title: "Understanding Conversational Programmers: A Perspective from the Software Industry"
authors: Parmit K. Chilana, Rishabh Singh, Philip J. Guo
venue: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
year: 2016
links:
- <a href="conversational-programmer-papers.htm">Blog post</a>

tweet: "Conversational programmers are professionals who learn to code to communicate better with engineers"

abstract: >
  Recent research suggests that some students learn to program with the
  goal of becoming <i>conversational programmers</i>: they want to develop
  programming literacy skills not to write code in the future but mainly
  to develop conversational skills and communicate better with developers
  and to improve their marketability. To investigate the existence of such
  a population of conversational programmers in practice, we surveyed
  professionals at a large multinational technology company who were not
  in software development roles. Based on 3151 survey responses from
  professionals who never or rarely wrote code, we found that a
  significant number of them (42.6%) had invested in learning programming
  on the job. While many of these respondents wanted to perform
  traditional end-user programming tasks (e.g., data analysis), we
  discovered that two top motivations for learning programming were to
  improve the efficacy of technical conversations and to acquire
  marketable skillsets. The main contribution of this work is in
  empirically establishing the existence and characteristics of
  conversational programmers in a large software development context.

bibtex: >
  @inproceedings{ChilanaCHI2016,
   author = {Chilana, Parmit K. and Singh, Rishabh and Guo, Philip J.},
   title = {Understanding Conversational Programmers: A Perspective from the Software Industry},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
   series = {CHI '16},
   year = {2016},
   isbn = {978-1-4503-3362-7},
   location = {Santa Clara, California, USA},
   pages = {1462--1472},
   numpages = {11},
   url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2858036.2858323},
   doi = {10.1145/2858036.2858323},
   acmid = {2858323},
   publisher = {ACM},
   address = {New York, NY, USA},
   keywords = {conversational programmers, non-CS majors, programming literacy, technical conversations},
  }