Educating for Empathy in Software Engineering

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.