
Empathy - ImOssir
http://nshipster.com/empathy/
======
sdegutis
This reminds me a lot of Mattt's other post about empathy[1]. What stuck with
me most were two tweets at the end of it: one person said "Why do open-source
programmers take things so personally?" to which another replied "because
we're all persons".

At the time, I was ruining some of my professional relationships over
arguments about their open source projects, because I only looked at these
from a technical stand-point. Once I started putting myself in their shoes, I
stopped criticizing. Instead I tried to be that person who always makes you
feel like you can do anything, who always praises and never criticizes, who
believes in you and your ideas, because that's the kind of person I look up
to.

True, I had to ignore some technical deficiencies a few times, but life's too
short. Plus, who am I to think I have all the answers? Maybe those technical
deficiencies are really innovations in disguise, which I just lack the proper
imagination to see properly at this early of a stage? Even more reason to
overlook it and be supportive rather than critical.

So far it's working out well. My professional relationships are improving, and
I feel like much less of a sour-puss than before. But YMMV.

[1]: [http://mattt.me/2011/empathy-and-open-
source/](http://mattt.me/2011/empathy-and-open-source/)

EDIT: This is possibly related to my recent burnout which made it a whole lot
easier to not really care about technical details and focus a lot more on the
relationships and the positives. These two things happened at the same time.

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peterwwillis
I can't upvote this enough. At the very least, developing cognitive empathy
can help you communicate better with people by understanding their emotional
state and responding appropriately. But more than that, there's all the
positive benefits of applying emotional intelligence to your work and personal
life that come from empathizing with people.

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sentenza
Given the name of the site, I'd like to add an off-topic remark on culturally
sensitive naming.

Your site is named nshipster, which is fine, unless it will become the name of
a product which you would ever want to market in Germany.

In public discourse in Germany, the two letters NS are commonly used as
shorthand for National Socialism in the historical sense.

So if you want to sell, I don't know, your coffee break management app and
call it ns-coffee, nobody in Germany will touch it with a ten foot pole.

Another two-letter combination for which the same holds (I'd even say it is a
lot worse) is KZ.

KZ is the everyday stand-in term for concentration camp. So think twice before
you name that Kazachstan travel app.

~~~
bguthrie
NS is a common prefix for Apple-derived ObjectiveC classes. In that context it
stands for NextStep, which Apple acquired many years ago. The NSHipster blog
is a reference to this usage of NS. I understand that it has extremely
negative connotations in Germany, but unfortunately you're going to have to
take that up with Apple, not with the blog's author.

~~~
sentenza
Yes, I know that. Just recently I talked with a friend about just that
unfortunate naming decision by NextStep. I also didn't want to directly
critique the site owner.

I just thought it might make sense to draw some awareness to the issue because
non-German speakers have practically no chance of knowing about this pitfall.
It's kind of similar to the Chevy Nova situation.

~~~
philwelch
The "Chevy Nova situation" is an urban legend.
[http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp](http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp)

~~~
middus
Alternative: Toyota MR2 in France :).

~~~
peterwwillis
Funny how they repeated that mistake with the next generation. Called the MR-S
in Japan, you could see how it could be shortened to "Mrs." in English,
comparing the car to something a mother or wife might drive. So they named it
MR2 Spyder in US and MR2 Roadster in EU.

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lux
It seems like an awful lot of our problems could be solved in good part with a
little empathy...

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kordless
Human trust is the result of empathetic proof of work. It takes what is most
valuable to you: time.

