Developers Who Vlog: Dismantling Stereotypes through Community and Identity
Souti Chattopadhyay, Denae Ford, Thomas Zimmermann

TL;DR
This study explores how developer vlogs on YouTube challenge stereotypes, promote diversity, and foster community by sharing authentic life experiences and career insights, impacting audience perceptions and engagement.
Contribution
It provides an empirical analysis of developer vlogs, revealing their role in dismantling stereotypes and promoting inclusivity within the software development community.
Findings
Developers use vlogs to showcase diverse life aspects and challenge stereotypes.
Vlogs help audience find information and connect over shared experiences.
Comment analysis shows vlogs influence perceptions and foster community engagement.
Abstract
Developers are more than "nerds behind computers all day", they lead a normal life, and not all take the traditional path to learn programming. However, the public still sees software development as a profession for "math wizards". To learn more about this special type of knowledge worker from their first-person perspective, we conducted three studies to learn how developers describe a day in their life through vlogs on YouTube and how these vlogs were received by the broader community. We first interviewed 16 developers who vlogged to identify their motivations for creating this content and their intention behind what they chose to portray. Second, we analyzed 130 vlogs (video blogs) to understand the range of the content conveyed through videos. Third, we analyzed 1176 comments from the 130 vlogs to understand the impact the vlogs have on the audience. We found that developers were…
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