#Mod 0 Gear Up
##What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
Empathy has played a leading role in shaping me throughought my life. As a kid I was very much shaped by specific forms of media I particularly liked, kids television shows such as Captain Planet and Mr. Rodgers whose purposes were to instill an understanding of morality and empathy in young children. Throughout my life empathy has informed the way I feel about the world, especially about the culture I live within and rest that I do not. It has made me a more thorough and compassionate healthcare worker and has certainly affected the way I communicate with those around me and I am a better person for it.
##How does empathy help you build better software?
Software design, from what I can tell with my limited experience, is most often a collaborative effort. To efficiently work collaboratively, a good programmer must not only write code that achieves the desired outcome, but can also be easily understood and accessed by a teamate. The role of empathy comes plays a huge part in how code is written because the coder should think about how something will read through a teamates eyes. This includes thinking of and understanding specific teamates and their methods and habits and personalities. Empathy also plays a large part in tailoring design to suit the target user, by thinking of the target user, who they are and imagining their experience with the program, they can foresee unexpected problems that that person might encounter and design accordingly.
##Why is empathy important for working on a team?
Empathy is especially important within the fields that are statistically dominated by specific demographics. This very much the case in software design and technology in general, which is predominately made up of white men. White men have been historically oppressive to other ethnicities and gender, and as a white male it is my responsibility to be make sure I treat and value team members as equal individuals. For instance, I might find myself on a team made up of my own demographic with one woman, or diffferent ethnicity. That peson may expect that their opinion and input could be undervalued or perhaps not even heard which creates a dissonce in equality that could be reinforced without actively working to make sure they feel that they are equals.
##Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
After leaving healthcare and before I started with Turing, I worked in a busy restaurant, and within any restaurant the way a team functions together largely dictates the business as a whole. Throughout a busy day it is inevitable that mistakes will be made on the part of many, the cook line, the servers, even the managers. When I was learning to expo on the cookline I made many, many mistakes, but the kitchen manager, Lee, running the line was always very patient with me and never once got angry even when I occasionally messed up an entire order. This made me feel much more comfortable communicating which meant we could identify mistakes as early as possible, but also made for less mistakes because I felt at ease. This in turn I took with me as I learned other jobs around the restaurant, whenever someone made a mistake that directly impacted me I remembered how many mistakes I had made in the kitchen and how Lee's patience made all the difference in the world. Empathy keeps a people working together for each other rather than working together for themselves, which ultimately makes for a more efficient and happier team.
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 find it most difficult to be empathetic when a person is frustrated with or angry with me specifically. As all people do I have an ego, but often the ego can be a block to empathic thinking and can be especially obtrusive when I find myself under scrutiny. Even though I am far from perfect, I try to keep an ongoing effort to be aware of when my ego prevents me from processing information objectively. This means actually listening to and understanding another person when they find me to be at fault, rather than reacting egotistically which prevents communication and does not lead to personal or professional growth.