Cat HicksI've already had to live in a world where the demographics of participants don't matter and aren't reported, where social topics are unreviewed or misviewed or given highly motivated bad faith reviewers, and where questioning bad results gets you threatened; that world is research on software teams
Or I should say engineering more broadly, I guess; it's hard to even know what to call it but it's the place where people buy a toy "brain wave" device and publish a paper about developers' personalities or whether their brain "trances" while coding or whatever basically it's the bad place
Social science has been my lifeline not because I think it's a perfect endeavor (actually I regularly critique its limitations if people would manage to just read my papers lol) but because applied researchers desperately need a body of evidence to work from. And it's essentially a third, fourth job I spend reading the literature and trying to stay up to date so I'm trustworthy on this. Now with almost every study I read I think "is this disqualified from federal funding?"
It would be VERY easy for me to put my head down, stop sharing social science on my platforms, cut out all "controversial" questions from my research (like everything that acknowledges the humanity and the diversity in software engineering), and act like everything that I do is just $$$ and Hardcore Tech Stuff. I will not, because I understand just how much we are in it together.
All of this social science that is being framed as useless in the prevailing narrative: it has been essential to me. I've worked with dozens of engineering organizations and their tens of thousands of engineers. The "Hardcore Tech Stuff" ALWAYS turns out to be human problems in the end
I want the grad students funded and protected. I want the campuses vibrant and bustling. I want our society to understand that the well-being of scientists is critical infrastructure for the future. I want science culture to finally admit that too.
Rachel Stephens
Ψ*Ψ@grimalkina if I had a nickel for every time a dumbass engineer tried to solve human problems by writing code, I might actually believe in retirement
Pseudo NymHard agree.
All problems are "people problems" and usually, specifically, communication problems.
Tom Renner@grimalkina 💯 People are the hardest problem in computer science
Stephen Farrugia@grimalkina never do that!