What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you? Empathy has saved alot of friendships and relationships for me. Alot of simple misunderstandings can be solved just by understanding the other person's feelings and emotions. Empathy is very important in life without it, it would be real hard to keep friends and work in groups. It is a good skill and personality trait that can benefit you greatly in the long run.
How does empathy help you build better software? It can help you understand other peoples needs, therefore making it much easier to know what to write. Better teamwork means better work done, resulting in higher quality projects. Everyone one on the team needs to contribute valuable pieces to the software so empathizing will help make that process much smoother. Empathzing makes us view problems in other people's shoes making it easier to support them and help them succeed.
Why is empathy important for working on a team? A team requires alot of empathy, because if you don't understand each other you guys are blindly building a piece of software. It requires understanding each other and supporting each other to create a proper program. It's like standing in their shoes and really understanding their problem they need to solve instead of blindly giving advice on how to go about it. If you have empathy it helps you stay open minded and open to new ideas or ways of thinking while coding.
Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful. In hockey I was paired up on defence with a kid that didn't get along very well with me. It shows in our games that we didn't get each others playstyle because of that tension that was holding us back. We talked and solved the tension issue and ended up becoming pretty close. There was a noticable amount of improvement with our chemistry on the ice and having that empathy for each other improved our gameplay as a whole.
When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios? Sometimes there is people that having opposing views that just make it very hard to empathize or get along with. You just gotta put it all to the side and make it work. You don't have to be best friends, but don't let it affect your professional work. That just is a bad look for you and them. Put differences aside, talk about it, become closer, understand each other, and become better teamates as a whole. This will greatly improve workflow.