If you were looking at a book about the psychology of software teams and it had a chapter about trauma and trauma recovery for software developers, and it tried to summarize the best current good science on it even if in the author's opinion we DO NOT ...
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If you were looking at a book about the psychology of software teams and it had a chapter about trauma and trauma recovery for software developers, and it tried to summarize the best current good science on it even if in the author's opinion we DO NOT have enough answers on all this, would you be like:
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@grimalkina Honestly, even just acknowledging the phenomenon would be so much more than I've come to expect
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@grimalkina I don't think I really understood the question enough to answer. Like, trauma from software engineering or just general trauma as experienced by software engineers in particular? Anyway I guess you've piqued my curiosity
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@silasmariner I guess I actually don't have all of that figured out yet, but I'm imagining thinking about the crisis moments that can occur in software work that have a high chance of being experienced as traumatic events. Eg, high stress, low support, or deeply threatening. What can current psychological science give us as a basic introduction to trauma, and a useful set of things to know to either prevent, or heal, illustrated with software examples and interviews with developers
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@silasmariner and for further context I'm a psychological scientist who does empirical research with software developers about how their beliefs, perceptions and environments either support or don't support them (in achieving well-being as well as things like innovation), and this is a real book I'm writing as a warm introduction to psychology for software developers. Just pondering how deep to go on some topics. This is a bit of a silly poll to my followers:)
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@grimalkina
Best effort with caveats is far better than ignoring the problem, always, even if best effort can’t be any more than naming it -
@grimalkina @silasmariner yes and I’d suggest both being upfront about the limitations and perhaps suggesting comparable to learn from.
Re trauma I would also suggest there are many forms that may create different conditions. Ie in my tech career I’ve had production systems go down and cost the company millions each hour they were down (stressful but we got it back up in a hour or two in most cases)
But then I had a system fail and the client (police dept) needed it to try to catch a murderer
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@grimalkina @silasmariner when the system you are supporting just generates/loses money failures are stressful and if intense could feel like the company or your job/coworkers jobs are on the line. But that is very different from systems that involve the lives of others (at least imho it should be) - there the stress of failures feel higher and distinct from mere economic risks.
It is a long time ago but Y2K remediation was this -trying to find and fix systems that if they failed caused damage
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@Rycaut @silasmariner I agree completely, and this distinction also matches much of what we know about the features of occupational trauma for folks who work in wildfires, hospitals, etc. I think it's very important to recognize it's not at all just about business systems and the resources of a business but that technical work can involve taking on immense responsibility and pressure during a human crisis (often unexpected/unsupported/unseen)
