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.