Career Decision Making Among Software Engineers: A Bounded Rationality perspective

Please enable javascript in your browser.

Shojai, Saeed | 2009

480 Viewed

Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
Language: Farsi
Document No: 39911 (44)
University: Sharif University of Technology
Department: Management and Economics
Advisor(s): Alavi, Babak
Abstract:
A qualitative study has been conducted in order to identify evidence of bounded rationality in software engineers' career decision making. Tversky and Kahneman's heuristics and biases approach has been used as a theoretical framework of the study. The theoretical framework comprised four decision-making and judgment heuristics, i.e. availability, representativeness, anchoring and adjustment, and affect heuristic. The data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis method. The final results revealed that software engineers did make use of heuristics in making career decisions. Several incidents of the use of availability, representativeness, and affect heuristic were identifed. Although there were evidence of the use if anchoring and adjustment, it did not reach a satisfactory level of saturatoin. Some biases were also identified in their decision making using heuristic methods
Keywords:
Bias ; Heuristic Algorithm ; Career Decision Making ; Bounded Rationality

No TOC