The !Empathetic Engineer - A short story portraying the software engineer archetype

Engineers are incredibly smart people. This could be a product of the complex problems they usually work on and the abundance of solutions a given problem can have. This is especially true for software engineering problems. With so many roads leading to Rome, it becomes attractive for engineers to favor the idea they came up with over others.

Engineers are arrogant. I say that as an engineer myself. I have been guilty of assuming I know more than most people in the room. Or that my way is the right way. Or that whatever other people might say is irrelevant. Or that I can rarely be wrong.

I wanted to shed light on this problem and highlight it and I’m using short stories as a medium. I did think about other mediums to portray this problem such as paintings, sculptures, poems, photos, music, and writing. However, I can’t paint or sculpture. I take atrocious photos (ask my wife). I never wrote any music so let's not go there. I do write poems but they are mostly in Arabic so that won’t reach the audience I want. Plus I think poems are immutable and can’t be translated without bleeding them in the process So the best route is to write. I know I'm not a good writer, as you will clearly see from this book, but I think I will be able to get my point across.