
Personality traits affect the open source development process - rbanffy
https://www.functionize.com/blog/how-personality-traits-affect-the-open-source-development-process/
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adnzzzzZ
Interesting article but this quote

"For Wallen, there is another longstanding issue in the development community
that needs to be addressed. “It’s become clear that there needs to be
significant improvement in the way the development community treats people of
color, women, and members of the LGBTQ community,” he says. “At this point,
there must be a zero tolerance for unwanted or unequal treatment.”"

does not follow at all from the rest of the post, as higher agreeableness, the
trait that would most match what the author just described, is not mentioned
as being relevant to their findings anywhere. It would be interesting to see a
study on the levels of agreeableness of developers compared to the rest of the
population, as it is mentioned in the article that "Most developers are
agreeable!" but I haven't seen anything to support that assertion.

~~~
etripe
> It would be interesting to see a study on the levels of agreeableness of
> developers compared to the rest of the population, as it is mentioned in the
> article that "Most developers are agreeable!" but I haven't seen anything to
> support that assertion.

What _has_ your experience been? Mine is that most are meek and avoid
conflict. That's at least some of what agreeable means in this context, right?

------
hooande
It looks like the source study [1] was based heavily on IBM Waton's
personality traits API thing. "Personality" is a difficult thing to quantify
and my experience with Watson is that it was good, but not great. Not sure I
would based a research claim on it.

Overall this seems to be a rather obvious result. "Popular people are more
likely to have their pull requests accepted"

[1]
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8935389](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8935389)

~~~
acituan
> Overall this seems to be a rather obvious result. "Popular people are more
> likely to have their pull requests accepted"

That is not the result at all; they are leaving social factors (follower count
etc) aside to specifically examining the personality traits, and have rather
counterintuitive conclusions;

\- Firstly, personality seems to _matter_ , significantly

\- Neuroticism correlates _positively_ with pull request acceptance [1]

\- High extraversion doesn't increase the likelihood of a pull request being
accepted, but low extraversion does [1]

\- The personality trait differential between the requester and closer is
important; the larger the gap the better [2]

[1] "In sum, we observe requesters who are high on Openness,
Conscientiousness, and low on Extraversion have a higher likelihood of getting
the pull request accepted. Similarly, a closer who are high on Openness,
Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism accepts more pull requests."

[2] "We also noted the absolute difference in personality traits between the
requester and the closer results in positive effects, suggesting that
diversity in personality is beneficial in open source projects."

~~~
bawolff
So people who are sterotypically nerds do better at sterotypically nerdy
things? Did the study account for the possibility that maybe those personality
traits corresponded to being members of a shared cultural context, which
helped their chances of code being merged because people like people like
themselves?

Edit: but the bit about personality difference contradicts what i said, so
maybe not.

~~~
acituan
> So people who are sterotypically nerds do better at sterotypically nerdy
> things?

I don’t get what makes you think that that is the conclusion. Study doesn’t
look at the cluster of open source contributors against “rest of the world”,
there is no stereotype being established here. It is examining concrete
project dynamics (e.g. pull request acceptance) against personality traits
_within_ open source developers.

Big five is such a widely applicable factor analysis that I don’t think there
is one particular configuration that would define a “nerd” except maybe for
introversion-extraversion axis. Since the study shows meaningful differences
on other axes too, I don’t think it is about nerdiness at all.

------
acituan
The source research paper is pretty interesting but the article is not well
written and conflates reputable sources with personal opinions while not
shying from making big conclusive statements. Several problems;

> The researchers also examined the importance of personality factors. They
> found that biases may be involved in the acceptance or rejection of open
> source work. That’s true despite the apparent advantage of open source
> whereby you can contribute with a level of anonymity; your persona shows in
> your code and comments. Someone reviews and comments on your work based on
> what they see in front of them, and not how they know you as a person.

There is absolutely no mention of bias in the paper nor the study design can
really account for this.

> “While the research phrases it academically as ‘personality,’ what they mean
> is someone’s ability to interact with others: the application of social
> interaction skills as well as technical skills.”

This is false for big-five personality traits. The most explicitly social
trait is extraoversion-intraversion scale. Rest of the traits e.g neuroticism
or conscientiousness has aspects that has nothing to do with social
interactions but interacting with self or the environment (e.g orderliness).

> He considers himself to be open and conscientious ... Foster describes
> herself as “primarily conscientious with a bit of agreeableness,”

That is not how big-five works. The factor analysis that result in traits are
only statistically significant when the big-five inventory is taken (and only
once). Self-ascribing these traits have no value in the context of big-five.

> “Developers are very much like artists, in that they can be very sensitive
> to criticism and place a very high value not only on their work, but on the
> acceptance of both their work and who they are.”

Contradictingly, study finds high neuroticism translate into higher acceptance
of pull requests.

