Why start a blog on Pychology for IT Pros (and other technical people)? Whilst there's a huge amount of information tailored to traditional business, and an increasing body of work around startups and their associated culture, there is very little that directly relates to the day-to-day working life of technical people and what they do.
This is a major omission; whilst technical people may be different in that part of the job involves dealing with machines, a huge part of the work is with, for, and mediated by, other people. There's a good argument that the role of IT people is to form the bridge between computer systems and the rest of the organisation. The aim of this blog is to use evidence from psychology, neuroscience and other related fields to give you insight into how you can do your job more effectively, and be happier whilst doing so.
You may well be wondering if reading this blog will be worth your time, aside from the absence of anyone else writing on the the topic to distract you. I have worked in IT for over 15 years, across a lot of organisational levels, and I'm currently an IT manager in Higher Education. I've always liked to study and in 2008 I did a psychology degree with the Open University. It was a course I enjoyed very much, and which, applied to my job, made considerably more practical difference than I expected. As a result I've continued to study psychology and neuroscience, putting much of it in to practice in IT. Now is the time for me to start sharing some of that information with you.
I arrived at the decision to start writing a blog on the back of other things. I've never really felt like the job title "blogger" was an attractive one, calling to mind someone who spends their entire day nursing a flat white in a city-centre cafe, typing occasionally on their laptop. It's not something I have actively pursued. Instead, my plan is to develop my own business so I can leave the day job (eventually) and work for myself. Not a unique dream, but one that you might identify with.
The blog fits into this plan as somewhere to work out my ideas, to get feedback, have discussions, and to sharpen my writing skills. In time, I hope a whole community will form around this website. I was surprised to find that even in Brighton there isn't much in the way of a regular community in this field. Searches on Meetup, Wired Sussex and the rest turned up nothing even closely related.
To give you an idea of the kind of topics you can look forward to, I have posts planned on neurodiversity, self-experimentation, how to be happier at work (and why you might want to be), the process of learning, the psychology of agile methods, and common cognitive biases. If any of those sound particularly appealing or you're keen to see something else discussed, please leave a comment.
This is a major omission; whilst technical people may be different in that part of the job involves dealing with machines, a huge part of the work is with, for, and mediated by, other people. There's a good argument that the role of IT people is to form the bridge between computer systems and the rest of the organisation. The aim of this blog is to use evidence from psychology, neuroscience and other related fields to give you insight into how you can do your job more effectively, and be happier whilst doing so.
You may well be wondering if reading this blog will be worth your time, aside from the absence of anyone else writing on the the topic to distract you. I have worked in IT for over 15 years, across a lot of organisational levels, and I'm currently an IT manager in Higher Education. I've always liked to study and in 2008 I did a psychology degree with the Open University. It was a course I enjoyed very much, and which, applied to my job, made considerably more practical difference than I expected. As a result I've continued to study psychology and neuroscience, putting much of it in to practice in IT. Now is the time for me to start sharing some of that information with you.
I arrived at the decision to start writing a blog on the back of other things. I've never really felt like the job title "blogger" was an attractive one, calling to mind someone who spends their entire day nursing a flat white in a city-centre cafe, typing occasionally on their laptop. It's not something I have actively pursued. Instead, my plan is to develop my own business so I can leave the day job (eventually) and work for myself. Not a unique dream, but one that you might identify with.
The blog fits into this plan as somewhere to work out my ideas, to get feedback, have discussions, and to sharpen my writing skills. In time, I hope a whole community will form around this website. I was surprised to find that even in Brighton there isn't much in the way of a regular community in this field. Searches on Meetup, Wired Sussex and the rest turned up nothing even closely related.
To give you an idea of the kind of topics you can look forward to, I have posts planned on neurodiversity, self-experimentation, how to be happier at work (and why you might want to be), the process of learning, the psychology of agile methods, and common cognitive biases. If any of those sound particularly appealing or you're keen to see something else discussed, please leave a comment.
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