- Empathy has played a complicated role in my life. It has helped me a lot in my relationships with other people, but has been a burden at times, for instance when watching the news. It would get to me. In the article "Three Kinds of Empathy" by Daniel Goleman, this is described as such:
One downside of emotional empathy occurs when people lack the ability to manage their own distressing emotions, [which] can be seen in the psychological exhaustion that leads to burnout. Purposeful detachment...offers one way to inoculate against burnout.
My concern was always that I would become indifferent, and it was revealing to hear the solution to that, "well-calibrated caring". So understanding the limits of empathy has helped me to be more effective in my application of it.
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Empathy is important to building software because the core of a developers job is understanding the problem, sometimes better than the client. Knowing why the problem exists, and having a grasp as to why it's a problem, is key to solving it. Even more so, it's important to think of how an end user may interact with the software in ways you may not expect, especially due to circumstances you may not think about if you don't empathize with them.
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You have to empathize with others in order to be successful on a team. Failing to understand where someone is coming from, why they have certain feelings about a subject, or to listen to their thoughts on a given issue will cause you to fail at your job of fully understanding the goal. Many times in my life, I have felt that I have a full grasp on a problem, and what I see as the solution, only to be proven wrong, and my understanding proven incomplete, when I chose to listen to others I was working with.
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Empathy made the most difference to me in my positions where I had employees reporting to me (which I consider teammates, even if I'm responsible for final decisions and the repurcussions). Listening when they had a problem, and taking my job requirement of resolving the issue seriously, made a big difference in my interactions with them. It was immediate when I failed to do that, that I noticed a change in my employees. If they felt they weren't being listened to, I could tell. I also noticed that without utilizing the feedback from employees, I didn't feel as confident that I was truly doing my best in my position.
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I find it most difficult to be empathetic towards someone I'm working with when they don't seem to care about the job at hand, or are contrarians about every single little thing. I begin to see them as obstacles to getting the job done effectively, as opposed to teammates helping to achieve that goal. What I think I can do in the future is to address these types of situations head on, as opposed to silently fuming about it, and allowing it to negatively influence the project.