Joint Fieldwork: Microsoft

A planned qualitative interview study with professional software developers, conducted jointly with Steven Clarke (Principal UX Researcher at Microsoft), exploring how the use of AI tools reshapes developers' understanding of success at work. Drawing on the Proxy Seduction Framework.

What the study examines

The study examines how developers describe success when using AI, how those definitions evolve over time, how they understood success before adopting AI, and how AI changes what matters to them personally and organizationally. It also investigates how developers and their organizations assess business impact, including cases where visible gains such as faster code output may obscure shifted bottlenecks elsewhere in the workflow, such as review or integration. The aim is to identify instances where metrics become seductive proxies for meaningful progress, and to understand the consequences for practice and decision-making.

How it runs

• Steven uses Microsoft recruiting resources to identify and schedule participants.
• Steven and Vikram jointly conduct the interviews and analyze the findings.
• The resulting analysis informs both Microsoft product teams seeking to help organizations get more value from AI tools and Vikram's academic work on proxy seduction in real-world settings.

Open question

IP arrangement to be settled: all generated IP is public, or generated IP is publishable.