Wtf is the evidence exactly that tech workers "fight for the user"

It's so insidious how difficult it is to maintain careful, evidence-based work in the world when you get compared to hot takes, short term thinking, and auto generated content. It creeps in in ways you don't even realize, to your sense of your own velocity and your guesses about people's perceptions & what they give money to. It feels quite Sisyphean sometimes to be an evidence scientist but as I learned in phenomenology...you do it because it is meaningful to do it, not because there's an end.

Across about ten things this week, I'll say this: mastodon has a real toxic reply guy culture going on and it is exhausting to receive this EVERY SINGLE TIME you dare say something that gets attention, as a marginalized female scientist. Worse to me tbh than typical trolling because it is so deeply rooted in credibility deficit "know your place" patterns. You all are worse than birdsite for me, where I have nearly five times more followers. Definitely thinking about leaving.

Fix your hearts.

A lot of people believe, basically, any kind of achievement is good because you got there in the end. But in fact maladaptive achievement is a whole cycle that leads to long-term breakdown, and it's a breakdown we have measured in learning science a lot.

I think there is a lot here that could be learned about how certain software teams function. In our Developer Thriving work, we focused on factors that predict *sustainable* achievement for this reason: flexible, celebratory, human centered.

A fatal flaw in the "be really hard on yourself as the mechanism to achieve" plan is that even when you achieve you absolutely cannot believe it, because you've really overtrained being hard on yourself. You see a systematic undervaluing that robs you of true information about your work.

So, one of the hallmarks of maladaptive high achievement I look for, as a psychologist studying productivity, is inability to really celebrate.

Leftist people online truly need to understand the skill of listening to someone's personal experience without leaping in to upchuck a bunch of societal abstractions at them, and worse, assume that person doesn't understand societal and structural issues just because they have chosen to tell a story about personal experience.

Get some empathy and respect skills.