Mental wellbeing at work: perspectives of software engineers
Mental wellbeing at work: perspectives of software engineers
Software engineers exhibit higher burnout and suicide rates compared to many other information workers. Consequently, mental wellbeing is a growing concern to technology organizations. To better understand the challenges of supporting mental wellbeing in the context of the work of software engineering, we conducted 14 interviews with software engineers. We examine the different aspects of their lived experiences with mental wellbeing at work, their strategies for managing mental wellbeing, the challenges they face in using these strategies, and recommendations they have for mental wellbeing technologies. We contribute to the HCI literature by discussing how mental wellbeing should be considered within the context of work across individual, team, and organization levels, and highlight the need for integrating mental wellbeing into the technologies employees use at work.
Empirical study that tells us about people, Health-wellbeing, Interview, Workplaces
Association for Computing Machinery
Wong, Novia
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Jackson, Victoria
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Van Der Hoek, André
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Ahmed, Iftekhar
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Schueller, Stephen M.
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Reddy, Madhu
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19 April 2023
Wong, Novia
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Jackson, Victoria
28beab06-6fae-46d3-ad73-1d29897680db
Van Der Hoek, André
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Ahmed, Iftekhar
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Schueller, Stephen M.
33afa765-4508-420c-a021-b3cd45e9e876
Reddy, Madhu
3279c2dc-753c-41b8-a372-12b3672ee360
Wong, Novia, Jackson, Victoria, Van Der Hoek, André, Ahmed, Iftekhar, Schueller, Stephen M. and Reddy, Madhu
(2023)
Mental wellbeing at work: perspectives of software engineers.
In CHI 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Association for Computing Machinery..
(doi:10.1145/3544548.3581528).
Record type:
Conference or Workshop Item
(Paper)
Abstract
Software engineers exhibit higher burnout and suicide rates compared to many other information workers. Consequently, mental wellbeing is a growing concern to technology organizations. To better understand the challenges of supporting mental wellbeing in the context of the work of software engineering, we conducted 14 interviews with software engineers. We examine the different aspects of their lived experiences with mental wellbeing at work, their strategies for managing mental wellbeing, the challenges they face in using these strategies, and recommendations they have for mental wellbeing technologies. We contribute to the HCI literature by discussing how mental wellbeing should be considered within the context of work across individual, team, and organization levels, and highlight the need for integrating mental wellbeing into the technologies employees use at work.
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Published date: 19 April 2023
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Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Owner/Author.
Venue - Dates:
2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2023, , Hamburg, Germany, 2023-04-23 - 2023-04-28
Keywords:
Empirical study that tells us about people, Health-wellbeing, Interview, Workplaces
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Local EPrints ID: 506903
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/506903
PURE UUID: b95c189e-6545-4a1e-8745-3020291d2530
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Date deposited: 19 Nov 2025 17:53
Last modified: 22 Nov 2025 03:18
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Contributors
Author:
Novia Wong
Author:
Victoria Jackson
Author:
André Van Der Hoek
Author:
Iftekhar Ahmed
Author:
Stephen M. Schueller
Author:
Madhu Reddy
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