Cat Hicks is a psychologist for software teams, a research architect and defender of the mismeasured. Cat founded the Developer Success Lab, an open science research lab creating empirical evidence on how organizations and individuals can achieve sustainable, resilient innovation in technology and create more wellbeing for technologists. Cat holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego and is the author of a forthcoming book on the psychology of software teams.
Developers are struggling to be heard. Software teams are grappling with high turnover, high burnout, and low resilience in the face of rapidly-accelerating technological change. Even though effective software teams are an essential part of our world continuing to work, many organizations struggle to understand their technical teams, stuck in old stereotypes that treat technical people like isolated machines. To build a thriving future, we need a new way of working together in software development. In my empirical research across thousands of software developers and their teams, I explore what a psychologically-rich environment looks like for software development. In this talk we'll unlock access to the psychological sciences and the human-centered evidence that you can use to make your every day more human.