grimalkina

grimalkina, 9 months ago to random

Across about ten things this week, I'll say this: mastodon has a real toxic reply guy culture going on and it is exhausting to receive this EVERY SINGLE TIME you dare say something that gets attention, as a marginalized female scientist. Worse to me tbh than typical trolling because it is so deeply rooted in credibility deficit "know your place" patterns. You all are worse than birdsite for me, where I have nearly five times more followers. Definitely thinking about leaving.

Fix your hearts.

grimalkina, 29 days ago to random

I want to see absolutely no sensible and practical advice here. What programming language should I start vaguely and in a chill way teaching myself if I just want to experience something fun or elegant or interesting in and of itself, assuming I have no goal for using it to do anything really (outside of learning)

grimalkina, 3 months ago to random

I have ✨ a new preprint ✨ to share!!

This is a scientific review paper which seeks to provide a map, an entry point, and a call to action for improving the lives of the people who create software:

"Psychological Affordances Can Provide a Missing Explanatory Layer for Why Interventions to Improve Developer Experience Take Hold or Fail"

You can download it free and open access here:

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qz43x

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

Realizing how many software engineering conversations pull probability estimates out of thin air is gonna radicalize me, a person who assumes that every probability estimate is OF COURSE based on empirical data and real statistics

grimalkina, 3 months ago to random

We have measured something researchers call beliefs about "role-based communal affordances" in my lab or in other words: how much do software developers think that the job of being a software developer includes helping other people and improving their lives? And the answer is A LOT of professional developers think this is important and see this as part of their identity.

People's beliefs about the communal affordances of software work is an undermeasured, underappreciated important thing imo.

grimalkina, 4 months ago to random

I can't stop thinking about this story from a student we went to brunch with about how her entire lab group of women dropped out, she was the only one left, after the first modules of the course required using an old weird piece of software that was only available on the school computers and the prof refuses to record any lectures or give notes so there was no way to reference instructions and basically if you miss the first lab assignment you're toast.

How much we destroy. How much we waste.

grimalkina, 8 months ago to random

I wrote about the idea of craft -- a concept I've been hearing a lot lately in conversations about software work and often find myself wrangling with. But it also turned out to be about my grandpa. In a year of many losses, I have been thinking a lot about those I love and try to take with me in everything I do.

https://www.drcathicks.com/post/on-craft

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

Reading about this xz backdoor story from the outside as a person who is still learning much about the technical ins and outs, but as a psychologist it is just overwhelming to imagine a maintainer in this position and all of the feelings of pressure and skill based identity and social isolation that must be involved.

Imho psychology has a duty to show up for technology practitioners and work for them just like we see and work for the well-being of emergency workers, healthcare providers.

grimalkina, 3 months ago to random

Summarizing a text conversation with a friend who is an engineering leader after he read my preprint, because we agreed this might be a fun reflection for others!

Preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qz43x

My friend: "I was really struck by the conclusion paragraph where you say devex initiatives can surface structural diagnostics almost by accident. I was almost thinking it's inevitable that they will...it really made me think about the hard position we put teams in that might be doing this..."

grimalkina, 11 days ago to random

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.

grimalkina, 9 months ago to random

A fatal flaw in the "be really hard on yourself as the mechanism to achieve" plan is that even when you achieve you absolutely cannot believe it, because you've really overtrained being hard on yourself. You see a systematic undervaluing that robs you of true information about your work.

So, one of the hallmarks of maladaptive high achievement I look for, as a psychologist studying productivity, is inability to really celebrate.

grimalkina, 9 months ago to mecfs

As usual Ed Yong is perhaps the only scicom journalist bringing a true patient-centered perspective to this writing. Please share -- these symptoms aren't mine but they are so wildly debilitating and happening to so many in our community. And our healthcare system and doctors are failing those of us with #LongCovid and #MECFS

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/07/chronic-fatigue-long-covid-symptoms/674834/

grimalkina, 9 days ago to random

It's REALLY weird to me when people in software mine research papers for their content and say "researchers" instead of naming the scientists who actually did the work they're using. We're human beings and our work is our livelihood (at a fraction of yours I might add). Name us.

Blessed for the community around me that has this value, side eye at the content engine that doesn't.

grimalkina, 10 months ago to random

People in tech will constantly interrogate social science methods and then cite a dusty blogpost from the 1980s like it's the ten commandments

grimalkina, 4 months ago to random

A thing I wrote in a recent draft:

"...on the team side, the reality of team practices that claim to be autonomous at large organizations is that supposed independence of action is frequently sustained by senior members or managers “protecting” their teams from external dependencies and taking on the work of advocacy as individual responsibility (Moe et al., 2019; Hicks, et al 2023)."

I think this is a big point with large psychological implications although software journals, alas, did not

grimalkina, 4 months ago to random

Just to continue on my beat of troubling narratives of achievement & cognition... mind-blowing to consider recent points made about social cognition and the flip of our deficit narratives

Let me try to put this in non-jargon terms. For years, it's been claimed on "classic" cognition tasks that lower social class (broadly speaking) predicts worse performance.

But what happens when you look at social cognition tasks that are thought to rely on the same core factors (like working memory)?

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

Contest cultures ("constantly prove you belong! Prove you're smart! Everything here is a dog eat dog competition!") tear people down under the guise of "toughness" and "identifying brilliance." In psych, we know this is destructive to long term sustainable work and mastery. We know it's systematically leveled at marginalized folks more.

These beliefs are at the heart of it all. This cannot be what we continue to let define who belongs in technical work and cultures.

https://mastodon.world/

grimalkina, 11 months ago to random

I canNOT believe this but the woman making the program for my grandpa's memorial services couldn't find the poem that had been picked for the beginning and asked some LLM (I don't know what platform it was very confusing) to write the poem based on her vague memory of some lines of it and that's what she read and said was my grandpa's favorite

I'm honestly like, hysterically laughing about it and also hurt and horrified. What a time to be alive

grimalkina, 3 months ago to random

This thread is a great example of something applied scientists like me warn about A LOT with assumptions about average increases and decreases. Disaggregated and longitudinal analysis with domain expertise is necessary to understand changes in complex experience, most of all those that are about evaluations of complex systems like our social systems.

In fact this exact problem of response collapse was something I raised an objection about in my first tech job at Google

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/111811331356331786

grimalkina, 8 months ago to random

Something I think about a lot lately is how physically difficult and claustrophobic being in a spacesuit and living in a space ship must be and how easily lots of people fantasize about this and are the same people who seem too stifled by masks to wear them when I sit in a cardiologist waiting room

grimalkina, 4 days ago to random

I have NOT read this paper yet so this is not a Cat endorsement yet but the title and premise is good enough to share 👀

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(24)00105-0

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

Some metascience thoughts as we share our latest preprint.

Social science and the health sciences have so much to bring to help software teams, not just on the individual level but on the systemic organizational level. Not just in our "caring topics" but in our radical centering of human experience as a technical craft, our empirical methods.

There is an underinvestment in developer experience not just categorically, but within the topic itself

(Preprint here:
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/8k5a4 )

grimalkina, 6 days ago to random

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.

grimalkina, 13 days ago to random

"Randomized trials cannot address all causal questions of importance in medicine and health policy and may have limited generalizability; thus, investigators may need to use observational studies as a source of evidence to address causal questions. The challenge, then, is to balance the importance of addressing the causal questions for which observational studies are needed with caution regarding the reliance on strong assumptions to support causal conclusions."

A challenge of our time truly

grimalkina, 23 days ago to random

Reading a 2016 paper on inquiry-based learning where "cognitive load" is once again used as a reason to stop any learner from doing anything FUN and HARD and EXPLORATORY my God

Being alive increases your cognitive load. We are not in some kind of robotic fry-out state every time we have to consume novel information. Working in a repetitive assembly line is low cognitive load and also destroys people

This one little tiny concept taken out of context is used for so many bad arguments.