191–200 of 385 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"when r u going to do this?" Why is that annoying? Its perfectly clear and concise. Good writing imo.
If I had a manager send this to me, it would impress in my mind a comical and degrading image of them hunting and pecking for keys. Doesn’t conjure much respect in an industry where computers are the main tool, IMO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh, most of my coworkers are smarter than me, so I'm certainly not trying to make an assessment on their IQ or any nonsense like that. That said, I do think that writing smsesque (which I am going to steal for the future because I had never heard that term before) is a really good way to make yourself look dumber, especially to non-engineers. Even if my long and rambling writings lack substance, they still typically…
This resonates with me. My writing is clear and concise, I'm proud of it, and it pays off because I can communicate effectively. I'm not sure I agree with the "undervalued", 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'm guessing whether they mean X…
Reminds me of a story about fighter pilots from World War 2. Some of the best fighter pilot aces had, at best, average vision. Their coping strategy for this was to find pilots who weren't as good at dogfighting but had excellent vision as wingmen.
Both parties benefited since the better pilot could spot enemy planes earlier and the lesser pilot got to fly with an ace and occasionally get kills they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
The 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…
To us, good, structured documentation and/or well-written tickets are a crucial part of delegating a task. Practically, it is part of my job to figure out and solve hard and architectural problems, around once per problem. Then I can document it properly. After that, the bulk of the team should be able to solve this problem.
And this is producing value for our customers, because well-documented standard tasks are resolved faster. I might be unavailable due to some critical problem. But if it's a documented standard task, one of the four other guys can pick it up and resolve it quickly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I do think that writing smsesque (...) is a really good way to make yourself look dumber, especially to non-engineers. Maybe they do that in purpose, then?. They do not need to be admired by everybody, especially not by non-engineers. Like the very rich people who dress extremely humbly, with torn-down clothes.
No they do not. I've seen a LOT of smsesque text that come from all sorts of different people who i'm 100% they are not trying to "appear dumber". I do not know why people do it, so i assume laziness. Smart people can be lazy too.
My tech-write wife says the Engineer-writer fault she most often encounters is the 'mystery story'. That's hiding the lead down at the bottom of an argument. Because Engineers like to show their work and don't want to 'give away the ending' until they've proved it right. 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 par…
[0] https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-pre...
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. 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…
I'm currently trying to get some folks on the same page regarding the most basic of things in a design document, and the passive resistance is just astonishing to me. Just adding the following text seems to upset some people: The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.…
I disagree with you, but since I'm shadowbanned, there's no point in explaining why.
This resonates with me. My writing is clear and concise, I'm proud of it, and it pays off because I can communicate effectively. I'm not sure I agree with the "undervalued", 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'm guessing whether they mean X…
I wonder if they have a junior person that does/did the writing for them. Reminds me of a story about fighter pilots from World War 2. Some of the best fighter pilot aces had, at best, average vision. Their coping strategy for this was to find pilots who weren't as good at dogfighting but had excellent vision as wingmen. Both parties benefited since the better pilot could spot enemy planes earlier and the lesser pilo…
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'm pretty sure that writing (reasonably) well online is what got me a job in venture capital after ten years as an engineer. David Perell (host…