Employers find ways to empathize with coders

To truly understand a programmer, one must walk a mile in their code—or at least a line or two of it.

In an attempt to improve workflow between programmers and other departments, some companies bring IT teams, security staff, and even customer-service reps into the coding process. These shadowing efforts can result in leadership changing their processes and how they make requests for modifications and bug fixes. 

At Code42, a cybersecurity company specializing in insider risk, it wasn’t unheard of several years ago for someone on the security side of the house to tell a developer to fix up 100 vulnerabilities. And for a coder, any time spent fixing dozens of flaws is less time dedicated to firing up, say, a new feature or a new app altogether.

Jadee Hanson, CISO and CIO at Code42, wanted to cultivate empathy with any bugged-out coders.

“For a software company like ours, it’s really hard to bridge gaps between security practitioners and developers if we’re not understanding exactly what each team has to do, and has to go through,” said Jadee Hanson, CIO and CISO at the insider-risk protection platform Code42.

And so, in 2021, Code42 encouraged about 50 security and IT team members to learn basic coding practices from the online educational program Udemy. Even Hanson studied up on Python to understand a coder’s day-to-day tasks…and frustrations.

“We didn’t have the right level of empathy and collaboration on my teams. And so my challenge to the team was, ‘Let’s actually try to understand what our development team has to go through and what is it like to build code? And when we come and ask them to fix 300 security vulnerabilities, what is that like?’” Hanson told IT Brew.

A 2022 report of over 250,000 developers from the software-development platform aptly named Software found that a developer only codes for 52 minutes a day. Instead of writing, the report suggests, coders are assigned tasks related to planning, documentation, and meetings.

The Code42 101 initiative led to changes in the code-to-production process, said Hanson, and when the security team asked for fixes.

“We were coming in too late,” Hanson told IT Brew.

Understanding coding can make an IT or security pro’s life easier. Knowledge of Python, for example, can lead to the creation of script that automatically patches servers or finds specified data in logs.

At the credit card company Mission Lane, coder empathy is found in the hackathon—an annual event that pulls together everyone from marketing, data analysts, and customer service to develop new ideas, like a rewards program or a mockup of a spend-tracking mobile app.

“In some cases, we’ll allow somebody who’s not a coder to actually code something,” said Mike Lempner, VP of engineering and technology at Misson Lane. The collaboration demonstrates that a lot of coding work is done outside of that 52 minutes at the desk.

“It’s really understanding the problem and coming up with the right solution,” Lempner told IT Brew.

For Sean McHale, mergers and acquisitions technology advisor at West Monroe Partners, a good development day involves peace and quiet. Understanding the many aspects to a bug fix—testing inputs and outputs, for example—can make managers think twice before asking for an update on Friday afternoon.

“Give them peace. Give them the space to really get into this code and build it out the best they can. And that’s where you produce the best software. And that’s where the real innovation comes in,” said McHale.