“How do you convince other engineers? You're not their manager”. @kelseyhightower, former Google Distinguished Engineer, on using Empathetic Engineering to win over peers:

“The one thing that I tried to do was: how do you convince other engineers? You're not their manager. How do you get them to trust you? I started these empathetic engineering sessions. The first one was like, get the Kubernetes team in one room, all of them at an engineering offsite.

I want you all to install Kubernetes, but you can't use any scripts. And remember, some of them are Distinguished Engineers and Principal Engineers. Some of them worked on Borg. Some of them are the original creators of Kubernetes itself.

And it was so fun to watch them struggle because it's like: do we install Docker first? What version of Docker? Can we put this on Ubuntu? Or does it need to be Red Hat? An hour goes by, teams of four are like, nah, man, this doesn't work.

I was like, great you all can stop. I'm going to show you how I would do it. And of course, I know how to do this: I get to prepare, right? So it’s not a knock against them. I'm just like, all right: ‘Debian, tune the kernel this way, put Docker on there, put etcd, put the API server, put all these things. There you go. That's how you do it.’ I mean, of course you had to prepare, of course.

And so the question then was, from an engineering perspective, how will we make this better? And then people were like, well, if we had OS packages, this could have been `apt-get install`, and we could have just used local machinery. I was like, that's a good idea. Someone was like, we will make that happen.

And so it was that empathetic engineering that helped me make a huge impact on cloud because I can go to every team, every org, and instead of guessing what their roadmap should be - given someone who would spend time in the field, given someone that had this enterprise background and hands-on experience across lots of tooling - I knew where people were coming from.”