- What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
- Empathy plays a huge role in my life, whether is be talking to my roommates, my friends, or even the cashier at the grocery store. Empathy can really make or break a relationship, and if you don't show empathy, you probably aren't going to have a girlfriend, friends, or cool roommates for too long. If I couldn't understand where my roommate was coming from when we have our differences, and she couldn't understand where I was coming from, then it would be pretty unbearable to live together. Empathy helps me make less selfish decisions, build better relationships, makes me more relatable and social, and generally just makes me feel better about myself and the world.
- How does empathy help you build better software?
- Empathy helps you build better software because it gives you a perspective other than your own. If you put yourself into somebody else’s shoes, you are going to gain perspective on your product and potentially see design flaws that you overlooked with just your own viewpoint. You can potentially gain insight into why this product could be essential to some people, and how you can make it essential to even more people.
- Why is empathy important for working on a team?
- Empathy is important while working on a team because this team is an important relationship, and you need empathy for all relationships to work. If you are working on a team, then everybody is bound to have their own ideas, and reasons for doing things, and if you can't understand where your teammates are coming from, or why they want to implement something, then how are you going to understand where your customers are coming from, or your boss, or anybody else? If you empathic with your team, you will all communicate better, and help prevent people from feeling left out or overlooked, and hopeully have a happy team that will have better cohesion and synergy.
- Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
- Working on the research orchard we had the core team, and then we had some highschool interns. The core team was mostly comprised of people that cared about the science, and wanted to get the science right, but the high schoolers were pretty uninterested in working. It was annoying at first, but then I thought back to being that age. Surely I wouldn't give a shit either. After that I just sort of accepted it and joked around about it, and fixed what I could when I needed to. It saved me a decent amount of stress.
- When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?
- When I don't like somebody, it is hard to be empathetic towards them. Lazy bosses that don't do anything except add their workload to their employees, or lazy teammates that don't pull their weight...It is really hard for me the empathize with these people. When faced with these scenarios you can try to talk it out, but most of the time you have to suck it up make sure things get done until you can move on to a place with better people.