What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you? I feel like empathy has played a huge role in my life so far, especially my professional life. Having worked as a teacher the last three years, I need students to feel comfortable with me, to trust me, and the only way they will open up is if they feel respected by me. Having empathy for people, in my case students, has helped me invision myself in their shoes.
How does empathy help you build better software? I think empathy helps build better software because we are ultimately interacting with a user, one that we need to understand their viewpoint of. Just like me invisioning myself in my students shoes, I need to invision myself in the users shoes. When working in groups to create code, empathy is a good practice to help with predicting your teams reactions or behaviors, understanding where they're coming from.
Why is empathy important for working on a team? Similar to what I said before, when working on a team, you are working with different personalities, different educations, different experiences, and none of which are bad. Making yourself see the viewpoint of someone else helps create a better environment, and also helps you learn more about coding. Code is also something that is always changing, and it is better to work with a team to create a concise code that will help the next coders, than to speed through and get the job done.
Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful. I consider my previous students as my colleagues since I worked directly with them every day. I had a student that never turned in homework, and instead of getting mad at her and yelling, I just had her stay after class and I asked her to tell me about what she usually does when she gets home. She went on to tell me that she goes home to take care of her grandma who has parkinsons and her three cousins that her grandma has custody over. I was able to have empathy for this student, and she felt comfortable to be honest with me about her home life from that point forward.
When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios? There are definitely times when it is hard to be empathetic. I think of times when I was certain that the other person in conflict with me was wrong in their thinking, and they were stubborn about it too. So I believe the hardest time to be empathetic is when someone is unwilling to also be empathetic. I think it's important to stay calm in these scenarios while still talking through the conflict with the other person.