 Οπότε, καλύτερα, αυτό was a really great event, I'm really proud of being part of it and I want to thank you all for coming, my name is Panagiotis Xenos, and this is the Greek pronunciation, but you can call me Opanos, right? Panos is good, my family calls me Panos, my friends, my colleagues, some call me Panous. It's easier and my pronunciation with my name is a weird thing. Anyway, I'm a software engineer for the last 20 years. I came to that realization lately and that was a bit harsh because in 20 years is a long time to admit I'm a bit scared of that. So, I'm a polyglot developer and I have changed many roles in the IT industry so I went from CISOP, DevOps, back end, front end, mobile, I've done it all, like I don't know how many languages I forget now, tried to forget. So, lately and for that one year and a half I'm working with engineer better and I'm very proud to be part of their team. So, it's time to make a presentation. It's a bit unique so I tend not to follow my notes even when I practice which is bad, I know. So, if I get stuck somewhere it's because I'm trying to remember and also translate from Greek to English which is something that I do often. So, the subject is empathy and saying that I would like to publicly thank Steve Greenberg and Daniel Jones for their keynote speeches. I think they talk to my heart and they raise the bar very high. That's why I'm a bit anxious today. It's like big shoes. So, this talk was inspired by two things. The first one is the thing that you just see over there, Kent Beck. So, he tweeted at some point and said that the craft of programming begins with empathy, not formatting or languages or tools or algorithms or data structures. And to my opinion it was right. Who is Kent Beck? Kent Beck, according to Wikipedia, is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming. Software development, that's the extreme programming methodology that deliberately avoids rigid format specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Sorry, my dual focus glasses are playing tricks on me. So, if I read something like that, that complicated is because I'm Greek. I don't understand it completely. So, there you go. You have your answer. Anyway, so, after reading this tweet, I did the same mistake that Steve Greenberg did. I read the comments. And I didn't like them at all. Most of them were criticizing him for what empathy has to do with programming, what empathy has to do with developers, with the way we work. Anyway, I will try to prove or at least explain throughout this talk what this is all about from my perspective. So, the second thing that inspired me was an experience I had of a very long and exhaustive remote-pairing session with a client and actually Dan Young proposed that I should talk about it because we had great feedback from them. So, that being said, this is asking to binary of the world empathy. It has nothing to do with my talk, honestly, it's just a catchy image. People will wonder what these numbers are. Okay, I gave it away. I should give you some pointers and just ask you. Anyway, so, I want to talk about empathy in the software industry, like in software engineer. Okay, and especially while pairing remotely using a digital means of some sort, like, or if you are just communicating, talking to Slack, as simple as that. Just to make a small note, for people that don't know what pairing is, pair programming, it's an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together in one workstation. Sometimes you work remotely, so they are on their own machine, still connected somehow. One is the driver who writes the code, the other one is the observer or the navigator who reviews its line of code. Both of them switch their roles and take my word for it. It's very frustrating, at least at first. But on the long run, I believe it's very beneficial. So, yeah, that's the explanation of that one. And why are there so many talks about empathy the last few years? Yeah, that's everywhere I look, like there are articles, there are posts, there are conversations, videos about that. I would like to say that it's because we work for the people and we work with people, right? That's my belief. The ugly truth is because it hurts business, which is also true. So, the general belief of my known tech friends is that I am basically working with computers, right? By the way, computers don't have feelings, so why am I talking here? Like empathy in computers? So, well, they don't yet. I'm pretty sure that if I ask Alexa in a certain way, I did that with Google, by the way. And she didn't answer quite politely. So, I get a mixed feeling about that. Anyway, I believe that they are wrong. I'm not working with computers. I'm working with people. I'm using computers to a means. So, now another thing that Mr. Jones mentioned in the morning. Okay, this is not a developer, probably a stereotype. It's more of a gamer, but it was very ugly and I wanted to put that on the screen. And, of course, because it's from a well-known series. So, they are very harmful. They are very harmful to the industry. They are very harmful to ourselves. Look what they have done with diversity, with everything that I don't want to talk about today. I don't want to touch those subjects. So, this guy over here, supposedly, he leaves and breathes cold, right? He drinks coffee and eats pizza and generates cold. There are teasers like that. Imagine how stereotypes have changed. How deeply they are in our society. He can fix your computer. He can fix your toaster if he wants to. He can tune your TV. During those long nights, he probably hacks somebody. This is media. I'm old enough to say that the 80s and the 90s were full of that. It was those loners that were hiking everything. They knew everything. They could find everybody. Some media, they still do. What's the movies? It's awful, right? So, at least this is what I was getting. So, I hate stereotypes. I really do. Even code strikes change at some point. That being said, there is a really nice post that I read lately. I regret that I haven't read it before. And it's called Text Damaging Myth of a Loner Genius Nerd. That's by Claire Kane Miller from the New York Times. I think it was somewhere in early 2007 or 2008. I don't remember. Sorry for that. But still, when I read that, honestly, it got connected immediately. So, how do we define empathy? The references in Wikipedia for the subject are 213 last time I checked. Of course, they're not references of the definition, but they are references of all the things in there that talk about empathy in some way. So, you understand how complex this thing is. I will try not to be deep with that, first of all, because I'm no therapist. Secondly, because I'm just here to mainly share my experience. So, my sources for this talk, apart from my experience, is Wikipedia, Psychology Today, Academia. There are some papers out there. I liked some papers from University of Miami. They talk about empathy, especially for kids and how you grow with empathy a lot. And some of my favorite books like this one, which is The Little Guide to Empathetic Technical Leadership by Alex Harms. So, that small book, it's very small book, but probably, I don't know if people will agree with the terms that it has in there, or, like, I don't know. I was touched by that thing. I read quite a lot of books the last years, but this one, like, even though it's small, I have it with me always, just touched me. I don't know. But it's mainly my experience. So, let's go to the word. Like, let's move on. I mean, let's make it a bit more spicy. So, empathy, the word, all right? The roots of the word empathy, and that's for my pleasure, are Greek. So, I'm Greek, all right? So, that does not obviously make me, like, an expert, but I think I know what it is. So, it has a Greek origin. It comes from Aristotle, and it was talking about how people get... I think the phrase was how it's very political, how people get corrupted, and they change their empathy while being part of politics. All right? So, the word is empathia. That's how you call it. That's the Greek word. And it's a compound word from m and pathos, which means in, feeling, or passion. Pathos is passion, but because passion has so many meanings, like, the direct translation is not that easy. Anyway, the original meaning, you might want to know, is strong feeling or passion. So, it's not like touching the feelings, like getting to know the feelings of others, it's like more of a just strong feeling, being in feeling. Now, the modern definition of the word. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Now, things get more complicated, all right? That's the modern definition. So, another definition, another thing that people usually say, is like getting people's shoes. I think that phrase harms empathy in so many ways. First of all, I don't want to be in anybody's shoes, honestly. They are smelly, they are probably sweaty. They sometimes don't fit me. I cannot work properly. I don't want to be in anybody's shoes, and, to be honest with you, I don't want to be in anybody's feelings. Like, unless I don't, I have to, unless I really need to in order to communicate, but not every time, all right? So, anyway, but remember, empathy is not here to make us uncomfortable. It's not like the projection of feelings, only the negative feelings. If there are any, I don't believe in negative feelings. So, I must warn you, by the way, that this definition does not apply for the Greeks. So, the Greeks, when you call somebody that he has empathized or he is empathic, please don't, the meaning, free translation from the dictionary, is strong dislike or hostility that blocks the objective judgment. All right? So, don't call Greeks empathic, all right? I don't know where it got, like, probably some religious thing, I don't want to know about. Yeah, but that's the truth, all right? And that's the meaning I knew, like I'm reading more of an English-written documents or papers. So, I had the feeling that empathy was that. So, when I used it as Greek, two Greeks, so you know the outcome of that one. Anyway, so, confused. There are some confusions about the word, I'm going to run with them. So, we believe that empathy is synonym to compassion, where compassion is often defined as an emotion that we feel when others are in need which motivates us to help them. A sympathy, which is a feeling of care and understanding of someone in need. A spiti, which is a feeling that another is in trouble and in need for help and they cannot fix their problems themselves. Often described as feeling sorry for someone, but all those are definitions from dictionary or Wikipedia. I think both, all of them are from Wikipedia, but I checked. And we have the emotional contagion, which was something that I found really interesting because I'm a parent and because it happens with infants. So, if you go to a nursery and there are lots of children and one of them cries, all right? All of them cry. All of them, all right? We want to leave the room very fast. So, that's the thing. So, there is a thing about that that was from the paper from the University of Miami. So, are we empathetic? Is that a brain function? Well, according to Martin Hofmann, who is a psychologist who studied the development of empathy, everyone is born with the capacity to feel empathy. But still, we sometimes ignore empathy. So, that gives us a feeling that we are not empathetic enough or not empathetic at all. They say that even psychopaths are empathetic. And, okay, if you see the series, I mean, if somebody chops you to pieces, being empathetic and at the same time, I can think of that. They say, though, that they don't care. So, they are empathetic, but they don't care if you are in pieces. Okay? So, how do we use empathy in our daily routine? So, now, that's a great example because I couldn't get the connection. It was really amazing when I read it. It was from Dr. Marcial Reynolds. And she says that we use empathy while avoiding people on the pavement. So, what? I mean, when I first read that, I didn't believe it. Anyway, she says that we are trying to guess people's intentions in order not to run over them. And by doing that, we mirror the actions of the people we encounter until our cognitive brain chooses an opposing move that would clear the path. Which, by the way, does not happen to me in London because I was walking always on the wrong side of the road or on the wrong side of the pavement. So, yeah, cognitive is another thing. So, another post my Marcial Reynolds gave me another helpful example. So, she said that I have spider sense. At least I thought I was. Like, yeah. So, well, not really. So, we will try to do an experiment. Okay? Bear with me. Close your eyes and imagine that on a person in front of you there is a big spider that is crawling on their back. Okay, that's really awful. How do you feel? Do you feel a creepy sensation of the insect walking up your spine? That's it. That's empathy. Believe it or not, it's not cognitive. It's like the feeling. You get the feeling. It's like you feel it. It's not that you think it. It's you feel it inside. I mean, you feel like you get all those emotions, even the fear, right? So, that's another good example. And I didn't put any pictures of spider scrolling on people's backs because it was very scary for me. Okay? I just freaked out. So, training the empathetic gene. So, there is no gene, obviously. If it is, I don't care. So, empathetic training is not obligatory for a software engineer. And I think that's a bit of a problem because we deal with everything else. We are taught development languages, databases, operating systems, file systems, networks, and we deal with all that, like every day, but we deal with people and we were never trained on how to deal with people. So, everything we know about empathy and empathizing, it's most of the time out of experience and actually trial and error. So, let's see how we can train this gene. Okay? So, let's go to the practical stuff. So, the first thing is feel. Okay? That's a generic title and it's a bit catchy and the picture is nice, but let me put an example. So, you are working with somebody, you're working with somebody remotely or up close, it doesn't matter. And all you are pairing or you're just associating, it doesn't matter at all. Okay? And at some point, you feel uncomfortable and you don't know why. You just get that feeling like you just move around, you change places, you have a path like trying to give your breath and you're sweating and you don't know, really. You have no clue. Then you realize that your colleague is doing the same thing. You catch the moment who did it first, so you don't know who did it. So whose emotions are these? Because it happens and it happens when you feel uncomfortable or somebody is uncomfortable next to you, especially if you are empathic, so you get that. So, how do you deal with that? How do you know? And it's so frustrating most of the times because if you do know if the feeling is yours or if the feeling is projected to you, then you can deal with it. All right? If you don't know, you don't know what to do. You are helpless and you cannot help your pair, your partner, your colleague. So identifying those feelings if they are yours or the person that you're working with is crucial. Lately, I found a technique that helps me identify my own feelings and get me out of this situation. And even though people disagree on that, but I used it and I am sharing my experience, it's called mindfulness. All right? So mindfulness is the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something, that's the definition from Google, or a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, body sensations used as a therapeutic technique. Sorry for my English Greek. So, why don't we do a small mindfulness exercise? Just a very fast one just to see how it is. All right? It will only take a minute and you have to just listen to me and my broken English. So it's close your eyes, bring your attention to your breathing. Take a very, a few slow gentle breaths, noticing the air flowing through your nostrils or your mouth. Feel the difference of temperature as it passes in and out of your body. While you breathe, feel your body touching the surface you are sitting or lying on. For those moments, it's just you, your breath and your close surroundings with no other thoughts to disturb you. Keep that for a while, don't let it go. If any thoughts are coming in, just acknowledge them and let them be. Don't judge. And that's peace, that's mindfulness. So, slowly, come back to the present. Open your eyes slowly, all right? So concentrating on breathing is an old Zen technique or maybe some other, I don't know, eastern technique. I don't mind where it comes from and I don't really mind how, why it's used by many people. I really mind how I use it and it helps me a lot. So I do that quite often and it helps me realize what my feelings are because I can sense them and I realize what I'm feeling at that moment and I'm not judging what I feel, all right? That's the crucial part. So, observe. So now that we know which feelings we're having, we need to observe also. But observing is not that empathic, all right? Observe is cheating and we cannot observe people remotely. So we cannot cheat remotely unless we have a camera. But still the signals that we're getting are not the same. So if you are remotely talking, collaborating, try to use a camera. It helps a lot to get how people feel because you have that visual stimulation that you don't have with audio. I mean, unless you can really understand how people feel with their voice, okay? So I said cheating because the breath, color of skin, uneasiness, the body language can tell us how people feel. I'm going to go to the most crucial part of this talk, which is listening intentionally, not just listening, okay? That's the most empathic thing that we could express, all right? According to Webster dictionary, listen means to pay attention to sound or to hear something with a thoughtful attention. And what is a thoughtful attention? What is intentional listening? Imagine that there is a really nice example in that book that I previously mentioned. Imagine that you're just getting out with a friend and you are walking in a very silent pavement and you are talking. And at some point, he or she turns to you and says, listen, like that, like trying to take all your attention, all right? And you just stand there and you're just trying to listen to something and it's silence. You can't hear a thing. So listen, listen, listen to that and you're trying even harder and then you hear something distant. It might be a dog, it might be a cat, it might be an ambulance, I don't know. It might be a distant thunder, all right? But you realize that you didn't listen till he told you, all right? Till then, it was silent. The same thing happens when you don't listen what people tell you, what they really tell you. So I have an example for that one as well. So in one of those frustrating moments while pairing with a client, I was working with a nice guy, a nice fellow that he was a trainee who couldn't express that he was scared that he would break things. So we were changing stuff together. I was pushing him to do all the changes and play with the code, play with pipelines, like do everything, like we were doing concourse and deployments in CF. How hard can it be? So he was always finding excuses of not taking the wheel at all. I mean if I took it lightly, I would say that he was lazy, right? But he was just scared and he was telling me that. He was telling me that when he was telling me, I am reading, you know what, I read that yesterday and I'm trying to write a notebook about that. So he was trying to be engaged and try to be like, show me that he's trying to learn stuff, but he was not. He was showing the opposite, quite the opposite. So that gave me the idea of that I was not listening enough and then I started asking the right questions. So feedback coming to the right questions. So if you don't ask because we are not trained, as I said earlier, you won't find. You won't know if people feel the same as you believe they feel. Of course, ask when it's appropriate. Don't ask everything. Be patient with the response. It might take them a while before they can recognize their own emotional state. Then share with them what you think that might do next. Even if you are wrong, it's okay. It's better to be wrong and ask than to be wrong and believe that that's the case. Alright? Finally, because we don't have too much time, self-care, so not all days are the same. You feel exhausted or stressed. The ability to empathize is very low. You cannot empathize when you are stressed. The reason for that is because you get all those feelings, you have your own feelings, you have the feelings of others. That gets overwhelming, especially you cannot recognize if those feelings are yours, that gets even worse, causes misunderstandings. It's not a good thing. Piece of advice. One people that you are not feeling well, alright? That will illuminate their own signals. They will know that you are not okay. They will not try to press you, they will not try to express if they have any kind of negativity. If you have a positivity, that's fine. It's acceptable. Work so low if you must. Take frequent breaks, use mindfulness when possible, check your body. Your body will tell you the truth if you are not feeling like doing it. I had some other exercise because of the time we are not going to do it for self-care. So, additional to all that, patience, you need to be patient. Kindness. Of course you have to be kind. Create a safe place. You don't have to drive people crazy. You have to be welcome. It is safe to make changes. It is safe to break things. Be positive. It's so crucial. So, summary. Feel. That means identify your feelings. Observe. Check if you are right or wrong by any visual stimuli if you have. That's a luxury. You don't have it always. Feel and listening are the main guidelines. Just feel your emotions. Listen to whatever they say. Get feedback. A lot of feedback. Try to get as much feedback as possible. When you don't feel that you can empathize, do some self-care. Turn to yourself. It's very crucial. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening. I know I was a bit nervous. This is my first talk after five years of being out there with short dress in Yuruko 2013. So, yeah, I had only one month to prepare this. Again, thank you very much. It was a pleasure. If you have any questions, I don't know if we have time. Unless nobody cares. Yeah, please. Yes. So there is a thing called self-empathy which is whatever you try to do with the field thing, like to discover your emotions. So you dig deep in your emotions and you try to find the cause of them. This is the first thing, which is like doing some self-therapy. And then as soon as you find the reason, then you try to positively encourage yourself to get over it. I wish I could have time. This is an exercise that is very complicated to do. It involves us to have some physical activities. It depends on what works with you. Sometimes people find physical activity something that will help them. They are getting focused. Some others just read a book. Some others watch the movie. Some others talk to a friend that they trust, as simple as that. But without trying to lean the burden to somebody else. You don't want to put your burden to somebody else, obviously. You just talk, if you want. If you express your fear, if you express your feelings openly, they lose power. There is somewhere a reference that says that a feeling in its peak is very strong for 30 seconds. From then on, it's just loose in your brain. Show your brain feedbacks that feeling. It becomes cognitive in a way. You are projecting that feeling from then on. The 30 seconds, it's feeling. It's like something that is uncontrollable. Empathy, something I haven't mentioned, is uncontrollable. When you get that feeling, you can block it. You can block empathy in general. But if you don't block feelings in general, whatever feelings that you are getting, you can't control them. They are projected to you and you just receive them. It's like connecting to a Wi-Fi and getting all the messages. There are ways to do that, but they are trying not to be cognitive. The brain has nothing to do with that. If you put the brain to do stuff because the brain always thinks, always wants to think, you are going to get very far. You just suppress what you feel and then come back again. Don't suppress. Feel more, understand and get on with it. Yes. First, frequent rotations, obviously. The principles are so many. There are techniques also. I think I was in a talk where five different techniques on how to switch from one developer to the other also, which is really nice. There is a talk that happened in some CF Summit, I think. Or not, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. But, yes, it gets frustrating sometimes. It's supposed to be frustrating because when you are doing that for the first time, you don't know how to behave. If you don't know also your pair, it's also uncomfortable because the reactions that they have, you are not accustomed to. We are humans. At some point, you will get a rhythm and everything will be nice. If they are not nice, then you tell them. That's what I said. Express your frustration. You have to do that. You have to also understand if they are also feeling frustrated. If you don't get that feedback, you are never going further than that. You don't know if you are frustrated and you are projecting that to them or they are frustrated and they are projecting that to you. You have to identify that. You have to identify that. The situation is hard to apply empathy, and thankfully I didn't have to do that alone, but it's hiring. Do you think it's possible to hire somebody with empathy? Because you know that when somebody applies for a position, they need it all. If you've been in that position, it's easier for you to be empathetic. Is it possible to hire with empathy without hiring everybody? No. I don't think you Υπάρχει η αμπαθήση στην αγγεία, στην στιγμή της στιγμής της ευκολογίας. Δεν χρησιμοποιήσεις αμπαθήση για να χρησιμοποιήσεις έναν άνθρωπο ευκολογία, ευκολογικά, διότι they are projecting so negative feelings and so negative vibes that you feel uncomfortable yourself and you don't want them near you. But I think it's part of the hiring process per se for a length, but not deciding, it's more of a... It's like that vibe, that sensation you have when you first meet somebody. Sometimes you meet somebody, instead you usually say like, I'm not going to deal with that guy, my best friend actually, you know, Janis Pagonis. So we started talking to each other in a very strong way, we actually disagree strongly, all right? And now he's my best friend. So it's like my first impression of the guy was like awful, all right? And it changed. So I don't know, it's difficult to say, honestly. Any other questions? Yes? No, no, I don't. No, I don't use any tools. I would be gladly, if you want to share, it would be amazing. I am more of a traditional guy, I was never trained to that, okay? I just sharing what I know and what I practice the best way I can. Using my experience, so no, I haven't used any tools, unfortunately. That's it, all right? Thank you.