Emotional labor of software engineers

The concept of emotional labor, introduced by Hochschild in 1983, refers to the “process by which workers are expected to manage their feelings in accordance with organizationally defined rules and guidelines”. For instance, judges are expected to appear impartial, nurses—compassionate and police officers—authoritative. While software development has been traditionally stereotyped as a nerdy “lone wolf” job less likely to induce emotional labor, nowadays software developers become more and more social, on the one hand, and are subject to increasing amount of behavioral expectations, e.g., formulated as codes of conduct.

In this position paper we stress that software developers are subject to emotional labor, envision how emotional labor can be identified based on emotion detection techniques applied in software engineering, suggest possible antecedents and consequents of emotional labor and discuss interventions that can be designed to address the challenges of emotional labor.