Today I'm giving a talk to the fabulous Bridges Summit. I'll come back to this post to share my talk once it's available!
Meanwhile, I wanted to create a small post to list out the citations, references, and links to the work I mention in the talk. 20 minute talks fly by :), so here are the deeper dives for those who want to go spelunking in the research referenced:
The Performance Paradox.
Bjork is a great guide to the "performance vs learning" effect. This is one of the reviews I cited, but pieces from him and this whole group on self-regulated learning and our misconceptions about learning are super interesting.
Performance orientation (or performance-avoidance orientation) comes from the general work on "goal orientation." Pintrich is a classic. If you look for "mastery orientation," you will find some really helpful pieces for cultivating the mindset that leads to longer-term outcomes
The Brilliance Trap has some good popular press, along with really important studies on how it plays out both early in development and in excluding certain groups. This was also the theoretical framework we used in our New Developer study (linked below)
Developer Thriving I've got a whole project page with various speaking and writing I've done on this, and here is the core scientific citation although it had a strict page limit, so there is much more discussion in the original report!
New Developer - our study on software teams adopting AI and the equity and opportunity gaps there has a lot more in it than I could cover in the talk, including a survey of folks' beliefs about the quality of AI
Our intervention study on Code Review Anxiety which was led by the indomitable Dr. Carol Lee and her clinical expertise in anxiety is under review right now -- but you can read the full preprint and see some materials at the project page!
Finally a lot of the overall thoughts about Psychological Affordances and Developer Experience are covered in this review paper I wrote earlier this year. Still love this paper.
If you want more Cat, and better than Cat you want my incredible wife Ashley who is a neuroscientist and educator, I also shared the new podcast Change, Technically we've launched on STEM pathways and making "who gets to be technical" bigger and brighter :) that's here plus most places folks stream podcasts.