The sky is not the limit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Software development has always inherently required multitasking: developers switch between coding, reviewing, testing, designing, and meeting with colleagues. The advent of software ecosystems like GitHub has enabled something new: the ability to easily switch between projects. Developers also have social incentives to contribute to many projects; prolific contributors gain social recognition and (eventually) economic rewards. Multitasking, however, comes at a cognitive cost: frequent context-switches can lead to distraction, sub-standard work, and even greater stress. In this paper, we gather ecosystem-level data on a group of programmers working on a large collection of projects. We develop models and methods for measuring the rate and breadth of a developers' context-switching behavior, and we study how context-switching affects their productivity. We also survey developers to understand the reasons for and perceptions of multitasking. We find that the most common reason for multitasking is interrelationships and dependencies between projects. Notably, we find that the rate of switching and breadth (number of projects) of a developer's work matter. Developers who work on many projects have higher productivity if they focus on few projects per day. Developers that switch projects too much during the course of a day have lower productivity as they work on more projects overall. Despite these findings, developers perceptions of the benefits of multitasking are varied.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.066 | 0.019 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".