What makes a great programmer?

Experience and brutebrainpower enhance programming skill by helping programming knowledgeto build over time, rather than by directly boosting currentperformance, according to a new article in the Journal of IndividualDifferences.

Authors Gunnar RyeBergersen and Jan-Eric Gustafsson put 65 professional programmersthrough their paces for two straight days, tackling twelve meatytasks in the Java language to prove their programming skill; this waswhat the study ultimately wanted to better understand.

Participants all filledin an extensive questionnaire on Java programming knowledge. Someparticipants also completed a suite of tasks involving memorisingitems (e.g. letters) while simultaneously handling another task suchas checking sentences for errors. These measure working memory, thecomponent of mind that keeps things available for consciousprocessing, and related to 'g', our proposed fundamental level ofmental ability. Unfortunately working memory scores for over half theparticipants weren't taken due to logistical issues.

The authors modelledthe relationships between all variables, including years of workexperience, and found the best predictor of programming skill wasprogramming knowledge: it loaded onto skill with a value of .77, where one would meanperfect prediction. Once knowledge was taken into account, aprogrammer's skill didn't benefit from better working memory orlonger experience. Rather, these variables seem to matter earlier inthe process by building better knowledge: working memory to help theprogrammer make sense of complex concepts, experience to provide thetime for this to happen.

You can't get by in theprogramming industry with a static knowledge base, so working memoryand a sharp mind will always be in demand in the profession. Indeed,observing that their data found an association between working memoryand programming experience, the authors speculate that wannabes withpoor working memory are more likely to leave the profession entirely.But this study asks us to recognise that a whizzprogrammer's competence is thanks to applying that brainpower tolearning their trade.

Bergersen, G., & Gustafsson, J. (2011). Programming Skill, Knowledge, and Working Memory Among Professional Software Developers from an Investment Theory Perspective. Journal of Individual Differences, 32 (4), 201-209 DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000052

Dirty work jobs call for low expectations

You may have a job that you sometimes personally resent; maybe your work draws hostility from others from time to time. But how about a job that automatically earns you the animosity of your entire society? That's the reality for those employed in dirty work occupations, defined as work that is seen as physically, socially or morally tainted: think sewer workers or morticians. The stigma of this work threatens identity, pushing notions like ‘sick’ or ‘creepy’ where we would prefer nice and desirable. A recent article explores how this affects incoming workers, and what makes some of them stick at dirty work.

Erika Lopina and her team from the University of North Carolina spent two years collecting survey data from 102 people starting animal care roles that involved some contact with the dirty work task of euthanasia. After two months, 28% of these individuals had left their organisation – contrast this with the better retention in mainstream jobs, where turnover within two months sits at somewhere under 10%. Lopina's team were most interested in the remaining 72%: what factors encouraged them to stay?

Firstly, those who remained had initially received more information about the type of work they were getting themselves into, which would lessen any unexpected shocks to identity. Secondly, higher turnover was associated with maladaptive coping strategies such as blaming yourself for problems, denial, or substance use as a support or escape. Clearly, the demands of these sorts of jobs require you to effectively maintain your own well-being, or be overwhelmed by their negative features.

Thirdly – and a little bleakly – those who began with generally poor expectations for life tended to stay longer in their role. This was measured in the survey using a construct called negative affectivity (NA), rating the general level of states like afraid, distressed, and upset; it seems that if these labels already apply to your life then the adjustment to the negative perceptions and reality of dirty work isn't such a wrench.

Two further factors appear to have some influence: turnover was lower when the new hire expressed a commitment to the career (of animal care worker) and emphasised their belief in the value of the job. However, it turns out they don't significantly contribute anything beyond the influence of the previous three variables when the data was combined into a predictive model. As the authors comment, the differentiator is less about pride or drive, but open eyes coming into the job, pragmatism within it, and a fairly low bar for what life offers.

Lopina, E., Rogelberg, S., & Howell, B. (2011). Turnover in dirty work occupations: A focus on pre-entry individual characteristics Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2011.02037.x

Switching, empathising and staying neutral: the emotional labour of GP receptionists

When you sit in a doctor’s waiting room, your mind, like mine, may wander toward the reception desk, with its trilling phones and flow of patients. But our idle observations pale in comparison to those of Jenna Ward and Robert McMurray, who spent over 300 hours observing GP receptionists within three practices. They´ve published their findings in a new study in the journal Social Science and Medicine, which raises the lid on the emotional labour conducted in this role.

The process of managing your emotions to achieve paid work outcomes was termed emotional labour by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her seminal The Managed Heart. First explored within the ever-cheery flight attendant role, it’s now been explored in a range of jobs including health professionals such as nurses. Given the increasingly crucial role of the GP receptionist as the gatekeeper of health services, it’s clearly worthwhile to understand what kind of emotional labour they are involved with.

The investigators noted that the receptionists have to balance their transactional activities, such as checking-in or filing, with the need to deal with the unique features of a patient. For instance, they observed receptionists pausing to relate to and warmly converse with a patient with mental disabilities regarding the children´s book they had brought in. Through interviews taken opportunistically across the study the investigators clarified that these emotional moments are to some extent a performance, not an effortless reaction: ”you can't keep up a level of empathy that maybe you would like to do all of the time because it would be emotionally draining". This is emotional labour in action.

The research uncovered two forms of emotional labour that have previously been undefined. The first was neutrality: under pressure or faced with abuse, receptionists must present themselves as calm, professional, and willing to allow access to services in a disinterested manner. The other, emotional switching, is a consequence of the constant flow of situations the receptionist must deal with: when a joyful phone call is followed by a anxious or sorrowful encounter, the receptionist´s emotions must keep step.

The authors conclude that the research offers insight into the role, and also asks questions about the nature of emotional labour more broadly. In their words, "it is not just the emotional style of offering that is part of the service provided by GP receptionists, but also the ability to tailor that offering to the needs of individual clients." They suggest that this may be a feature of many more roles that demand emotional labour, and call for more research to investigate how our working lives require us to be the keeper of our feelings.

Ward, J., & McMurray, R. (2011). The unspoken work of general practitioner receptionists: A re-examination of emotion management in primary care Social Science & Medicine, 72 (10), 1583-1587 DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.03.019

The invisible workforce: schoolchildren in paid roles that are complex, rich and often ignored

Schoolchildren in jobs: that just amounts to the odd kid on a paper round, doesn't it? Not according to Jim McKechnie's research team from the University of the West of Scotland, who presented earlier this month at the Annual BPS Conference. McKechnie revealed that part-time paid employment was a majority experience for schoolchildren. From his own survey data – around 10% of those in secondary education in Scotland, 18500 students in all – once students move beyond their last year of compulsory education, more of them are in paid work than not.

It may be common, but does it matter? From one perspective it's a problem: given finite time, any non-school activities supplant time that should be spent on education. For some, it's a blessing, providing opportunities and learning experiences unavailable in the education system. And for those such as McKechnie's group, it's a balance: any adult job has a mixture of positive and negative aspects, and the same is bound to be true for children as well.

The team surveyed the types of roles taken by children to explore the charge that they are generally menial and unstretching,. They found that, rather than paper routes, the sample worked substantive jobs in service industries, including retail, (28%), catering (28%) and delivery (18%), with smaller numbers in other domains such as care work and cleaning. Moreover, participants reported a range of activities within roles, with 70% dealing with customers and surprisingly, over 20% engaged in some kind of supervisory activities.

To look closer at this, each candidate was given a 'demandingness' score based on the activities within their job. Demanding jobs were more likely to be taken by those in higher school years, and by females rather than males, but features such as socio-economic status, academic attainment, and truancy didn't have any influence. As McKechnie puts it, there is “nothing atypical about taking a demanding job”.

McKechnie observed that taking survey data from youngsters may pose additional methodological challenges, a theme picked up by his colleague Amanda Simpson. Her study used multiple methods to gather information from 32 working youngsters, combining observation with interviews and also asking participants to record the activities they were involved in at various points in the day, prompted by mobile phone notifications.

The study suggested that the jobs, even many seemingly basic ones, involved a range of activities and opportunities to gain and develop both soft and technical skills. However, the children often initially showed limited awareness of these, though they gained more insight through the event recording procedure. To some extent, the 'invisible workforce' are only partially visible even to themselves.

In the next post, we spend some time with Jim McKechnie to discuss the significance of this research for the workplace.

Drinking habits of freelance musicians are a response to job demands

When we pore over biographies of Cobain, Mozart, or Shakur, are we getting a true insight into the psychology of musicians? Doubtful; dealing with rare figures whose musicianship is confounded with celebrity, the psychological autopsy is inadequate for understanding this ancient and valued profession. The stereotypes it can reinforce, such as the 'mad genius', are often dispelled by more rigorous investigation: a study of psychopathology in a sample including artists, writers and scientists revealed that composers had almost the lowest rate.

And how about the other stereotype, that musicians love to get trashed? It's true that jazz greats often got high, but their reasons were more varied than simply hedonism; many used drugs to deal with pressure from the job and from peers. A recent study suggests our current jazz and string musicians, in a similar spot, find themselves deep in the drink.

Melissa Dobson from the University of Sheffield conducted interviews with eighteen freelance musicians, half string players and half jazz musicians. Reviewing these reveals that a key professional capability for these musicians is social expertise with peers. If looking to draft in a cellist for an event, differences in talent between candidates may be too minor to matter for the audience, so the job may swing to whoever's a better laugh to hang with during the breaks. In their informal economy, musicians know the power of these fickle decisions and do what needs to be done to maintain a reputation that they “get on with people”.

Typically, that involves drinking. Partly a generational legacy, as hard drinking is tied into the subcultural furniture, it's also a fact of the environment, as venues for live music typically serve alcohol. It fills dull gaps between sets in unfamiliar places, and after the show offers a form of psychological detachment from work. Ultimately, it's socially self-perpetuating: if everyone drinks, then you need to develop a habit too. Some interviewees had mixed feelings about this: “lots of players that haven't been offered jobs.... [are those who] won't really go out for the whole sort of socializing thing... a bit sad, but that's sort of the way it works”.

As well as alcohol, the interviews revealed the highly political nature of the freelance music world, where musicians both compete against and depend upon each other for work, and can find themselves trading disparaging judgements on absent peers to shore up their in-crowd position - another form of social currency.

Melissa Dobson concludes that the professional training that musicians undertake focuses on technical development over the challenges of navigating a freelance career, leaving them to figure out how to maintain reputation through a 'hidden curriculum' that operates out of sight of the convervatoire. Is this the only form of professional training that this critique applies to?

Dobson, M. (2010). Insecurity, professional sociability, and alcohol: Young freelance musicians' perspectives on work and life in the music profession Psychology of Music, 39 (2), 240-260 DOI: 10.1177/0305735610373562

Understanding job demands: hindrances and challenges are not the same

What's in a job? The Job Demands-Resources Model answers this question by defining two types of characteristics: job demands such as workload run down our energy and can harm our health, whereas job resources, including positive feedback, stimulate us and increase engagement. Neat, but the model has struggled with evidence that, against expectations, some job demands also link to higher levels of engagement.

A study by Anja Van den Broeck and colleagues approaches this by integrating work that carves demands into two further types. First are hindrances, e.g., repeated conflict: these provoke negative feeling, encouraging us to retreat into managing our feelings. Second are challenges, which include workload: these are still effortful but draw us toward a problem-solving stance which can lead to fulfillment and stimulation. Both types can run down our energy, but challenges can reward us in return.

Integrating this view into the model could remedy the inconsistencies - but not without answering some questions. Specifically, the hindrance-challenge research rarely considers job resources, and it's important to know what the beneficial effects of challenges are after resources are taken into account. (If increases in workload were sometimes accompanied by a free expresso, we'd want our analysis to separate caffeine from the workload effect.)

The study asked participants to complete questionnaires reporting levels of exhaustion (a measure of energy depletion) and vigour (stimulation), together with ratings of various job characteristics: demands (negative work–home interference and emotional demands), challenges (workload and cognitive demands), and resources (autonomy and social support). It used two samples, seeking to generalise beyond a single industry: these were 261 call centre agents and 441 police officers, distinctive due to more education and seniority.

They found that higher vigour - the good stuff - was not only associated with lower hindrances and higher job resources, but also with higher job challenges. Modelling the data confirmed that challenges had a significant and separate effect to job resources. (Bang goes my expresso theory.)

The story for exhaustion was less straightforward. Generally it increased with higher job demands and lower job resources*, in line with expectations. However the authors found no relationship either way to job challenges – surprising, as traditionally these would be classed as job demands, and demands = energy depletion. The authors recommend future work consider treating energy as elastic rather than as a fixed resource: challenges may produce energy to balance what they expend.

The study makes it clear that job challenges are made of different stuff from both job resources and their job demand cousins, hindrances, and modelling the data using three characteristics did a better job than the Demand-Resource model (or indeed, other ways to pair the characteristics).

Implications

As a practitioner, a model is a useful way to carve up the world: to consider the stresses and supports in a role for job redesign, or as touch-points for a developmental discussion. Many such models are spirited out of the air, and an approach that's evidence based is hugely preferable.

But when a model doesn't reflect the nuance of personal experience, people won't buy it. For many people, the cognitive load of a job isn't simply a hassle, a drain. It has a further quality, one the study's authors relate to Selye's concept of eustress- stress that spurs us forward. To separate these challenges from the disruptive distress of a hindrance feels right, and this study provides evidence that doing so sharpens this solid model of what's in a job.

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Van den Broeck, A., De Cuyper, N., De Witte, H. & Vansteenkiste, M. (2010). Not all job demands are equal: Differentiating job hindrances and job challenges in the Job Demands–Resources model. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 19(6), 735-759. doi:10.1080/13594320903223839

*For the call centre workers, job resources did not relate to exhaustion. The authors suggest that in this group of more temporary workers exhaustion was driven by immediate concerns rather than long-term issues the resources can shield against.