Building empathy

Original source: Building empathy as a software developer - DEV

Empathy is simple the ability to put yourself in the shoes of someone, to feel their feelings and to imagine what it would like to have their problems.

1. Be your own critic first

You’ve just finished writing some code, and you’re about to request a review. But wait, who should be the first one to review it? You!

• Before you send any code review, take the time to scan through your code for clear issues. Avoiding the need for someone else to point out obvious issues in your code is one of the key ways you can be respectful of their time.

2. Anticipate your coworkers’ questions

We’ve all had to commit code that we're not proud of — maybe an impending deadline or working with a rough API made you do some questionable things.

Be proactive in documenting the sacrifices in code quality you’ve had to make, and why. In other words, leave comments (in the code or in the PR, however your team decides to deal with comments)

3. Seek first to understand

• View disagreement as an opportunity to learn from someone else
• Make every effort to understand your disagreeing coworker’s point of view
• Do you agree with that? If not, keep asking why until you can agree on what you’re trying to accomplish

4. Be positive

You’re constantly putting your work out there to be judged by your teammates. Handling this criticism is just part of the job. We want to constantly be learning, growing, and pushing ourselves towards excellence.

5. Empathy for other teams

You'll often end up spending a lot of time with cross-functional teams as well. When someone makes a request or asks you for something, put yourselves in the shoes of someone who doesn’t know all the terminology and details of the issue that you might. How might they want their engineer to respond?

If someone is asking something of you, it’s in service of building a better product for your users. Remember this as you communicate with the people around you.