Multi-organizational Embeddedness: Impacts on Developers’ Turnover and Career Mobility

Software development often requires developers to simultaneously engage multiple organizations. Outsourcing or consulting arrangements exemplify such situations. We synthesize job embeddedness theory with human capital theory to understand how a developer’s engagement with other organizations influences their relationship with their primary employer, as well as their movement between employers. We test our model with two studies using survey and archival data. We find that being embedded in an OSS community increases turnover from an employer and is associated with increased job mobility. We also discuss the relationship between OSS embeddedness, intellectual capital, social capital and job mobility

Digital Traces of Brain Drain: Developers during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked renewed interest in the phenomenon of brain drain: the exodus of human capital out of countries. Yet quantifying brain drain, especially in real time during crisis situations, remains difficult. This hinders our ability to understand its drivers and mechanisms and to anticipate its consequences. To address this gap, I draw on and extend a large scale dataset of the locations of highly active software developers collected in February 2021, one year before the invasion. Revisiting those developers that had been located in Russia in 2021, I confirm a significant exodus of developers from Russia by late June 2022. 8.6% of Russian developers list a new country, compared with 2.4% of developers from comparable countries in the region but not directly involved in the conflict. 11.3% of Russian developers have obscured their location (vs. 1.9% in the comparison set). Our data also allows us to observe heterogeneities in who leaves and who remains, and to see where they are going. Developers leaving Russia were significantly much more active and central in the collaboration network than those who stay behind. This suggests that the most important developers have already left Russia

Eight Observations and 24 Research Questions About Open Source Projects: Illuminating New Realities

The rapid acceleration of corporate engagement with open source projects is drawing out new ways for CSCW researchers to consider the dynamics of these projects. Research must now consider the complex ecosystems within which open source projects are situated, including issues of for-profit motivations, brokering foundations, and corporate collaboration. Localized project considerations cannot reveal broader workings of an open source ecosystem, yet much empirical work is constrained to a local context. In response, we present eight observations from our eight-year engaged field study about the changing nature of open source projects. We ground these observations through 24 research questions that serve as primers to spark research ideas in this new reality of open source projects. This paper contributes to CSCW in social and crowd computing by delivering a rich and fresh look at corporately-engaged open source projects with a call for renewed focus and research into newly emergent areas of interest

Dev2vec: Representing Domain Expertise of Developers in an Embedding Space

Accurate assessment of the domain expertise of developers is important for assigning the proper candidate to contribute to a project or to attend a job role. Since the potential candidate can come from a large pool, the automated assessment of this domain expertise is a desirable goal. While previous methods have had some success within a single software project, the assessment of a developer's domain expertise from contributions across multiple projects is more challenging. In this paper, we employ doc2vec to represent the domain expertise of developers as embedding vectors. These vectors are derived from different sources that contain evidence of developers' expertise, such as the description of repositories that they contributed, their issue resolving history, and API calls in their commits. We name it dev2vec and demonstrate its effectiveness in representing the technical specialization of developers. Our results indicate that encoding the expertise of developers in an embedding vector outperforms state-of-the-art methods and improves the F1-score up to 21%. Moreover, our findings suggest that ``issue resolving history'' of developers is the most informative source of information to represent the domain expertise of developers in embedding spaces.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure

Going farther together:the impact of social capital on sustained participation in open source

Sustained participation by contributors in open-source software is critical to the survival of open-source projects and can provide career advancement benefits to individual contributors. However, not all contributors reap the benefits of open-source participation fully, with prior work showing that women are particularly underrepresented and at higher risk of disengagement. While many barriers to participation in open-source have been documented in the literature, relatively little is known about how the social networks that open-source contributors form impact their chances of long-term engagement. In this paper we report on a mixed-methods empirical study of the role of social capital (i.e., the resources people can gain from their social connections) for sustained participation by women and men in open-source GitHub projects. After combining survival analysis on a large, longitudinal data set with insights derived from a user survey, we confirm that while social capital is beneficial for prolonged engagement for both genders, women are at disadvantage in teams lacking diversity in expertise.\u3cbr/\u3

Externalities and Enterprise Software: Helping and Hindering Legal Compliance

Enterprise software helps organizations comply with laws and regulations, yet software itself creates negative externalities that can undermine rights and laws. Software developers are an important regulatory force, yet many know little about how law and software interact. This work examines developer understanding of legal concepts and examples of the software code and law relationship: payroll, Sarbanes Oxley Act, web accessibility, and data protection

The Academic Grind: A Critique of Creative and Collaborative Discourses Between Digital Games Industries and Post-Secondary Education in Canada

ABSTRACT Digital game development, seeking opportunities to extend its reach and augment its capabilities in a competitive global market, requires the institutions around it to respond and reconfigure to its needs. In Canada, collaborations between digital game industries and educational institutions coalesce around the need to identify and draw students into a tailored educational stream where narrowly defined forms of creativity and knowledge maintain a fluidity amenable to the needs of capital. Provincial and federal government endorsement, supplemented with targeted policy measures, presides over a repurposing of the relationship between post-secondary education, business, and society as a whole, translating monopolies of labour and knowledge into monopolies of power. For educational institutions however, this process of adaptation is necessarily an incomplete one. Using document data, along with interviews of administrators and professionals who negotiate the space between industry and education, the dissertation targets three regions of Canada with idiosyncratic industrial ecosystems, institutional networks, administrative imperatives, and specific demands for skilled game development labour. In Vancouver, Montréal, and Southern Ontario, the disciplining of students as ideal neoliberal subjects magnifies class divisions, unevenly addresses struggles around gendered working conditions in a male dominated industry, and exacerbates ongoing tensions regarding labour in digital media industries. This dissertation contends that the further intensification of the flexibility of educational institutions and their attempt to adapt to the speed of digital capital is a moment of high risk: in negotiating their adequacy and legitimacy in a neoliberal mode of capital, educational programs and their students are exposed to rapidly changing market conditions, competing agendas, and economic crises. The contingencies and contradictions present within administrative subjectivities generate spaces to establish the terms of a recomposition of post-secondary education that requires new arrangements of affinity within educational networks

Technical Interviews: Another Barrier to Broadening Participation in Computing?

What does it take to obtain a computing position in the industry? Although anecdotal reports state that ``hiring is broken,\u27\u27 empirical evidence is necessary to identify the flaws in the existing system. The goal of this dissertation was to understand what expectations companies have for job seekers in computing, and to explore students\u27 experiences with technical interviews and their pathways to job attainment. In particular, this work considered how hiring practices may impact populations already underrepresented in computing such as women, Black/African American students, and Hispanic/Latinx students. It also sought to understand how minoritized populations leverage their own inherent capital to overcome obstacles throughout the process. The theoretical frameworks of community cultural wealth, social cognitive career theory, identity theory, and intersectionality guided the studies, to answer the following research questions: 1) What does the hiring process in computing look like from both the applicant and industry perspective?; 2) How do cultural experiences impact technical interview preparation?; 3) How do technical interviews, and other professional and cultural experiences impact computing identity?; and 4) How do students describe their experiences with the hiring process in computing? To address these questions, a variety of methods were employed, beginning with a systematic literature review. This was followed by an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design that utilized a survey, statistical analysis, and semi-structured interviews. Discursive phenomenography was also the methodology chosen which shaped the qualitative inquiry. The findings illustrated the unique experiences and support mechanisms students from different gender, racial, and ethnic backgrounds utilize to succeed in hiring. These results not only serve to inform students, educators, and administrators how to best prepare for technical interviews, but also present a call to action for industry to change hiring and workplace practices that limit diversity. Suggestions and guidelines are given to enable a hiring process that can still achieve its target of finding qualified employees, but that does so in a manner more inclusive to all job seekers