Cat HicksMar 30, 2024

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.

Show threadaeva
@grimalkina Software development is a weirdly high stress career, often for bad reasons, but often not. The stress is still real either way. As a team lead in a corporate setting, I think one of the most important parts of my role is essentially being a therapist to the rest of the team (I gotta keep morale up, keep people from burning out, and help them grow in their careers), but I'm left to figure all of that out on my own with little training (as I'm a programmer, not a real therapist).
Mar 30, 2024 at 7:15pmWeb
Show threadaevaMar 30, 2024
@grimalkina the maintainers of popular free and open source software projects usually don't even have the benefit of that. There's just a ton of demand and abuse when something is going wrong, which is always, and everyone takes your work for granted.
Show threadaevaMar 30, 2024
@grimalkina I think a lot of folks in the field have bad luck working with real therapists, because there's almost always a major cultural disconnect between us and everyone outside the profession, and a good many of us are neurodivergent in some way, so it's like what good is it to pay someone a few hundred bucks a week to talk about your problems when they don't understand what you're going through or have the ability to empathize with you at all & all the time gets eaten up by training them.
Show threadaevaMar 30, 2024
@grimalkina so yeah, I think you're absolutely right - there could easily be a whole specialty here, and there's an enormous need that's being unmet