@grimalkina I'm not a full time developer (I worked 80% part time and I'm currently on a career break after suffering burnout anyway) so as a data point as to why you might have fewer non-men's voices here...
Good luck with the research though. The software industry sucks for gender minorities at the moment and I'm glad there are folks around trying to make it better.
@grimalkina i think if the research design is flawed to that degree then expecting women and nb people to give their labour for free to fix it so a for profit company can tick its EDI box is a little rich
@grimalkina Hi, happy to boost, but I would like to request a clarification. There's a section to provide my name and email "as a follow-up to the survey" – I would like to see the results of the survey, but this section doesn't say whether my name and email will be linked to my responses or not. I would hope not, but without that assurance I am not comfortable providing my name and email during the survey. Could you add a disclaimer to that section? Also, will results be shared here?
@grimalkina Have you considered that you may get an even larger share of female software developers if you drop the full-time requirement? Mothers in particular work above average part-time only.
@grimalkina if you have the capacity to give me 280 or fewer characters (including the url) I’d be happy to share this on t2.social (full of tech people!). totally understand if you don’t! (I don’t!)
@grimalkina The questions felt like they were asking about people working in a very different environment to me and my team. We are very, aggressively collaborative, and everyone's success is dependent on the entire team
The individualist vibe of the question did not feel right
I'm also on the edge of your definition; i write a lot of code but for databases and analytics, and do information system engineering, but not stand alone application development
@vivienhessel we are specifically recruiting for more responses from these two different groups, in order to meet our goals to represent both of these groups in this research. They are not combined in survey items on identity.
@grimalkina as a nonbinary trans man in tech a) I filled this out and b) I am compelled to point out that in tech, trans men are an extreme minority and often overlooked because of a misperception that we enjoy the same level of privilege as cis men do. "Women and nonbinary" is a phrase that always makes me feel... invisible, lesser, unwanted.
@spacelogic we are specifically recruiting for women and nonbinary people, which is not intended to be the same as calling for transgender folks or inclusive of all possible identities which are also important to measure. This is not a call that lumps these groups together but specifically looking for both women and nonbinary participants because of our recruitment goals for those groups.
@spacelogic throughout our research, we do specifically provide demographic options for responses from transgender men, and we do look at this group where possible in our analyses. We do not combine these responses with responses from cisgender men.
@grimalkina@spacelogic then I suggest a term other than "women and nonbinary" would get across who you actually mean better. It's a somewhat... loaded phrase, for a lot of the people I know.
@grimalkina@spacelogic why are trans men's voices not relevant? Why is the smallest minority not a subject of interest? What makes me as a nonbinary person interesting but me as a trans man, who went from being supported as a "girl in STEM" to being explicitly and implicitly excluded from gender-minority groups and spaces, undesirable?
@spacelogic I'm afraid I'm not following this critique. Participants of any identities are welcome to our research, as I've linked to in past research in the thread here. Eg there are many transgender & genderfluid participants in our studies, & I'm only posting here specifically about certain groups because we already have met goals for other groups
Participants are also welcome to choose multiple identity options OR write their own, & we include all of these important experiences in findings
@grimalkina@spacelogic let me back up a little bit. You urged more "women and nonbinary" to take the thing because of a need for diverse voices on a hot topic. People, especially in the industry, often use "women and nonbinary" as a shorthand for "people of marginalized genders" but it also erases trans men, and people who use the term often view nonbinary people as a sort of "women-lite". Are you saying you already got enough trans men but not other marginalized genders?
@phrees I am an applied researcher working in tech actually! I assume you're talking about my consultancy which takes on occasional contracts for applied research. This is not that -- this is from my research lab which is at Pluralsight (similar to Microsoft research, we are a lab of PhDs funded by a company). See more at https://www.pluralsight.com/product/flow/developer-success-lab -- we do foundational social science research, not market research, and publish studies along with open educational outreach about our research.
@grimalkina One could use the vocative if that helps. :)
O Pluralsight, why is PII required to download research? Why are we required to consent to marketing uses of that PII before we can download?
When I see an organization publishing research on its own site with no journal links and with access via signup to a sales funnel I have a hard time taking it seriously. Removing the signup would make people like me more likely to share.
@phrees Sorry, I know our website needs a redesign and I'm working with the resources I have. But the VAST majority of the content I have produced is open -- the optional sign-up that you can do to access a white paper is just for our executive-facing materials that include additional graphics and such. See below post for examples of the ungated, including arxiv posts.
We're a young lab so we're still working on our publishing.
@phrees It's your prerogative what you take seriously, but as a PhD who left academia to work with nonprofits, schools, and do community-based methods, I am proud of the work we've put out and I believe there is room for good work from researchers at companies.
@grimalkina I suggest you have a naive user you trust look for your ungated materials and that you also look at the bounce rates on your subsite. It will give you a feel for how much impact the current site design is having on effective dissemination.
One area I'd have liked to have seen covered in the Developer Thriving paper is neurodiversity. Do you have any plans to include that in future research?
@leoniensieger our eligibility item should help with this -- we are recruiting for people who say they are responsible for technical code work in their role and would call themselves an IC engineer, developer, or software developer, or a manager or leader of the same. If none of those eligibility items apply to you, you can still sign up to receive results of this study and invites to future research (& you can also contribute your job or role, we maintain a list of other roles to reach out to)
@grimalkina@leoniensieger thank you very much. This just doesn't help me much with the definition of "fulltime professional". Would you specify this too, please?
@grimalkina Sorry, but this doesn't help me. I am a lateral entrant, programming new things is a necessary but small part of my job, I have no idea if I should call myself software developer.
Wikipedia tells me: "A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs."
I don't feel like these terms are usually used interchangeably. But if everyone who programs anything is a software developer, then yes.
@grimalkina I love your pic! Are you a superhero? Also, will this involve downloading anything to my box? Because that’s just not going to happen. It’s not that I don’t trust you but I don’t trust you.
@piratero this is just a survey hosted on Qualtrics, a widely used professional and academic survey platform. Their policies are available and no downloads that I'm aware of. Your trust is obviously your own prerogative!
@CoffeeClicker it is important to study what people are experiencing, including their negative experiences and things they disagree with. That is also part of our research. The use of large-scale prediction is not limited to a single organization or tool, but is a set of technologies that impact our human lives already. I am proud to be studying the HUMAN experience of this moment.
@maco you're definitely not alone in this and I often feel that too. 💞 There's some great psych research on how much it can help to imagine taking the compassion you'd give OTHER people and trying to apply it to yourself!
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