Discussion
Old, and imho not very good, models of programming ability were pretty strongly informed by the cognitive science backgrounds of the few people who worked on them. E.g., the argument that a strong working memory and trained better 'chunking' might lead to large indiv diffs in programming
@grimalkina I remember taking a test for CS ability and totally flunking it.
The main reason I failed was that for many of the multiple-choice questions I could make valid arguments for more than one choice - so had to try and guess what the question-setter was trying to get me to pick.
It was deeply frustrating as there was nobody to ask clarifying questions.
Turns out that the ability to find logical flaws is rather useful for programming! Also, asking clarifying questions is critical!
This is laughably simplistic when it comes to modern programming, and there are approximately a million other things we can also care about when it comes to people learning and working.
So many myths about the skills of programming derive from this obsession with (human) memory
It's pretty interesting to think about how these attributes may have mattered because of the constraints of the day, but the ways we've carried them forward in stereotypes is just, remarkable
I keep trying to wrap my mind around it because it's such a chain of claims that are slightly warped referencing other claims that weren't actually the thing that person said....loads of noise. Very frustrating.
Another thing I notice is that things that are probably generally true if you selected ANY cognitive task, for any group of people, are taken to represent programming ability in a unique way just because a study was done solely with programmers.
So few questions about what might be a general trend across pretty much all forms of complex work (e.g., working memory could also matter for managing a restaurant), and assumption that finding in a population of programmers = "unique to programming"
@grimalkina I think working memory affects what type of software development or practices come more natural to you. Also, mental rigidity, hyperfocus tendencies, visual pattern matching, and even learned behaviours like prioritizing effectively affect how you solve the problems.
Are these related to what you were saying or are you only focusing on ambiguities surrounding correlating memory to programming?
@rojun I think the last one you list, effective strategies, is probably what I would call metacognition which is part of the class of things that I believe has been far too overlooked in favor of fixed trait explanations. We have strong evidence that you can help people learn better metacognition and this is one of the more effective ways to improve their learning and problem solving. On the other hand very small effects from working memory over a certain threshold
@rojun so if you care about improving things, care about the things that have more predictive value for your outcome and that are more possible to change. With a large global population you're going to have a distribution of working memory plus over their lifetimes it'll change. It's absurd to act like small diffs which may be detectable in simulated laboratory challenges will predict any large amount of the variance in real world outcomes for this population, and nothing else does.
@grimalkina With small diffs you refer to the working memory and other personal differences?
Even though metacognition sounds like something to be learned, I've noticed some people just seem to fall into it more intuitively. If a person can filter priority more efficiently, they are bound to be more proficient in creating software.
I guess this relates to learning to sing does not guarantee one to land the highest level musical productions, or learning to run faster to break world records.
@rojun yes I mean the effect size of the individual differences on these measures used for this purpose tend to be small (particularly when looking at a population of professionals which has already been selected to be at a certain level of functioning)! And working memory changes across a lifetime and is coopted by many many things (eg anxiety will steal it away from your problem solving, so will needing to solve social problems) so it's a complex factor to talk about
@rojun metacognitive strategies are more teachable though, and frequently win out as the largest intervention effect size in large scale tests across educational interventions (eg, this is old but gets at some main points https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543066002099 )
@rojun often things that seem "innate" in some people are in fact the product of learning, and can be learned. Just because they come easily to some doesn't mean they can't be taught to others! Metacognitive skills is one of those things where there might be high individual variance on them but that doesn't make them a bad intervention target, what we tend to assess is whether those people who start low can end up high (rather than simply who is high and low without intervention)
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