Dr. Cat Hicks, a psychologist studying software teams, joins RedMonk’s Kelly Fitzpatrick to discuss the role of psychology in technological innovation. Dr. Hicks emphasizes the importance of understanding the human aspects of software development and shares insights from her recent research projects, including a study on code review anxiety and the impact of what she calls “AI Skill Threat” on developers. Dr. Hicks also addresses the challenges faced by scientists today, the significance of cumulative cultures in software, and her upcoming book on the psychology of software teams.

Transcript

Kelly Fitzpatrick (00:12)
Hello and welcome to this RedMonk Conversation. My name is Kelly Fitzpatrick, Senior Analyst at RedMonk, and with me today is Dr. Cat Hicks, a psychologist studying software teams. Cat, thank you for joining me on the MonkCast today.

Cat Hicks (00:25)
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (00:27)
We at RedMonk, I’m using not even the royal we, but we at RedMonk have been a long time fan of you and your work. You have spoken at Monktoberfest, I think it was 2023. I’ve been to many Monktoberfests and it was the first time I can recall that someone showed up and was like, hey, I have two talks, which one would you like me to give? And I love the one that you gave and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes so folks can go and watch it, because there’s a lot of good stuff there.

But for folks who are not already familiar with you and your work, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Cat Hicks (00:56)
Yeah, absolutely. And maybe that’s a good intro, because that’s a bit of psychological blackmail to get you all to invite me back. So for the second talk that you didn’t hear, but I am a psychologist, as you said, I have a PhD in psychology and a lot of other things besides and after that. But I really consider myself a psychologist who studies what drives technological innovation. So right now that looks like being a psychologist for software teams, which is also a field that didn’t exist. I also see it like I have to invent the field that I think needs to exist that I want to exist out there to hold the work that I want to do and to create that for other people as well. I think we need it for the future of software.

So to that end, I’m someone who’s really interested in being a research architect. Sometimes I call myself a designer of evidence science for organizations. I’m really interested in everything around the questions that everybody seems to be asking in a field about the humans in that field, but then we don’t seem to be on a good path to getting those answers. That’s kind of like the space where I thrive trying to bring those answers to the surface.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (02:06)
I love your articulation of your role as being like an architect in all of this. Because we talk about architects in software, but in terms of the work that you do, it sounds like that this is something that is needed.

Cat Hicks (02:08)
Yeah. That’s right. I think so. I think so. I see it like a black hole, like at the center of the universe, you know, my universe, maybe. And I love to borrow and steal the words from software teams, because I think that you all, you know, here in the tech industry have a beautiful language for creating infrastructure. And we have our own language as well in social science.

So I try to kind of bring those two things together and sort of, you know,provoke people a little bit by saying, hey, you might think psychologists are just people with a couch in their office, you know, and we actually are also very technical and have kind of an understanding of dynamics and systems and we can bring that to you.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (02:57)
And I do, feel like you very much have to have one foot in psychology and one foot in the tech industry. And I understand that because I’ve always been like, okay, here’s academia and here’s the tech industry. But for you I think that overlap has to be even more intense.

Cat Hicks (03:10)
It’s pretty intense. But I love that too, right? And you seem like a very multidisciplinary person yourself, right? Like there are things that sort of define us as two people who like to talk to each other besides just the majors that we had, right? And I think that drives a lot of people who are very intellectually curious,

Kelly Fitzpatrick (03:31)
absolutely. And I think your point about having to almost like invent a way of looking at psychology and developers, it blows my mind that that’s not something that we’ve been talking about for longer. Years ago, I was teaching at Georgia Tech and we had computer science students working in groups to do projects. And we would have them do surveys that would talk about psychological safety. So there’s terms that we’ve been using.

Cat Hicks (03:41)
Yeah.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (03:55)
Yes.

Cat Hicks (03:55)
Things have come up. Things have been, in my opinion, quite cherry picked and brought to the tech industry. And I say this with like respect, love and, actually like deep admiration for the individuals who have done that work. So that’s not a ding on them. You know, I actually worked very closely next to the team that brought psychological safety to Google, the people analytics team there. So I interned as a PhD in people ops at Google. And saw people like me who had PhDs in psychology. But I was really struck by what seemed to be allowed to come in and what wasn’t allowed to come in. So psych safety is a great concept, but why have we not brought in other psychology questions like organizational fairness or organizational injustice? A lot of stuff to me has stayed at the individual level. Those are the little concepts from psychology that have been allowed to percolate in. There are a lot of other ones.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (04:52)
And think the way you put it as these things have been cherry picked, and put that alongside the whole idea of architecting, more structured, like research projects that look at this, which is what you’re doing.

Cat Hicks (05:03)
I appreciate that. I’m glad you see it that way. it’s really validating and heartwarming to me. Like we’re still very early, I think, in building this vision of a science for developer teams and it’s constant reinvention.

I recently talked to Dr. Cristine Legare, who is this amazing interdisciplinary cognitive scientist. We had her on my podcast and she gave me this language. She said, you’re designing a culture. You’re designing a different culture.inside of a field or inside of an organization. I was kind of like, I’ve been given permission to use this word culture about my work.

But that actually is something that I’ve always cared really deeply about. How can we build the infrastructure that frees us to get rigorous evidence and frees all the young scientists, analysts, software developers, like all the people that need to come together to do the kind of projects I like to do, they need infrastructure to feel safe to do that work and to have jobs that let them do that work. yeah, it’s kind of like to lead in this to invent the field, you need to care about that.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (06:06)
so speaking of this, like the projects that you’ve been working on recently, for folks, again, who are not already familiar with what you do, like what are some of the most recent projects that you have? And then we’re going to come back to the whole fact that you have a podcast. Like we’re going to come back to that one. But let’s start with some of the things you’re working on.

Cat Hicks (06:18)
Yeah, absolutely. So I put out empirical research and we put it out in a lot of different formats, but there tends to be like a scientific artifact at the center. So a research study that we run and we recruit people like software developers, real working software developers, and we measure things about what they’re experiencing. And then we put it out in a scientific paper. Some of those are published. and a good example is we did a research project that you’re familiar with on code review anxiety.

This was published in Empirical Software Engineering, which is a great journal. so it was peer reviewed. And we led this intervention project. So we actually, this is led by Dr. Carol Lee, who I know is also a friend of RedMonk. And she developed an intervention from her expertise on the experience of anxiety that people were having about code reviews. And we asked ourselves as psychologists, what can we do to help this? Can we change what they’re experiencing? So we developed an intervention and did just that. gave them a workshop on anxiety, measured differences in it. And I think one of the things that’s really cool about this body of work from my lab, the intervention side of it, is it really gives people the evidence to just convince their leadership that some of these difficult things can be moved, can be changed. So that’s one example.

Another project that is near and dear to my heart that we put out is this research project I named the New Developer. And we took a large scale observational study of over 3000 developers and engineering managers, which everybody always forgets about the managers. But actually we studied them in this study as well. And we looked at how they’re experiencing the adoption of AI, not just as all of the kind of like logistical techie conversations we’re having about it, but how it’s making them feel about what it means to be a developer in this time.

So that’s an area of research I’m really interested in, like how do our social identities change us? And do we have good ones? Are we hanging on to bad ones? We developed a model that we call AI skill threat, which is essentially the deep level of fear threat that people feel in this moment when they think maybe who I am as a developer isn’t good enough, isn’t gonna fit with the future and give a lot of evidence about how people can move past that as well.

So those are kind of two different, I try to think of my research kind of like either we’re giving people a good map to the landscape, we’re doing this big, cool, what’s the field experiencing, what are developers experiencing at large, or we’re doing an intervention and we’re kind of developing evidence about mechanisms.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (08:55)
And you’re right, we have had Dr. Carol Lee on the show as well talking about code review anxiety. the work you’ve done on the New Developer and AI skills threat, we cite that all the time in conversations with clients and other ways. So your work is appreciated and I personally turn to it quite often.

Cat Hicks (09:06)
Thank you. How incredibly validating. Like, scientists don’t always get to hear that.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (09:20)
Much less like here on a podcast so everyone else can hear like, we like your work.

Cat Hicks (09:23)
Yeah. Yeah.

But I do think it speaks to, you know, it speaks to the need, the gap, like I said, the black hole. It does astonish me too, that there isn’t more of this out there for engineers. And I tell tech audiences all the time, it’s not just nice that I do this work. Y’all should demand this work. Honestly, you deserve it. Like you’re connected to, so much of the economy. You’re connected to so much human knowledge in the world, we should have a good science for you.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (09:53)
Especially at a time where science right now is in a really interesting space. going back to your podcast. So you have a podcast with your wife who also has a PhD. And I know one of the episodes you did recently was on the NIH, the National Institutes of Health. And that’s something where their funding and the people who have funding through it is kind of under threat.

Cat Hicks (09:56)
That’s right.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (10:11)
What is it like to be trying to do science at a time like this?

Cat Hicks (10:16)
I just have to breathe for a beat because what is it like? We’re in pain right now as scientists for a lot of reasons. Trust in science has gone down, took a hit, I think because the pandemic was so difficult for so many people. you know, science is not just a thing that magically happens, it’s human beings, it’s grad students working in labs, you know, not getting paid very much.

It’s people like my wife scraping out grants, and then using those grants to place more students in labs that then turn into scientists. Like there’s a whole beautiful economy happening here. And that economy is taking some hits. So maybe for people who don’t know the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, this is a massive federal agency that puts out a huge amount of where science funding kind of comes from, especially for basic science. So things like…how do the cells work that create cancer and things like that. Yeah, and we try to tackle this kind of issue and others on our podcast, Change, Technically. My wife is a PhD in neuroscience, which is very fun for me as a psychologist.

And now I’ve completely forgotten your question. Like you were just asking what it’s like to be a scientist. I guess what it’s like is I feel this burning desperate need to tell people what science is and to invite them in and to also like confront the ways that science hasn’t always connected to people or shown or proven its own value and to like rise to that challenge right now. And to also like care for all of the young junior scientists and try to protect them.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (11:58)
We talk about say like early career developers all the time. And I feel like you’re kind of early career scientists as well, or even people who are aspiring to be scientists. I have, have a niece, has a senior in college and she’s going into something in STEM. this is an interesting moment to be faced with the world as it is and still kind of make those decisions.

Cat Hicks (12:04)
Yeah. My advice to anybody who’s got like a kid in their life, you know, is, listen, this has always been a thing that we made, we made science, we decided girls could get into science, then not everybody has always thought that, as we know, and we decided it would be so and people fought for that. And it’s so frightening and overwhelming. And you could feel, I feel immense amounts of anger when I think about the young girls in my life who might feel not valued in this moment, but then I’m just like, I’m going to show up five million times harder for them. So people like me and Ashley, like we’re, we’re out there. We’re trying to be visible and I’m loud about it. And I’m tearing up because this matters a lot. Yeah.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (13:04)
I do, think loudly and visibly doing science, that alone is very important at this moment.

Cat Hicks (13:10)
Mm-hmm. I think, again, people have a hunger for this. And things are messy and hard, but at the end of the day, people will be getting sick. Your parents will need drugs to help them. We need to solve big problems of human suffering. And the goal of science has always been that you could do work that transcends your own lifetime. You could pass it on to someone else. And that actually inspires me quite deeply when I think about software as well, one of my recent projects has been on developing a theory of cumulative cultures in software.

And so to me, that means shifting our perspective away from the idea of lone geniuses and isolated brains and showing the evidence that we have that innovation is really driven by many, many cycles of culture and social learning and our brains really do work that way, you know, and so everything else is fighting against our nature. And I really do believe that and that gives me like a lot of hope even when I live in a difficult context where my studies, you know, aren’t always the studies that are at the top of the pile to get funded.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (14:20)
I love that concept of cycles of culture, especially within the software industry. I feel like it can be applicable outside of it as well. And you, I understand, are also working on a book, is that correct?

Cat Hicks (14:23)
Yeah. That’s right, I am. I’m really excited to be working on this book, tentative title, The Psychology of Software Teams. So that’s with CRC Press, under contract there with a great editor, and I’m really enjoying it. Always wanted to publish a book on this stuff.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (14:48)
I’m always excited when people are excited about publishing a book because I did one book and I’m like, I’m done, I’m never doing it again. But to see people who are still very energized and excited to have their book baby come into being.

Cat Hicks (15:03)
Yeah, I gotta tell you, I love writing. I know lots of people say that, but I think a lot of people want to have written things. And I genuinely like writing. And one time I was on a hike with my wife actually, and I was at a really difficult moment in my career. I was actually thinking about leaving tech as everyone does, especially every woman in tech over the age of, what did they say? Like over the age of 35, like 50 % of women have left tech or something like that.

So I was about at that birthday and I was walking around with Ashley thinking, am I going to leave tech and just try to sell macrame on Etsy or something? And we were having a deep conversation about our values. And I said, you know, I just want to do more words and less code. I love the problems of code, but I really want to be talking about it and writing about it and finding language for things. And so I wrote down like more words, less code and put it on my desk and here I am.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (15:58)
Do you have like the post-it, “more words, less code” somewhere?

Cat Hicks (16:00)
You know, I don’t have this one right now. I’ll show you what I have. I have this Post-It, It says, Let Cat cook. And that’s from my friend Danilo, who’s our podcast producer. And it’s on a little In-N-Out Post-It note, which yeah, just a reminder to myself right now.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (16:18)
And so back to the book, this whole conversation came to be because a couple months ago on Bluesky, you were talking about the process of writing your book. Going back to that concept of cycles of culture, having to go back and write a book and look at some of the formative texts in a field can be, there’s usually a lot there.

Cat Hicks (16:26)
Yeah.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (16:39)
Your phrasing here is so great because you actually say, “Now I am writing a book in my own field and the still exalted ‘classic text’ contains these jagged shards of exclusion, ready to cut my hands as I sift through the work.” That is such a beautiful way of, I think, expressing what has to be a very frustrating process.

Cat Hicks (16:53)
Thank you. You know, one of the things, one of the reasons maybe that I went into psychology is I, I really feel like human experience matters, including your own painful experiences. And having just been an author on the first piece of clinical psychology work that I’ve ever done with our code review anxiety paper, which was really, really fun for me to do that. I found that even more amplified and echoed because, so much of the way that we help people confront difficult experiences is by saying you can do this, you can face this, you can take action.

So in working on my book, I picked up some old software books, and there’s all kinds of stuff in those books. There’s all kinds of generalizations about human beings that are decades out of date, and very painful. you know, statements about women, like comparing a beautiful program to a beautiful woman. We have this concept in psychology called stereotype threat that you might have heard of before if you know this word.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (17:56)
I have not, and I am positive there are people who are listening who have not heard that before either.

Cat Hicks (18:02)
Yeah, okay, so there’s this great, –great, that’s like a real psych thing to say, “Oh, this is so interesting, this terrible thing”– There’s this great, interesting mechanism that happens, it’s called stereotype threat. So picture you’re doing your job, you’re doing your work, and you get reminded of some identity or some way that other people see you, and you know that other people have a negative stereotype associated with it.

So it’s not about whether it’s true, it’s probably not true, almost certainly, but it’s about your knowledge that other people think it’s true. When that happens, we have like decades of research on this in psychology. When you experience stereotype threat, it takes the same resources away from your mind as you have to use for problem solving. So essentially you have extra work to do because you’re under threat.

And that work takes away from, for instance, your ability to do a math problem on a test. So they’ll bring people in and say, let’s remind you of a negative stereotype. And then people will perform worse on a test than they might have if they had not been reminded of that. So I experience a lot of stereotype threat. Like myself, when I pick up a book and I read something that feels really gendered and I’m reminded of my own identities and how people see them.

But then I’d really try to reframe it and think, it’s amazing that we have these tools. Like other people spent beautiful years of their lives fighting to surface evidence about what is stereotype threat. And now I can have this experience and I can know that it’s not about me and it’s not my competence and I can understand it. And because I can understand it, I can get past it and maybe even confront it and do my own part there.

So. Yeah, that’s a lot from one Bluesky post,

Kelly Fitzpatrick (19:51)
I did not know about stereotype threats. And now I do. I think that, like, for me, I’m like, hmm, this could be just very useful in my own having to go through the world.

Cat Hicks (19:54)
Yeah. Speaking of cherry picking, isn’t it interesting that you’ve probably heard of implicit bias and like implicit bias trainings in tech, but you haven’t heard of stereotype threat? And I think that that’s interesting because I think sometimes implicit bias trainings create stereotype threat for people who are minoritized. And I’ve been pretty vocal about this actually with some organizations I’ve worked with. That’s just a little bit of psychology inside baseball for you.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (20:26)
Very inside baseball. Any other parts of your work or your book or anything that you’re looking forward to working on that you wanna talk about?

Cat Hicks (20:35)
I’m really interested in all of the kinds of areas in engineering work where we seem to rely on a small group of individuals to be superheroes. and then we sort of just have cycles of depending on those people and only putting a lot of pressure on them when things go wrong. So maybe incident response, people who’ve been working on infrastructure for a long time or reliability.

This is a tough, tough, tough topic. And I know it’s tough one and I know it matters to people because people come up to me like after I present my research and they say, can you please do something about this? Can you please like create some evidence about the cost of not investing in this and how much we are like carrying innovation cycles on our backs, but our work looks really mundane to people. I think that we could do something to help these people. So I’m not going to be able to tell you what that is yet because I’m still designing it, but that’s a project I’m really excited about. I’m really excited to connect also to organizations that are interested in this question. So I think we need kind of a like coming together across organizations. Yeah, so stay tuned for that, I guess.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (21:46)
No, that is exciting. I feel like anyone out there who’s ever, like incident response was, I think the first thing that popped into my mind as you were starting to say that, and I think folks who live in that world are like, yes, this could be really important research.

Cat Hicks (21:59)
A lot of tech worlds are very brittle, and I don’t like that. I like resilient and adaptive. Something I’m really curious about is whether we can increase the compassion of people around those people to give them a more supportive frame in which to do their work. I’m curious about that. I’m really interested in crisis response and how people respond to natural disasters. I think that software teams actually could use a little bit of that work. Yeah.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (22:24)
So Cat, we are about out of time and I definitely will be looking forward to your book coming out and any of your future research. But for now, where can folks go to hear more about you? Do you have like preferred social channels? Are you doing any speaking in 2025?

Cat Hicks (22:40)
Yes, so many places to find me. I’ll just rattle them all off. So I try to be very active on Bluesky and Mastodon. My handle around the internet tends to be Grimalkina, which is a play on my name because it means cat. Find me at drcathicks.com. I’m also a co-host as we touched on on a podcast called Change Technically with my wife Ashley, who’s a neuroscientist and a science writer. By the way, she’s also working on a book which is going to come out about mind-body connection.

I will be doing some speaking this year. I’ll be speaking at Craft Conference. So they’re at craft-conf.com. That’s in Budapest in May. This year I’ll be a keynote speaker at Posit::Conf, which is in Atlanta in September. I am really excited about this. It has a special place in my heart because all of those tools, RStudio, R, those are the tools that I have worked in when I was just a scrappy little baby researcher. So excited about that and I’ll keep announcing more speaking events hopefully this year on my website.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (23:37)
It sounds like you certainly are busy.

Cat Hicks (23:39)
I like storytelling. Yeah, more words, less code.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (23:44)
More words,less code. I think that’s a good takeaway. Dr. Cat Hicks, many thanks again for dropping in on the MonkCast. Again, my name is Kelly Fitzpatrick with RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast And if you’re watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.

RMC: Psychology, Technological Innovation, and Why We Need Science (with Dr. Cat Hicks)

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