Educating for Empathy in Software Engineering
Source: https://www.ijee.ie/ ↗
Levy's paper is part of the small research literature on why empathy should be taught in computer science programmes and what changes when it is.
The piece is short, well-referenced, and argues the obvious point carefully: software engineers whose training never treats users as full humans produce predictable kinds of software, and fixing the gap at the professional stage is expensive.
For product direction it is worth reading as a structural argument — the empathy gap in many product organisations starts in the pipeline that produces their engineers.
A useful counterweight to the "soft skills" framing that usually surrounds empathy discussions.
Central argument
Levy argues that software engineering education systematically fails to treat end users as full human beings, and that this curricular omission produces engineers who carry a structural empathy deficit into professional practice. The central thesis is not that individual engineers lack compassion, but that the training pipeline itself never installs user-centeredness as a technical competency — making it a design problem in computer science education, not a personal failing. Levy contends that attempting to remediate this gap at the professional stage is costly and largely ineffective compared to intervening during formation.
Critique
The paper's structural argument — that empathy should be embedded in engineering curricula — risks assuming that formal education is the dominant socialisation force shaping how engineers relate to users, when workplace culture, incentive structures, and organisational norms may be far more determinative once engineers are in the field. A thoughtful reader might push back that even engineers who received empathy-rich training will regress toward the behaviours their product organisations reward, which would suggest the educational fix addresses a symptom of a deeper institutional problem rather than its root cause. The paper's scope, being short and focused on curriculum design, may not fully engage with this tension between formation and context.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, Levy's argument reframes a common organisational frustration — engineers who treat user needs as edge cases or noise — not as a hiring or coaching problem but as a pipeline problem, implying that talent strategy and onboarding need to explicitly compensate for what engineering formation did not provide. This has direct consequences for how discovery is structured: if empathy was never taught as a rigorous practice, embedding user research into delivery rituals is not a cultural nicety but a structural correction. It also offers a sharper diagnosis for why cross-functional friction between product and engineering so often centres on disagreements about what counts as a valid user problem.