# Why I Studied Psychology While Working Full-Time in Tech Source: https://normanholz.de/en/articles/why-and-how-to-study-psychology/ Language: en Last updated: 2024-09-03 Reading time: 6 min read Psychology made me a better engineer, manager, and product thinker. Not because it replaced technical skill, but because it explained the human problems behind the technical ones. I studied psychology while working full-time as a software engineer. Not a weekend course. Not a certificate with a LinkedIn badge. A real degree, over multiple years, with exams, statistics, research papers, and a thesis at FernUniversität in Hagen. People usually ask two questions. Why would you do that? And how did you survive it? Here is both. ## Psychology is underrated in tech Every hard problem in software eventually becomes a human problem. Why is the team missing deadlines? Human. Why does the user ignore the button you designed for them? Human. Why does the same conflict with product come back every sprint? Human. Why did the senior engineer you spent months hiring quit after three months? Also human. Engineers like to treat these as soft problems. Annoying side quests around the real work. But the higher you get, the clearer it becomes: this is the work. Code is rarely the bottleneck for long. People are. Psychology gives you a better operating system for that reality. Not pop psychology. Actual psychology: motivation, cognition, group dynamics, research methods, statistics, personality, social behavior, organizational psychology. That foundation changes how you look at almost everything in tech. ## What it changed for me The degree did not make me less technical. It made the technical work more useful. Four areas changed the most. ## Hiring I stopped trusting my gut so much. A lot of hiring is still theater. Companies design interviews that reward people who interview well, then act surprised when the hire cannot do the job. Psychology makes you less impressed by charisma. It teaches you to care about structure, evidence, prediction, and bias. A good interview process should predict work performance. I became much more interested in structured interviews, realistic work samples, and clear evaluation criteria. Less "do I like this person?" More "what evidence do we have that this person can do the work?" That alone is worth a lot of money. ## One-on-ones I also stopped asking fake questions. "How are you?" is not a real question in most work contexts. The socially acceptable answer is "good", even when everything is clearly not good. A useful one-on-one needs better prompts. What is currently harder than it should be? Where are you waiting on someone? What are you avoiding because it feels politically annoying? What would make your next two weeks easier? These questions are not magic. They just make it easier for people to tell the truth. People rarely give you the real answer first. Not because they are lying. Because they are protecting themselves, simplifying, guessing what you want to hear, or not yet clear on what they think. A good manager makes the real conversation easier to have. ## Product work Studying psychology also made me less naive about users. Users do not always know what they want. They often cannot explain why they behave the way they do. They will tell you one thing in an interview and do something else in the product. That does not make user research useless. It makes bad user research dangerous. There is a difference between: - what users say they want - what they actually need - what they understand - what they will pay for - what they will use when nobody is watching Once you see that, product decisions become less about opinions in a meeting and more about behavior in the real world. ## Conflict The biggest payoff was conflict. Most technical arguments are not only technical. Sometimes they are about architecture. Often they are about status, autonomy, fear, ownership, or someone feeling ignored for too long. The API design, estimate discussion, or code review fight is usually the surface. The real issue might be control, trust, or someone feeling their competence is being questioned in public. Once you can name the actual issue, conflicts get much easier to solve. Not easy. Easier. And much faster. ## How I did it while working full-time It was hard. Not heroic. Not impossible. Just hard in a practical, boring way. Three things made it work. ## Pick a program built for adults with jobs Do not romanticize this. If you work full-time, a rigid in-person university schedule will probably break you. You need a program that assumes your life already has obligations. For me, FernUniversität in Hagen was the right fit: distance learning, structured material, exams, academic standards, and enough flexibility to make it compatible with work. That flexibility is not a luxury. It is the whole point. ## Treat study time like work I put study time on the calendar. Not "I will study when I have time." That time does not exist. Work expands. Life expands. Something always eats the empty space. Two evenings a week belonged to readings. Saturdays belonged to university. Exam periods got blocked early. I treated those blocks like meetings with someone I did not want to disappoint. Myself, unfortunately. The trick is not motivation. Motivation is unreliable. The trick is reducing the number of decisions you have to make. You do not ask yourself whether you feel like studying. You already decided last month. ## Accept that some weeks are ugly There were semesters where work was intense. There were exam periods where my social life basically disappeared. There were weekends where I questioned every life choice that led me to another statistics textbook. That is part of it. Stop expecting the workload to feel balanced every week. It will not. Some weeks are university weeks. Some weeks are work weeks. Some weeks you do the minimum everywhere and keep the machine running. The measure is not whether every week feels good. The measure is whether the system works over years. ## What it costs You pay for it. You read less fiction. You miss some Friday nights. You sometimes open your laptop on a Saturday morning and hate the person who signed you up for this. That person was you. You also become annoying at dinner because you start seeing research design problems everywhere. Still worth it. Compared to an MBA or another technical specialization, psychology gave me a second lens on almost every problem I deal with professionally. That is rare. Most people in tech already understand technology well enough. What they do not understand well enough is human behavior. That gap gets more expensive the more senior you become. ## The combination is the point "Engineer who understands humans" is still an unusually rare profile. Not because engineers lack empathy. Many engineers care. But caring and understanding are not the same thing. Psychology gives you models, language, research discipline, and a better bullshit detector for people problems, including your own. That matters in leadership, product, hiring, and when a team is quietly losing trust and nobody has said it out loud yet. Technical skill gets you into the room. Human understanding lets you stay useful once the problems stop being purely technical. That is why I studied psychology. Not to leave tech. To become better at it.