Turing Culture: Developing Empathetic Programmers

TuringEmpatheticProgrammersPrework.md

Turing Culture: Developing Empathetic Programmers

1. What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?

• Empathy has helped me directly relate to others in a more meaningful way. I've raised 4 sons, all with very different personalities and different strengths and weaknesses. Empathy has been invaluable in listening to them and understanding their struggles in a way that allows me to help them the best way possible.

2. How does empathy help you build better software?

• In my professional life, as a software engineering leader, I've had to learn empathy in order to help teams work better together. It's especially useful between disciplines on larger teams, where developers typically hand code off to QA. With empathy as a skill, the relationship and understanding between these two disciplines ie healthy rather than contentious.

3. Why is empathy important for working on a team?

• A team fundamentally is a group of people, and the more you know and understand the people on your team, the better the team will function. Everyone has a story, and empathy helps the team members to be open and aware of the things others on the team may be dealing with.

4. Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.

• I'll share one that I've seen many times, and experienced first hand; the handoff from development to QA. It is easy for a developer to throw the code over the proverbial wall and let any defects be someone else's problem. But I've seen and been part of teams where developers had a true empathy for QA, and worked side by side to the betterment of the product.

5. When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?

• I think the toughest times to be empathetic in a professional setting is when I'm working with people who are not very self-aware. This tends to result in me becoming frustrated with their behavior and dismissing them, when the better approach would be to understand they may not have been shown a better way to deal with difficult human situations.