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Dr. Cat Hicks is a category of one."
"The whole thing is stellar. Five stars.
This book could be the "Accelerate" of the agentic era. It's one thing to have opinions, and entirely a different thing to have opinions **backed by research.**
Anyone who cares about software should read it.
- Charity Majors, Cofounder & CTO at honeycomb.io
If you lead engineers and believe culture is ‘soft,’ this book will disabuse you of that notion quickly. Psychological safety, learning, and collaboration aren’t perks, they are infrastructure. Ignore them and your systems will fail, slowly or catastrophically.
- Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community, Microsoft
It is quite possibly the best software development book about teams that I have ever read. Each paragraph has some insightful nugget and relates so well to the real world. Highly recommend!
- Carol Willing, Python Core Developer, 3-term steering council member
One of my most gifted [former] co-workers at Google has written an incredibly insightful book on the psychology of software. Very nerdy, very wonderful. It's worth a read if you care about scientifically based ways to best manage software teams
- Mary Kate Stimmler, Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences (CASBS)
If you work in tech or if you work with people who work in tech, preorder this book. Just do it. I have no doubt that you will better for it, and I’m pretty sure the world will be better for it.
- Bryan Guffey
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The Psychology of Software Teams is essential reading for anyone engaged in building, supporting, or growing software teams.
My favorite chapter is Chapter 3, where you bring the receipts that nuke the "10x developer" and "l33tcode" myths from orbit, leaving them both a smoking crater in the ground. 👏
- Eli Israel, Managing Partner, Gartner Consulting
Like everyone else with a lick of sense in this dumbass software business, I have pre-ordered [Cat's] 's book.
- @oisin@mastodon.ie
Cat Hicks knows more about the human dynamics of software teams than anyone else I have ever known. Can't wait to read her new book. If you work with developers, this is the user manual you've been looking for.
- Adam Zimman, author of Progressive Delivery
I’ve never read a book with such high levels of dense content, as in 0 fluff and filler.
It makes it impossible to highlight a section to refer to later because nearly every paragraph was revelatory.
- David Amor, Principal FPGA Engineer
...another thing I love about this book: the evidence base (from studies spanning decades) is rigorous and richly framed, but Cat sets it alongside the lived experiences of developers to help illuminate and validate their insights -- instead of positioning the science as truth from on high that overrules lived experience....a masterclass in science writing!
- Shern Tee, PhD, Senior Developer & science communicator
Never have I felt so well understood in my job as a manager of engineering teams.
- Sasha Göbbels, Senior Engineering Manager
I specialize in applied social science that helps real people. I'm broadly interested in the structure of our beliefs, how we can scale up productive strategies for learning, how innovation cycles work via social processes, integrating long-missing empirical theories into the study of software teams, diverse mixed-methods and measurement design that better captures multidimensional insight, and how people build coalitional strategies while doing technology work.
Hicks, C. M., Lee, C. S., & Foster-Marks, K. (2025, March 15). AI Skill Threat: How the Structure of Developers’ Beliefs about Software Development Ability Impacts Their Psychological Resilience During Rapid Technology Shift. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2gej5_v2
Flournoy, J. C., Lee, C. S., Hicks, C. M., & Wu, M. (2025). No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.05040.
Hicks, C. M., Hevesi, A. (2024, November 21) A Cumulative Culture Theory for Developer Problem-Solving. PsyArXiv, Preprint. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tfjyw
Hicks, C. M. (2024). Psychological Affordances Can Provide a Missing Explanatory Layer for Why Interventions to Improve Developer Experience Take Hold or Fail.
Lee, C.S., Hicks, C.M. & Foster-Marks, K. (2024). “My code is shit”: Negative automatic thoughts and outcomes of a behavioral experiment for code review anxiety. PsyArXiv, Preprint.
Lee, C. S., & Hicks, C. M. (2024). Understanding and effectively mitigating code review anxiety. Empirical Software Engineering, 29(6), 161.
Hicks, C. M., Lee, C. S., Ramsey, M. Developer Thriving: four sociocognitive factors that create resilient productivity on software teams. IEEE Software (2024).
Hicks, C. (2021) It’s Like Coding in the Dark: The need for learning cultures within coding teams [White Paper], Catharsis Consulting. [https://www.catharsisinsight.com/reports]
Weatherholtz, K., Grimaldi, P., Hicks, C., Hill, K.M., Freeman, C., Akbayin-Sahin, B., Coker, C., Ma, J., & Henneman, L. (2020). Use of Khan Academy Official SAT Practice and SAT Achievement: An Observational Study. Mountain View, CA: Khan Academy.
My research has influenced practice across organizations' engineering and product teams at organizations such as Wells Fargo, Adobe, Google, Duke University, Vanguard, UC San Diego, Stanford University, Coursera, TD Bank, Grainger, Westpac, Coles, Fidelity, Manulife, and the BBC. My research has been highlighted in workshops, panels and keynotes for technology organizations and publications in academic peer-reviewed venues such as IEEE Software, Empirical Software Engineering, CHI, the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, Developmental Science, the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, the Journal of Workplace Learning, the International Convention of Psychological Science, Coursera Partners' Conference, and Infant and Child Development.
I hold a PhD in Quantitative Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego, where I worked with David Liu and Gail Heyman. I conducted a field-work heavy, cross-national dissertation with more than 800 early learners in complex applied settings, including managing institutional partnerships between schools and academic partners, and published research on disclosure and early belief formation around performance and cultural differences in beliefs about ability and performance (which remains a consistent theme in my work!). I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in the UC San Diego Design Lab and was one of the Design Lab's first fellows and only senior research postdoc during its very first years, where I worked with Scott Klemmer, Don Norman, and Jim Hollan on Human-Computer Interaction design, engineering and computer science topics in large-scale interactive digital learning scenarios.