Mastodawn

So here's one of the things I'm super interested in that's coming out of our recent pilot research with software teams: there's a big difference between "things that are hard, but we're good at solving them" and "things that are hard, in a way that absolutely kills our motivation."

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

I think there's a lot of talk in the industry about "developer experience" and easing friction and I get that and believe in that -- but I'm always struck by how, when you ask several hundred developers if they believe they can solve hard problems....they DO believe this! They solve hard problems all the time!

But certain kinds of "hard" are a killer--cascading demotivation for people.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

A lot of what we've studied about motivation with *students* in school focuses on helping them get over that first kind of hard -- individual self-efficacy. But developers score REALLY HIGH whenever you ask them to answer self-efficacy measures!! This is wonderful to me. What a cool gift. What a cool feature of this community.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

This also has implications for where motivation "lives" in the system of software engineering. Yes, individual self-efficacy is always a good thing to encourage. But I am not sure it's what software teams truly deeply NEED, as much as they need support and protection against the second kind of hard.

What's the second kind of hard? Well we're working on identifying that, but there are pretty clear trends.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

Sneak peek from our pilot research: this "second kind of hard" seems to bubble up for people when they say, "I had to repeat all this work again because no one remembered a previous project." or "yeah I solved an amazing technical issue, and then I found out I was working on the wrong part of the code because someone had changed x and hadn't told me." It's core motivational stuff about whether you feel SUPPORTED.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

There are many important things here but one I think is vital to see: people who are capable of solving IMMENSELY difficult technical challenges will still feel this type of friction as "final straw" stuff. If you ask people about what they imagine the riskiest kind of software project, really dig into it -- consistently, people say that burnout from dealing with hypocrisy is worse than not having the technical skills or even not having money

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

A lot of things matter but it's really interesting as a researcher to ask, "which kind of hard would you choose if you had to choose." At least so far in my research, developers will choose the 'first kind of hard,' will choose to teach themselves entire new languages, will find motivation inside of ALL kinds of hard stuff, as long as they feel protected from the second kind of hard.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

(if any of this rings true for you or you want to share a related experience definitely please check out our survey, where you can also opt in for future research!! https://pluralsight.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_06TsuT7vkoM9Pdc )

Qualtrics Survey | Qualtrics Experience Management

The most powerful, simple and trusted way to gather experience data. Start your journey to experience management and try a free account today.

wb x64 Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina my work in hackerspaces has definitely taught me that motivation, inspiration, energy, a sense of accomplishment, camaraderie, friendship, a sense that what you're doing is worthwhile, and a sense of self-actualization (doing not just interesting things but interesting things that seem to arise from within ourselves and our fickle desires) is far far far far more important than tools and languages and physical space and all the tangible things you think are important.

wb x64 Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina when I'm teaching wood shop or programming or soldering I'm usually not just teaching the skill so much as training the idea and practice of continuing forward even when things are unclear and hard: it's a life skill that's trained out of a lot of us especially in "teaching to the test." There is no single right answer or even a universal "right" or an "answer" in the sense of a fixed destination, nowhere in life outside of academia and totalitarianism.

scy Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina You might be interested in this short thread describing a related topic: https://eldritch.cafe/@AgathaSorceress/109428636157002184

agatha, fangs gf 🎀 (@[email protected])

just read a long article about software not being good and honestly at this point I'm still a big believer of the idea that most "software is painfully low quality" problems in computer science boil down to either capitalism prioritizing what's profitable over high quality, or people who don't even /want/ to be doing programming doing programming... because capitalism makes it more profitable than things those people might actually be interested in doing

Eldritch Café

francis norton Dec 11, 2022

@grimalkina If - as a burnt out coder turned counsellor - I do the survey, would you like me to specify my "current" role (individual contributor) or my less applicable but really current role (other).

Do you want to capture the experiences of people so burnt out that they've left the profession?

Alex Francis Dec 23, 2022

@grimalkina not a developer, but much of what you’re describing rings true for burnout in academia as well, both based on personal experience and what small amount I’ve read. I suspect a lot of „knowledge workers“ fit this pattern, scoring high on self efficacy but also depending on a strong sense of institutional support and shared purpose that can be debilitating when lost, betrayed, or undermined by shortsightedness or incompetence.

Bhob Rainey Dec 23, 2022

@grimalkina thanks for this thread. I've been developing for a long time now and still get motivated by true, technical challenges. Any day where I find that the best solution is a recursive function is a good day. But I'm driven to the point of early retirement by all of the trivial missteps and poor communications and anti-architectural processes that turn easy things into hard things, leaving a trail of bad blood behind them. Devs are too often set up for failure.

Grant_H Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina is the first sort of hard not more "intellectual", and the second a lot more "emotional", possibly, for want of better terms?
The sense of betrayal from having your time wasted by indifference or incompetence has, I think, a far higher impact than losing a chunk of work to a bug or a misplaced comma.
Programmers are notoriously bad at "playing politics", which is more an emotional game than the coding.
My R0, 02 worth.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@grant_h yes totally. I might say "cognitive emotional" or "motivational" because hey, a lot of intellectual work AND emotions are involved in dealing with these kinds of problems. But totally agree that at the core of it there is this "lesson" you're learning

Grant_H Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina I like "cognitive emotional" because dealing with non-technical issues is definitely both.
The number of software people who struggle with relating to humans is not zero.

Cat Hicks Nov 30, 2022

@grant_h I too, despite and perhaps because of being a psychologist, can struggle with relating to humans :)

Grant_H Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina mmm. Cause and effect here? I have found psychology helpful in understanding humans, in their diversity. Even some of the simpler "pop" psychology models make people think about how different someone else can be. Intro vs extraverts?

Grant_H Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina Which triggers a tangential thought to the original post: if the pre-October Mastodon was largely populated by introverts (objective evidence limited!) then the influx of "noisy extraverts" from the other site would feel like quite the invasion, and they would be looking for the excitement of the affirmation that a huge site would give, but quiet Mastodon doesn't.

was B (this is my old account)Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina is anyone good with the second kind of hard? 😅 I’m not a dev and not really great at sticking with stuff like learning new programming languages or instruments or what-have-you but even just reading the examples of the second kind of hard kinda felt like a gut punch. 🙃 I wish I had that kind of fortitude!

Cat Hicks Nov 30, 2022

@b_cavello I actually do think some people develop tremendous strategic ability to protect their teams/projects... But executing on it requires a certain amount of agency and power in the environment! So I hear examples of this much more from managers

Ann H Dec 19, 2023

@grimalkina This resonates. There’s also overall cognitive load and context switching. Putting too many complex hardships together and needing to move from one to the other when they may not be related is possibly a factor.

Steve Freeman Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina "consistently, people say that burnout from dealing with hypocrisy is worse than not having the technical skills or even not having money"

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina Hey there! I was a software developer, and now am a psychotherapist. I am given to understand there is research finding the same thing in psychotherapists. Outsiders assume that psychotherapist burnout is a product of the high exposure to distressed patients and listening to horrors. While vicarious traumatization is a thing, burnout comes from feeling unsupported/undermined by management.

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina This has a lot of face validity for therapists. Sitting with traumatized pts is just what we do, it's an ordinary Tuesday, and most of us are pretty accomplished at handling that. That's the good kind of hard. But junior therapists often have to (in some places by law) work in institutions that are outrageously exploitative and abusive and typically contemptuous of their front-line medical professionals.

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina I've spent a lot of time on the net over the last few years in a forum for therapists, supporting junior therapists through burnout. It's an endemic problem.

We also have a term we use for a phenomenon we experience: being deskilled. It describes how someone who is being treated as incompetent or worthless by others loses access to their advanced clinical skills. The do not perform their job duties well, and seem to be bad at their jobs when this happens to them.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@siderea wow this is a compelling way to put it. I have seen this connection before but not thought of using a term like this, thank you

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina You're very welcome. I assume there's literature on this, but I haven't seen it for myself.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@siderea so you and @CSLee need to talk, a clinical scientist turned developer researcher 😂😂💖💖! 100% agree on the source of burnout being this kind of betrayal experience

Carol Lee Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina @siderea hahaha omg I love this

Pragmatic Teams Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina That sneak peek looks interesting, because it seems to point to a lack of communication and knowledge management, and later on you mention that people need to be "protected" from that second kind of hard.

With respect to protection: according to your results, is that second hard perceived as "somebody else's job", or as something they need to improve on themselves (but e.g. haven't got the time for)?

Keith Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina Is this type 2 difficult stuff related to what Persig called "gumption traps" in _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_?

Uma Karmarkar Dec 23, 2022

@grimalkina So interesting! This seems related to the OB research on psychological safety in firms- like a practical/execution-based complement.

Martijn Faassen has moved Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina interesting that both sound like issues with communication, and memory

Sasha Kotlyar 🌻

@grimalkina I wonder how much of this could relate all the way back to Larry Wall's three virtues of a great programmer... when we're unable to do those things, we might get demotivated...

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@arktronic haha I think so. I think those 'three virtues' are a description of motivational processes that would apply to most human problem solving :)

John Brownlow Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina also true in screenwriting

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@thejohnbrownlow Tell me more!!

John Brownlow Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina some screenplays are jenga towers, where if you try to improve one bit -- a plot point or the motivation of a character, say -- it throws out another part. The problem is ridiculously overdetermined and you often can't tell if something will work unless you try it.

This is basically what people mean by 'development hell', where you end up making something different, not better.

John Brownlow Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina A related problem is that once you've been working on something for multiple drafts, even the good parts bore you to tears, so you're tempted to start cutting or changing them, which causes even more problems. And you also become blind to completely obvious problems, like the fact that your protagonist is dislikeable. So you end up not solving problems that aren't the problem.

All of these can end up destroying your will to live!

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@thejohnbrownlow ok I appreciate and relate to this a lot as I'm trying to teach myself to write better fiction.... SO true!!!

John Brownlow Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina that's the writer's POV... I'm sure producers and develoment execs have their own versions...

John Brownlow Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina another motivation killer is when you've identified a key problem with a script but the notes you're asked to implement to address it have no chance of fixing the problem AND will make other things worse. Multiply x10 when the thing you know you could do that *would* fix the issue is shot down without discussion.

Alex Gude Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina
I definitely feel this!

I love hard problems that improve our customers' lives, or require a lot of careful thinking to get it right, or even some tricky, clever code.

And then you try to deploy it and it's like "Library A conflicts with the library B. But if we upgrade B logging breaks, and if we downgrade A..." and that saps my will to push forward like no other. 😬

Shady Jade Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina Definitely feel the difference between those two!

The motivation killers for me are things like bad version control states, having to second-guess motives, being in the midst of code with massive technical debt, IT issues, inability to replicate. Basically, currently unavoidable confusion and/or lack of control.

But... something to improve what we have? A better algorithm, a better design, a better test? THERE IN A HEARTBEAT. Anything involving a whiteboard 😊

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@lampjaded I think a lot about who gets "the joy of problem solving" and who gets it taken away from them, by what!

Shady Jade Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina That's a fantastic topic to explore!

The unenjoyable problems aren't just issues in and of themselves, too; they're productivity-killers. I've seen other devs - and I'm sure they've seen me - just "fuzz out" and lean back trying to clear their head and get past the demotivation these roadblocks cause.

Unspoken costs of things that do not 'spark joy' but that we can't Marie Kondo away!

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@lampjaded another thing we're thinking about in my lab is cadence. You can't just go from one experience back into flow and problem solving --sometimes you need to regroup and rest and recover your motivation. Allowing for this kind of recovery specifically might be one of the smartest fastest things managers can do to help work life feel better imho...

Shady Jade Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina For big things, especially! There's ramp-up time where a network of understanding builds up - which is where technical debt can essentially overload working memory I *swear* - and it really seems like there needs to be a ramp down as well.

It's a lot like looking at programs running with a modest amount of RAM and slow disk. Exiting an app on a computer like that? SPIN spin spinspin spin spin.

Ah, maybe I'll just launch the next one now!

SPINS HARDER.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@lampjaded ok this is fascinating because I'm thinking about the experience of "choosing not to solve tech debt" or "knowing you're creating tech debt for the future" in a way I've never quite thought of it before...as a kind of exhausting inhibition task... Of COURSE it creates a big mental load to have to self-monitor that way. Hmmm lots here to think about

Shady Jade Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina I'm sure there's also much to be said on the side about prefrontal and frontal cortex and the number of things one can juggle at the same time (the 5-9 items), and mental chunking, and how easy it can be to overload that system with too many loose ends, and just ONE extra loose end can make someone have to swap something in and out, losing concentration in the process.

I *think*. I can almost feel it happen, honestly.

Alice Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina For me, the second kind of hard (be it in developing, problem solving, or life in general) is when the return on investment is minimal/negated, or the hard work itself is toward meaningless gain. I’d imagine demoralizing an adversary is largely getting them to do hard work for naught.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@__3ve yes that's it exactly. Demoralizing is totally the word

Greg Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina Love this whole thread. Reminds me of why I love senior tech and managing tech teams but find the interaction as a lead with non-tech teams an exhausting mix of advocacy, negotiating, office politics, spending months building trust, and other things I can do but don’t especially care for. I could summarise it by describing it as “spending my precious life energy compensating for certain people’s personalities”. Hence I stick to senior but not lead roles that maximises my time with tech folks and customers and solutions and minimises my time with executives and their silly random whims and egos.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@greg phew, a lot of important stories in what you just summed up... I'm super curious if you've ever experienced someone on "the other side" creating allyship with you from outside of the tech community that feels like the world you want to live in... Maybe not but wondering if you've seen it done right vs this demand for constant compensation!

Greg Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina Absolutely. Humans are a real mixed bag. I’ve encountered some brilliant folks from all disciplines. I could put together a dream team of people who are good at what they do and work perfectly well with others. But it’s like bad apples. If I’m a tech lead, it only takes one bully from amongst all the other leads in a company to ruin my working day and if I’m not the company owner I don’t get to fire them so how long do I have to put up with being in high school? This has never happened to me inside a tech team, sheltered by the lead. Most people IN tech teams that I’ve worked with are focused on the work and getting the best outcomes, not on how good they look in the yearly budget, in a super healthy way. I love that about tech teams. The rare exceptions are imminently avoidable too. I guess with tech, people have to prove their words and bullshit eventually ends up walking out the door.

Aranel Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina this is a pretty good explanation of why I'm thinking of getting a new job. The burnout from that lack of support can be tough

J Paul Gibson Nov 29, 2022

@grimalkina what is « hard » for many of my recently graduated students is seeing so much technical debt, knowing how to address it, yet not having the support to do so. there is a common hypocrisy in software development where there is universal criticism of technical debt but also almost universal neglect towards removing it.

Cat Hicks Nov 29, 2022

@jpaulgibson I'm super interested in this too omg!!! The difference for students can be a shock and hard for them, but also the idealism of junior folks can be something we need to listen to... So many layers to what we talk about vs what we truly reward and make time for

David Stark Nov 30, 2022

@grimalkina In my own experience working mostly as a solo developer, I've noticed a big difference in my motivation for two seemingly similar tasks:

Figuring out how something works when there's documentation but it's bad: hate it.

Figuring out how to do something when it's not clear if it's even possible: love it.