Notices by Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)

According to my very scientific study, our paper has a 67% chance of somewhat to critically derailing a reader from their important work tasks. This is actually a really big deal Developer Productivity metric you may not have heard of called Suddenly Held Interest No Yikes (SHINY). Little known fact that a healthy environment for devs needs enough SHINY objects

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/113534028177690393

@phaedral @anthrocypher yeah totally! I think there are several folksy variants of this :)

@phaedral @anthrocypher yeah absolutely. The grasshopper leg problem is evident in software research (aka, take a grasshopper, pull off legs one by one, and then when it inevitably falls down take the last leg you pulled and say ah ha! This is the critical leg)

And yah. We're certainly all trapped in capitalism. Although comparisons *within* our system and across time are still informative I think

Every single day these days, a friend in science has despair over their funding, my friends in fed agencies doing vital work monitoring things like our ocean health are making plans to be laid off, fear for the people I love most on this earth becoming targets because they are marginalized people who publish constantly on diversity and equity in science, it is simply overwhelming.

A preprint about a more inclusive model of developer ability may only be a tiny push against this but still --

-- it reminds me that our voices are here, that they matter, and every push for more open science matters, and more access to better information and tools to push for consideration and protection and support matters. There is still power and agency in being a scientist, even though I feel deeply that this era has turned against science and against scientists.

Here's that talk: https://www.drcathicks.com/post/the-most-personal-talk-i-ve-ever-given-in-tech

I shared a little bit in this talk about why having a perspective from outside of the education system gave me a sense of mission and clarity of survival: how we think about human ability matters, and the human ability we DON'T SEE is one of the great challenges for society

I want you to know it's not inevitable that work like this happens and stories like this get told. It's writing and reading endless papers on nights and weekends (I read papers for weeks and weeks for this one!), it's uncomfortable or even hostile encounters in this industry sometimes with people who want to diminish social science, it is persistence on and on and on.

I hope you'll share our ideas out loud and name us when you do, because I think that matters. ❤️

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tfjyw

Having a language and a toolkit to describe what matters to us and what we have lived through is vital. I think that software engineering, as a global endeavor, as a transforming field, deserves better than our cold, chilly stereotypes about "programming brains" and destructive contest cultures. I think it matters not just because it is "nice" (although it is!!) but because this is the ONLY way we get to a healthy ecosystem of innovation. And I think a lot of people in software want this too.

All fields are imperfect and all science is a human endeavor, and so psychology is an imperfect human endeavor (that is why in our preprint, I explicitly acknowledge that while we are critiquing a general individualistic model of developer ability that is pervasive in tech, you can trace the ORIGINS of that model TO PSYCHOLOGY and our own constructs applied too broadly -- shared heritage! Shared failures!). Yet it is so much bigger than a single effect, or a single finding, cherrypicked

I would have to claw my way into education and then navigate years of schooling to gain access to the tools of psychology that explained my experience, but now I have words for so many of the things I had seen for myself and for the adversity-surviving kids around me, the kids I tutored as we all tried to stay in school together: psychology had words like identity threat, and psychology had evidence about "noncognitive factors" and "domain specific cognition."

Le Guin writes, in the essay that we pulled a quote from to begin our preprint: "Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all."

Chills every time I read this.
I will tell you what. This is how we should read the "evidence" about human ability -- it has been applied *backward*, to justify exclusion, not to learn.

I said for the last three years (thinking about the waves of discourse in tech on this) but really, the story of this paper starts far, far further back, to the beginning of my interest in psychology and in the measurement of human ability, which I confronted when I had to take a standardized test for the first time, as I shared about in a talk at Monktoberfest (link below)

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/113521762777915059

if you ever use one of these in a talk or something I will send you an autographed copy of this paper hahahah

She must be stopped

This is my hope anyway

@phaedral not gonna lie @anthrocypher and I did talk about this paper as Thanksgiving reading

(paper here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tfjyw )

This is my ABSOLUTE favorite this IS the energy I bring to the party

This one only makes sense if you've had to listen to the claims about Engineering Brains that I've had to listen to for the last three years, we're losing it out here

Here is our newest preprint (me + @anthrocypher ) in memes (sorry)