Full Session Description

Empathy is what will define the great companies of the future that create products that truly fulfill the needs of our diverse world. These companies will be made up of diverse populations across gender, race and ethnicity designing and building the technology of the future. Engineering with empathy can not only create teams that work well together, but will produce better products. Empathy is a skill that can not only be learned, but is one that we can improve on with regular practice. Engineers don’t tend to think about empathy as an important part of building software, but I want to change that mentality. You will learn how empathy can be applied in practical ways to every day engineering activities like code reviews, project planning, and team meetings. I will also share how you can lead with empathy to take your engineering leadership skills to the next level.

Jossie Haines

Platform Engineering Director @ Tile

About the author

Jossie Haines instantly became fascinated with technology when she was given a Commodore 64 for Christmas at age 5. For the last 19 years, she’s worked as a software engineer, tech lead, and engineering leader at the forefront of emerging technology across Silicon Valley, including engineering manager for the Siri Media Domains at Apple, and both Principal Software Engineer and Director of Engineering at Zynga for a variety of teams. She is currently the Platform Engineering Director at Tile, where she is integrating the Tile technology into the 5 billion Bluetooth devices released this year. She is also an advocate for women in the tech industry and has mentored at Girls Who Code and Technovations. She led 4 middle school girls teams to create applications that helped their communities. Jossie ran Women at Siri, and leads the Women at Tile employee resource group, and mentorship program. The initial run of the mentorship program empowered 29 pairs of employees at Tile to develop their careers. She co-founded a podcast named Retaining WIT that focuses on the challenges with keeping women in technology.