Empathy in DevOps
You've both written and spoken a lot about empathy. I'm not sure whether you coined the term EmpathyOps, but can you elaborate on what you mean by empathy?
Jeff Sussna: There's a lot of confusion and anxiety about its meaning, and a lot of people tend to misunderstand it. Sometimes people think empathy means wallowing in someone else's pain. In fact, there's actually a philosopher from Yale University who is now putting out the idea that empathy is actually bad, and that it's the cause of all of the world's problems and what we need instead is compassion.
From my perspective, that represents a misunderstanding of both empathy and compassion, but my favorite is when people say things like, "Sociopaths are really good at empathizing". My answer to that is, if you have a sociopath in your organization, you have a much bigger problem, and DevOps isn't going to solve it. At that point, you have an HR problem. What you need...