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Why Empathy In Tech with Andrea Goulet
60 Plays5 months ago
Andrea and Ray dive into the “why” of the Empathy in Tech podcast. Why empathy? Why tech? Why us? Why now? Andrea shares the backstory of how the Empathy in Tech came to be, the mission of the Empathy in Tech organization, and why she’s passionate about leading a scientific revolution.
LINKS
- Jamil Zaki’s article: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24137520/americans-empathy-new-compassion-research
- Roddenberry Hypothesis - https://www.ted.com/talks/jamil_zaki_we_re_experiencing_an_empathy_shortage_but_we_can_fix_it_together
- Communication is just as important as code talks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFuNdKPV0jc
- Empathy is a Technical Skill - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1ZKwkPU_0Y
- Corgibytes - https://corgibytes.com/
- Legacy Code Rocks - https://legacycode.rocks
- Milton Waddams from Office Space - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvMeiKSD43E
- Shannon-Weaver model of a General Communication System - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Weaver_model
- Mender.ai - https://mender.ai/
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
- A Short History of the “Soft Skill” vs. “Hard Skill” Divide - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/short-history-soft-skill-vs-hard-divide-why-its-farce-andrea-goulet
- Unlearning the Empathy Stereotype - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unlearning-empathy-stereotype-andrea-goulet-xjyfc
- Madison Mohns' TED Talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbQjrA9VPjY
HOSTS
Andrea Goulet LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreamgoulet
Ray Myers LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/cadrlife
ABOUT EMPATHY IN TECH
Empathy in Tech’s mission is to accelerate the responsible adoption of empathy in the tech industry to help humanity solve our most pressing and complex problems. We do this by focusing on three key areas:
- Technical Empathy - Close the empathy skills gap in the tech industry by leading a scientific revolution that embraces new research.
- Ethical Empathy - Ensure empathy is used for social good through ethical, equitable, and responsible choices.
- Actionable Empathy - Build a thriving community that makes effective empathy training accessible, affordable, and widely available.
Learn more at https://empathyintech.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Empathy in Tech
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Empathy in Tech, where we explore the deeply technical side of empathy. And the critical need for empathy in technology. I'm your host, Andrea Goulet. And I'm Ray Myers. Today, we're talking about why.
Andrea's Empathy Journey
00:00:16
Speaker
Why empathy, why technology, why us, why now.
00:00:22
Speaker
Now, Andrea, you've been working with the empathy and technology community for a while, and you're looking to take things to the next level. We're starting this podcast. Why don't you tell me a little bit about what your plans are right now? Yeah, I'll give a little history first. There was a article that came out from Jamil Zaki, who's an empathy researcher at Stanford, and he was talking about the empathy gap and how in 2009,
00:00:52
Speaker
There was a study that showed that our empathy had decreased as a society significantly. And this happened to be the same year that I started my company Corgibytes with a friend of mine from high school.
00:01:08
Speaker
He was really passionate about modernizing legacy systems and fixing bugs and the mission critical stuff that makes companies work. I came from strategic communications, so I thought I had a really good understanding about empathy and I had run my own businesses. And as I started to learn more about the software space, part of our vision was that empathy had to be the anchor of every decision that we made.
00:01:37
Speaker
And, you know, we wrote out core values, like our first one was act with empathy. And it was funny because we went to a strategic consultant to kind of help us like, how about a five year vision and that kind of stuff.
Empathy: Soft vs. Hard Skill
00:01:50
Speaker
And when we said that, the feedback we got was you can never say the word empathy and software in the same sentence because you will be laughed out of the industry.
00:02:01
Speaker
At the time, that was absolutely the prevailing belief, and the idea was the empathy is going down, and why empathy? There's this soft skill, hard skill divide. I had a lot of doubts. I was like, oh, I'm not technical, but a lot was wrapped up in gender and culture. There was just so much. So over the decade that I was CEO,
00:02:23
Speaker
It freaking worked. I gave talks on communication is just as important as code. As I started to learn a little bit more about empathy, I realized that we are in a paradigm shift because the research that's coming out now, because after 2009,
00:02:42
Speaker
People were like, oh my gosh, we don't care about each other. We need to fix this. So for the past 15 years, there has been a lot of research in this space to try to figure out what empathy is, why it's important, how it manifests in our brains, how it shifts in context based on who we're with and our motivation. There's just been so, so, so much.
00:03:08
Speaker
As I've learned more, I've realized that the way that I thought about empathy before was wrong. I used to identify as an empath and I would walk into a room and people told me this. People were like, you're so good. You can just walk into a room. Like you naturally just read the room and you can connect with people very easily.
00:03:28
Speaker
Like Deanna Troi from Star Trek or something. Exactly. And I'm so glad you brought that up because Jamil Zaki has a TED talk about this and he has a theory on this called the Roddenberry hypothesis that maps exactly that. And I grew up watching Star Trek Next Generation and absolutely identified with Diana.
Evolving Views on Empathy
00:03:49
Speaker
Like I had this kind of quasi psychic superpower and I was able to infer
00:03:53
Speaker
And at the time, that was what the research shows. And we're still just kind of coming out of that. But that is, by far and away, the prevailing theory in emotions and also in just our common knowledge of what empathy is. But on the other end of that is Data, who Scott really identified with, my business partner. And he would say things like, I'm just not good with people.
00:04:21
Speaker
You just want me in the code. I don't understand anything about people. And this really, really, really confused me because Scott is the most compassionate person I know. We actually ended up getting married a few years after starting the business. And I absolutely could not reconcile this thing that I was seeing where, how is it that one of the kindest and most empathetic and most compassionate people that I know that I want to commit spending the rest of my life with,
00:04:51
Speaker
doesn't see themselves as compassionate.
00:04:54
Speaker
when clearly they are. So that really made us double down on kind of like, well, what is empathy and how does it apply to code? And our core values were communication is just as important as code, crafting context, and calm the chaos. I didn't realize at the time how much our core values aligned with this new paradigm of empathy. And it frickin' worked. We were able to go in and make progress on legacy systems
00:05:23
Speaker
where other companies couldn't.
Community and Empathy in Legacy Code
00:05:25
Speaker
We were able to actually implement the vision of Agile and create an environment. We focused on developer experience before it was a thing. We have so many people who have worked for us that just
00:05:41
Speaker
It feels really good to be on a team where you're supported, where you're doing good work, where you're getting stuff out the door, where you can count on the people around you, where you know what's going on and things are understandable. And that when challenges happen, because they always do, you know, people have got your back. And even if that means like things that happen to you that like we've had to lay people off over the years and contract and, you know, there's definitely been conflicts.
00:06:10
Speaker
But at the end of the day, empathy has been the thing. Those core values are how we anchor every single decision. And in 2015, we attended a conference. And then it became, it's not just Skye. It was the Agile conference. And again, I was like, I don't know if I belong here. I don't know anything about Agile. And Scott was like, no, you have to come. I think these are your people. And it was really interesting because I was like, oh, this is actually all about people. Huh.
00:06:40
Speaker
That was when I noticed that Scott wasn't the only person who felt this way. There was like a little group that had kind of formed during this conference and they were all very excited about legacy code and fixing bugs and paying down technical
Empathy in Overcoming Challenges
00:06:53
Speaker
debt. And I just kind of watched this and at the end I was like, so how are y'all gonna stay in touch? You know, I'm a communications strategist and I'm all about creating community and strategic planning. Somebody turned to me from that group and was like, ah,
00:07:08
Speaker
We code, we're not good with people. We can't create a community around this. We're just resigned to being kind of the Milton from office space where we're in the basement. No one cares about maintenance for software. No one cares about legacy code. And this has been our struggle for the past 20 years and we just kind of know it. And I was like, it does not have to be this way.
00:07:32
Speaker
At that moment I figured out, I think I can find a place because I'm not the best person for coding. I know how to code. I know how to participate in a group coding session, but I was really struggling to figure out where I belonged in the industry. I was like, you need someone to help with communications and community? Like I'm good at that. I can set that up. So in an hour, I was like, okay, here's a Slack channel and here's a signup sheet. And I started a newsletter and just like got all the infrastructure in place.
00:08:02
Speaker
And everybody got so excited and we got like 50 people who signed up right there. And then we just started small and we started like publishing a newsletter of like, Hey, here's some interesting things. Started the Slack channel and we started a GitHub repo of, you know, awesome legacy code where it's got things like Prince of Persia and DOS and, you know, these things that have been open source. And that's been going on almost 10 years now. And so I've seen not just.
00:08:32
Speaker
empathy work on the level of human system. But also in observing this, we started a podcast at Legacy Code Rocks and interviewing about a hundred people. Scott's continuing to keep it going. I'm focusing on this podcast now. I saw that there was something there and that there is a reason that we don't have empathy specifically in the tech industry because we have an empathy deficit overall.
Systemic Solutions through Empathy
00:08:57
Speaker
But in the tech industry, it feels like it's really deep and it feels like there's so many rivalries, right? There's software developers versus the business and all this contention. And Scott and I had worked through a lot of that because we were very different. And I was like, empathy is the thing that will make all of this better. In the course of
00:09:18
Speaker
talking to everybody at Legacy Co Rocks and Ray, that's how you and I connected. Everyone that I have met through there is so kind and compassionate and wants to do better. So I don't think that this is a question of motivation in terms of like wanting to be a good person.
00:09:38
Speaker
I think it's more of a systemic problem where people feel resigned. People have told me I'm not good with people, so I'm just going to be somebody who takes the tickets. It doesn't matter.
00:09:53
Speaker
We also have huge pressing challenges. And this is why I'm really excited to do this podcast with you, Ray, because you're really focused on kind of both the legacy code space, but also the acceleration space and all the AI and kind of where the industry is going. You're also super excited about like human systems and a really nice person. So thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And, you know, I think.
00:10:16
Speaker
As I've learned more about this new idea of empathy as a system and not just as the pseudo-psychic stereotype, what I've learned is that we can use the exact same computational principles and the things that we're familiar with in information theory and communication theory because that's the foundation of all computer science where we get, how do we get a bit of information from point A to point B? The underlying principles of how do I get an idea from my brain to your brain
00:10:46
Speaker
are pretty much the same. So we can level up the skills challenge, which is so, so, so important. Humanity has some big, big pressing, important, complex challenges right now.
00:11:03
Speaker
How do we prevent AI from taking over and the existential risk with that? There's a lot of people who are worried about that. How do we solve climate change? How do we ensure that resources are distributed fairly so people aren't hungry all the time? There's a lot that we need to figure out and we will not get there unless we understand the mechanism that humans evolved to enable collaboration and that mechanism is empathy.
00:11:31
Speaker
I'm so excited to just explore all of this and then see where this goes and really make this not just a podcast, but really a movement.
Podcast Mission: Global Solutions
00:11:42
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think that this personal story that you provided does show how much the legs that this idea has, because you were told you can't possibly say software and empathy in the same sentence. And what did you do? You did so far the opposite of that. I've learned in my career that when someone tells you something's flat out impossible offhandedly like that,
00:12:05
Speaker
You know, that raises my eyebrow. That makes me think, actually, there might be a really big contribution here. You recognize that. And you started this successful and influential, I might add, software consultancy, Coribis with Scott. I was one of the people influenced by that, actually. Speaking of AI, my website, mender.ai,
00:12:24
Speaker
about the implications of AI on specifically legacy code was named after your work, your conversation about menders versus makers. I think it is really exciting that you're now taking that principle and seeing how can we enable more people just to achieve the success with it that you have and see where that goes. How this comes into the mission. Do you want to talk about what specifically the mission of empathy in tech is?
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah. So we're looking at organizing as a nonprofit as well. It's been kind of a grassroots community. Empathy and tech kind of started because I ended up getting a book deal to write empathy driven software development based on my experiences. And that was part of we're doing the deep research there. I'm like, whoa, I don't actually, this is where that new paradigm came from. So I started, you know, a discord channel. We have volunteers come and it's been really grassroots for the past like three years. And.
00:13:19
Speaker
Now I think we're really ready to take it to the next level. So the mission is to accelerate the responsible adoption of empathy in the tech industry to help humanity solve our most pressing and complex problems. And we do that in three
Empathy in Computer Science Education
00:13:32
Speaker
ways. First is technical empathy. So it's closing the empathy skills gap in the tech industry by leading a scientific revolution that embraces this new research.
00:13:42
Speaker
ethical empathy, so there are dark patterns in empathy. We need to be aware of them and we need to do our best to make sure that we're using empathy for social good through ethical, equitable, and responsible choices, and then actionable empathy. So making empathy content, making empathy training accessible, affordable, and widely available, because one of the things that I've seen, you know, just in trying to figure out how do I do the book and how do I do speaking, because I've been
00:14:11
Speaker
keynote speaking for this on a while and it's like, I think one of the big problems I see is that so much of this really great training is hidden behind a paywall. You get it if you work at a big corporation, but everyone needs to know about this. We have to shift what the common understanding of what empathy is.
00:14:32
Speaker
That's the mission of the non-profit and where we're going. There are several different audiences. If you're listening to this, this is our first episode. What can you expect?
00:14:45
Speaker
focus is on software development and legacy systems. And so we'll definitely be chatting about that, but there's other things that this applies to too. I think this is why it's a little bit different than legacy code rocks, which is very niche because there is so much. So we've got several different kind of segments that we're thinking about and that we'll be bringing experts in to help us understand the intersection of empathy and tech in these different domains. So software development,
00:15:13
Speaker
product development for sure, right? Because products have largely been built using design thinking. That was where I first learned a lot about empathy. But then again, there are elements of that that don't work and are wrong. And we need to re map and reframe based on new evidence. Academia. So a big challenge is that Ray, I don't know about you, but the common thing I've heard from most people who graduate with a computer science degree is that they got no training in communications.
00:15:44
Speaker
or skill building for how to interact with people. Very little. Yeah. I probably got as much of it doing college radio as I got anywhere else in college. That makes sense because communication and empathy and people skills in general were not included in the overall, it's called SWEBOC, which is like the software standards for academia and how to teach it. And it wasn't included until 2008.
00:16:11
Speaker
So maybe some of the people who have graduated recently, but largely it's still things like ethics and communications and empathy are largely taught in a elective class that's outside of it. And there's new evidence that shows that doesn't work. People roll their eyes and go, this isn't important.
00:16:28
Speaker
But when you integrate it into the existing curriculum, that's how you build it.
Empathy in Leadership
00:16:34
Speaker
So helping professors and people who are teaching computer science embrace this and show how you can use empathy in the classroom based on this new paradigm. Of course, leadership and management. There's a lot here. I think this is something that we see a lot of. Here's another thing about the Jamil Zaki article that was published recently. Empathy has rebounded.
00:16:56
Speaker
We are now back at the 1970s level so we've been doing a lot of work as humans on leveling up our empathy and that shows us that there's hope and we're on the right track so we need to keep it going and leaders and managers are a big place there.
00:17:12
Speaker
ethical AI. I'm really excited. One of our first guests is Madison Mones, who you know, and just I had a chance to connect with her. I'm so excited to geek out with her and get her to help us understand more about like what the ethics are and how she has used it successfully on her team advocacy. So there are a lot of people who are like me in the beginning who are like teaching empathy and we're all about how empathy is important.
00:17:42
Speaker
But I was not using the latest research and that's another thing I see is that right now people who train on empathy It's taught in more of an get in touch with your feelings, you know kind of touchy-feely squishy soft skill Kind of way it's all about intuition and inference and that doesn't make sense Sometimes when you are an analytical thinker and so that is why I think people in the tech industry have said Oh, I don't I don't belong
00:18:11
Speaker
But we can follow this new research and we need to train the people who are already teaching about empathy to governance and policy. We've we know kind of which governance structures enable empathy and which hinder it. And then also research. Oh my gosh. I can't wait to get some of the researchers on the show who have been so instrumental
00:18:32
Speaker
in shaping my ideas of empathy and what they are and I can't wait for people who are listening to learn along with us so that we can really take this to the next level and, like I said, just solve the big problems through collaboration.
Empathy Driving Innovation
00:18:50
Speaker
We do that by understanding empathy as a technical skill.
00:18:54
Speaker
Absolutely. And I can't wait to dive more into this with you and also to tell some of my stories from my career because we don't always talk about this. But I think a lot of the best accomplishments of my career have been enabled by empathy when we present.
00:19:12
Speaker
What happened is like, oh, well, we shipped the thing and we plugged the components into the, it was great and people could use it. But like, how did we know what to do? I mean, I, I, in a lot of situations just listen to someone who wasn't being listened to. And that's where I even understood there was an opportunity. And so I think that is, uh, we're learning that is a transferable skill. That is something that you can consciously get better at. And I've gotten a lot out of consciously getting better at it. I would love to dive more into this with you.
00:19:39
Speaker
One quick thing is that we are going to ask a final question of all of our guests. So Ray, you and I should answer this one quickly, which is what's the most important thing that you think should happen at the intersection of empathy and technology? I've already described it. I think we need to start treating empathy as a technical skill so that we can enable the scientific revolution. What's yours?
00:20:05
Speaker
Well, at this exact moment now, I think understanding even what technology is there for, stop looking at especially these new, these AI systems as an end in and of themselves. What are we trying to achieve with them? What even is the goal? I think a lot of people have lost the plot.
00:20:29
Speaker
And empathy is what helps us, you know, arrive, achieve the actual goal that we want. But even just understanding that technology is there to help us achieve a goal and is not its own end.
Engaging with the Empathy Community
00:20:43
Speaker
That's where I want us to get right now.
00:20:45
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. If you all found this conversation interesting, subscribe so that you don't miss any of our episodes and head over to empathyintech.com where you can sign up for email updates. We're taking a pause on our workshops for the moment as we start to transition into the nonprofit status. Keep that in mind if you are listening to this in spring-ish of 2024.
00:21:12
Speaker
Then that way, it's like you can connect to a community, right? You can connect with other people who want this to happen. There's a Discord channel, which if you like Discord, we would love to have more people talk on it, right? And and kind of get that going. Yeah. And so if if this sounded interesting to you, I'm so grateful. We'll put our LinkedIn links so you can follow our work individually, me and Ray, and just
00:21:40
Speaker
Ray, anything else you want to say? I'm just really excited. Now just stay tuned. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening and we will see you in the next episode.