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Welcoming Different Perspectives When I started Compassionate Coding in 2016, I was inviting my fellow software engineers, who often hold more organizational power than they realize, to prioritize nurturing the well-being of themselves, their collaborators, and the people impacted by their work. I believed—and still do—that this is not just the right thing to do, but that it ultimately leads to happier developers and more effective teams. It was a struggle to even have the conversation back then, but I kept planting seeds alongside a few others and kept seeing hearts and minds gradually open. So much has changed since those early days! Now, I keep hearing about new initiatives popping up to bring more compassion to tech in different ways. It’s really been amazing to see how the industry has progressed. It’s also been great to see how people approach issues like sustainability or artificial intelligence or company culture from different angles. People working to improve the tech industry do not have to agree on every issue. In fact, we’ll likely find the best path forward by allowing for people to pursue, present, and debate various approaches. I’ve become even more passionate since the pandemic about preserving this ability to dissent. As Thomas Macaulay wrote in a 19th century essay, “Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.” I lately feel that well-intended efforts to encourage more mindful use of language have pulled the pendulum a bit too far toward speech restrictions and self-censorship. This hinders our ability to connect as humans. William James observed in On Vital Reserves that poor conversation often stems from an “over-active conscience,” and advised that “conversation does flourish and society is refreshing…whenever people take the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will.” OK, perhaps more caution than that is needed in some contexts (especially on social media…), but I do think that true compassion emerges from seeing each other as full humans, and that benefits from open and honest communication. I’ve even added slides to my talks to clarify that compassion is not about censorship or walking on eggshells. This applies on a smaller scale, too, to your team discussions. Do people on your team feel they can disagree? Or has groupthink taken over? Related to having discussions with people we disagree with, I highly recommend (again) Mónica Guzmán’s book, I Never Thought of It That Way and Alexandra Hudson’s new book, The Soul of Civility. This one is targeted more specifically toward Americans, but I will also recommend the Polarization Detox Challenge from Starts With Us.
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