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Cat Hicks

@grimalkina@mastodon.social

mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06

Psychologist for the humans of tech
Evidence strategy for technical teams

The Psychology of Software Teams (July, 2026): https://www.drcathicks.com/#book

Co-host at Change, Technically: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/

Seizing the means of scientific production. "Too much psychology for a software engineering audience" - Reviewer 2

She/her
Founded: Catharsis Consulting, Developer Success Lab, Travrse
Neighborhood Cool Aunt of Science

11304 Followers

930 Following

50 Posts

Joined November 10, 2022

Podcast:

https://www.changetechnically.fyi/

Book:

https://www.drcathicks.com/#book

Developer Science:

https://www.drcathicks.com/projects

Newsletter:

https://fight-for-the-human.ghost.io/

Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

me: so let's think about levers to change a policy-- very online ppl: ENSHITTIFICATION me: uh, maybe...but also there are specific ways this-- very online ppl: ENSHITTIFICATION IT'S A CABAL me: well idk it's also many interacting factors and if you look at how change has previously been made-- very online ppl: HOPELESS. LATE STAGE CAPITALISM. ENSHITTIFICATION. YOU'RE JUST TALKING ABOUT ENSHITTIFICATION me: ok I'm trying to talk about a specific-- very online ppl: ENSHIT--

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@animesh/116685030985963198 I like this paper but the strangest part of its impact to me is the general idea people seem to take from it that we cannot form our mental models when we haven't created something ourselves, when in fact, the core architecture of how human beings form mental models and test hypotheses about them is essentially all evolved for understanding a world we didn't create ourselves

Quoting

@animesh@mastodon.social

"Programming is building a mental model. It is not mechanical code production. The shared mental model in developers' minds is the real product. A program is "living" only while the team understands this theory. When programmers leave, it becomes "dead". Without the original theory, new maintainers treat software as a black box, creating patchwork fixes that cause side effects and architectural decay." Absolute truth. Originally from Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" (1985)

Open quoted post

mastodon.social

baksignal: ""Programming is building a mental model. It is no…" - Mastodon

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 1w ago

I enjoy meeting people, and I absolutely love public speaking in tech. This is such a wonderful part of my work that I feel privileged to do But for the love of god please CAN WE STOP 😩😩😩😩😩 with introduction handshakes. It's nothing personal but I'm on an immunosuppressant 😩😩😩😩😩 and I do not want to shake anybody's hand

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to on mastodon.social

It took EIGHT appointments, over $1000 (that's after insurance), and loads of time and stress. And I raised the thing we needed to look at in the very first appointment and every subsequent one. Now, I don't dispute the need to not leap to assumptions. Perhaps there really are many drivers of Symptom Y. But not even *considering* Condition A? A real failure. Doctors' appointments are subject to anchoring effects, perhaps worse than any single high-stakes reasoning moment I've ever seen.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

Oh and one more thought don't ever let yourself feel like you're somehow screwing up for going to yet another doctor. I felt like an IDIOT going to the EIGHTH doctor appointment and she was a complete angel and the first person to truly help me and literally the days before going to that appointment I was wondering if I should cancel it because it was just going to be dumping money down the drain for another miserable experience. Roll again roll again roll again roll again keep going if you can

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

The price to get care is not just money. It is the energy and ability to fight with evidence. Who is capable of being as much of a pitbull as I am about things? It shouldn't take relentlessly going back again and again and again to finally get into a room with a basic diagnostic inventory. And it wasn't a failure of information: *I* knew the diagnostic inventory eight months before someone was finally willing to note two things together in my chart. Come. the fuck. on.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

In order to achieve the maximal efficacy of medical intervention, you absolutely need to solve diagnostic delays. Diagnostic delays are increasingly costly the more efficacious our early interventions are. If you miss the boat, and the boat could take you to an entirely different universe of outcomes, that miss matters tremendously.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

Fun fact Matt and lab had a video game created for his fish. Is this the first video game designed specifically for fish?? It's the first one I know about anyway https://today.ucsd.edu/story/social-brains-allow-animal-groups-to-escape-danger

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

Anyway I'm having Thai takeout and a snickers ice cream bar. You do not choose what happens to you but you choose what you do with it.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

and you know, I did it. There is a window of intervention for what I'm going through, and I got started on treatment during that window. Past that window, patients' chances of changing the long-term course of their condition ARE. CUT. IN. HALF.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

This is ONE example. I feel some I dunno, hesitation saying this because I have that gaslighting bullshit residue in the back of my throat, but we have spent thousands of dollars on my health appointments and you know what, we *needed to* for me to achieve an actual quality standard of care. My wife is a TENURED BIOLOGY PROFESSOR who TEACHES EVERY PREMED student in one of the best medical systems in the country and that's what we get.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

Famously, doctors struggle with base rates and similar cognitive biases around likelihood ( see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247373134_Physicians_neglect_base_rates_and_it_matters or https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2753.2001.00284.x ) Really, we all struggle with base rates We are trained to think about population level averages. Our minds like to anchor on large known patterns. But most moments of detective work are about winnowing through conditional probabilities

researchgate.net

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

But I guess, you know, so many impossible things have happened in my life it's made me believe that change will always happen. Odds are constructed out of the way things currently are and we can change that. Another form of conditional probability we have to solve: we cannot make it necessary to be a goddamn PhD rearranging her entire life to get to be someone who gets an answer and an intervention and gets to have that life back.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

some candidate pitfalls/fallacies:

thinking that just because you reverse a characteristic in the body, the body will just "go back" to the prior state (it has already been through a change that probably changed other things)
merging things at inappropriate levels of granularity/scale, like thinking because you know a peptide or such is involved in x, the peptide-or-such "explains x" or "is the sole cause of x"

others you see?

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

I have been going back through the last two years of my experience here and trying to write something out of it. A few large points are resolving

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

The length of time of that window? We don't know for certain, but the range looks roughly similar to the length of time THESE things take:

how long it takes most women with these symptoms to get referred to a specialist in the first place
around the length of time you might spend battling two denials + appeals of a medication (based on my personal experience)
the time it takes your favorite local psychologist to pitch, draft and publish a book

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

I understand the underlying theory that structure elicits clearer and better group decision-making, which seems sound at a high level. But in practice, the "structure" or facilitation of these panels seems to vary widely. It seems quite possible to create false consensus via forced choice.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

Do I have a solution, not really, but having read approximately twenty billion Delphi panel articles in medicine, and been on several in software, I find myself frustrated by the solicitation of experts *downstream of ontology and operationalization decisions*

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

They are frequently surveys written without survey methodology expertise. Especially for professional areas that don't value the behavioral sciences (......medicine, software.......)

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

the risks of having some very specific mechanistic knowledge of biology but then vastly oversimplying other parts. Interactions between systems are a good example here.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

A good example is tech "security" stuff aimed at the general public. I actually read a lot of it, for sad reasons that you can probably figure out pretty quickly! And I find much of it baffling, overwhelming, loaded with posturing that seems aimed at Other Security People and not someone like me

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

I feel really grateful to live in a time and a place where I get to do work with my mind, to help other people's minds, to think about the aspects of our psychology that help us through, to try to extend the platforms and the audiences for it. I feel so grateful for my past self persisting. Seeing this response to the book is emotional to me in a way I didn't plan for because I feel like I took a bet on this stuff mattering and it's being met with my community's belief that it matters too.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

You need a theory of why a problem happens, a coherent and empathic understanding of why those choices seem to make sense but lead people astray, an evidence-based view on which are the most important things to push, and a test that your message actually works.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Insurance just denied a medication I take every single day because, and I quote, the provider did not submit new notes that it was working well 🙄

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

To be frank, too many tech expertise collectives think they can just intuit their way to intervention science and never research what creates an effective behavioral intervention or comm. Getting a lecture in bullet points reduced to such a high generalization there's no process detail isn't it.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 1mo ago

Ten minutes of trying to help someone do a thing you want to happen is worth ten days of screaming on social media about the things you wish weren't happening

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

When you work on behavioral interventions you know people's attentional focus on your message is PRECIOUS. Wasting that gas on redundant and confusing lecturing can be worse than no guidance at all.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

Other highlights: very fun to walk around labs with a group of SUPER excited science educators who exclaim every time a neat piece of equipment comes into view, I love scientists

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

I gave this talk about software research but I think it applies to tech orgs wishing to influence the behavior of the public We need to think about things that are targeted, tailored and timely https://www.fightforthehuman.com/software-research-must-become-more-reusable/

fightforthehuman.com

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

It's so strange and baffling that sometimes going through dark, weird, tough journeys can pull back the curtain on the meaning of your work. Everything I put into this book passed through a NEW filter that wasn't just my years of psychological science and my many thousands of datapoints and my storytelling in tech; it also had to pass through the filter of what I still fully believed while confronting such deep loss and fear as grief brings you.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

Rainbow colored rows of equipment helping us crunch mysteries about the immune system next to the gender inclusive bathrooms, as g-d intended

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

And then it vanished, in the way that things can vanish, the structure falling out. At the exact same time I experienced these massive health challenges that made it difficult to sit and write for long hours. I was always going to write the book *I* wanted to write (that was baked into every single proposal), but this project became sharper, stripped down to the essence. But in a weird way....free. Suddenly I was writing at home, in pain, asking myself "what really matters to say right now"

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

What I didn't share *then* was that I was still reeling from a lot of losses. That summer one of our closest friends was diagnosed with a massively rare terrifying brain tumor, one of our dearest family friends (like a second parent to us) was diagnosed with early-onset alzheimer's (incredibly there was a gorgeous, moving, essential talk at monktoberfest about dealing with exactly this possibility for loved ones. I will never ever forget it. We NEEDED that)

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

You can take a lot of hits in tech, you know. I actually had an earlier version of this book proposal which a really influential editor wanted, but he only wanted it as long as I was still a VP at a tech company. There was a large marketing proposal attached to the book, all based on the Dev Success Lab's work. It felt like a dream: I'd sweated and fought so so hard for publishing open empirical science and then the audience had shown up and because of it I was going to get that!

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

There are some cut chapters that may be lurking, ready to be published somewhere 👀

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

I can send out media copies of my book! What tech focused media do you read? 👀

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

What I didn't share at the time but did a few months later is, two days after closing the lab I was given a shocking and very terrifyingly urgent diagnosis that helped to explain the six months of steadily increasing and baffling pain I'd been experiencing before that I gave a talk about this at 2025 Monktoberfest https://youtu.be/U8naVinNd6M?si=GXYiriqHFEfaR7t5

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

SEATTLE friends: Cat-in-real-life alert! I am in Seattle this week and decided to host a small (limited spots) Psychology of Software Teams happy hour this thursday July 30th, 4-6pm. You can come, leave whenever you want, zero expectation, just wanted to talk about human stuff with humans of tech. RSVP here for location & to secure a spot: https://luma.com/lxcmtn68

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@duckalini@cloudisland.nz with TWO kitties!!!

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@duckalini@cloudisland.nz oh wait or a dog and a cat together?!???

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@almad@fosstodon.org 😂😅😂😅

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

@llorenzin@infosec.exchange I appreciate your thought, but I'm capable of verbally communicating this boundary and the idea of wearing a button like this makes me feel nauseous, I don't need the "different" labeling more than usual!

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social

· 2w ago

Boosted by @MaryAustinBooks@mstdn.social

Replying to

As one of my patient friends said once, Cat it sucks that [condition] happened to you but damn you also happened to [condition]

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