Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
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Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
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Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#2It's hardly undervalued. Another one mentioned too much is "empathy".
I feel like these are such softball answers, as no one will say no, this is bullshit.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#3It's hardly undervalued. Another one mentioned too much is "empathy". I feel like these are such softball answers, as no one will say no, this is bullshit.
It's definitely undervalued by engineers themselves. I.e., the majority don't seem to treat this skill as a priority in their professional development. However, it's definitely not undervalued by the companies that hire them. Especially as they progress through their careers, where they will experience a glass-ceiling affect if they have not sharpened that skill.
EDIT: Fixed stupid autocorrect error (thanks sokoloff). I wish browser inputs had grammar hints as well as spelling correction.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#4I 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.
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't address any real user needs.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#5The more experience I get as an engineer, the more time I spend writing documentation, proposals, tutorials and the like.
This article is absolutely spot on when it points out that these skills become increasingly important as the size of an engineering organization grows.
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't physically co-located.
I don't think software engineers talk about or think about how to improve technical writing nearly enough.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#6I 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'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.
I'm hardly John Steinbeck or Mark Twain, but I'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 "when r u going to do this?", I get a bit annoyed.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#7It's hardly undervalued. Another one mentioned too much is "empathy". I feel like these are such softball answers, as no one will say no, this is bullshit.
It's definitely undervalued by engineers themselves. I.e., the majority don't seem to treat this skill as a priority in their professional development. However, it's definitely not undervalued by the companies that hire them. Especially as they progress through their careers, where they will experience a glass-ceiling affect if they have not sharpened that skill. EDIT: Fixed stupid autocorrect error (thanks sokoloff)…
Though I was a "pretty good or better" software engineer, it's almost surely the case that I've made more career gains from English-language writing than code-writing during my career.
(Normally I'd let this pass without comment, but because of the specific topic of this comment chain, you mean "glass-ceiling effect" not "affect" there.)
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#8It's hardly undervalued. Another one mentioned too much is "empathy". I feel like these are such softball answers, as no one will say no, this is bullshit.
Writing well may not be undervalued from a managerial standpoint, but I think many individual engineers undervalue developing good writing skills. That assessment is based on personal & anecdotal experience. Writing skills are a subset of communication skills. Communication is largely "getting the idea(s) in my head into your head with as little ambiguity and confusion as possible". Once a team is is reasonably large and diverse, this becomes very valuable and important to the individual engineer.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#9The more experience I get as an engineer, the more time I spend writing documentation, proposals, tutorials and the like. This article is absolutely spot on when it points out that these skills become increasingly important as the size of an engineering organization grows. The biggest challenges in engineering at scale (scale in terms of complexity and size of the team) are around communication. Good writing is how y…
Absolutely. And if you ever want to strike out on your own and start your own company (especially if you want funding for it), writing well is critical and can't always be outsourced.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#10I 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. 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 syste…
“Writing is nature's way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.”
― Leslie Lamport