Engineering with Empathy - Engineering Empathy

I spent thirty years as a software engineer — long enough to feel like master of my own destiny, and long enough to get thoroughly frustrated that things never turn out the way you plan them.

This blog started as a way to make sense of that gap. Between what customers want and what gets delivered. Between what the business thinks IT does and what IT actually does. Between the confident expert voice of a thousand non-fiction business books and the messy, human reality underneath.

Human Software, my debut novel, grew out of that frustration. It felt more honest than writing another business book that repackaged the same ideas with a different cover.

I’m Richard W. Bown. This is where I think out loud.

TWO WOMEN. ONE SYSTEM.

BETH WALTERS has kept Gerbach’s logistics systems running through sheer stubbornness and too many sleepless nights. She knows where the bodies are buried — technically speaking.

CHRISSIE HEGARTY has flown in from New York with a mandate, a deadline, and very little patience for sentiment. She’s done this before. She knows how it ends.

They are not enemies. Not yet.