(TL;DR: software is a social endeavour, and if you can’t figure out some way to engage with that fact, then that fact will engage with you nonetheless – and things are unlikely to go well for you from that point)
TO HIGH-FUNCTIONING NEUROTYPICALS:
PLEASE STOP READING NOW
You know who you are: the life and soul of the party, charming everyone you meet. I like you, honestly I do! Although this will not be a surprise, because everybody likes you. But reading any further will be a waste of your time, since you already understand everything I’m about to lay out so painstakingly, without even having to think about it.
(Also, I’m going to be bitchy about you at one point in what’s coming, and you may find that unpleasant)
The rest of us will wait for you to leave.
Could you close the door on your way out? There’s a bit of a draft. Thanks.
LET’S TALK ABOUT EMPATHY
Are the rest of us sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.
There are some incredibly useful ideas about empathy that no-one ever talks about. Why?
Because ideas only get talked about if they’re in the mainstream. And the mainstream is full of people who can find their way around The Land Of Empathy just fine: no map required. So the kind of talk about empathy that we’re about to have is in the “blind spot” of our culture.
LET’S TALK ABOUT COGNITIVE EMPATHY
So: to the ideas themselves. The distinction that I’m going to beat you about the head with in what follows is set out on Wikipedia’s Empathy page: it is between Cognitive Empathy (“Empathy of the Head”) and Affective Empathy (“Empathy of the Heart”).
Affective Empathy is common-or-garden human sympathy, or as Wikipedia puts it “the ability to respond with an appropriate emotion to another’s mental states”. If you are incapable of exercising any of this variety of empathy, I’m afraid that we are unlikely to be friends – not that you would care, of course. You may as well stop reading and go back to tearing the wings off flies, or whatever else it was doing before you encountered this essay. Have fun! Please don’t kill me!
Cognitive Empathy is a very different beast: it’s all about how much you get inside other people’s heads (Wikipedia: “the ability to understand another’s perspective or mental state”). Unlike Affective Empathy, this doesn’t carry any intrinsic moral virtue: you can be a lovely, wonderful person, and absolutely suck at Cognitive Empathy. Note that if you lack innate ability in Cognitive Empathy, there are workarounds – ways to “fake it ’till you make it” – much more so than for a lack of innate Affective Empathy.
Here’s something that I’m often fascinated by: the use of Cognitive Empathy as a weapon. Here’s an example: Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Dr. Lecter is very good at Cognitive Empathy, and unfailingly polite. To someone who is meeting him for the first time, he generally comes across very positively. However, Dr L. leaves something to be desired as a social companion in the longer term, and I would definitely advise against inviting him to your next dinner party.
COGNITIVE EMPATHY IS IMPORTANT
(YES, EVEN IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY)
In IT, Affective Empathy is present in normal amounts, but Cognitive Empathy is generally way thinner on the ground. I won’t go into about why that is so in this essay. But we all know that IT is packed with people who would far rather focus on technical, analytical framings of issues than get all “touchy-feely” and worry overmuch about the thoughts and feelings of others.
So IT people are terrible on average at Cognitive Empathy, but does that really matter? Does a deficit in Cognitive Empathy harm you in an engineering context?
Here’s a simple motivating example:
You’ve slogged your guts out on project X but have not been given sufficient recognition for your effort. During this time, person Y has risen, seemingly without any justification.
That may sound … familiar? And if you don’t understand why this disconnection between value and reward happened, then you didn’t understand enough about how the work was being evaluated: who was pronouncing on its worth, and what they attached value to. And this kind of situation is where even a smattering of Cognitive Empathy can help tremendously.
By this stage, I imagine I might be annoying some readers. They’ll be thinking: You’re telling me to pander, and be a people-pleaser. But I’m an engineer, not a diplomat! Surely, if I just carry on doing Good Things then I should be recognised? And, if I’m not recognised, surely that means it’s the fault of the company, and that I should go and work for somewhere else with a better value system? Right?
To them, I’d like to say this:
PAY ATTENTION, YOU IDIOT
if you don’t engage with what the people around you are thinking, you are at a massive disadvantage compared to anyone else who is paying even the slightest attention to the mental states of others.
There is a romantic myth in IT of the sole coder who has an amazing idea and weaves a magical blanket of abstractions by working 24/7 in their bedroom, unveils it to the world, and receives instant fame and recognition for their genius. Like most myths and archetypes, it’s fatal to take this as an unadulterated guide to living in the real world.
Almost everywhere, and almost all the time, creating software is a social endeavour. Most great ideas come from cross-fertilisation with a wide range of other people – some of whom are likely to think very differently from you – and a lack of appropriate context makes even geniuses appear stupid.
INTRODUCING PERSON X
Person X has spent a long time (10 years or more) working on the same part of the same product, for the same company, without interacting with other teams much, whether internally or externally.
Other team members (whether more extraverted ICs or managers) interface between them and the world outside their team. But Person X prefers to concentrate on their own part of the world. While Person X most certainly adds value, hardly anyone outside their team knows who they are.
PERSON X WILL SUFFER
At some point Person X will find that their local technological landscape is invalidated. This can be through technological advances, company mergers, a new CTO with a vision – the cause is uncertain, but it will happen sooner or later. When this happens, there will be redundancies, and Person X will get the chop.
Why?
Because the decision of who to chop is made by multiple people (managers, client reps, etc) getting together and voting, and only one of these people will know who Person X is, and so they will be outvoted by all the others.
This is not fair. But it happens all the time.
I AM SORRY
I may have come across as a bit of an arsehole so far. Angry. Sorry. But this isn’t an accident; I’m attempting to shock you out of complacency. Here’s the reason I’m so cross – no-one else is going to bother to help you out: they’ve been spending their whole life cruising past your low-cognitive-empathy slum in their high-cognitive-empathy limousines.
And most of the people in the limos don’t really get why you’re in the slum, and the minority who do have an inkling: well, I wouldn’t say that they’re laughing at you through their tinted side windows, not exactly, but they don’t care about you either; at least, not enough to help you out. So you’re stuck with me, doing my grumpy best. Sorry about that. But also: fuck those guys, right?
YOU CAN ESCAPE
If you work in the IT realm and think that you may be suffering from this kind of empathic disadvantage, and would like to make the pain stop, I recommend studying the works of Gerald Weinberg. I didn’t get to meet him in person, which is one of my few major regrets in life: he died in 2018, leaving a legacy of marvellous writing behind. His original classic “The Psychology of Computer Programming” was written in 1971 but is still as relevant as ever.
I have read every non-fiction book that GW wrote and haven’t regretted a single one. He has the technical chops: he was a project manager on Project Mercury. But also he transcended personal tragedy in his family life, and as part of his journey he produced this amazing synthesis of Rogerian psychological thought with the practical process of writing systems. I cannot recommend his writing highly enough.
YOU MAY BE SAD
Please don’t be sad. There is lots of good news here. You can learn Cognitive Empathy. And this isn’t just about career benefits, about helping yourself out. While being able to better comprehend what everyone around you thinks, feels, and wants is very rewarding professionally, it’s also tremendously rewarding in itself: you will be able to help more people and generally do more good in the world.
And on top of all of this – circling back to career benefits – knowledge of Cognitive Empathy will be hugely more durable than all those technology hamster wheels we spend all our time running around. I have lost count of the number of networking technologies I have learnt over the last 30 years – but people? They are just the same now as they were 30 years ago, or the last few hundred come to that. It’s an incredibly useful bit of technology that is going to be just as relevant when you retire as it is today. You know, like key bindings for vi?
YOU MAY THINK I AM FULL OF SHIT
Well, really. The nerve of you! Well, I’ve done my best. Feel free to ignore me and focus on those sweet, sweet technical/analytical problems that we all love so much. But don’t come running to me when an idiot manager or daft fellow developer who happens to be exercising slightly more Cognitive Empathy than a broken toaster runs rings around you.
Incidentally, don’t despair if you feel that a self-perceived lack of neurotypicality on your part might make all this too difficult. As I have already implied, I’m not neurotypical either, having a decently-sized helping of Emotional Contagion, with a side order of Face Blindness. Depending on the mix at your workplace, non-neurotypicality might actually make it all easier: check out The Double Empathy Problem to see what I’m talking about.