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Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

1109 pointsby gregdoesitabout 6 years ago

74 comments

lpolovetsabout 6 years ago
Writing well is an undervalued skill in life, not just in engineering. When you work on a team of peers with similar skills in your field, whether that field is engineering or something else, being able to write well and communicate well become strong differentiators. FWIW, I&#x27;m pretty sure that writing (reasonably) well online is what got me a job in venture capital after ten years as an engineer.<p>David Perell (host of the North Star Podcast) has been tweeting a lot of good things about the value of writing + writing tips:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;david_perell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1127348174404890625" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;david_perell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1127348174404890625</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;david_perell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1124002449646395392" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;david_perell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1124002449646395392</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;david_perell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1116485842615377921" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;david_perell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1116485842615377921</a>
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jstyabout 6 years ago
I agree with the author that writing is one of the most undervalued skills for SWEs, but for a completely different reason - it forces you to reason things through properly, even if nobody else will ever read what you write.<p>Writing a couple of pages of design docs or an Amazon-style 6 pager or whatever might take a few days of work, but can save weeks or more of wasted implementation time when you realise your system design was flawed or it doesn&#x27;t address any real user needs.
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Maroabout 6 years ago
This resonates with me. My writing is clear and concise, I&#x27;m proud of it, and it pays off because I can communicate effectively.<p>I&#x27;m not sure I agree with the &quot;undervalued&quot;, in so far that I see a _lot_ of people who are not able to write clearly, and they get ahead and along just fine. Many executives who I worked with wrote terrible emails (sometimes they leave out the negation, so I&#x27;m guessing whether they mean X or not-X), and they&#x27;re super successful, in so far as their companies are successful &#x2F; they are in high positions.<p>Sometimes the Amazon protocol comes up (before a meeting, the organizer submits the topic in writing, everybody has to read it before), and I always cringe - in my experience most people just can&#x27;t write a clear 2 page document [or can&#x27;t be bothered]. I would love it tough.
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simonwabout 6 years ago
The more experience I get as an engineer, the more time I spend writing documentation, proposals, tutorials and the like.<p>This article is absolutely spot on when it points out that these skills become increasingly important as the size of an engineering organization grows.<p>The biggest challenges in engineering at scale (scale in terms of complexity and size of the team) are around communication. Good writing is how you scale your communication, especially if your team aren&#x27;t physically co-located.<p>I don&#x27;t think software engineers talk about or think about how to improve technical writing nearly enough.
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JoeAltmaierabout 6 years ago
My tech-write wife says the Engineer-writer fault she most often encounters is the &#x27;mystery story&#x27;. That&#x27;s hiding the lead down at the bottom of an argument. Because Engineers like to show their work and don&#x27;t want to &#x27;give away the ending&#x27; until they&#x27;ve proved it right.<p>So put the conclusion right at the top somewhere! Sometime its as simple as putting the last sentence of every paragraph at the beginning of the paragraph.
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apoabout 6 years ago
I noticed the article appears to contain a single point of evidence supporting its main claim:<p>&gt; Don&#x27;t take this advice just from me. Take it from others, like employee #8 and now SVP of engineering at Google, Urs Hölzle who also says that writing clearly is an important superpower for engineers.<p>The link goes to a LinkedIn page with a brief quote captured in raster image format. This is weak evidence for a topic that will certainly be met with strong resistance from the target audience.<p>The author could make a much stronger case by interviewing a few people at top companies specifically on the topic of engineer writing. These people should be in a position of making promotion decisions. The author might coax out of them illustrative anecdotes that show exactly how poor writing skills can keep an aspiring engineer down.<p>How much money in lost wages is my crappy writing costing me? What are my job prospects if my writing doesn&#x27;t improve? What exactly will better writing allow me to do that I can&#x27;t already do? These are all questions that demand answers (and evidence) from people with 10 other things they might be doing.<p>Another idea: what studies (if any) have been done on the correlation between writing quality and promotion within technical organizations? For that matter, how does one objectively measure writing quality? After all, you&#x27;re much more likely to improve something you can measure.<p>A hallmark of good writing (of any kind) is ample evidence to support claims. Engineers and scientists are a skeptical bunch, and so this point applies even more to technical writing.
aresantabout 6 years ago
In a past life I helped optimize &gt;$1b of online transactions as a CRO professional and learning to objectively &quot;write well&quot; could be quantified in two ways:<p>1) <i>Message Density</i> - there&#x27;s a great quote attributed to Mark Twain that nails this &quot;If I&#x27;d had more time I would have written you a shorter letter&quot;.<p>In practice Jeff Bezo&#x27;s push to making executives build &quot;4 page memos&quot; for meetings outlines this idea clearly: &quot;the reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than &quot;writing&quot; a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what&#x27;s more important than what, and how things are related&quot;(1)<p>2) <i>Message Accessibility</i> - Making your message broadly accessible is a good forcing function to writing clearly. An easy &quot;hack&quot; in this department is to utilize the &quot;gunning fog index&quot;(2) which is a structured way to estimate &quot;the years of formal education a person needs to understand the text on the first reading&quot; and there are many tools online that can spit out a score.<p>(1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;jeff-bezos-writing-management-strategy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;jeff-bezos-writing-management-strategy...</a><p>(2) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gunning_fog_index" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gunning_fog_index</a>
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mabboabout 6 years ago
Amazon is obsessive about this stuff. I&#x27;m surprised the article never mentions it.<p>There are internal classes offered on writing better documents (and it&#x27;s a great class). There&#x27;s videos, guides, documents, everything. Writing well at Amazon is key to a successful career here. Got a project idea? Write a very good 1-pager explaining it and you&#x27;ve got a much higher chance of it actually happening. Want to share a design? Write a 6-pager (often 10-15 pages with appendices) explaining what, why and how you&#x27;re going to build the system.<p>I&#x27;ve been in meetings that start with 15 minutes of silent reading, then 45 minutes of discussion. No PowerPoint presenting.<p>It&#x27;s very weird for newcomers, but I don&#x27;t know anyone who finds that it isn&#x27;t better than the alternatives.
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kashyapcabout 6 years ago
Especially for those who work remotely, I (English is my third language) can&#x27;t overstate the importance of deliberately working on writing skills. As remotees, we are often judged by our words, whether we like it or not. A couple of recommendations:<p>• Many here might&#x27;ve already come across it, but is always worth bringing up: William Zinsser&#x27;s, <i>On Writing Well</i>. In which, he urges us to write with &quot;clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity&quot;; tells us &quot;the intangibles that produce good writing—confidence, enjoyment, intention, integrity&quot;; reminds us to &quot;remember that what you write is often the only change you&#x27;ll get to present yourself to someone whose business or money or good will you need&quot;; and much more.<p>• The equally excellent book, <i>Clear and Simple as the Truth</i>[2]. In this rigorous work, Thomas and Turner describe a style of writing that rests &quot;on the assumptions that it is possible to think disinterestedly, to know the results of disinterested thought, and to present them without fundamental distortion. In this view, thought precedes writing&quot;. And the book also has a chapter that is aptly titled, <i>The Museum</i>, a &quot;guided tour through examples of writing, both exquisite and execrable&quot;.<p>The second book, I suggest to slow-read it over a period of several months to digest it (and perhaps even do the exercises in the chapter titled <i>The Studio</i>, if you&#x27;re a non-native speaker), not least because, as a certain Roman Stoic urged us, <i>to read attentively—not to be satisfied with &quot;just getting the gist of it&quot;</i>.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;author&#x2F;show&#x2F;7881675.William_Zinsser" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;author&#x2F;show&#x2F;7881675.William_Zinsse...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;press.princeton.edu&#x2F;titles&#x2F;9445.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;press.princeton.edu&#x2F;titles&#x2F;9445.html</a>
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beatabout 6 years ago
I used to be a huge proponent of learning to write well as the most important skill an engineer can learn.<p>Now, I think it&#x27;s the second most important skill.<p>The most important skill is <i>sales</i>.<p>The key value of writing well, in a workplace environment (or other environments, really) is to convince others to agree with what you&#x27;re proposing. Convincing people that something they don&#x27;t initially understand or trust is going to be a win for <i>them</i> is a sales problem. Clear writing is only a means to that end.
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mnortonabout 6 years ago
I have kept around and distributed multiple copies of The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, for the past few years (lots of revisions of this out there, 4th might be most recent iirc). It&#x27;s like a 9$ book and the guidance is priceless.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Elements-Style-Fourth-William-Strunk&#x2F;dp&#x2F;020530902X&#x2F;ref=sr_1_3?crid=2MK6DSC2Y7SVJ&amp;keywords=elements+of+styles+strunk+and+white&amp;qid=1559316830&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=elements+of+style%2Cstripbooks%2C144&amp;sr=1-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Elements-Style-Fourth-William-Strunk&#x2F;...</a>
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wazooxabout 6 years ago
Writing well can have several meanings. I&#x27;ve found that hilarious bug tickets are much better received and treated than dry ones. Maybe because they get many eyeballs (of the sort that makes all bug shallow).<p>Here is one of the first ticket I wrote in my still current company:<p>Then God appeared to wazoox and told him: &quot;You will not spread your software on the face of the world without properly testing the new features, so as not to get into trouble with a rarely used tool that proves buggy with an important customer. I said, and so be it.&quot; So it was done this way, and the courageous people of the developers wrote unit test scripts, to validate the proper functioning of each new version, whereas until now they were content to test by hand and whatever popped into their heads. Then rivers of milk and honey flowed on the earth, and the customers gave them much money; then the Lord saw it and was pleased.
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tombertabout 6 years ago
I do find it a bit bizarre that the otherwise smart people that I work with, with English as their first language, will often resort to writing emails and documentation like a 14-year-old on AIM. I&#x27;m obviously much more forgiving of people that had to learn English as adults, but somewhat paradoxically I find that they typically write a lot more comprehensibly than most of the native-speaking engineers.<p>I&#x27;m hardly John Steinbeck or Mark Twain, but I&#x27;ve always felt that if I wanted to be treated like a grown-up, I should write like a grown-up, and as a result I have tried to write well. I try and be understanding of typos, because those are just honest mistakes, but when an adult sends an email to me saying something like &quot;when r u going to do this?&quot;, I get a bit annoyed.
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franciscopabout 6 years ago
I don&#x27;t feel like it&#x27;s undervalued; 93% of developers get frustrated by it:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensourcesurvey.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensourcesurvey.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;</a><p>It is a fairly thankless job because it&#x27;s more difficult and the concept of bugs or missing features is fairly fuzzy (compared to software). But it is highly valuable, and people do notice it.<p>I attribute most of my open source popularity&#x2F;stars at decent&#x2F;good docs+examples in my libraries, like the most recent one:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;franciscop&#x2F;ola&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;franciscop&#x2F;ola&#x2F;</a>
dsignabout 6 years ago
Why is this skill considered &quot;undervalued&quot;? Could it be attributed to the gluttony of the industry for engineers? I have been in a couple of interviews to job applicants who couldn&#x27;t bother less to fix typos and grammar in the first sentence of their CVs. The mere fact that we bothered to interview those candidates is disturbing.
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xrdabout 6 years ago
Popular opinion almost makes it seem like &quot;writing well&quot; (for human consumption) is almost the opposite of &quot;writing good code&quot; (for computers).<p>To be regarded as a great programmer, you need to know all the arcane details of a system, where those are the intricacies of a particular language or framework, or the small details of how a computer system works. It&#x27;s the minutiae that counts.<p>With writing for humans, you need to have a very high level overview of things. You need to speak broadly and appeal to a common human understanding. The top level understanding is what matters.<p>Coding interviews reflect the change the industry is sensing and what this author puts well: the worst coding interviews are where they ask you about some small detail of a language or algorithm. It&#x27;s a gotcha test. The better interviews ask you to show how you holistically approach a problem.
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mattjaynesabout 6 years ago
Basically, here is what I tell myself when I&#x27;m going to write something for an audience:<p>• Nobody gives a fuck ABOUT ME or how cool or awesome I am.<p>• People only care about how awesome THEY ARE.<p>• I am competing for their very short attention-span. Facebook, Netflix, and porn are my competition. This better be pretty compelling if they are not going to immediately hit their back button.<p>• I either need to address some real PAIN they have, or be pretty amazing at entertaining them. In most cases, addressing a real pain is easier. It&#x27;s much harder to entertain better than porn, breaking news stories, etc.<p>• Structure for pain is clear:<p>1. Identify the pain and show how much it hurts and costs them<p>2. Show them the solution, and how good it will feel to stop losing and start winning<p>3. Anticipate and address their concerns. Are they worried about cost? Are they worried about how much work it will require? Are they worried what their boss or customers will think? Etc. Think of the most likely concerns or objections they will have and explain how to resolve them. All or most of their questions should be answered so that there is nothing in the way for the next step...<p>4. Call them to action to do something. Use your tool. Change a behavior. Etc.<p>The structure can vary a bit, but this is generally the structure. In a purely technical article, you may have very short sections on the pain, then spend most of the time on the solution. If the purpose is more for sales, then you&#x27;ll want to have it more balanced and focus a lot on resolving concerns.<p>The article should be clear enough and structured enough so that every paragraph can have a headline. And a reader should be able to scan the headlines and know very quickly and clearly without having to think &quot;what is this article about?&quot;<p>If the article feels or looks like work to read, they will give up right away and you&#x27;ve lost them. There has to be something really compelling for them. How will this make them more awesome? They don&#x27;t give a fuck about anything else.<p>They are milliseconds away from hitting their back button or searching for &quot;nude guitar solos&quot;, so put the effort in to deliver something compelling and valuable. One well-thought-out clear useful article is far greater than a hundred jumble-thought aimless ones.<p>Edit: formatting
kazinatorabout 6 years ago
&gt; <i>It is with a larger organisation that writing becomes important for messages to reach a wider group of people.</i><p>I&#x27;m not able to fully agree. An engineer is more likely to write text that reaches a customer in its original form in a tiny startup or consulting firm than in a big organization.<p>The larger the company, the more of a cog you are with specialized tasks. Writing? That&#x27;s a documentation person; just give them a rough draft capturing all the info. Customers typically talk to customer support, not to you. Customer support people have to write well, to be sure.<p>If the engineer started in a small organization which grew, but that engineer&#x27;s responsibilities grew in proportion also, then that is apples and oranges. You have to compare how much writing is required in comparable roles.
dkarlabout 6 years ago
I think people appreciate this about other people, so if there&#x27;s a place where it is undervalued, it&#x27;s when people evaluate themselves and their opportunities for improvement.<p>I remember Bjarne Stroustrup saying that an important sign that a person could become a good programmer was that they could write clearly in their native (natural) language. I can&#x27;t find that quote, but I did find a 2013 interview [1] in which, forced to pick three key pieces of advice for budding programmers in their early twenties, his #2 was, &quot;Learn to communicate well, verbally and in writing.&quot;<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yourstory.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;bjarne-stroustrup-interview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yourstory.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;bjarne-stroustrup-interview</a>
sonecaabout 6 years ago
This article pitches the idea that writing is an important skill to advance your <i>career</i>. It makes the point that you will be better at spreading an idea and influencing people.<p>I agree with this, but to me personally, the more compelling reason to improve your writing is that will improve your <i>work</i> (not necessarily your career).<p>It is more about better communication than influencing people. I want people to more easily and reliably understand what I am trying to communicate. Understand my ideas, my doubts, my suggestions, my attitude, my feelings.<p>My writing was definitely valuable in my transition to software development two years ago.
nihil75about 6 years ago
Why is it undervalued? because you decided it&#x27;s so? It&#x27;s extremely valued, and even specified as a requirement for most positions (either explicitly or under &quot;communication skills&quot;).
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cosmodiskabout 6 years ago
I think writing doesn&#x27;t get anywhere near the attention ot should be getting.I&#x27;ve met and I work with some really great people but boy oh boy they struggle to write.I&#x27;m not talking about producing the next bestseller but simply communicating simple ideas. I read what some of them write I think: wtf...if you were only able to write better you could be reaching the sky.. Technical capabilities+ ability to communicate well in writing is a killer skill and can literally elevate people to a whole new level..
mrmrcolemanabout 6 years ago
Fully agree and I&#x27;d expand the point to cover communication in general. Explaining ideas clearly with text or voice is one of the characteristics that I&#x27;ve noticed in high-functioning engineering teams.<p>I did a talk[1] a few years back about my experiences helping a team to improve their communication skills. What surprised me was the emotional complications that prevent people from communicating effectively.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;134601419" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;134601419</a>
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sicularsabout 6 years ago
I say it all the time: a significant fraction of my job is to read and write google documents. I’m either writing docs or I’m reading&#x2F;commenting on docs someone else wrote.<p>Reading and writing are foundational skills needed in virtually every field. Especially especially especially at google.<p>&#x2F;I work at google&#x2F;
jacquesmabout 6 years ago
Funny, I <i>never</i> thought that that would be the hill one of my plans would die on. Writing well - and reasonably quick - is rare, when you take the intersection of people that have that skill with people that are technically inclined the resulting set is super small.
amirhirschabout 6 years ago
Did anyone else find this article to consist of ironically poor writing? The blog post contains of a lot of fragments, run-on-sentences, unnecessary pauses, mixed tenses, dangling clauses, use of the passive voices, and no Oxford comma!
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Envec83about 6 years ago
I completely agree. In fact I created <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailywritingtips.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailywritingtips.com&#x2F;</a> (more than 10 years ago) for this exact reason.
ericmcerabout 6 years ago
There are kinda two disciplines here, writing something that tries to convey a complex concept is important, but it&#x27;s also important to be able to tersely describe a problem, and use correct, agreed upon language to do it.<p>Compare:<p>Wrong error message shows on Xm-z pages username input.<p>Xm-z page, username input, Error message incorrect.<p>I would argue that having agreed upon naming, and explicit syntax for how to describe issues&#x2F;improvements in-between your team members is almost more important than being a good writer. The bottom sentence isn&#x27;t even grammatically correct.
lgleasonabout 6 years ago
As an engineer and now an author of a technical book I definitely agree with this. I have seen many places where they have a talented engineering team that cannot communicate what they have created etc. to everybody else. The worse anti-pattern is when they hire technical writers with no knowledge of the domain (or dev skills) to create documentation on how to use API&#x27;s targeted at developers... The end documentation from that effort, unsurprisingly, is often borderline incomprehensible.
petraabout 6 years ago
What about using writing to sell an idea ?<p>My friend, who isn&#x27;t good at interpersonal skills, is trying that.<p>Can this work for him ? or is the trust created via face-to-face is irreplaceable for convincing others ?
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jcapraniabout 6 years ago
Is anyone else seeing the irony of the poor writing in this article?
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joshuaccabout 6 years ago
Along these lines, I have a half-completed book on GitHub titled Prose for Programmers: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joshuacc&#x2F;prose-for-programmers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joshuacc&#x2F;prose-for-programmers</a><p>I started it because I found that being able to write effectively was my biggest advantage at work. Compared to others who were at least as technically competent as myself, I was more often able to persuade others to take the course of action I prefer.
everyoneabout 6 years ago
I think writing well is a skill that is in very short supply all around, even in writing-focused areas like journalism. A major culprit in this, in my opinion, is how writing is taught in college. It&#x27;s very common for students to be tasked with writing an essay with a <i>minimum</i> word count. This has been training people into the habit of being unnecessarily wordy and obtuse. What they should do, is give students a higher mark the <i>less</i> words they use to make their point.
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hwjabout 6 years ago
For German speakers:<p>there&#x27;s a good book about writing in computer science called &quot;Technisches Schreiben (nicht nur) für Informatiker&quot;[1].<p>The appendeix contains a funny correspondence between an author and his publisher whether &quot;FORTRAN&quot; or &quot;Fontran&quot; is correct.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanser-fachbuch.de&#x2F;buch&#x2F;Technisches+Schreiben&#x2F;9783446409576" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanser-fachbuch.de&#x2F;buch&#x2F;Technisches+Schreiben&#x2F;97...</a>
hbarkaabout 6 years ago
In the US university system there are undergraduate requirements called distributional or general education requirements. The breadth of the courses cover humanities and arts, social sciences, and other classes under a Liberal Arts category. I wonder if there are similar requirements in other countries. Does an undergrad degree, say in India, have an apples-to-apples equivalent to an undergrad in the US with respect to the distributional requirement.
mailslotabout 6 years ago
This is literally how I get “impossible” changes to happen virtually anywhere. There’s so much psychology that goes into the impact of the written word.<p>Don’t spread my secret. :(
inflatableDodoabout 6 years ago
Writing well? I&#x27;ve had to read engineering drawings for QC in a precision engineering shop working with critical industries. Screw grammar and style being undervalued. You get told to fuck off if you complain about spelling.<p>edit - there is a pathological aversion to updating a drawing, not because of the work, but because of the process. People will do almost anything to avoid having to get an update signed off.
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spurcell93about 6 years ago
This is one thing I love about stripe. There are a ton of resources to write, and every employee is encouraged to communicate at a very high level.
ragonaabout 6 years ago
This falls into the category of a much wider undervalued engineering skill -- communicating well. The best engineers tend to be excellent communicators. There is a whole group of extremely talented programmers who just don&#x27;t understand why they aren&#x27;t getting ahead, and nine times out of ten the answer is that they suck at communicating.
piarombaabout 6 years ago
I recall my technical writing class in collage was actually pretty good and it was a required course. But when i went into industry there was not monetary connection to writing quality. Sometimes it is even better for developers to have convoluted documentation because then they make themselves indispensable to maintenance in the future.
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michaelmiorabout 6 years ago
I recently had a colleague recommend Writing for Computer Science[0]. It feels targeted more toward academics, but there&#x27;s plenty of useful things in there.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.springer.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;book&#x2F;9781447166382" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.springer.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;book&#x2F;9781447166382</a>
tmalyabout 6 years ago
I would highly recommend the book The Pyramid Principle for improving your writing in a professional environment.
fooblitzkyabout 6 years ago
Another undervalued skill is speaking well. Since joining Toastmasters my career has undergone a step change. Managers perceive me as being much more effective, even though my writing and coding skills have only continued growing incrementally. It&#x27;s the best investment of time I&#x27;ve ever made.
eutropiaabout 6 years ago
I sometimes think that programmers come in two types: mathematically inclined or linguistically inclined. Think sorting vs parsing.<p>I only realized this after testing out of and skipping all English and writing requirements easily, but having to retake several mathematics courses during my time in engineering school.
danoabout 6 years ago
I recommend the following book on a regular basis to those in newly minted leadership positions.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Writing-Works-Communicate-Effectively-Business&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0060956437&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Writing-Works-Communicate-Effectively...</a>
heisenbitabout 6 years ago
In the Middle Age we needed to thumb through huge binders located in a room close to the mainframe. Tedious.<p>Then we could buy the books. We still needed to thumb through and it took time.<p>The the wastage of engineering hours was decreased by putting the writing to low level engineers. That was a good idea as it saved money.<p>That idea could be made even better by having documentation moved to another location by even lower paid staff. Great financial results!<p>In the meanwhile we got patterns and realized that all software is created the same. Documentation can be recycled and continuous releasing saves time for unneeded reviews.<p>Software and its documentation is really just assembling blocks. Learning from the leader in that space, Ikea&#x27;s manuals yielded even greater results. And with additional ingenuity video was introduced. Saves trees, Ikea could learn from us.<p>These days one does not need to read much anymore, just google a video. And if a problem can&#x27;t be solved, then agility comes to rescue. Lean development means problems are solved when needed and that is what agile users are for.
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ironman1478about 6 years ago
At USC, they had multiple mandatory writing classes and I felt that the people who did well in those classes did well in engineering too. I think there is a high correlation between being able to clearly write something down and explain it and understanding the concepts.
zn44about 6 years ago
This article comes at a perfect time. As I want to work on my writing skills. I’ve found many recommendations in this thread on how to improve your skills but nothing focusing on technical writing.<p>Any recommendations for materials specifically for developers?
jambuttersabout 6 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;vtIzMaLkCaM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;vtIzMaLkCaM</a> has very interesting tips on writing.<p>tl;dw : you have been taught to write to people(teachers) who are paid to care about your writing.
tw1010about 6 years ago
Ugh, I don&#x27;t understand why people keep recommend the Pinker book about writing well. Pinker has the most formal god awful style I could imagine. There are so many better writers to learn from. Don&#x27;t fall for mimetics guys.
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jestinjoy1about 6 years ago
I am from India and here writing skill for engineers is not valued at all. As someone into research, I found it important when I started sending papers. Academia here is not giving importance to the writing of its students.
kinkajouabout 6 years ago
I&#x27;ve been interested improving my technical writing for some time but don&#x27;t really have any idea what good tech writing looks like.<p>Can someone suggest some examples of what you consider really good documents?
pugworthyabout 6 years ago
The ability to be &quot;agile&quot; with writing is pretty important to some. I sometimes find I&#x27;ll edit and revise (and tweak) a gamedev stack post many, many times over just little things.
jlmortonabout 6 years ago
&gt; I have noticed a few skills that people often underestimate the importance of developing. Skills that add a significant boost to the impact of any developer. <i>One of these ones is writing.</i><p>Heh.
bearcobraabout 6 years ago
One thing I love to do is send any major communication I&#x27;ve written through text to speech. I&#x27;ve caught soo many mistakes that Grammarly or Word didn&#x27;t when I hear it.
keitsistabout 6 years ago
I know this is an off topic question but would anyone know of a similar site&#x2F;author with a electrical and&#x2F;or mechanical engineering focus&#x2F;background?
Myrmornisabout 6 years ago
I agree that writing well is extremely important. However people like to do so much verbally in meetings, that what you write will probably not be read carefully.
abbadaddaabout 6 years ago
&quot;One of these ones is writing.&quot; - I couldn&#x27;t help but laugh at this. Would have been a little more concise to drop the &quot;ones.&quot;
sam0x17about 6 years ago
Right up there with &quot;communicating well&quot;, and the often important &quot;managing the expectations of non-technical stakeholders&quot;
syndacksabout 6 years ago
I&#x27;m surprised this article doesn&#x27;t suggest reading books. The best way to improve your writing is to read good writing.
JustSomeNobodyabout 6 years ago
I get that times are changing, but I still believe that if you choose not to write well, you just aren&#x27;t being professional.
0xdeadbeefbabeabout 6 years ago
Reading is undervalued, and just writing better won&#x27;t fix it.<p>Good readers tend to underestimate this problem obviously. If you read the article I bet your colleague didn&#x27;t, and he or she isn&#x27;t interested in reading your better-catchy-succinct-effective-if-not-superlative writing either, and he or she is going to rewrite the system.<p>(Oh but exceptions I can think of are Harry Potter, and also the LKML as a vehicle for developing linux)
antplsabout 6 years ago
I totally disagree with this claim, because, it is discriminating, narrow-minded, shortsighted and subjective.<p>Writing is only a way to convey information, there a many other ways to do it, and there surely will be other ways.<p>The current system favors people who know how to write in English, but it doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s fair nor right.<p>A language that may work for you may not work for others, therefore, &quot;well&quot; is not objective.
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ulisesrmzrocheabout 6 years ago
Engineers should write more science fiction, especially software engineers.<p>I’ve already died on this hill tho.
peter_retiefabout 6 years ago
Good software skills are good writing skills
nowabout 6 years ago
”Writing Good”, there, I fixed it for you.
zadkeyabout 6 years ago
Also, documentation skills.
dborehamabout 6 years ago
See also: critical thinking
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vidro3about 6 years ago
second only to reading comprehension
starpilotabout 6 years ago
how too rite good?i dum dum
growlistabout 6 years ago
Agreed, hugely undervalued and I would argue pretty rare. My formal grammar is pretty poor and I mainly operate on what sounds right, but nonetheless I am commonly shocked by the basic mistakes that are made by most people including very senior people - poor punctuation, ambiguities, misuse of apostrophes etc. I don&#x27;t know if this says something about education in the UK? But the main message to me is - things other than writing matter when it comes to getting ahead. Why bother showing it off or improving when it will likely just get you labelled as (if you can believe this still happens in a business like tech - but it does) a geek.
mlthoughts2018about 6 years ago
I actually have found that if you are an engineer who displays well-rounded skills in multiple disciplines, like business acumen, communication, writing and conflict management, this causes managers and non-engineers around you to view you as a threat, and they will work harder to undermine you and try to box you into a “engineer only” label.<p>Above all, you won’t be rewarded for these other skills, despite how vital they are.
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bongobongoabout 6 years ago
I don&#x27;t think this and other so-called &quot;soft&quot; skills are undervalued by engineers themselves. A good writer&#x2F;communicator brings immediate value to any engineering team and will be treated as such, usually. It&#x27;s the pointy heads and the business side of the operation who don&#x27;t value it, because it&#x27;s not sexy. IT and software engineering are abstract to them, so when they don&#x27;t see &quot;hands on keyboards&quot; (writing code), they think no work is being done.<p>Software engineering will remain in its infancy as a &quot;profession&quot; until software engineers themselves organize and better assert their own professional standards. Writing and iterating over documentation is an ISO standard that is ignored 99% of the time. If you ignore your professional standards, you are not a professional, no matter your title or your salary or even your field of work.
adamnemecekabout 6 years ago
It&#x27;s hardly undervalued. Another one mentioned too much is &quot;empathy&quot;.<p>I feel like these are such softball answers, as no one will say no, this is bullshit.
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