Software practitioners discuss problems at work with peers, in-person and online. These discussions can be technical (e.g., how to fix a bug?) and social (e.g., how to assign work fairly?). While there is a growing body of knowledge exploring fairness problems and solutions in the human and social factors of software engineering, most focus has been on specific problems. This study provides fairness discussions by software practitioners on Stack Exchange sites. We present an exploratory study presenting the fairness experience of software practitioners and fairness expectations in software teams. We also want to identify the fairness aspects software practitioners talk about the most. For example, do they care more about fairness in income or how they are treated in the workplace? Our investigation of fairness discussions on eight Stack Exchange sites resulted in a list of 136 posts (28 questions and 108 answers) manually curated from 4,178 candidate posts. The study reveals that the majority of fairness discussions (24 posts) revolve around the topic of income suggesting that many software practitioners are highly interested in matters related to their pay and how it is fairly distributed. Further, we noted that while not discussed as often, discussions on fairness in recruitment tend to receive the highest number of views and scores. Interestingly, the study shows that unfairness experiences extend beyond the protected attributes. In this study, only 25 out of 136 posts mention protected attributes, with gender mainly being discussed.

翻译：软件从业者会与同行在线下和线上讨论工作中的问题。这些讨论既可以是技术性的（例如，如何修复一个错误？），也可以是社会性的（例如，如何公平地分配工作？）。尽管在软件工程的人为与社会因素领域，探索公平性问题和解决方案的知识体系正在不断增长，但大多数研究都集中在特定问题上。本研究提供了软件从业者在Stack Exchange网站上关于公平性的讨论。我们呈现了一项探索性研究，展示了软件从业者的公平性体验以及软件团队中的公平性期望。我们还希望识别软件从业者最常谈论的公平性方面。例如，他们更关心收入公平，还是在工作场所受到的待遇公平？我们对八个Stack Exchange网站上公平性讨论的调查，从4,178个候选帖子中手动筛选出了136个帖子（28个问题和108个答案）。研究揭示，大多数公平性讨论（24个帖子）围绕收入主题展开，这表明许多软件从业者对其薪酬及其公平分配高度关注。此外，我们注意到，尽管讨论频率不高，但关于招聘公平性的讨论往往获得最高的浏览量和评分。有趣的是，研究表明不公平体验超出了受保护属性的范畴。在本研究中，136个帖子中只有25个提到了受保护属性，其中主要讨论的是性别。