Empathy as an Engineering Skill

By Sergey Nosov

May 12, 2025

Let us start this article with an inspirational quote from Sue Monk Kidd, the bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees:

“Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.”

Kidd’s writing often explores emotional depth, human connection, and spiritual awakening. This quote reminds us that empathy is not passive — it is something we must actively choose to engage in.

Empathy is rarely listed among the top skills for a software engineer. Job descriptions focus on frameworks, databases, cloud platforms, and shipping velocity. But if we step back and reflect on what makes a developer effective—not just productive—we will find that empathy plays a foundational role.

Empathy, at its core, is the ability to understand and share another person's perspective. In engineering, that perspective may belong to a user, a teammate, a stakeholder, or someone impacted by a system's design in ways we might not see at first glance. Although empathy may sound like a soft or emotional trait, it is an essential and learnable component of engineering practice that improves software, collaboration, ethics, and leadership.

Empathy Improves Software

Every software system has a user—even if the user is another developer. Empathy enables us to imagine what it feels like to use the system from someone else's point of view. That perspective may be someone who is less technical, under stress, using outdated hardware, or working in an environment unlike our own.

Empathetic engineers ask themselves:

What would this experience feel like to someone encountering it for the first time?
If this operation fails, will the error help the user recover—or simply confuse them?
Could this process be frustrating for someone who needs to repeat it frequently?

These are not just UX concerns; they are engineering questions. They influence how we handle exceptions, name functions, design APIs, write logs, and choose default behaviors.

Consider this example: A colleague once worked on a tool used heavily by customer service representatives. It technically worked, but it required five mouse clicks to complete a common task. After shadowing a rep for one day, the development team realized how exhausting the interaction was when performed dozens of times per hour.

They made a few seemingly minor changes—keyboard shortcuts, smart defaults, and field autofocus. The result: users saved hours each week, experienced fewer errors, and reported a dramatic increase in satisfaction. Empathy drove those improvements. Not specs. Not Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Empathy.

Empathy Improves Collaboration

Modern software development is collaborative by nature. It involves constant interaction with product managers, designers, testers, other engineers, and support staff. Projects do not succeed through technical brilliance alone; they require healthy team dynamics, communication, and trust.

Engineers who practice empathy:

Listen fully before responding.
Recognize others’ pressures, priorities, and perspectives.
Provide helpful, respectful feedback.
Assume good intent during misunderstandings or disagreements.

These behaviors foster psychological safety and enable teams to take risks, ask questions, and grow together. You will see teams with excellent technical skill flounder because collaboration broke down. You will also see teams accomplish extraordinary things because they respected and understood one another.

Empathy is what transforms a collection of skilled individuals into a cohesive and effective team.

Empathy Promotes Ethical Responsibility

Software increasingly shapes lives, institutions, and entire societies. Engineers make decisions every day—about what to measure, what defaults to enable, who has access, and which concerns to prioritize. Many of these decisions have downstream consequences that are hard to predict, especially if we only think about our own perspective.

Empathy broadens our sense of responsibility. It invites us to ask:

Who might be harmed by this feature?
Is there anyone this system is excluding?
Are we optimizing for convenience at someone else’s expense?

This is not abstract philosophy—it is daily practice. Choosing to make accessibility a priority, or taking extra time to handle edge cases, may not generate headlines, but it reflects empathy in action.

In a world where software affects everything from healthcare to education to employment, ethical engineering must be built on empathetic understanding.

Empathy Strengthens Leadership and Growth

As engineers advance in their careers, they often find themselves mentoring others, leading teams, or guiding decisions that shape culture. At that level, empathy becomes indispensable.

An empathetic leader can sense when a teammate needs support, when a conversation requires listening rather than advice, and how to give feedback that uplifts instead of discourages. They recognize when someone is struggling and respond with care, not criticism.

Empathy helps leaders build inclusive environments where people feel safe to learn, make mistakes, and contribute their unique perspectives.

In the long run, teams led with empathy are not only more productive—they are more resilient, diverse, and loyal.

Conclusion

Empathy may not be taught in computer science programs, but it belongs in the core curriculum of every engineering career. It helps us build better software, foster healthier teams, make more ethical choices, and become more effective leaders.

Fortunately, empathy is not an inborn trait—it is a skill. One that grows with intentional practice: listening more than we speak, imagining life from another’s viewpoint, and caring deeply about the people affected by our work.

Let us bring more of that into engineering.