@grimalkina@mastodon.social
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grimalkina

@grimalkina@mastodon.social

Social & Evidence Scientist. Defender of the mismeasured. 🦄🏳️‍🌈 she/they

I 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

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grimalkina, to random
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I can't figure out if this is a good blogpost topic or not, but I've been thinking about how many conversations I see about human behavior in software overindex on like, differences between people* and not within-individual variation**

Overall malleability of our own traits and states over time is fascinating and underexplored in a very essentialist kind of culture***

  • "all managers are like x"

** "some days I am like x and some days I am like y"

*** I find tech to be very essentialist

grimalkina,
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Possibly too niche to be useful, but what else is blogging for??

grimalkina,
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@tess yeah I can see that....the mental model that people are fixed and lifetime homogenous certainly seems like it would plausibly lead you to think such a situation would be attainable/easy/desired ...? Not sure I'm familiar enough with this variety of tech thinking :D Like, "if we forced people to use Real Names it would fix all poor online behavior"? That kind of thinking?

grimalkina,
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@kleaders oh lots of strengths-based literature in education would apply here. Does feel related like a true growth mindset/mastery orientation sees strengths and is nonpunitive about learning vs a mental model that says you're always trying to detect whether someone is the "wrong" group

grimalkina,
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@robryk sure, far different timescales are possible than that example! Like developmental lifespan changes you're thinking?

Can you give me a little more of an example or expand at all on "written in a way friendly to people who have a reductionist approach to reality"? What does such a person look like to you and what might you hope a piece of writing would do for them?

grimalkina,
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@complexmath yeah I think that's probably very true. I do think software engineering is in some specific ways both inside and outside of business tho

grimalkina,
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@complexmath Also I'm sorry you were treated that way while like, just trying to authentically express reality.

grimalkina,
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@PragmTeams 😭 ❤️

grimalkina,
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@tess ah yeah totally. Well I'm sure it would be very CONVENIENT for people to be the unit of analysis and for that unit of analysis to never change when you want people to be, you know, the currency. So liberating to see conversations as the unit of analysis instead or "people I get to be in this particular community" and so much closer to a social constructivist view of folks. Plus more accurate to the developmental lifespan

grimalkina,
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@gdinwiddie and a great example of the debates too (for example, you can use testing as a way to primarily focus on group differences but you can use dynamic testing that allows for mistake-feedback-retry and such types of tests provide a higher fidelity view of individuals)

grimalkina,
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@johana I'm so sorry you experienced that, it sounds incredibly hard for something that should have been met with much support and understanding! And indeed, so many unique important strengths that come from that understanding that our workplaces should value

grimalkina, to random
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What do you MEAN every single DAY I have to construct a sensory experience that works for me out of clothing 😭

grimalkina,
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@EVDHmn ❤️ I never thought of that, that is a really great tip thank you!!

I also have a lot of panic triggers because of chronic pain/recovering from breathing issues and temps absolutely make it worse. I am doing pretty well with mine though and wishing you all comfort and the same

Still figuring out shoes though 😬

grimalkina, to random
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Small structured experiments designed the right way force organizations to do something very radical: pre-commit to the evidence that we agree would force a change.

grimalkina,
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Yes, measuring stuff is objectively frustrating. Yes measures don't capture everything important (or even most important things in our experience). But you know what consistent measurements over time give you?

LEVERAGE

grimalkina,
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Better, design the (always not capturing everything) measurement plan before you're just swimming through a trash pile of everybody's post hoc justifications of everything.

A lot of scientific thinking is fundamentally about how we can mislead ourselves less and you should put that power to work for you.

grimalkina,
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@faassen what do you think would help people in this situation?

grimalkina,
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@dtauvdiodr @faassen I mean I think that could be framed any number of ways from "we will maintain some healthy flex and ambition and also not be hard on ourselves if we list a few too many things and don't hit all of them" (could be big or small tbh) all the way to "let's grind ubermax hard and force curve everybody so only a few ever win in this competition of endless do more with less". Not enough context in "OKR" to know what world we're living in.

grimalkina,
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@matthewskelton but as with all change making, you may also find engaging in this process teaches you that a place will never do it. That's illuminating information imo. But so many places are in the messy middle!

grimalkina,
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@matthewskelton truth. at the end of the day I think this is why 'the data people'/researchers/scientists and other roles where people are strongly committed to telling the truth about the world can be treated with such hostility and rarely get leadership roles. I see this brokering of early buy-in/agreement to structured experiments and evidence strategy as a way to protect ourselves and teach our allies how to prevent a culture from calcifying into no-evidence opinion land

grimalkina, to random
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This kind of thing has been around the block for a bit -- the reality in my opinion is that "programming ability" is simply not something we've defined and possibly not a single thing. The many decades of interest in predicting programming ability have sometimes succeeded at pushing against our stereotypes that it is math associated (as this work), but "math ability" is ALSO a fraught measure. It's important to bring a lot of context to the prediction of ability...

https://fosstodon.org/@yabellini/112470616882303876

grimalkina,
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To this paper's credit, for sure, they situate this work in a context that I strongly agree with. For instance the very real world problem that we gatekeep programming classes on advanced math prereqs with incredibly poor evidence for it, and while ignoring the huge cost this introduces because of the inequitable access to math. Like if the choice is "see programming ability more like language than like math" I am making that choice. There's just a lot to the entire search for neural correlates.

grimalkina,
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@Graffotti oh yeah same experience. I mean our beliefs about and education pipeline for math are essentially the poster child for the worst example of this stuff. I want us to fix how we think about math but while we haven't done that I also don't want math to keep getting to contaminate, pollute and destroy other pathways which it very much is

grimalkina, to random
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This One Weird Trick (seeking to surround myself with people who choose bravery and kindness over box ticking that is easily legible to HR) has never let me down

grimalkina, to random
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Not me, a person who hates unanswered questions, dropping an individual differences thread on a very controversial topic where putting out opinions will take deep scientific thought immediately before I launch into a very very busy day 😅

Anyway I'll get back to it this is just a slow work kind of topic not a hot take kind of topic 🤗❤️

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