Today I'm launching something near and dear to my heart...VERY near and dear 😂
-- a podcast project with my phenomenal favorite neuroscientist (& wife), @analog_ashley@mastodon.social !
On "Change, Technically" we're coming to your ears to share tales of who gets to be technical. We dig into STEM pathways & how leaders can learn from psych and neuroscience to think about cultivating innovation. We share our stories from classrooms to software teams. Plus new Cat & Ashley lore!
https://www.changetechnically.fyi/
I have enough followers on here (👋
💞
) that I think it is worth a little thread on how I relate to social media and online conversations & try to cultivate community
1. I am a person, not an object. I have personal thoughts, feelings, experiences, a family, & a life. Angry interactions from strangers & esp those interested in exploiting me as An Example Of Some Battle of Yours are dehumanizing & will get blocked (e.g.: "this is why those Ex Twitter people should be banned by default")
It's not like it's normatively permissible in conversations to criticize people as much as we do on social media, which has always made me think, as soon as we're on social media we're being objectified and objectifying. But honestly hard to find work getting at this specific issue
To be clear I also do this and it frustrates me
It's mind-bending to me how many people are ready to criticize vs help you on social media and I often wonder if this is a true ratio experience or if it's distorted by the culture of social media and allowances of interactions, or what
It's not like it's normatively permissible in conversations to criticize people as much as we do on social media, which has always made me think, as soon as we're on social media we're being objectified and objectifying. But honestly hard to find work getting at this specific issue
It's mind-bending to me how many people are ready to criticize vs help you on social media and I often wonder if this is a true ratio experience or if it's distorted by the culture of social media and allowances of interactions, or what
Knowledge workers having a good time and treating each other kindly and being inclusive about the future is actually so profoundly terrifying to the machine that they have to construct the most elaborate mental prison possible to convince you you can't be that way
They are working against your own psychology but they're doing a good job at it! They're exploiting the parts of you that respond to threat, and they're dangling always conditional belonging in front of you to convince you that you have to cling to groups and leaders and Technical Superstars that you secretly hate looking up to. The only way past this is seeing through it.
I can't tell you all what to do with this whole thing you've built here but I CAN teach you to understand it and in my experience that really defangs it
Knowledge workers having a good time and treating each other kindly and being inclusive about the future is actually so profoundly terrifying to the machine that they have to construct the most elaborate mental prison possible to convince you you can't be that way
Let's all go to church and recite the litany of the grind factory, lmfao. Let's spread our gospel to the children, no it's because they're "hardcore," not because they're tractable!! For sure the actions of a culture that has a strong handle on the human mind haha
I can't tell you all what to do with this whole thing you've built here but I CAN teach you to understand it and in my experience that really defangs it
imho, the machinery of myth-making is actually very easy to understand in this industry and it's not about burnout lol
Let's all go to church and recite the litany of the grind factory, lmfao. Let's spread our gospel to the children, no it's because they're "hardcore," not because they're tractable!! For sure the actions of a culture that has a strong handle on the human mind haha
imho, the machinery of myth-making is actually very easy to understand in this industry and it's not about burnout lol
@saraislet@infosec.exchange @mhoye@mastodon.social ...stance from the CEO quotes, when even similar qualitative work with a sample of very similar people surfaces a lot of conflicting opinions! I read these qual studies less as statements of ground truth and more as investigations into perceptions.
On the learning environments piece though, I do think this can be pretty lacking for a lot of devs and that paying attention to it is helpful. It's a stated value but I think cultures that truly incorporate it are rarer in tech.
@saraislet@infosec.exchange @mhoye@mastodon.social but I see your point that we should look to the natural behaviors of developers as a signal of what's easily and readily relevant to them though, and totally agree. I mean tool adoption is difficult and I don't like to take it as a proof of efficacy either (people can flock to stuff that is bad for them) but I think we're probably aligned on that.
@saraislet@infosec.exchange @mhoye@mastodon.social I understand why you're frustrated with the state of the conversation and evidence. I am too, and I agree that the "productivity" investigations are super lacking. Really, I engage with qualitative interview studies of this sort as interesting artifacts and mostly read the quotes while leaving the researcher frames as you know, their frame, which I like more in some cases than others. In this particular case I thought it was an interesting contrast to the assumed unanimous...
@saraislet@infosec.exchange @mhoye@mastodon.social ...stance from the CEO quotes, when even similar qualitative work with a sample of very similar people surfaces a lot of conflicting opinions! I read these qual studies less as statements of ground truth and more as investigations into perceptions.
On the learning environments piece though, I do think this can be pretty lacking for a lot of devs and that paying attention to it is helpful. It's a stated value but I think cultures that truly incorporate it are rarer in tech.
Cat Hicks