Empathy belongs in the tech industry.

Trevor Hultner
Aug 8, 2017 · 4 min read

A Google employee has been fired for writing a widely-distributed “manifesto” in which he derides the decision for his workplace to diversify, specifically when it comes to promoting more women in engineering and STEM more generally. According to this manifesto, one problem that women in particular have is that they’re too interested in dealing with people.

A quote from the garbage fire:

Women, on average, have more:

Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).

This is apparently a bad thing for this dude. Later on, he writes:

De-emphasize empathy.

I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy — feeling another’s pain — causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.

So like, I work in the tech industry. Not anywhere near the same section of the tech industry as this guy apparently worked (and we’ll talk about that in a hot second), but I basically work in a field of tech where customer service is a major priority. There are a few areas adjacent to my field currently: technical support, sales and presales support, departments that take care of non-technical complaints, departments that take care of shipping issues, etc. and on and on forever.

I’m currently working as a trainer for call center customer service reps. My entire job is centered around giving my trainees the skills they need to succeed — both on the technical side and as a person. People can come in to my line of work knowing nothing about the products we help with and leave my classes with the ability to not only fix those products but — hopefully! — help the customer feel supported as well.

What I’m saying is that empathy is a big part of my job AND the jobs of those I support. It’s mandated, in fact.

This might be hard for folks like the author of the aforementioned manifesto to believe, but I think the reason why companies like Google try so hard to diversify their workspaces is not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because in 2017 the empathy such an act engenders is what customers expect and demand.

And what really bothers me is that this whole thing is damaging to technical fields like software or systems engineering, that already seem to suffer from a public perception that the people who perform those jobs aren’t in-touch with what customers want. I don’t personally believe that’s true, but it’s hard to argue that there isn’t a problem, especially with stuff like this coming out. But ultimately, empathy is just part of the job now, whether you’re working in tech support or tech creation.

I think my favorite idea to come out of this whole thing is something Yonatan Zunger wrote in his response to it. Here’s the quote:

Engineering is not the art of building devices; it’s the art of fixing problems. Devices are a means, not an end. Fixing problems means first of all understanding them — and since the whole purpose of the things we do is to fix problems in the outside world, problems involving people, that means that understanding people, and the ways in which they will interact with your system, is fundamental to every step of building a system. (This is so key that we have a bunch of entire job ladders — PM’s and UX’ers and so on — who have done nothing but specialize in those problems. But the presence of specialists doesn’t mean engineers are off the hook; far from it. Engineering leaders absolutely need to understand product deeply; it’s a core job requirement.)

And once you’ve understood the system, and worked out what has to be built, do you retreat to a cave and start writing code? If you’re a hobbyist, yes. If you’re a professional, especially one working on systems that can use terms like “planet-scale” and “carrier-class” without the slightest exaggeration, then you’ll quickly find that the large bulk of your job is about coordinating and cooperating with other groups. It’s about making sure you’re all building one system, instead of twenty different ones; about making sure that dependencies and risks are managed, about designing the right modularity boundaries that make it easy to continue to innovate in the future, about preemptively managing the sorts of dangers that teams like SRE, Security, Privacy, and Abuse are the experts in catching before they turn your project into rubble.

Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers. If someone told you that engineering was a field where you could get away with not dealing with people or feelings, then I’m very sorry to tell you that you have been lied to. Solitary work is something that only happens at the most junior levels, and even then it’s only possible because someone senior to you — most likely your manager — has been putting in long hours to build up the social structures in your group that let you focus on code.


Originally published at medium.com on August 8, 2017.

The Oklahoma Breeze

Independent Journalism from the Great Plains — by Trevor Hultner

Trevor Hultner

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27. He/They. Asexual. Anarchist. Does journalism sometimes. Twitter: @illicitpopsicle

The Oklahoma Breeze

Independent Journalism from the Great Plains — by Trevor Hultner

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