Empathy and Software

I’ve said before that empathy is a three-part process; the first being aware of how another person is feeling, and the second is caring about how they feel, and finally acting on that caring. Without all of these, empathy can’t be achieved.

So, to the subject of software engineers. The reason that most software, even the best software, is such rubbish is that software engineers miss the first step – that of being aware of how the users of the software might feel.

When I tell my software engineers that a way in which they have implemented a certain function is retarded because of this and that, they go ‘oh, of course’. And then change it. Usually they care about the users and have no problems changing the code once things have been explained to them.

The reason that most software is so shit is that there is rarely a person specifying the user interface that also checks and challenges the software that is supposed to meet these specs. Indeed, often a better way to do things isn’t always obvious until the first dodgy approach becomes a reality.

The reason such a person doesn’t usually hang around bossing about software engineers is that (a) it’s very boring and there are many much better things to do in life, and (b) the sort of people that hire software engineers are former software engineers that don’t have the empathy to realise they need to put such a person in charge.

In fact, the lack of empathy in the product development process of software is a pure form of rational proof of my definition of empathy. People using software; it is in fact psychology encoded into maths.

I hadn’t thought of that before. People don’t conform to mathematical models but when they interact with software they do in a sort of second-order way. You only need one side of the experiment to be mathematical for the whole shebang to be solvable. This is a way in which we could mathematically model psychology. Huh!

Anyway, I got onto this because of the stupid, stupid self-check out machines at Coles. My god they were specified and/or programmed by utter fucking morons.