to maintaining the hope as funding and institutions seem to vanish

I can't put into words how it feels to see my wife's extraordinary work increasing diversity in STEM be targeted so explicitly and punitively by the most powerful forces in our country; at the same time I can see the chilling that is happening for social scientists like me who study topics that directly engage with psychological wellbeing and adversity. This is the work we both love and we are not going to give it up. We are both committed to that work benefiting our community

Ashley's work is transformative. At UCSD she's created, from scratch, a milestone neurobiology lab that gives critical lab skills that unlock a plethora of STEM careers. She's led the STARTneuro program which funded & graduated something like 40+ students all still working in science; she's created neural data science & discipline-based programming courses she now teaches other teachers to lead. She's rocketed through tenure with acceleration at every step. She is truly a unicorn in STEM

There's not really a playbook for putting this kind of conversation on social media so I appreciate your kindness! Just sharing, we have no entitlement about this, we understand the deep difficulty. I have family across four countries. I have a half Canadian family and for many years we have considered moving in that direction; we're really broadly open though with an obvious need for LGBTQ+ safety and a desire for us both to live in a place where our work can go as far as we can make it go.

Going to put this out there in light of news of other researchers moving, because I think information sharing in our communities is a form of power, but Ashley and I are looking at opportunities outside of the US right now and considering it. I want to signal our openness to it.

Especially for her, as a tenured teaching professor in neurobiology whose entire lab & teaching practice is deeply grounded in equity & increasing success in STEM. Her extraordinary work makes local communities flourish

Me: "I've been thinking a lot about both how we try to operationalize but then also make inferences from the rate of work, when the work itself is ill defined..."

My friends, supportively, "I bet that's really useful. To somebody. Who's doing whatever this is"

"So there's this thing called cycle time...."

It's really funny trying to talk to some of my friends about my latest software research papers because I just come off like this person with a really niche and bizarre hobby

Between life and death there is but a thin veil. It's called lung tissue!

chronic illness girlie? I prefer to call it Indoctrinated Into the Sisterhood of Knowing Too Much. Capable of Visualizing Interactions We Were Not Meant to Parse. Viewer of the Internal Screens. Oracle of Aging. Quietly Making That Oh Boy Face When Young People Vape

I know too much about the respiratory system. I never needed to know all this.

These are the people you defund, this is the work you destroy, when you gut the NIH & the NSF & the scientific infrastructure. And by the way, when you gut "diversity in science," you gut work that lets us understand women's brains (an explicit focus for a tiny fraction of neuroscience research)

She no longer has confidence that we'll continue to get the kind of progress on brain diseases we've been getting; we already know multiple labs that have had to shut down their research programs entirely.

My neuroscientist wife, whose vital, necessary and compassionate scientific work directly increasing the number of scientists we have in this country has been threatened and defunded by the current administration, is currently conducting a lit review to help a loved one diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

you gut children's future opportunities (better tell those kids to stop imagining they could be scientists if you're not ready to fund them yourself), & I suppose folks don't care about this, but it destroys the careers of the kindest, most hard-working, & most intelligent people I've ever known

And why care about that? Well, because they're powerful....AND changeable. Many factors that have been proposed as key factors in developer experience, or as correlates of development outcomes, do NOT show promise as intervention targets. Our work tests factors that do: ability beliefs are malleable and have been the subject of many promising interventions

Why read this? Reflected in the new title: because the structure of developers' beliefs about software development ability impacts their psychological resilience during rapid technology shift.

To my knowledge while this connection has been lightly speculated in a few works, this is the first empirical software research that directly set out to characterize how a multidimensional network of ability beliefs can operate here, drawing from the psychological sciences, to change developer experience