| What you describe is orthogonal to whether a developer has empathy, though. 1. UX design is a trained skill that most developers don't have. It's not a lack of empathy if you have no idea how to create a better user experience. 2. Many developers are in it only for the paycheck. They do exactly what they have to in order to keep being paid, and not a minute more of effort goes into their work product. They may be an excellent people-person, and in fact may be able to talk themselves into raises and promotions at work due to their excellent empathy skills. But if they really don't care about the end user or the work product, that's not a lack of empathy as much as a lack of pride in work. 3. RTFM may be misplaced if there really is no good manual, but a significant fraction of the time I've seen it employed (or more polite variants) was because there was a manual that had the exact answer the developer asking the question was looking for, and the questioner just didn't bother to look. I spent an entire year and a half on a project answering questions to the same developer with links to the documentation where he could find the answers he was seeking. I swear he would ask me something at least weekly, and I always could just point him to exactly where I'd already answered that question. It's not a lack of empathy to just start saying RTFM. It's a failure of PATIENCE with someone for asking the same question you've already answered a hundred times because they're too lazy to look up the answer themself. And telling an end user to RTFM goes back to point #1 above: If the user feels the need to ask how to use a product, then that's a failure of UX. See Don Norman's many books on the topic: He's fond of saying that an ideal user interface shouldn't require instructions. An as in point #1, if you needed instructions to begin with, that implies bad UX, which isn't the fault of a programmer, but rather of a UX designer. Most programmers also shouldn't be front-line on helping end users anyway because of the patience issue I mentioned. There are developers out there who just lack any form of empathy. Granted. Anyone with the skill to code can likely find work, regardless of their shortcomings; demand is such that they will be hired even if they're generally jerks. But I don't accept that programmers are in general less empathic than an average person. It's just that empathy isn't a job requirement. |