I recently had a colleague recommend Writing for Computer Science[0]. It feels targeted more toward academics, but there's plenty of useful things in there.
Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
51–60 of 385 posts
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#52Writing well can have several meanings. I'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).
Here is one of the first ticket I wrote in my still current company:
Then God appeared to wazoox and told him: "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." 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.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 think this is true inside a company, but it is another example of how weird our hiring techniques are. Writing plays basically no part in the hiring process. So for those engineers who have progressed by sharpening that skill, it is jarring to find that the barrier to their next job takes absolutely no account of it. You can spend years impacting or entirely setting the technical direction of a project or entire co…
Your comment made me realize that even when we hire execs/senior execs, I can't recall ever specifically evaluating their writing skills. I only recall doing so for dedicated comms people, but it's just as relevant for execs and yet we don't seem to do it there either.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#54Writing well can have several meanings. I'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). Here is one of the first ticket I wrote in my still current company: Then God appeared to wazoox and told him: "You will not spread your software on the face of the world without properly testing the new feature…
Do it once and it's kind of clever. Do it twice and it gets a lot less fun.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#55I 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 Jo…
I used to think like that (being the kid that wrote well in school). But now I'm not so sure anymore... Been humbled too many times by people much, much smarter than me that wrote in smsesque. Have read too many apparently well-written texts that are nothing but bullshit written by ignorants.
Limiting this to written technical discussions, I don't get uptight about misspellings, typos or grammar errors, so long as I can unambiguously parse what they want to say. What bothers me is that txtspk is almost always unclear and frustrating. That tends to lead me to try to find folks who do write clearly, just for efficiency.
I will say that I do judge on written proficiency. Again, I don't care that much about form (although in more formal writing, mistakes are signals), I care about clarity of thought and ability to convey relevant information. Completely apart from interpersonal factors, programmers who can't write in a human language tend to be bad at writing in artificial ones.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that is fine. I'm obviously not asking for someone to write the next Moby Dick when sending me an email asking for a status update. A short and simple message is totally fine, I just would be prefer that it be (mostly) grammatically correct.
That is easy to say, but it doesn't work that way. Your mind knows what you wanted to say and assumes it said that. Even when you read your writing again you know what you meant to say and you will skip over the bad grammar. Note that this same problem exists in spoken speech. Someone will ask a passenger to "please adjust your window out" which makes no sense. What they really want is adjust the mirror out, but the…
You have taken things out of their context. The syntax he was talking about is "when r u going to do this?", not honest typos. It has nothing to do with what you describe.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#57I 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 Jo…
I'll take a conversational email with sms shorthand and emojis explaining a bug effectively over the business major crap emails I get 30 times a day complete with greetings, farewells, oxford commas, correctly used semi colons that don't actually tell me what the problem is or what the repro steps are.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
And as a follow-on comment rather than an edit... There's nothing smarmy or dishonest about sales. Misleading sales is bad sales. The best salespeople are focused on fulfilling the customer's needs, not selling the product. The product sells itself once the customer understands that it fulfills their needs and offers them real benefits relative to the expense. And expense isn't just money. It's time. It's risk. It's…
Do you have any good resources on sales?
Start with How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. Ignore the cheesy-sounding title; this book was written in the 1930s and has been in print continuously ever since, which speaks to its effectiveness. I also recommend To Sell Is Human, by Daniel Pink (and all of Daniel Pink's other books, as well).
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that is fine. I'm obviously not asking for someone to write the next Moby Dick when sending me an email asking for a status update. A short and simple message is totally fine, I just would be prefer that it be (mostly) grammatically correct.
That is easy to say, but it doesn't work that way. Your mind knows what you wanted to say and assumes it said that. Even when you read your writing again you know what you meant to say and you will skip over the bad grammar. Note that this same problem exists in spoken speech. Someone will ask a passenger to "please adjust your window out" which makes no sense. What they really want is adjust the mirror out, but the…
I mentioned earlier that I am fairly understanding of typos.
Typos are an honest mistake, and since I work with humans, they are going to make mistakes. Even using the wrong version of "its" or "it's" is ok, because at least that is an easy mistake to make.
However, when someone writes me an email using a lot of abbreviations and shorthand, like something a 14-year-old would write on AIM, it makes me feel like I'm being treated like a 14-year-old on AIM.
Do I mind if a friend does that in a text? Not at all, this is informal. But coworkers aren't inherently friends, they should be (at least in theory) adults that you have some respect for.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#60Amazon is obsessive about this stuff. I'm surprised the article never mentions it. There are internal classes offered on writing better documents (and it's a great class). There'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've got a much higher chance of it actually happening. Want to share a desi…
Interesting. Is the advice published externally somewhere? The Everything Store does mention the silent reading bit.