The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

Sometime in college, I forced myself to socialize, and did everything I could to learn what I needed to fit in. For example, I learned from the internet to dress and care for myself so I didn't look like a 17 year basement nerd, and a bunch of other things I guess most people just pick up naturally by being around other people in high school.

Today, edging towards my 30s, looking at the questions on that test makes me feel surprised at how "well adjusted" I've become compared to how I was at 15 years old.

[1] https://psychology-tools.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/

Makes me wonder how much of "neuro-diversity" is actually just "neuro-plasticity". Maybe many aspies are actually just "neuro-typicals" who were bullied and lost faith in social interactions, and thus spent much of their early life on geeky interests instead, developing better technical skills but neglecting social skills.

But as they get older many realize that social skills are important and pick them up anyway, just a little later than most.

I am very much in favor of ripping the hard work of well-intentioned people to sheds, if it deserved to be ripped to shreds, like e.g. the fine "make proper God-fearing Christians of all those dark-skinned heathens" (the missionaries were/still are quite often well-intentioned and hard-working).

Now, some of the stuff that is done, well-intentioned, in the tech industry to promote diversity and/or make the workplace a friendlier space for women and other groups may end up achieving opposite results, driving co-workers apart and making the work environment more toxic for everybody.

Therefore, we must be able to discuss and criticize any and all such programs, and therefore the hard work somebody put into them, and stop such programs if we determine a detrimental outcome.

Like in science: you prod and poke and even try to shred-rip a theory (somebody put a lot of effort into), and if that theory withstands it probably is solid and sound.

"Because contemporary moral codes delineate women as vulnerable or marginalised, we stop seeing them as individuals with unique talents and idiosyncrasies, but as representatives of a victimised class."

Acknowledging that women are 'vulnerable or marginalised' shouldn't remove their individuality, you can easily have both --

How can you disagree with it? The author isn't saying this should happen, just that it does, even if this doesn't apply to you.

I don't think you can easily have both, and this problem underlies much contemporary political conflict. At its core is a pervasive hypocrisy: people readily engage in broad, often negative, stereotyping about groups they oppose, or are not a member of, while aggressively resisting and resenting any attempt to stereotype about their own group, or groups they favour.

So, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, some people will make broad statements about Muslims, and the need for collective action within Islam to address religiously motivated violence. Others will reject this, and say Muslims in general cannot be held responsible for the behaviour of a minority of extremists.

Then, in the aftermath of a sexual harassment scandal, some people will make broad statements about men, and the need for collective action by men as a gender to address sexual harassment and sexual violence. Others will reject this, and say men in general cannot be held responsible for the behaviour of a minority of harassers.

Oftentimes, the same people will be on the complete opposite sides of each debate. And they will unthinkingly employ language and rhetorical tactics in one that they would utterly reject in the other. This behavior can be seen in almost all discussions across or about political affiliation, race, religion, gender, sexuality, and just about any other cleavage you can think of.

This is the real empathy gap. People reflexively respond to any criticism of their own groups with hostility, while attacking others without restraint, and dismissing hostility from members of that group as an overreaction. They recognise a degree of individuality and diversity within their own favored groups that they simply can't or won't recognise in others. They use tactics against their enemies that infuriate them when used against themselves. In some cases, they may recognise that those tactics are wrong in specific cases, and even in the abstract, but defend their use by themselves or their allies with excuses based on cambatting political correctness or appeals to historical victimhood.

Making all of this worse is that statistical thinking about groups is a necessary of component of any mature political debate. Certain traits or behaviors often are more prevalent within some groups, for a variety of reasons, and being able to recognise and talk about this is basic prerequisite for any attempt to address social and political problems.

In theory, people should have no problem recognising statistical differences in a group, while also recognising and respecting the inherent right and diversity of individuals within that group. In theory, people should be able to hear comment, even criticism, about their own groups, and judge it purely on its statistical reality, without feeling that it is a personal slight upon them. But in practice, this doesn't happen.

Besides the reflexivite hostility discussed, statistical thinking often does give way to blind stereotyping amongst outside observers, and this stereotyping gives rise to discrimination. Causal factors are ignored, or distorted, and adaptive traits are portrayed and inherent, and vice versa. Instead of helping to inform rational debate, this discrimination entrenches and exacerbates division. Soon, any statistical thinking about a group that carries an implied or perceived criticism becomes tantamount to discrimination, and groups become hypersensitive to it.

All of this is probably just an inherent flaw in human cognition, and likely unfixable, without some kind of attempt at species-wide genetic engineering that completely reconfigures our co-operative behavior.

I get that this is natural reaction, but don't assume that people who disagree with something do so because it offends them. I didn't like the article because I don't find it very insightful. I think it generalizes too much and takes things at face value.

It also opens the door to creating drama because of the tone of the criticism, thus missing the original point (or deliberately deflecting from it). If you've worked under people for whom this is second nature, you know how destructive and poisonous this can be. "Please give me feedback" is code for "Flatter me", and not doing so results in "How dare you" indignation.

I don't think it's a coincidence that tech is one of the fields where this posturing found loud and well argued push back early, and no coincidence that high school mean girl tactics were the response.

If a memo is sufficient to cause one to feel unsafe, then being fired and slandered in media ought to be much worse. That's the empathy gap in action. People assume the problems that are talked about the most are the most important, not realizing those that are passed over can never be addressed in the first place.

Back in the day when social/legal barriers were removed for women, general expectation was that women would rise to the top in wide variety of fields. But that hasn't really materialized(eg: only a handful of noble prizes), despite decades of preferential treatment, despite women being educated in number much higher than men.

So obvious conclusions to draw would be either 1. Admit the mistake in the feminist theory ( One is not born but becomes a woman). 2. There must be something else.

Only obvious answer is option 2 and the failure obviously should still be borne by the other party.

I remember reading a shocking line in nytimes article, something to the effect of

"I still believe in humanity of men, despite evidence to the contrary"

Basically distills the current attitude, womens' failure is mens' failure to be human. There is calls for all men to come forward and publicly admit this shame[1], maybe convince society that men are human too.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/opinion/metoo-sexual-hara...

I think the problem is that we have gone from rightly taking down the Weinsteins, a predator which is why its shocking (normal no's don't work on people like him as he seem to get off on ignoring them), to trying to regulate away the awkward encounters and misinterpretations that is the natural occasional byproduct of the situations that makes life interesting.

In my experience it's the 1:1s with mentors and colleagues that is the most interesting, and a victorian worldview is telling us that we can't do those anymore if the mentor is a man while the mentee is a woman and that will rob women of equal learning opportunities. Because why take the risk if any accusation can't be defended against and results in blacklisting from your industry, even if the mentee says the accusation is bullshit?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/opinion/metoo-sexual-hara...

I'm not at all sure about the "easily" part there. Humans cognition seems to be very prone to substituting stereotypes in place of individuals with unique attributes.

While I personally agree with your point, the popular media seems to be incapable of making arguments that require holding two separate opposing concepts in tension with each other. The mainstream media monologues on these issues are usually simplified to a childish level.

Human society is anything but.

Amusingly my wife assumes that I am deliberately ignoring her when she interrupts me and storms off in a huff half the time. My staff and students have just learnt that you have to say my name and wait a bit before speaking.

Say when I'm out traveling or doing some other activity that involves talking to people for most of the day. Conversation flows naturally and I feel at ease interacting with different people about anything really.

This has of course gotten better with regular practice and being aware, but rare times I still feel it is an effort to even produce a coherent sentence in my second language (English) after a really intense day of developing. People notice that I'm acting absent-minded too which is the worst part, but like I said, practice and awareness has generally made it better.

But once I figured that out, I find the more I code during the week the more I enjoy social and creative activities. It's like one part of my brain is tired and another part needs to be doing stuff for a while.

There are intense focus sessions though where I turn off the music and after that, I can't talk to people in the hallway and they think I'm being cold. Outside of exceptions like that, it feels mostly like context switching I suppose, like the systemizing side turns off and the creative/human side turns on, or at least, gains control of the gears, so to speak. The best way I can describe it.

If I did something cool or make a cool finding, I want to talk about it.

If I'm just gluing stuff together, I'm less interested in talking.

I don't think there's anything special about programming that would affect this -- just being tired after working.

I am immensely grateful for the nerd-friendliness of the tech industry, as I spent my teen years being mocked for being a nerd. But if the tech industry has a higher-than-average number of members who are slightly anti-social, is it really surprising when people accuse this group of having little empathy to members of other social groups?

It is entirely possible for the tech industry to be nerd-friendly and women-hostile at the same time. I'm not saying it is the case, but it could be. And while I've been vocal against the idea of "hide the nerds so girls won't be scared of joining CS programs", I think it's worth considering whether we are being welcoming enough.

Edit: Although according to wikipedia "empathy gap" seems to mean something quite different from either what I was expecting or the way it's used in the article.

It isn't a failure of meritocracy - in both cases, it's a failure to achieve meritocracy. Pet peeve.

And arguably the best solution to the lack of confidence in women problem is a two step process: to (a) educate women on the difference so that they can (b) try to address it themselves, if they choose to do so. If a woman wants to be a housewife or a teacher, what's wrong with that?

> So I don't know that we have it that bad, or that efforts to attract more woman (even if you consider the given reasons to be bogus) are really misguided.

To attract more women into tech in the numbers wanted, the only way is to solve the pipeline problem - encouraging girls at a relatively young age to choose programming as a career, and encouraging them to stick with their STEM major in the face of adversity (but ultimately it's their choice, of course). But multiple times on Twitter, I've seen the pipeline problem sneered at, ignored, or downplayed, by women who claim to be supporting women in tech. They've even sometimes attempted to shame me for focusing on the pipeline problem, as if it was somehow grubby and unhelpful.

The reality is, poaching female employees from one company to another achieves precisely zero for gender diversity in the industry as a whole, good as it may be for one company's PR in terms of its own gender numbers.

How is this a failure of the meritocracy? To me, this is the meritocracy working correctly and succeeding. A competitive person will naturally work harder to improve their skills because they have a greater desire to be the best. In a true meritocracy, you'd expect them to outperform less competitive people.

Seeing the reaction and outrage when a boy slapped a girl in the hallway though was very telling where people's biases are.

Does book you cite mention neurodivergences at all? Reading the review on amazon didn't seem to say it did.

It does not, however, follow, that it does not repress women. "But not all mens!" is true, but is also a bit of a red herring. Most members of both genders suffer it to their detriment.

UC Davis seems to be investing a bit in ASD research. This one, for instance, focuses on girls:

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/mindinstitute/research/gain/ind...

..and there are a few others. Most focus on the intersection of Children and Autism in some form or another.

Alternatively SciAm ran an article a while back around just this issue of how and why we're "missing it" when it comes to recognizing ASD early (or at all) for girls.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-diffe...

Is that part of your answer?

Nevertheless, among my friends, parents agains boy doing computing were practically nonexistent. Computer was usually in boy room and boys were heavily praised for every tiny thing they knew and expected to deal. Their sisters largely aware that it is for boys and not expected of anything (not in my familly I found out only much later).

Note that my parents seen spending much time with computer as waste of time and were systematically attempting to send me out - but they did not seen it boyish nor seen me fundamentally incapable to master it. I had reasonable access to computer and to some books that were in household.

That's not "non-PC" on Hacker News. A lot of people here belive that there are few to no legitimate reasons for women to not be programmers and that they just don't want to. What isn't PC on Hacker News is the idea that it isn't society who is against women as programmers, but the environment built by "us". That maybe it isn't this environment that is more accepting than all others, but that "we" just fit in.

Edit: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=tech+industry+men . You might get different results but for me the first "positive-looking" story is on page 4 - "The Fittest Guys in Tech - These 10 men break the tech-guy stereotype".

Where? I find the exact opposite to be the case.

There's in my opinion a lot wrong in tech but I think one cannot say that it's the fault of a certain group. It's rather the habits and "traditions" of the people working in the tech industry that need an upgrade.

It's complicated. The truth seems to be more nuanced than what we have ever been able to fit into a single narrative.

(1) - https://www.education.com/reference/article/gender-academic-...

(2) - https://www.google.se/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/education/20...

My own biases as well as basic knowledge of the respective cultures makes me fairly certain that it's culture in both cases rather than genetics, though.

Cultural and structural factors swamp genetic factors. At the extreme, you have state-sanctioned systems of discrimination such as apartheid, where people who belong to certain groups are legally impeded from fulfilling their potential. Remove the legal underpinnings and it's not like things are solved all of a sudden -- pervasive, virulent discrimination by the in-group still plays a decisive role. Even as overt discrimination softens, historical factors such as accumulated wealth continue to tilt the playing field.

When do structural factors cease to dominate? That's a never-ending argument. At every point during the evolution of society, there will be people who argue that the status quo is just.