Directions: Submit your Gear Up Pre-Work reflections on the pre-work google doc.
Our mission is to unlock human potential by training a diverse, inclusive student body to succeed in high-fulfillment technical careers.
- Interpersonal skills (including empathy) have a direct, significant impact on your professional success.
- Empathy is a foundational interpersonal skill. Other skills, such as collaboration, communication, compromise all hinge on your ability to demonstrate empathy.
- Interpersonal skills, including empathy, can be developed and improved.
- Turing's mission (cited above) demands that we support students development of technical and interpersonal skills.
Read two of the following articles/videos (we recommend all of them!) and reflect on these questions: why are we talking about empathy at a software development school? how can you develop the "skill" of empathy? and why should you care?
- "Why is Empathy Important for Design"
- "The Surprising (Nontechnical) Skill You Need to Succeed in Tech", The Muse
- "Why Aren't We More Compassionate?", TED Talk (Daniel Goleman)
- "Can you teach people to have empathy?", BBC (Jun 29, 2015)
- "Three Kinds of Empathy", Daniel Goleman
- "The Importance of Empathy in Our Services-Centric, People-Oriented Economy", Wall Street Journal Blog (Oct 9, 2015)
After reading the articles above, create a gist on Github and reflect (4-6 sentences) on the following prompts.
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What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
Empathy has played a big role in my life and has helped me to try to always be considerate of others and treat people the way that I would want to be treated. Empathy has taught me never to look down on people and always try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I believe empathy is a skill that can be improved upon and I definitely consider myself to be more empathetic now than when I was younger. After going through some tough life moments, I've realized that its always best to be overly kind to people because you never really know what someone is going through behind closed doors. They could be having a really rough day and not showing it and maybe you holding the door open or giving them a smile could be the tipping point to turn it around.
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How does empathy help you build better software?
At the end of the day, you are hopefully not going to be the only one using the software you are building. In that case it is super important to try to get into the minds of the people who will be using your software and try to think about what exactly they need to get from using your software, what their natural intuition about how to use the software may be, what potential pain points with the software may be, and so on. If you have no ability to understand what your users goals are, chances are your software isn't going to be very good or very useful. Secondly, most great software is not built by only one person. In order to build great software, you will most likely have to work together with other people. Clearly empathy is critical to working on a team for many reasons. Empathy plays a big role in probably one of the most important skills of any team member which is to be able to constructively give and receive feedback and criticism. When giving criticism to another team member, one must put themselves in their shoes and realize that receiving criticism probably isn't their favorite thing, so its best to put it in the best and nicest way possible and still make that person feel good about themselves while moving the project forward. At the same time, empathy is super important to receiving criticism because it enables you to realize the goals of the person giving you the feedback. Its easy to take criticism as a personal attack, but when you realize the goals of the other person, most times they are not at all trying to attack you, they just want to move the project forward and make it the best it can possibly be, which should be a goal shared by all team members.
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Why is empathy important for working on a team?
Empathy is absolutely crucial to working on a team because it is critical to good communication. Any team will inevitably have tons of disagreements. Disagreements can be on anything from stylistic decisions, to the direction of a business, to what to spend money on, this list goes on and on. If every time there is a disagreement, everyone just throws their hands up and says "that person doesn't know what they're talking about!", then the team will never get anywhere. To effectively communicate and resolve disagreements team members must be able to put theirselves in the other persons shoes and understand where they are coming from and why their side of the disagreement makes sense to them. If you can do that, the other persons perspective will likely make a lot more sense to you and then you both can move forward and come up with a compromise that works for everyone.
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Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
Everyday my bandmates and I are empathizing with each other and making compromises in order to move our music and the overarching brand of our band forward. This can be a very hard thing especially because music is very personal and you may both have very strong feelings on how a song should sound. There have been too many times to count where I think a part of a song should sound one way and my partner thinks it should sound a different way. So in these cases we each try to explain to each other why we think it should be a certain way and then one of us either says "ok, that makes sense, lets do it your way" or we try to combine the two schools of though into something that we're both happy with. The important part is to realize that everyone is on the same team and regardless of the details, at the end of the day we both want the same things. Its also important to admit that you are not always going to be right and sometimes overall team morale is way more important to success than one minute little detail.
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When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?
Probably the most difficult time for me to be empathetic in a professional setting is when someone has either made a completely blatant careless mistake or when someone is not holding up to a promise or I don't feel like that person has been working as hard as I had expected them to. It is hard not to be upset when someone has let you down, but getting all upset when something like that happens is not going to solve anything and will probably make matters worse. Most of the time if someone knows they have done something wrong, they will own up to it and perform better the next time. There are so many factors that can go into something like and you really have no idea what people are dealing with on a day to day basis. That person could be dealing with marital issues or maybe someone in their family is ill or maybe they really tried their best and something just didn't come together. Either way, it is always best to give people the benefit of the doubt and try to get to the bottom of what went wrong and how to make it not happen again next time instead of getting angry at people.