A long time ago, I read Ender's Game, and a key point of that fictional story is that empathy is not about showing compassion, just a common byproduct. Empathy

A long time ago, I read Ender's Game, and a key point of that fictional story is that empathy is not about showing compassion, just a common byproduct. Empathy is about understanding, and in the context of software development, we need it all the time. Imagine coming into a new codebase, and seeing what you believe are hacks and idiosyncracies everywhere. With empathy, you can get into the mindset of the original coder and begin to see why X is done in a certain way, or even be able to guess how they imagined you'd be using their framework without any documentation to lead you along. It's extremely useful to understand someone, their situation, and their reasoning without them at hand to explain it for you. It's empathy... but without the obvious compassionate outlet of excusing what they've done.