Comment by SoftwareMaven
15 years ago
It is a rare developer who can handle the Nesin step 3. It requires an empathy that doesn't come naturally to many engineers. However, when cultivated, that empathy makes for phenomenal developers. When I manage development teams, that is the number one trait I manage for. With empathy, all other problems can be solved.
[empathy] is the number one trait I manage for. With empathy, all other problems can be solved
You win. I've stumbled across a handy mental model (in which empathy plays a pivotal role) through research on mindfulness, emotion, and neuroscience, as well as in an emotional intelligence course taught at Google by Chade-Meng Tan. In short:
Bodily awareness -> emotional self-awareness -> emotional other-awareness (empathy) -> effective communication -> healthy relationships -> happiness.
It turns out that your brain uses the same machinery to model your own emotional state as that which it uses to model the emotional states of others, so the better you are at identifying your own emotional states, the better you will be at identifying them in others, which will allow you to communicate more effectively and so forth.
Also relevant: Asana's Jack Stahl touches on the importance of empathy in a post post about peer feedback at work: http://asana.com/2011/06/peer-feedback-at-asana/