Lack of wealth through lack of empathy
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 β 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 β 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 β 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 β 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 β you
broke my heart.
Potential solution: arbitrage of density of inanity.
As you say, tools for programmers are cheap because of too much
supply from programmers developing for people like them. The corollary
is that software for non-programmers is underserved. You say that it's
the core concept that you'd find hard to think anew for the first time,
but the thing is, you don't need to be first ever. You can be first in a
different market (e.g. Android vs iPhone, or Europe vs US, or New York
vs San Francisco), as well as better and more polished. After that, it's
a matter of marketing.
To make a better and more polished punching app, I'd have to
understand what "better" means in this context β the way to make it
"better" to me is to delete it, the way I think I could "improve" it
(automatic detection of facial features) doesn't necessarily make the
user happier.
I'll concede that it's not impossible to make something you'd never
use well, but it's so much easier to make something you would
use well that I wouldn't be able to compete with anyone who'd give it a
try, so I'd have to be extremely lucky with timing or something to make
it.
The other problem is that if I spend time working on a compiler or a
processor or a build system and I fail, well, I failed but I was working
on a compiler or a processor or a build system, but if I spend time
working on something which seems useless and I fail, I've just spent
time working on something useless, and I failed. So the risk is much
higher.
It's sad there are so many idiotic apps out there that people use,
and are willing to pay for β Farmville, this punching app, etc. I am
surprised this app is actually available from the Apple store β or is it
one of those apps for liberated phones?
I think there are lots of neat apps out there waiting to be made that
are not a waste of time though. For example, a friend of mine recently
bought an app for $8 that's a huge catalog of birds. I asked her if you
could take a picture of a bird and have the app recognize it for you.
The answer was "no." But wouldn't that be amazing? I am sure someone
will do this, eventually, and I can certainly see that as being both
fairly successful and extremely cool.
Well, there's six billion and counting people on the planet. Usually
that idea scares me but it's almost impossible not to succeed at
something if you just make something that appeals to yourself. Maybe
make a kafkaesque transformation game?
As for dev tools you'd be surprised. Sure, there are a million of the
most basic things like text editors, but I've made some tools to put
very large companies to shame for more complicated/specialized stuff.
But of course then you need to have more specialized knowledge too, but
I got run off of a big website for defending the idea of making your own
data structures and algorithms.... That is the competition by and large.
People for whom anything that takes more than downloading an API and
plugging it in is simply outside the realm of imagination.
If you do something, anything, you will succeed. Even if it's just to
make some open source API, then you can write books about it and
contract out fixing problems with your own API. There is a lot of money
even in 'free' software. I'd rather be the computer vision API guy than
the face punch guy, there's always stupid things to succeed in. If
that's really what you wanted I'm sure you could have been a lawyer or
insurance guy instead of programmer.
I work with a co-founder who is great a talking with users and
selling people on our software. I make the software. It's a good
division of work. I put in more hours, but since I love writing code and
since we're each making a small fortune, I don't mind...
Yossi, thanks for putting in writing what I had long felt as a
developer of mobile games back in the mid-2000s. At the time I was
struck by the fact that while I myself would never spend $5 on a mobile
game, those who did were providing my livelyhood. I had the advantage of
working for large publishing houses that were able to "motivate" me
despite my lack of empathy for the end-user.
I think this can be described as an inverse-Hamlet problem: as 99% of
the population cannot empathize with the most intelligent 1%, many times
the inverse is also true; and empathy with the user (through
understanding their "pain") is the key to creating value.
@Dan
You need to turn your Intrinsic motivation factor of writing software
and convert it to Extrinsic motivation factor. You will soon find out
that the guy your working for may in-fact be taking home a bigger
portion of the pie than you. (What I'm saying, don't allow your love for
programming blind you)
Food for thought, I've allways disagreed with doing what you love. I
think if you love what you do and you work and make a living off it,
then your complicating matters. You get caught up in internal debate
about justification of the hours that you do. Is it for the money or you
love doing what you do? But if you sat down and put a extrinsic value on
what you do, you will find that there are other rewarding professions
that still allow you to keep doing what you love.
To the article.
It has amazed me about the west is that its been so decensertised to
violence on television and entertainment medium its just taken as
granted today without much thought. For example your inital reaction to
the punching application, your first thought goes out to the person who
is getting punched in the face and secondly to the person who recieve
enjoyment to inflict virtual pain on somebody else.
I forgot the term of this in phsycology, but its close to diffusion
of responsibility. That because hes pushing a glass screen and visual
seeing the effects of his action, and receiving enjoyment out of it he
does not feel responsible for his actions. Although, I've always kept my
distance from people who get enjoyment out of these kind of things.
Granted he may be a very polite person in real life, my main concern is
the moral,social bindings where to be removed by say alcohol or
substance abuse will lead to such a person lashing out.
From person experience I've seen this happen not directly to me but
to several close people I know. So I've tended to stay clear of such
people who do enjoy inflicting pain on entity's, it being a computer
game or visual medium.
@Vladimir Levin: detecting the kind of bird on a photo is
astonishingly hard. 100 man-years kind of hard.
@Antilamer: I'm in it strictly for the money, though I'll concede
that I, um, learned to relax and enjoy it as a vulgar Russian joke goes,
and I'll also concede, as I did above, that the worthlessness and/or
idiocy of a project greatly increases the risk of failure as I perceive
it.
@Dan: Good times.
@Tim Smith: I started working on automotive safety apps long before
getting a driver's license, but I wasn't doing user-visible stuff. I
guess I could be reasonably happy to work on the backbone of a punching
app, in a universe where it needed any "backbone" to speak of.
@Entity: regarding people's enjoyment in inflicting pain upon
virtual, um, entities β I won't go down the path of elaborating on the
psychology of that; never was that good at psychoanalysis and deep
suppressed desires and stuff. Regarding "the west" β by far the most
humane civilization to ever inhabit the planet, I find.
I do wonder if something could be done vis. the bird recog thing. I
can think of some short cuts β like using the iPhones gps to eliminate
possibilities based on location, then showing the user several
candidates as possibilities and letting them choose. Maybe even letting
the user take several snapshots and combine them for the search... I
don't know if such tricks would help though or if you just need to hire
a 100 programmers to work on it for a year :D
Lack of empathy is not a problem. rather a symptom.
The problem is striking unsmartness and undecentness
(Π½Π΅ΠΈΠ½ΡΠ΅Π»Π»ΠΈΠ³Π΅Π½ΡΠ½ΠΎΡΡΡ, you know) of people. It's not that any person is
undecent, but once you gather a lot of people their common denominator
(what would they do, like or say) is awful.
Even mass culture, which used to be stupid but respecting smartness,
became actively harmful, for every second you experience it, it rots
your brain by some amount.
Once you solve that you'd have your empathy back.
Just make people:
1) Understand who is smart and who is not, and only care about the first
ones.
2) Actively try to become better themself.
People used to be like that when they headed from countryside into
city, but they're no longer.
Empathy was a big theme of the great 19th century Russian
literature.
- in many instances that was armchair empathy, but sometimes not, as
somewhere the real thing has to be out there.
This conflict was eating Mr. Tolstoy in the end, Gogol was the real
thing, but he went nuts.
The problem here is that software is really an armchair world par
exellence β its not quite real in the end; its a simulation.
So showing empathy with real persons by means of a simulation β wow,
that sounds like the stuff that literary conflicts are made of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieRsuz3jp88
that's what I mean.
Empathy for whom?
In the end, the primary empathy that matters is empathy for yourself.
When the work day is done, when the job is done, are you proud of
it?
Last week, I did a pro bono consultation over the phone for someone
who was having trouble activating both cores on his laptop. I was able
to trace the problem to a Windows-only DSDT, one that the laptop's BIOS
devs weren't likely to fix. But at least I was able to find the source
of the problem, even if I couldn't fix it. And I was very pleased with
myself that I still have the chops for tech support. That was the only
real payback I got: a spring in my step for the rest of the day.
If you're not proud of your work, even after you get your paycheck,
you need to find other work. And maybe the face-punching app's author is
proud of that. Who knows?
I doubt I would go back to computer tech support full-time. The
cobbler's kids are the last to get new shoes, and the IT professional's
home system gets poor administration.
@Ilyak: my opinion of the population is much higher than yours.
@Michael Moser: erm, I'm not a big fan of Russian literature and
especially everything in it having to do with the authors' concern for
mankind. I think the prerogative of authors is to be concerned with
entertainment.
@gus3: "pride" is very multidimensional and depends on one's
worldview and emotional habits. One could develop a habit of being proud
of almost anything.
You sound like a pussy.
I find it funny and ironic that you reference Joel, who would (based
on his own posts) never hire you, because you aren't "enthusiastic"
enough (as shown in this post).
I would never hire Joel. He's a little too enthusiastic, I think.
Anyway, a good game is just an interesting action (or collection
thereof) with some gold plating. It's supposed to be the inverse of
work. Ideally we would work less to get more tangible results but we
play to get practically nothing in turn, and more play is better. So
while it might be logical to automate something, that thing might be fun
to do in itself. Imagine a fully automated FarmVille β something rather
like an aquarium. Aquariums aren't inherently fun. What's interesting
about aquariums is the care of and interaction with its inhabitants.
Ya dig?
I do prefer looking at someone else's aquarium to running my own,
similarly for other people's cats and dogs β more to the point, there
exist FarmVille bots, at least it's a popular search query according to
Google's auto-completion. Of course the bots are (probably) there to
give the humans a competitive edge over fellow humans β but here again
is something I don't quite understand, nor do I understand Quake aim
bots and the like: winning a game is supposed to be fun because it's an
achievement, and if you cheat, you effectively cheat yourself out of an
opportunity at an achievement (similarly to the way your opponent cheats
you out of it if he plays a weak game to "let you win" β now you can't
really win no matter what you do); the ability to enjoy a group's
respect for an achievement one didn't really achieve is something I find
hard time identifying with.
I ain't diggin'.
Empathy in a bowl of soup...
Where does the punching app author fit in with your world? does he
have to?
Do you really want to write anything other than what you do?
I don't know why applications like this are fun or good or even
profitable, I know I'd never buy/write something like that, although I
do want to write a Game [as in a complex interactive software with
narrative and emotive functionality] because it's something I've always
been interested in.
There are alot of idiots in the world [I had a few as teachers
unfortunetly] and I suspect most of them probably have an iPhone as well
and much more money than I would ever see... I'm not sure where I was
going with that... And now I'm depressed too...
Brilliant insight. The other problem is that people who HAVE the
empathy to appreciate a "punching" app probably don't have the skill to
create it.
So you have empathy, just the wrong kind to make a fortune with a
punching app. Sorry about that.
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