The Psychology of Software Teams
routledge.com
routledge.com
However, every person I've worked with who was into these workplace-psychology books started thinking of themselves as expert diagnosticians of other people's psychology. Every personality or problem got mapped back to a scenario from a book they read, even when it wasn't a good fit. They started believing they understood other people better than those people understood themselves.
You couldn't talk to them about problems unless you could figure out which book(s) they were using, read them yourself, and then played a game where you explained things to them in a way that would get them to match the stereotyped situations in their books.
So instead of saying that the requirements are changing too haphazardly and too often (which would get you labelled as being too rigid or a complainer or something) you would have to explain that the requirements changing process is harmful to the team's psychological safety or other buzzwords. They've read enough books saying that a manager's job is to provide psychological safety, they see themselves as the hero manager, and therefore they need to fix this problem to provide psychological safety for the team.
I loathed it all so very much. It's refreshing to go back to managers who just talk to other people like people. I'm sure my good managers also read some of these books, but they didn't put any one book on a pedestal or take it all too literally.
It’s good to read others’ perspectives and expand your own. It’s even good when you disagree with the author. But you need to read multiple perspectives and adopt a habit of learning.
Like you're watching a movie and everything is going disastrously wrong, then the hero shows up and the tone completely changes for the better. Everything starts going right.
The most valuable parts are probably reframing the situations and looking for different perspectives as a way to broaden your thinking. I try to take them as as additional perspectives to have available.
I think the thing I disliked the most about having the books applied to me was when they were treated as an instruction manual for all situations. People would read those books and then start to fit every situation into something from the book.
The Team Topologies book that another comment brought up is a common offender. For years you could tell when someone had read the book because they'd try to force every organization to fit into the prescribed team and interaction formats. If it wasn't working out they'd switch to one of the other formats instead of thinking critically about what we needed for our unique situation.
It's a shame because the underlying message of not overloading teams with extremely broad feature areas is good, and was exactly what we needed.
Failure could be team burnout and attrition, it could be a major bug due to fast tracking validation (or not checking AI output), or a fundamental architectural issue with future repercussions that with a clearer mindset would have been considered .. or myriad other things in combination.
The person calling out the risk knows that it will 100% cause a failure somewhere. Exactly where and how the failure will occur cannot be predicted beforehand and it actually doesn't matter as the end result will be a missed delivery or incident.
Unfortunately the executive decision maker needs a concrete failure in order to implement a concrete solution.
(the authors tries to abstract over team topologies, adding some additional design dimensions)
Just like working with fresh college grads who are ambitious and think college knowledge is an instruction.
It's interesting to think how this affects self-perception. Basically this applies to how one views and treats themselves. One approach is to read book, take a test and put yourself in a bin: "well, I'll never be able to do xyz, the book said I am an abc". There is a danger there self-limiting and making the same mistake putting others in bins.
the tipping point for me was when he started preaching "Never Split the Difference". he'd gotten so cocky to the point he'd start meetings with "I already know how this is gonna end".
i don't mind these books as long as they come from a place of need, but it seems the main crowd are wannabe master manipulators. also, they can often be distilled to a couple chapters, not sure why they're so long.
"... a book had washed up on the shore... 'Extreme Ownership' ... soon the tribe was worshipping the book"
It happens over and over again in software history. I remember people running around panicking about TDD "But we only have 99.8% test coverage" until eventually it started to get shot down by "Show me the ROI on tests"
Yes! Very similar to my own criticisms. It's thinly veiled authoritarianism. Nobody handing you one of these books is ever doing it for your benefit despite framing it that way. The message always is, "this is the behavior I expect out of you".
As to the content density, they all tend to ape Dale Carnegie's work. Carnegie himself borrowing heavily from Ben Franklin, who actually had a lifetime of interesting anecdotes. If you don't have that, you spin out 80 pages worth of filler.
Here it goes like this:
- you receive an email: Please create an account on our website, you will benefit a lot from it
- then another email: If you want to get the book you just payed for, you must register first and then enter this code: #20 digit cryptic string#
- you create an account, eventually successfully bypass the dark pattern to seduce you to accept spam mails from them ("click here if you do not want to receive spam mails from us").
- You log in an see: "No books in your account", where can I enter the 20 digit cryptic code?
- Another look at the mails, oh, they said, "If you want to receive your book, you have to create an account on ANOTHER website
- You create another acccount
- Log in, you see a message: "Please click on the link in your confirmation mail"
- no confirmation mail received
- Go back, click on "send confirmation mail again"
- Some time later, confirmation mail arrives. But just a mail with header and footer but no content, no link to click
- Try again, same result
- Obviously something went wrong, can i report the bug somewhere? Of course not!
I am still waiting for my book.
https://catharsisinsight.com/ , scroll way down to “Developers deserve science.”
I found this one interesting. The authors note that often, developers avoid code reviews, and engage in a lot of unproductive behavior around them. They claim that a pretty simple one-session cognitive-behavioral intervention can dramatically change that.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-024-10550-9
Anyway, the longer I work in this field the more I see psychology as the dominant factor in team productivity. Assuming the job is doable, and you’ve hired good people, and the team has adequate control over their own work, that’s what’s left. You might argue that tool use or team practices are more important, but what stops you from adopting them or using them correctly? What stops you from learning from your mistakes? Usually something about your group psychology.
https://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Programming_Psychology.html
He joined IBM in the 50's, led the design of the telemetry system for NASA's Mercury project in the 60's, aimed to put humans at the center of software development with 'The Psychology of Computer Programming', and spent the rest of his life working on helping people do software development well together. IMO, any time you spend digging in to his large catalog will be well repaid.
In https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116743715688970777 she gives a concise explanation of the minimal groups paradigm where "People assigned to arbitrary groups immediately form strong allegiances, even though they haven’t been given any other psychologically meaningful cues about their group"
Which is it? Am I switching the toggle to opt out of selling my personal information or am I switching it to opt out of NOT selling my personal information?
I shouldn't have to read a paragraph of fine print to tell if they are intentionally using a dark pattern or merely incapable of composing a simple declarative sentence.
It's a shame, because it looks like an interesting book.
Except they've now started ruining them too with the new asinine trend of making them look like radio buttons
1) Human Technology (online journal, papers) - https://ht.csr-pub.eu/index.php/ht/index
2) Psychology of Programming Interest Group (papers) - https://www.ppig.org/
3) Cognitive Biases in Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study - https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03869
That phrase does not occur in the paper linked to in (3) above (i.e. "Cognitive Biases in Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study") at all.
The Abstract itself states;
One source of software project challenges and failures is the systematic errors introduced by human cognitive biases. Although extensively explored in cognitive psychology, investigations concerning cognitive biases have only recently gained popularity in software engineering research. This paper therefore systematically maps, aggregates and synthesizes the literature on cognitive biases in software engineering to generate a comprehensive body of knowledge, understand state of the art research and provide guidelines for future research and practise. Focusing on bias antecedents, effects and mitigation techniques, we identified 65 articles (published between 1990 and 2016), which investigate 37 cognitive biases. Despite strong and increasing interest, the results reveal a scarcity of research on mitigation techniques and poor theoretical foundations in understanding and interpreting cognitive biases. Although bias-related research has generated many new insights in the software engineering community, specific bias mitigation techniques are still needed for software professionals to overcome the deleterious effects of cognitive biases on their work.
i respect writing a book - ive written three, but if there’s a time when most tech leadership cared LESS about understanding software team psychology, i havent seen it.
truly a sad state of things. i love this topic and plan to read the book but i dont expect most people to care - the only mantra in software rn is to go as fast as possible on shitty features and burn people out.
of course above assessment is about the general state of big tech co’s. some pockets of sanity out there still at smaller companies but not many!
taking preorders now
I wish I was on a software team so I could justify buying it. But but my $DAY_JOB is answering phones and fixing printer-jams in a medical practice, so not a lot of application there.