Reading about this xz backdoor story from the outside as a person who is still learning much about the technical ins and outs, but as a psychologist it is just overwhelming to imagine a maintainer in this position and all of the feelings of pressure and skill based identity and social isolation that must be involved.
Imho psychology has a duty to show up for technology practitioners and work for them just like we see and work for the well-being of emergency workers, healthcare providers.
I feel that as a field, psych has largely let the human side of software development pass it by and we have been content to be merely consumers as much as the rest of the world. But the needs of these people are going unaddressed, undermeasured and unheard. I talk to a lot of psychologists about why I started working with software teams and the human needs that are there and the massive amounts of societal responsibility & pressure that are there too. We really need to have this conversation.
@grimalkina Really appreciate you doing this work.
Here's a question I think about a lot: What's the rate of occupational burnout in software engineering?
Is it more common than in similar professions? Do we talk about it more?
Amongst my circles it sometimes feels omnipresent but I have no idea if that's "real" or just an artifact of who I happen to know. I don't know if anyone's even done surveys on the topic.
@nat @grimalkina there were surveys & I’ll link to them directly later; here are links to my series of 10 articles , linking OSI layers & Maslow needs layers : first 2 are about physical & mental health : https://labs.ripe.net/author/becha/you-are-not-alone-ripe-community-resilience/ & https://labs.ripe.net/author/becha/ripe-community-resilience-physical-layer/
