Profession‐centric measures and indicators for occupational stress: An empirical study with novice software developers in Mexico

Abstract

Occupational stress refers to job-related uneasiness and anxiety, which affect people's emotional or physical health. Although occupational stress has been studied in several industries, it has remained largely unexplored in software developers, particularly in emerging economies such as Mexico. In this work, we propose a set of measures for supporting the assessment of occupational stress in software developers, which concurs with the types of tasks performed by software developers daily. For this, we first identified several stressors found in the literature. Then, we carried out 10 semi-structured interviews with novice software developers to further understand stressors at the workplace. Afterwards, we conducted a study with 30 novice software developers for associating stress with workplace measures. From our work, we identified the workload, mental work fatigue, and work distraction as relevant measures associated with a certain level of stress in software developers. Our results suggest that some indicators can be used to monitor measures that are associated with occupational stress in software developers. | INTRODUCTIONThe software industry in Mexico has been growing steadily for the last two decades. It has several strengths, which make it attractive for investment in the global market. According to A. T. Kearney, a global consulting firm, Mexico ranks 8th for providing information technology services worldwide [1]. In the U.S. from 1997 to 2012, software industry production grew from $149 billion to $425 billion USD. This growth outpaced the rest of the economy, the software industry's direct share of U.S. Gross Domestic Product increased from 1.7% to 2.6% [2]. This growth was also reflected in Mexico where software companies hired thousands of new professionals until 2017, as reported in [3]. Several news reports have dubbed the city of Guadalajara as the Mexican Silicon Valley [4][5][6][7]. However, Mexico tops the world ranking in occupational stress, above China and the U.S. [8]. Symptoms of occupational stress are physical and psychological for the worker and are present at the organizational level. Workers can present cardiovascular and muscular disorders, increased blood pressure, insomnia, lack of appetite, flu, chronic pain, rheumatoid arthritis, etc., among others. They can also present psychological symptoms such as excessive worrying, anxiety, anger, frustration, inability to make decisions, mental blockage, bad mood, frequent forgetfulness, drug and alcohol addictions, depression, low self-esteem, and deterioration of interpersonal relationships. Regarding the organization level, the symptoms are decreased performance and productivity, absenteeism, increased costs due to illness, high job turnover, lack of cooperation between colleagues, higher rate of errors, accidents, and incidents [9].Software developers, in particular, show at least one symptom of occupational stress, and at least 60% of them have high levels of stress [10]. Thus, there are psycho-social risks associated with software ...