Our Industry Needs Compassion

Well, I’ve utterly failed to blog at regular intervals, writing only three posts in 2016. Ouch. To be fair, one of those posts is insanely famous (the one about NPM and left-pad.js), but still, I’ve really let my readers – and myself – down.

So, I resolve to write a blog post every single week of 2017, starting today. This will probably mean that I write slightly shorter posts, and maybe even multi-part series posts. My traditional style has been “come upon something that is really bothering me or is really tricky, and proceed to blog about it in great detail writing thousands of words for all to benefit from” which doesn’t really scale well. Instead I plan to take the approach of “write about a new or interesting topic each week, and see what people like and what they don’t like” which will hopefully be better.

This week’s post is about compassion, especially in the field of programming. Let’s use an example that is both recent and practical, if a tad emotional.


My dog died

3 days ago our dog Ruby died. She was 16 and lived a good, long life. Having said that, her death was unexpected and rather painful to go through. My wife and I were up with Ruby all night comforting her as she slowly passed away from sudden heart failure. The last breath she exhaled will forever be seared into my brain. It feels like it’s all I can think about right now.

My wife and I have been grieving for the past 72 hours in our own ways. This has surfaced as mostly a mix of depression, tears, quick but sad chats about the things we miss about Ruby, and sorrow every time we look somewhere in the house for her only to find that she is no longer there. It sucks.

Out of sight, out of mind

What’s important to realize is that I am not unique or special in this circumstance. Animals die all of the time, and you don’t feel sad about them because you never met them. They are out of sight, out of mind. Yet they are out there, and the passing of good dogs and cats – as well as other households pets – is happening every single day. Even as you read this.

These events occur in the scope of individual’s lives. There is no national news story about the passing of Ruby to make us all aware of it and help us all feel the effects of it. There never will be. This event is confined to the lives of me, my wife, and our extended family. We suffer through it silently (other than my writing about it and a few social media posts).

Silent suffering

This silent suffering is the point that I want to drive home. Others out there are silently suffering too. It might be the death of a family pet, or it might be something else entirely. It’s not a contest of who has it the worst. I want you to simply realize that crappy things are happening to people, even if they are not in your domain and thus you are not aware.

Odds are that someone in your life or workplace is suffering with something that troubles them. Right now for me it’s the passing of my dog. For a close friend of mine it’s stress about work and finding the next permanent job. For another person I know it’s about being a brown man in America and how scared they feel about the future. We all battle demons every single day.

You work with people

With this in mind, I ask you to be compassionate everywhere, but especially at work. You work with people, not cogs of some machine (even if management may think of them in that way). These people have real feelings and some of them are surely fighting battles you’ve never even fathomed.

Your responsibility as a good member of the IT field – and as a good citizen of this planet – is to demonstrate compassion. Be nice to everyone you work with until you are given a reason not to be. Consider that they might be having a bad day if you feel they’re lashing out or being an asshole, and forgive them. Try to sympathize with what frustrates them. Work to understand them beyond their role at the company and their job output.

We are all in this together. Now more than every we need to be compassionate, respectful, kind, and considerate to others. It is my opinion that our industry has a long history of being hostile to certain people and demographics – such as women – and we must each work individually to change that.

My last request to you: please think hard about what you’ve read here as you begin your first week of work in 2017. I know I will.


See also