I think a critical part of building an empathetic engineering culture is understanding decision impact. This is a blindspot that I see happening a lot: a deliberate effort to understand the effects caused by a decision. How does adopting X affect operations? Does our dev tooling support this? Is this architecture supported by our current infrastructure? What are the compliance or security implications of this? Will this scale in production? A particular decision might save you time, but does it create work or slow others down? Are we just displacing pain somewhere else?
What’s needed is a broad understanding of the net effects. Pain displacement is an indication that we’re not thinking beyond the path of least resistance. The problem is if we lack a certain empathy, we aren’t aware the pain displacement is occurring in the first place. It’s important we widen our vision beyond the deliverable in front of us. We have to think holistically—like a systems person—and think deeply about the interactions between decisions. Part of this is having an organizational awareness.
Tech debt is the one exception to this because it’s pain displacement we feel ourselves—it’s pain deferral. This is usually a decision we can make ourselves, but when we’re dealing with pain displacement involving multiple teams, that’s when problems start happening. And that’s where empathy becomes critical because software engineering is more about collaboration than code and shit has this natural tendency to roll downhill.
The first sentence of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team captures this idea really well: “Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.” The powerful part is obvious, but the bit about rarity is interesting when we think about teams holistically. The cause, I think, is deeply rooted in the silos or fiefdoms that naturally form around teams. The difficulty comes as an organization scales. What I see happening frequently are goals that diverge or conflict. The fix is rallying teams around a shared cause—a single, compelling vision. Likewise, it’s thinking holistically and having empathy. Understanding decision impact and pain displacement is one step to developing that empathy. This is what unlocks the rarity part of teamwork.
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