Cognitive biases affect everyone, regardless of experience or education. Biases are particularly tricky because even if a person is aware of a bias, they typically only notice when others are guilty but not themselves.
Based on my reading of Misbehaving, if Nobel Laureate economists and huge investment firms can make critical errors because of bias (especially in the latter case when there is a lot of hard cash on the line) then we should expect devs to make the same kinds of mistakes.
Cognitive biases affect everyone, regardless of experience or education. Biases are particularly tricky because even if a person is aware of a bias, they typically only notice when others are guilty but not themselves.
Then again, I have been reading books like The Undoing Project, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), and Misbehaving so this response may be affected by my own recency bias 😎
Based on my reading of Misbehaving, if Nobel Laureate economists and huge investment firms can make critical errors because of bias (especially in the latter case when there is a lot of hard cash on the line) then we should expect devs to make the same kinds of mistakes.
There is a great post about this topic, I think it resumes it pretty well:
Cognitive Bias and Software Engineering
Graham Trott ・ Oct 25 ・ 4 min read