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Today I'm at the UC Irvine research forum on developer experience with researchers from across industry and academia.
If you're curious about the future of developer science, what do YOU want me to ask about, talk about, and think about with this crowd?
https://isr.uci.edu/event/uc-irvine-research-forum-series-developer-experience/
@grimalkina waves from across campus
I'm going to take some running notes.
Please do not use this thread to yell at me, argue about AI. Thoughtful dialogue is welcome but not anger.
First up is Eirini Kalliamvakou, GitHub, talking about developer identity shifts. Since I studied AI threat from a social identity perspective in 2024 this is interesting to me! I think identity theory needs to be brought in far more than it has been in DevEx
For instance, we know that strongly internalizing an essentialist identity can be harmful for people's ability to face change. Those are interesting mechanisms we can test for and potentially help reduce people's distress by changing, imho.
Her (qualitative, ~22 or so samples) research belies the idea that AI superuser developers see themselves as managers. Thinks the metaphor more appropriate is creative director of code, doing a lot of active cognitive work. My thought: thank God someone is saying this
In my experience with hundreds (and in my research thousands) of developers, rarely do I find people who simply don't care about learning, who don't want to do interesting work, and who don't have a high need for cognition.
@grimalkina Reality checking versus superstition for the individual developer or dev team, perhaps?
At work we learn what we experience in the context we find it. Sometimes the context encourages understanding, and sometimes it encourages explaining away the "why" without checking.
This morning's CoffeeOps peer discussion highlighted operations "game days", rehearsing failure scenarios, as a way to exercise and transfer working knowledge, to work across teams in the response, and test assumptions. Sometimes the incident response books get confirmed, and sometimes rewritten.
@jmeowmeow can you restate the question for me? Is it something like, how can we encourage people to do more reflection and check their understanding? Or is it understanding the features that encourage "explaining away the why" ? Both?
@grimalkina More the first question: How do we encourage practitioners to test assumptions about what matters in their work?
And partly the second question, as you point out: What systems and cultures encourage explaining away the why and how of working routines?
Both of these questions touch on superstitious or unexamined beliefs about work routines.
@jmeowmeow got it thank you!
@grimalkina How do we make the positive changes we want to see palatable enough to leadership that we can start building incentives around them?
@grimalkina How do we make the positive changes we want to see palatable enough to leadership that we can start building incentives around them?
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