A Different Kind of Internship Goal
When asked about my goals for the quarter, my standard answer had always been about making more informed decisions. Coming into my second internship with Slack, I thought that goal meant deepening my technical knowledge and my familiarity with the codebase. But joining the accessibility team quickly reframed the problem for me: the most important decisions I needed to make weren’t purely technical—they required understanding how my work would impact real people, and being comfortable making compromises to benefit them.
In a university setting, most of my code is graded by automated processes with a clear rubric. Unless I’m debugging an error, I never have to think about how a user will interact with what I’ve built. That background left me feeling unprepared to make product-level decisions. Early on, I deferred to my teammates for almost everything, which held me back from engaging in team conversations and creating solutions of my own. I needed to stop purely focusing on polishing my React skills and start getting intentional about user experience.
Why Empathy Matters in Engineering
Working on accessibility makes the importance of user empathy obvious—the whole goal is to remove barriers by considering a wide range of abilities and contexts. But this type of thinking is not limited to an accessibility team. If we’re building a product that people use, we have to care how intuitive and meaningful it is for the people on the other end of the screen.
Empathy means having a real understanding of who your users are, what they need, and how they will actually interact with a feature in a real-world scenario. That’s not to say every engineer should become a product manager or designer. But engineers seeing the human side of their feature makes for richer collaboration with those roles, especially when they bring their technical knowledge to the table. It also, honestly, makes the work more satisfying. “I write code” is a very different thing to say than “I solve this problem for people by using code.” For someone fresh out of college whose motivation has largely been metric-driven, shifting toward the focus on the end user is a rewarding change.
Practical Ways to Build Empathy
I believe empathy is a skill—we have it innately, but we need to practice it. These are the practices I found most valuable this summer.
1. Avoid Attachments
It is easy to get attached to a feature you have spent time designing and testing. You have seen what it does perfectly, so it is hard to imagine anyone being tripped up by its intended use case. But it is critical to acknowledge that someone else might have a perfectly sensible, completely different experience. If you are willing to let go of your preconceived notions of how something “should” work, you open yourself to the option that will actually serve your users best.
2. Learn to See the Feature From a New Point of View
Engineers rarely have day-to-day interactions with end users. Feedback usually goes through an established pipeline that filters and prioritizes before it reaches us. While that is necessary for efficiency, it means we have to actively seek opportunities to engage with users.
This summer, I got to attend product testing calls with our accessibility consultant—a blind individual who uses screen readers and Slack in-depth. Hearing his perspective on what feels intuitive versus what presents a challenge has been invaluable. Observing a user approach a feature for the first time is always educational; they might highlight a problem no one thought of, or even end up using the feature in a way no one predicted.
3. Talk in Depth With Your Teammates
When I am at an impasse, I can rely on the designers, engineers, and PMs on my team. Just asking for the answer is not enough, though. To build your own decision-making intuition, you need to ask why. Ask about their thought process, share your own, and challenge their reasoning in a respectful way. When they suggest one option over another, ask them to walk you through how they are weighing the trade-offs.
My team also holds weekly office hours for other teams looking to improve the accessibility of their features. Watching them weigh all the options out loud on a new problem each week has been an excellent training ground. It also illustrates how other engineers can participate in the conversation with their own understanding of technical and logistical constraints.
4. Vocalize Your Ideas
To my fellow interns and newer developers: yes, it is intimidating to speak up in your first few months. I was worried I would “waste people’s time” with half-formed thoughts or questions that were not relevant to the issue of the day. But if you remain entirely quiet beyond standup, you never get to see how an idea you have can spark a crucial discussion. The best way to know if an idea is viable is to offer it to the team, and the feedback you get is valuable whether it works out or falls flat—you learn to weigh the context and improve your judgment faster. Listening is an important part of the process, but the thing that has truly helped me progress is putting my insights forward in conversation.
The Bottom Line
You will notice that all of these principles are just good practices for being on a team in any capacity. That points to something important: practicing empathy makes you a better engineer, a better coworker, and likely a better thinker in all areas of your life. It takes constant effort from every engineer on a product to make it genuinely thoughtful and inclusive for all users.
