

Cat Hicks: Brains in Jars, Overproduction Pressure, and the Future of Software Teams | JetBrains Research Podcast
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: Dr. Hicks' LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drcathicks/ Catharsis Consulting: https://catharsisinsight.com/ "No Silver Bullets" paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05040 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



