In our fifth episode, we chat with Dr. Cat Hicks, Founder and Chief Scientist of Catharsis Consulting. She is a psychologist and author of The Psychology of Software Teams, published July 2026.
Episode links:
Our previous episodes can be found here: https://jb.gg/rsrch-pdcst
Find out more about JetBrains Research here: https://jb.gg/rsrch
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:46 Meet Dr. Cat Hicks, psychologist for humans in technology
04:15 Why write a book about software teams?
08:49 Building a "third place" between academia and industry
17:10 Why publish research when technology moves so quickly?
27:07 Why study teams instead of individual developers?
31:13 Team culture, developer identity, and AI skill threat
37:55 "More bands, fewer rock stars": The lone-genius myth
43:37 Code-review anxiety and code review as a learning practice
47:27 How AI creates uncertainty about belonging and expertise
53:03 Overproduction pressure: When AI becomes a productivity hammer
55:47 Context engineering and scaling human mental models
58:40 Culture is infrastructure—and invisible work matters
1:01:36 Being a public expert when the answers keep changing
1:07:02 What should we research about AI next?
1:11:14 Take-home message: Your actions matter
