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