My favorite things about working at companies with a culture of writing

I work at a company you’ve all heard of that prides itself as a place where everyone writes and everyone reads. A lot.<p>I’m an individual contributor. In theory, my job is to build stuff, which - again, in theory - involves writing code, debugging, solving deep technical problems, and so on. Unfortunately, due to the culture of writing and reading I spend most of my time mired in documents. Every breath we take produces a wall of text that must be reviewed and commented on. At this point it’s been about three weeks since I’ve written code.<p>Not every question deserves the dreaded one-pager. Not every potential code change must be foreshadowed by an exhaustive treatment in a peer reviewed design doc. Not every potential failure mode must be imagined and written up in detail, including all hypothetical gory details.<p>And don’t you dare protest! You’ll be labeled not a team player, poor communicator, a lone wolf. You’ll get a negative performance rating in the next cycle and then “managed out” for non-compliance with prevailing culture.<p>Oh, performance reviews are a special kind of joy. For a few weeks each year the economy of writing traffics mostly in documents written by employees who must openly brag about work they did over the past year. It’s a kind of literary hunger games in a corporate setting.<p>Oh, and this Kafkaesque machine has feelings too. It’s weird about “tone”: disagree with someone’s writing and they see a personal attack. Sickly sweet praise is the name of the game, whereas legitimate critique of another’s writing must be circumspect and formed such that it cannot be “taken the wrong way” or else!<p>I’m so done.

Counterpoint: this can only work if your company has a culture of <i>reading</i> first.<p>I spent a lot of time on an exhaustive readme, but at best people skim it and ask questions or make the same mistakes I made again.<p>Writing is cool and all, but make sure you have a system in place, an index, and a culture of telling people where to find what.

Counterpoint: Confluence, by itself a great tool, just by hearing its name is making my eyes hurt from all the rolling.<p>I can&#x27;t count the projects I took part in, in which the &quot;knowledge database&quot; had grown in to a gigantic, helplessly out-dated pile of words. Few people read another persons content, thus even less correct&#x2F;update it. Finding anything usually involves scrolling through redundant search results and entries.<p>I know clean-code can&#x27;t solve everything but I find self-explanatory code to be a major time-saver: less need to write documentation, less need to update documentation, easier getting an understanding of the code.<p>For everything more meta, there are still comments or e.g. infrastructure files. And ultimately the README.md. Looking into a package.json or docker-compose.yml often was more helpful if not a requirement to make sense of Confluence&#x27;s content at all.

I agree with most, if not all, the points raised in the post. I&#x27;m curious how people deal with:<p>1. Organizing knowledge. Too often I&#x27;ve seen a lot of well-written and well-intended information thrown into a shared cloud drive or wiki to rot and grow stale. You end up with multiple, sometimes contradicting documents about the same topic, finding what you&#x27;re looking for is difficult, and before you know it people revert to tribal knowledge and slack DMs to find out what they need.<p>2. A writing culture can penalize and demoralize non-native speakers whose writing skills may not be as strong as their peers. I&#x27;ve worked with brilliant individuals who felt like they&#x27;re perceived as &quot;stupid&quot; because their language skills weren&#x27;t as polished.

One of the best things that came out of Amazon was the popularization of writing memos to ensure the meeting organizer and attendees had thought out the problems they are trying to solve upfront and use the meeting time to read and make a decision. Arguably how meetings should be conducted if you&#x27;re into the Peter Drucker&#x2F;Andy Grove philosophy.<p>Just about everything in this article are principles I value in any company. When you have a &quot;write it down&quot; culture, you get all these benefits and then some. What I have noticed in big tech however is the anti-pattern that most people in lower leadership positions are often mediocre writers and politician players. The best writers? Usually individual contributors or leading entire organizations.<p>For developers who don&#x27;t like to write, but like to express their ideas, I&#x27;ve found a &quot;RFC&quot; (request for comments) process to really clarify the thinking, get the right feedback, and ultimately make teams make higher quality decisions together before writing any code.<p>Anyway you put it, a culture of writing is crucial for success.

For me, the single biggest advantage of a writing-oriented culture is that it&#x27;s more remote-friendly. Even the &quot;road shows&quot; OP mentions don&#x27;t get to people who work in &quot;odd&quot; locations. I was fully remote for years even before COVID, but I was always close to an office. That meant I could go in when there guests showed up (assuming I heard about it in time). However, I could just as easily have worked too far away for that, and there&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> I would have missed out on.<p>Also, this suggests a type of interview that I&#x27;ve never seen IRL: make someone write text, not code. Give them a topic and a laptop, let them Google as much as they want, and leave them alone for fifteen minutes. For a whole bunch of reasons, I think that&#x27;s much more realistic than making people write code on a whiteboard in front of people, and candidates who do well at it are much more likely to do well for real.<p>Then again, maybe this is all motivated reasoning because I would have benefited personally from a greater focus on writing (and reading) at companies where I worked. At my last company I feel I was actively screwed because writing wasn&#x27;t valued at all.

Having worked at a writing-based company, any time I have to sit through a PowerPoint is now painful: Do I ask a question about the topic I care about now? Will we get to that topic later, and the speaker is just providing needed background context? Or is the thing I really care about sandwiched in at the end? Should I tell the speaker that we already know about all the stuff he&#x27;s talking about now? On this next slide, should I tell the speaker that all the thing he just said are &quot;basics,&quot; I&#x27;ve never heard of?<p>Having a document to read gives the time to read faster through things that don&#x27;t require as much attention, and read slower through things that require more attention, and maybe even stop and google things that you don&#x27;t know so you have needed background.

I’m in a company where English is not our native language, yet we write almost everything in it. Being a second language I sometimes need to phrase and rephrase my ideas while writing them. I found that it sharpens my thinking.

Amazon often pitches itself as having a &quot;writing culture&quot;, but much like the LPs and other mantras like &quot;working backwards&quot;, this is more a case of cult-like exceptionalism than any sort of actual advantage once viewed from the inside.<p>I haven&#x27;t seen any evidence of a company culture scaling beyond ~10 people - in a bigger group, sub-cultures and individual personalities seem to inevitably take precedence. Arguably this is even more the case at a place like Amazon where raw metrics are king - nobody cares how culturally aligned your work is as long as you are delivering the goods.

I am exhausted by the use of powerpoint as a replacement for well-formed prose.<p>I don’t even know if prose would be superior, but I find diagrams to be, almost always, completely meaningless, or at least far more economical to describe with written words, than to create and then present with the ephemeral spoken word.<p>But go ahead and try writing a long thoughtful prosaic treatise on technical strategy to solve some difficult problem. It will almost certainly be ignored by the people you are trying to influence, and if you’ve been responsible at all with including criticisms of alternative views, it will infuriate people and create permanent enemies. PowerPoint is safe by nature of it’s ambiguity. People look at it, and automatically assume that you are representing their own thoughts. This is how you build agreement on disagreement by abstraction to the pseudo-technical neutral. The project will fail, but you will get promoted. Writing is precise, and contrapuntal, and dangerous to your career.<p>Edit: Upon reflection, I believe that this has a lot to do with the nature of authority in the business. The company I work for (not specifically my immediate group) currently has a very strong culture of top-down decision-making; very little influence is accepted upward, as well as very little explanation required downward. As a result, everything is ephemeral, and decisions from above change often, so nobody has the ability to break that chain by committing anything to writing.

I like this culture too, and I wish it was more prevalent. Unfortunately, many developers today oppose it, writing explanatory code comments in natural language is seen as unnecessary, and documentation in natural language is seen as an afterthought.<p>I also suggest to younger people, try to write your own notes in full sentences instead of just bullet points. This is a good first step towards appreciating writing more, and in my experience helps you organize and remember your thoughts better.

I’m all for culture of writing, but that feels too easy.<p>Like another pointed out, what about a culture of reading? And further, what are these cultures of writing doing to help individuals improve their writing? Understanding audience, valuing brevity, tone, structure, knowing when not to write, etc are all important skills that the vast majority of people in business (probably including me) lack.<p>Further, writing takes time. How do you evaluate what writing is worth it, that the time you take away from e.g. coding still adds business value? It certainly may, but that feels very hard to quantify.

Too bad when you&#x27;re trending on HN and the link to the paid version at the end of the article returns 404...

I&#x27;ve been writing for most of my life. I&#x27;m fairly good at it; but nowhere near a professional writer.<p>I write in a manner similar to how I design software. I use an &quot;evolutionary design&quot; approach[0]. My writing tends to be a rather loosely-organized, casual, vernacular.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;littlegreenviper.com&#x2F;miscellany&#x2F;evolutionary-design-specification&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;littlegreenviper.com&#x2F;miscellany&#x2F;evolutionary-design-...</a>

&gt; Less political orgs: I’ve found that the companies without a culture of writing are the most political.<p>Hm, I do wonder what James Damore would have to say about that

I&#x27;m the kind of person who likes to write stuff out while planning or figuring something out.<p>At my last workplace, I was chewed out for doing so because apparently I was &quot;wasting time&quot;.<p>But we ended up wasting a lot more time over subsequent months because nothing was concrete, so plans kept changing, people constantly misunderstood, stuff had to be re-explained and discussed with people who&#x27;d forgotten or hadn&#x27;t paid attention or who&#x27;d joined the team late, it was a mess and it really kinda pissed me off.<p>My current workplace is better in this regard, where stuff can be planned and finalised and put to paper before we begin working on the implementation.

The following quote is attributed to Leslie Lamport [0], creator of LaTeX and important contributor to the science of distributed computer systems:<p>&quot;Writing is nature&#x27;s way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.&quot; [1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Leslie_Lamport" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Leslie_Lamport</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;author&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;523508.Leslie_Lamport" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;author&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;523508.Leslie_Lampor...</a>

Writing is very important. My partner has worked at two of the FAANGs and often times could not understand what anyone was even trying to say. Surprisingly the smartest people in the world are also amongst the worst writers in the world.<p>My only advice, and I am by no means perfect... Is to use bullet points!

Scientific progress has been enabled by well written materials. Most seminar presentations are an overview of the material which inspires interested persons to read the actual papers for more details.

Culture of writing is not really inclusive. Some people struggle with writing, e.g. dyslectic people