"People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don't really need to understand humans so well"
About this Quote
Hertzfeld lands a clean punchline on a real hierarchy of labor in tech: some work is judged by how it touches people, and some work is treated as gloriously indifferent to them. The line is funny because it’s structured like a compliment that turns into a gentle roast. “Empathy” gets positioned as a core competency for user interface work, then the second sentence drops the contrast with deadpan certainty: device drivers, those invisible plumbing layers, supposedly don’t require “understand[ing] humans.” It’s a joke, but it’s also an institutional map.
The intent is partly defensive of UI as serious engineering. In a culture that often valorizes low-level code as “real” computing, Hertzfeld flips the status game: the hardest part isn’t talking to machines, it’s negotiating with messy, inconsistent human expectations. The subtext is that the interface is where technology becomes culture, where a product either earns trust or irritates you into churn. Empathy isn’t softness here; it’s an instrument for predicting confusion, anxiety, impatience, and delight.
Context matters: Hertzfeld helped build the original Macintosh, a project explicitly obsessed with making computers legible to non-experts. In that era, “understanding humans” wasn’t a feel-good value; it was a strategic wedge against command-line priesthood. The sly irony is that even driver writers ultimately serve humans too, just at a remove. The joke works because tech organizations often forget that distance doesn’t erase responsibility; it just makes it easier to pretend the user isn’t real.
The intent is partly defensive of UI as serious engineering. In a culture that often valorizes low-level code as “real” computing, Hertzfeld flips the status game: the hardest part isn’t talking to machines, it’s negotiating with messy, inconsistent human expectations. The subtext is that the interface is where technology becomes culture, where a product either earns trust or irritates you into churn. Empathy isn’t softness here; it’s an instrument for predicting confusion, anxiety, impatience, and delight.
Context matters: Hertzfeld helped build the original Macintosh, a project explicitly obsessed with making computers legible to non-experts. In that era, “understanding humans” wasn’t a feel-good value; it was a strategic wedge against command-line priesthood. The sly irony is that even driver writers ultimately serve humans too, just at a remove. The joke works because tech organizations often forget that distance doesn’t erase responsibility; it just makes it easier to pretend the user isn’t real.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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