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I guess working on your empathy skills and trying to understand emotions of others (instead of solely focusing on your own) might make your life easier. I have

I guess working on your empathy skills and trying to understand emotions of others (instead of solely focusing on your own) might make your life easier. I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of “technology is the end and sales and product managers are the means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that these people struggled in environment focusing on "the customer". I doubt, that "customer and product centric" companies will become less "customer and product centric". A reason for the changes we are observing is less access to cheap capital which - as far as I can tell - will shift attention more towards "money, customers and products" and away from "engineering pet projects". But, perhaps this is a good thing.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
The most shocking thing to me I’ve observed during my career is how many good technologists lack empathy. I hazard it’s because the same neurological structure that optimizes for what makes a good dev/technologist is also what makes empathy and social skills lacking, very broadly speaking. You can learn/fake it with enough time and practice (I’ve met those who do), it just doesn’t seem to be that common of a hack. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1362361319883506 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13623613198835...
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  A lot of people discover that they can get respect despite being an asshole if they're skilled enough. You see this pattern of behaviour in all disciplines, but in tech it seems that social skills are less important than elsewhere so those types are attracted to the field, and we've also cultivated a culture that glorifies people who are assholes but are also visionaries - Jobs/Musk/Zuckerberg etc.
  - estebank 4y ago
    I find that people that conform to the "asshole genius" trope are far outnumbered by the assholes that believe themselves to be geniuses.
  - hadlock 4y ago
    Being a visionary is mostly tied to having a budget line item for paying a PR firm that specializes in that kind of work. If you would like to be a visionary there's a whole fleet of companies over on Post St who would be happy to take your money and get your name in blog posts on Fortune and Bloomberg's website.
    - wincy 4y ago
      You mean like the amazing visionaries Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes?
- gramie 4y ago
  One of the programmers I used to work with took an online personality test, and told us that it reported him having "less empathy than Stalin". He was a good programmer, though!
  - chasd00 4y ago
    many years ago i signed up for an online dating site where i had to take a very long (maybe 200 questions) personality test. I reach the end and it says "due to your personality our services cannot help you" or something like that. That was a blow to the old ego heh. /happily married for 13 years now with two kids so i guess my personality isn't that toxic heh
- BirAdam 4y ago
  I am not a psychological professional, and I should keep my mouth shut, but I don’t believe this is terribly unique to the tech sector. I think this is more closely linked to institutionalized people. That is, people who spent long amounts of time in schools, the military, prison, and so on. These large organizations themselves lack empathy. A person formed by such a machine will begin to find that treatment normal and replicate that treatment. As many technologists are university graduates, they’d fall into this category of institutionalized people. It doesn’t help that many then get hired by megacorps which are also institutions.
  - stcroixx 4y ago
    Empathy doesn't seem particularly valuable in a work context. Wether I empathize with a non technical manager who creates more problems than they solve or not doesn't change the impact that person has on the people around them. Is it empathy that keeps someone like this employed? We tolerate their meddling and chaos because we feel bad for them?
- imbnwa 4y ago
  Off the cuff, I observe people who have social skills also find social commercing and social power pleasurable in itself and desire the activity for that end as well, far more pleasurable than sitting around solving logic puzzles and factoring the solutions; maybe on the side, like someone who plays Sudoku, but not as something occupying their day. Unless your mob or pair programming all day most of the week, the actual work involved is rather isolating. I don't have programmer friends, my friend group has consisted of social people owing to a series of incidental factors that began late in high school. I was consistently the person first to be exhausted going into late night where they seemed to have a replenishing reservoir of energy.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

The most shocking thing to me I’ve observed during my career is how many good technologists lack empathy. I hazard it’s because the same neurological structure that optimizes for what makes a good dev/technologist is also what makes empathy and social skills lacking, very broadly speaking. You can learn/fake it with enough time and practice (I’ve met those who do), it just doesn’t seem to be that common of a hack. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1362361319883506 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13623613198835...

DoughnutHole 4y ago
A lot of people discover that they can get respect despite being an asshole if they're skilled enough. You see this pattern of behaviour in all disciplines, but in tech it seems that social skills are less important than elsewhere so those types are attracted to the field, and we've also cultivated a culture that glorifies people who are assholes but are also visionaries - Jobs/Musk/Zuckerberg etc.
- estebank 4y ago
  I find that people that conform to the "asshole genius" trope are far outnumbered by the assholes that believe themselves to be geniuses.
- hadlock 4y ago
  Being a visionary is mostly tied to having a budget line item for paying a PR firm that specializes in that kind of work. If you would like to be a visionary there's a whole fleet of companies over on Post St who would be happy to take your money and get your name in blog posts on Fortune and Bloomberg's website.
  - wincy 4y ago
    You mean like the amazing visionaries Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes?
gramie 4y ago
One of the programmers I used to work with took an online personality test, and told us that it reported him having "less empathy than Stalin". He was a good programmer, though!
- chasd00 4y ago
  many years ago i signed up for an online dating site where i had to take a very long (maybe 200 questions) personality test. I reach the end and it says "due to your personality our services cannot help you" or something like that. That was a blow to the old ego heh. /happily married for 13 years now with two kids so i guess my personality isn't that toxic heh
BirAdam 4y ago
I am not a psychological professional, and I should keep my mouth shut, but I don’t believe this is terribly unique to the tech sector. I think this is more closely linked to institutionalized people. That is, people who spent long amounts of time in schools, the military, prison, and so on. These large organizations themselves lack empathy. A person formed by such a machine will begin to find that treatment normal and replicate that treatment. As many technologists are university graduates, they’d fall into this category of institutionalized people. It doesn’t help that many then get hired by megacorps which are also institutions.
- stcroixx 4y ago
  Empathy doesn't seem particularly valuable in a work context. Wether I empathize with a non technical manager who creates more problems than they solve or not doesn't change the impact that person has on the people around them. Is it empathy that keeps someone like this employed? We tolerate their meddling and chaos because we feel bad for them?
imbnwa 4y ago
Off the cuff, I observe people who have social skills also find social commercing and social power pleasurable in itself and desire the activity for that end as well, far more pleasurable than sitting around solving logic puzzles and factoring the solutions; maybe on the side, like someone who plays Sudoku, but not as something occupying their day. Unless your mob or pair programming all day most of the week, the actual work involved is rather isolating. I don't have programmer friends, my friend group has consisted of social people owing to a series of incidental factors that began late in high school. I was consistently the person first to be exhausted going into late night where they seemed to have a replenishing reservoir of energy.