Cat Hicks

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

Studying how developers thrive. My focus areas include how people form beliefs about learning, move through behavior change, 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_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Last Notes

2024-08-06 14:53:05

OH my God y'all my wife (she is a self-taught coder who now teaches biology students to code) only just found out about rubber ducking this morning and she's so excited about it 🥹 she's buying 100 little rubber ducks to give to her students 🥹 she's like "Knowing that this is what REAL DEVELOPERS do will be so good for them" 🥹

2024-08-04 18:12:33

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I am more thinking about the ways people respond to posts and interactions there but sure

2024-08-04 17:48:34

Why does sharing any thought on linkedin feel like throwing a book into a wood chipper

2024-08-02 15:37:14

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Having studied workplaces for a while now it is clear to me that transformative impact can come from people who put in THE WORK to not be a blocker, a crusher, a muffler of creativity, and those people are not appreciated enough for this practice. It is a practice of knowing you are not a neutral observer, being willing to stay with discomfort when challenged by a new way of doing things, capable of saying well maybe I just don't see it yet. That space is where innovation can happen.

2024-08-02 15:34:09

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This is somewhat simplistic but overall makes sense when you consider that by definition creativity is going to be unfamiliar, rule-breaking, seem wrong before it seems right, and causes us some friction to encounter. These are things we do not like particularly when we are people-functioning-as-large-organizations

2024-08-02 15:32:28

An important thing I learned in grad school from a great psychologist who had spent decades working on achievement and high performance is that "creativity" is a thing everybody says they like but then the vast majority of people have a strong negative reaction to creativity when presented with it

2024-08-01 20:05:19

Just wrapped up a lovely podcast interview where I said the top skill software developers need right now is not this language or that language but evidence-based reasoning. 🗣️I said what I said 😅😂

2024-07-27 15:47:17

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Something about our structures has deadened our response -- our very real, very human, very insightful response to the world. We are perpetuating a culture of shame and fear around caring about the very stuff that makes the biggest difference to us. Does centering this result in better work too, yes but honestly who even cares.
Imagine being PROUD to be a software engineer who cares about the human things. Imagine thinking, by default, that most of us want this. What choices could we make?

2024-07-27 15:43:55

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There is a defining signal that has come out of every set of qualitative interviews I've ever done, every research topic, it emerged for me as a defining thread across the last few years even when I wasn't looking for it. People care about the human side of software, and then they say: "It's probably only me that feels this way." "I care about this...I'm different than everyone else, probably." "No one else feels the way I do"
I believe this, these people are a silent majority right now

2024-07-27 15:40:00

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There have been thousands of developers coming through our studies. Is there noise and mess, yes. Are people cruel sometimes, yes. But are there also so many people, I can tell you often the majority in a statistically meaningful sense -- who want their roles to involve helping people, who want their teams to believe in learning and support, who have a vision of technology being about what we can build together and technology being a place we can be proud of again.

2024-07-27 15:35:30

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I know that many, many people are truly suffering in this field, still. I see it daily. I know people feel isolated, and misunderstood, and very uncertain, and trapped inside of cultures they don't particularly like but also don't necessarily understand, like toxic context competition cultures. But I'm telling you, this field has remarkable strengths and I'm not giving up on it and the world needs it. Psychology has ignored these folks for too long, yet the world depends on their work.

2024-07-27 15:33:17

Software engineers have a remarkable opportunity to advocate inside of their businesses for better policies for both themselves and colleagues. Does that mean it's easy? Absolutely not. Change is not easy. But I do think it is possible in a way that is remarkable.
This is the most powerful group of people I've done research with -- I mean that. I have worked with teachers and kids and older people and women in healthcare. Software engineering as a field doesn't know what it HAS.

2024-07-26 15:33:13

Some people have stood in opposition for so long that they mistake standing in opposition ITSELF for a position

2024-07-17 01:35:15

It's so interesting how when you're a female leader you're never technical enough until you are and then you're too rigorous and inflexible. Love this labyrinth with no exit for us.

2024-06-01 18:06:16

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it's an extremely cool and satisfying idea although as far as I've read still a lot of grid infrastructure to think about

2024-06-01 17:45:30

I tire of all these posts about how much solar energy we GENERATE and so few posts about how we store and transport it 😤

2024-05-24 15:16:23

By the way just a general comment that if I only studied the things I liked and supported personally I wouldn't be much of a social scientist

2024-05-19 15:37:29

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"Assuming that people are reasonable highlights the need to engage with people who are the targets of interventions. This turns them from targets into partners and also acknowledges the systems they inhabit. This more participatory and deliberative engagement can manifest in methods such as qualitative interviews, focus groups, citizens assemblies, engagement with citizen science initiatives..."
again 👏 ! But also widespread in areas that would've been nice to cite here

2024-05-19 15:30:59

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"behaviors that might initially seem irrational may be modeled as optimal use of information available to people within the task"
"researchers and policymakers need to exhaust alternative explanations based on people’s goals and social environments before assuming irrationality and to use methods that engage participants as partners not just targets of interventions."
All applied scientists nod. (I disagree that this argument is new)

2024-05-19 15:29:28

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Fits nicely in this week's theme of "context" tho!
"Across the psychological sciences, [Felin et al] argue that human behavior is often judged against standards that are implicitly assumed to be objective and critique this approach as reflecting an ‘all-seeing eye’ that can objectively differentiate rational from non-rational choices. Instead, scientists might ask what people are attempting to achieve given their context and environmental constraints."

2024-05-19 15:15:18

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

2024-05-18 15:57:02

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Great demo of a pervasive dynamic, to get through a gate in fields that activate gender biases we require women to be at the highest achievement level to be treated comparably to lower achieving men
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/math-intensive-fields-have-a-gender-problem-the-men-are-worse-at-math/
Also potentially demos the backlash effect, where socially punishing bias incongruence can be considered more important than getting the value of the work itself. Highly technical women can be hated FOR technical achievement
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308508000051

2024-05-17 15:35:38

Every day I recommit to being in tech for the stupidest but cutest reasons!!! I just saw a customer support exchange that was so wholesome!! Or somebody said "oh I'm not technical" at a conference and a bunch of extremely intimidating og tech people spontaneously organized to be like "YOU DID A DEMO LOOKS TECHNICAL TO ME"
The human breaks out, y'all. The human breaks out. It's there. We deserve this version of tech not just in nooks and crannies but everywhere.

2024-05-12 17:01:41

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.

2024-05-10 15:52:36

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it is also necessary to acknowledge the deep sociological realities that keep us from advancing: grad students who are massively underserved and undertrained in new methods, the devaluing of "practical statistics" education (despite all the hype about data); if we had healthier more inclusive pathways of learning for trainees of course we would have healthier methods. Many of us out here doing applied science have to entirely self-teach and un-learn poor statistics and poor methods training

2024-05-10 15:48:12

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Folks outside of science may not be familiar with this but there is an absolutely massive struggle across so many fields to think about whether our scientific conventions around evidence from the 1900s are suitable to this century. I am firmly on the side of observational causal inference; the principle of "randomization" is almost never ACTUALLY implemented in the real world and our ecological validity suffers. We need all forms of evidence. RCTs are not possible for MOST questions.

2024-05-10 15:46:23

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Source: "Causal Inference About the Effects of Interventions From Observational Studies in Medical Journals"
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2818746

2024-05-10 15:45:43

"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

2024-05-01 00:20:40

I feel like I should find more people to follow 🤔 where is there thoughtful science content, social science preferably, and maybe just more fun and joyful vibes around these parts 💐