Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
[pulls up chair, sits backwards]<p>OK so this is a question I&#x27;m arguably qualified to talk about -- I focus on usability and promoting it within a large tech company.<p>The problem that I see a lot is that engineers are not well-versed in what I will call &#x27;imaginative empathy&#x27;[1], which, as I define it, is the ability to creatively conceive of end-user needs by reflecting at length on who those people are, what they desire, and what they expect, _even when the end user is a very different kind of person than the developer_, with different strengths, weaknesses, and expectations.<p>I&#x27;m at this moment setting up an internal programme to try to beef up imaginative empathy among engineers. My premise is that imaginative empathy is actually not hard to train for -- people in helping professions (counsellors, therapists, social workers) get pretty good at it, as do novelists; but, like any muscle, it can atrophy, and it is emphatically <i>not</i> something that is tested for in most interviews. Therefore, since it is not selected for, it is often not in abundance on any particular engineering team.<p>A book that inspired me in this approach is _Anthro-vision_, by Gillian Tett, which is a gift to anyone who makes anything for another human being, and wants them to enjoy it.<p>1. Empathy on its own isn&#x27;t enough -- people tend to empathize most with people who are most like them. Sometimes this is enough on its own -- if you&#x27;re a neovim obsessive (like me :D) and you&#x27;re making an extension for other neovim obsessives, you can run on just regular empathy. But most of the code I write is not written for &#x27;people like me&#x27;, it&#x27;s written for people in the general case, and that means a cognitive stretch. Imagining the Other and attempting to be of service to them requires imagination. I&#x27;m inspired in this observation by Buddhist &#x27;metta&#x27; practice, and the ways in which the Buddhist conception of &#x27;compassion&#x27; differs markedly from what is often called empathy by contemporary professional psychologists.