Paul Graham on Empathy

"Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.

When I was a kid I was constantly being told to look at things from someone else's point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it.

Boy was I wrong. It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret to success. Empathy doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply you'll act in his interest; in some situations -- in war, for example -- you want to do exactly the opposite.

Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one. [I'll expand this thought to suggest you replace the work hacker with any other word that applies to you -- trainer, writer, wife, etc.]

One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch them explain a technical matter to someone without a technical background.

Here's an example, of applied empathy. At Viaweb, if we couldn't decide between two alternatives, we'd ask, what would our competitors hate most? At one point a competitor added a feature to their software that was basically useless, but since it was one of few they had that we didn't, they made much of it in the trade press. We could have tried to explain the feature was useless, but we decided it would annoy our competitor more if we just implemented it ourselves, so we hacked together our own version that afternoon."

Here is Paul Graham's essay on Hackers and Painters upon which the book was written. Other cool essays exist there.