Lack of wealth through lack of empathy

March 13th, 2010

A few days ago a coworker stepped into the room of our Integration Manager, with his iPhone in his hand and his face glowing with happiness, telling he has this great new game on his phone. He asked for a permission to take a picture of the Integration Manager, and did so to the sound of dramatic, though somewhat repetitive, music. He then marked the areas around the eyes and the mouth of his subject.

Then the game started. The guy pressed some buttons, delivering virtual blows to the photographed subject, who couldn't really fight back according to the rules of the "game". The face on the photograph got covered with blood and wounds (especially the eyes and the mouth), and the speaker yelled out something designed to convey pain. And the guy stood there and kept punching and laughed his ass off.

Then he talked about how iPhone was this great thing and how iPhone app developers got rich. And I told him in a grim voice to go ahead and get rich off iPhone apps and he sensed disrespect, to him or to the iPhone or both. But mainly it wasn't disrespect, it was desperation. I told him to go ahead and do these apps because he probably can, and I certainly can't, so I have no choice but leave all this wealth for him to collect.

Take this punching app. Where do I fit in?

For instance, I know enough computer vision to eliminate the need to manually select the eyes and the mouth. You find the eyes using circular Hough transform, and then you get a good idea where to look for the mouth and then it can't be too hard. How much value would this automation add? The happy user I observed didn't seem bothered by the need to select, worse, I suspect having to do it made him happier – this way he actually worked to deliver his punches.

And then what I couldn't do, and I couldn't do this for the life of me, is to invent this app in the first place. It's just something that I don't think I'll ever understand, something worse than, I dunno, partial differential equations which you can keep digging into, something more like the ability to distinguish between colors, which is either there or not.

Could someone PLEASE explain just how can such a profoundly idiotic activity yield any positive emotions in a human soul?

Perhaps it's because our Integration Manager is a bodybuilder, with bulging biceps and protein milkshakes and stuff, so there's no other way to beat him up for that guy? Well, he could probably beat me up, and he still enjoyed going through the process with me. So this just shows how childish my attempt to dissect the psychology of the phenomenon is – I'm not even close. How could I ever think of something I can't even begin understanding after I've already seen it?

The serious, or should I say sad, side of this is that to develop something valuable to users, you need empathy towards these users, and the way empathy works is through identifying with someone, and so the best chance by far to develop something valuable is to develop something for yourself. But someone like me, who bought his first PC in 2007 and uses a cell phone made in 2004, with no camera, no Internet connection, no nothing, simply can't develop something for himself because he clearly just doesn't need software.

The only chance for a programmer who uses little software except for development tools is to develop development tools. Take Spolsky, for instance – here is a programmer who is, by the programmers' standard, extremely user-aware and user-centric, as evident in his great UI book, among other things, and yet he eventually converged to developing software for programmers, having much less success with end-user products.

The trouble with development tools is that the market is of course saturated, with so many developers with otherwise entrepreneurial mindsets being limited by their lack of empathy to this narrow segment of software. This is why so many programs for programmers have the price of zero – not because copying software has a cost near zero; developing software has a cost far from zero so there aren't that many free face punching apps, but with software for developers, there's unusually fierce empathy-driven competition.

So every time I see an inexplicably moronic hit app, I sink into sad reflections about my destiny of forever developing for developers, being unable to produce what I can't consume and watching those with deeper understanding of the human nature reaping all the benefits of modern distribution channels.

P.S. To the fellow programmer who, as it turns out, uses FarmVille – you broke my heart.