Ask HN: Academic study on AI's impact on software development – want to join?
Comments
nearting
research2026
Totally valid question. We need to adhere, however, to the permission we received to post our study on a public forum. PI contact information is included in the Informed Consent document along with other information to help potential participants decide if they consent to participate in the study.
Hasg1
How would this self-selecting study be representative? It will be swarmed by paid AI shills.
The anti-AI people are already weary by having to contradict the $trillion industry, so they might skip this particular battlefield.
research2026
HN is only one of our recruitment channels. We are definitely aiming for a balance of perspectives.
idrissbellil
Will you in exchange publish the results/dataset for free?
research2026
Happy to share the final peer-reviewed publication with research participants.
roguechimpanzee
do I get a starbucks giftcard or anything?
research2026
Thanks for asking! We're unable to offer compensation, but the insights you share will directly contribute to social scientific knowledge about AI’s impact on professional work and careers. Software engineering is at the forefront of this change and objective, academic research on the topic is still scarce. So we really appreciate everyone who volunteers their time to share their experiences and views on the topic.
kibibu
I'm surprised your human research ethics board doesn't require you to indicate the benefit to participants
Did you get ethics approval for this? I can't see any reference to it on the survey
research2026
I understand your concern, and thanks for asking for this clarification.
We have IRB ethics approval from NYU for the study. All the detailed information you are looking for is contained in the 'Research Informed Consent Form' that will be emailed to eligible research participants. After reviewing the informed consent form, you can choose to proceed or not with scheduling an interview. And of course, you can at any time withdraw your participation.
The link in the post is just a simple contact form giving us permission to contact potential participants and assess their eligibility (i.e. whether they are based in the US, whether they are software devs etc). And, if we hopefully get more responses than we need, the brief information contained in this form will help us sample participants based on company size or professional experience level.
You will see in the 'Informed Consent Form' that there are no direct benefits to participation. The study will contribute to social scientific knowledge about technology’s impact on professional work and careers. I hope this helps!
saadn92
this is the right question to ask
grossiweb
Thank you just completed the form
research2026
Thank you!
0xchamin
done. good luck!
research2026
Appreciate it, thank you
I see from other comments that you have IRB approval for this study, but you really should include the IRB protocol identified and/or contact information of the PI here, especially if you've created a separate account just to post this recruitment material.
While it is possible to ask questions about the study here (as others have done), there's actually no way for me to know anything about the study approval except to email this thread link to NYU's IRB and have them figure out what protocol it corresponds to. And so far, the response has just been "Yes, we have approval, just trust us and send us your contact info."
Assuming that it's possible for non-researchers to use Qualtrics at NYU, there's really no way for me to determine if this is a real research study or someone whose account has been compromised and is running a data harvesting operation. I also don't even know what department this study is associated with (computer science, business, sociology, etc), which I suspect would influence people's interest in participating.
In any case, I'd recommend providing some more information up front, even if your IRB didn't require it.