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Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

#231

Post by anchpop »

everyone wrote: post #81
tombert wrote: post #6

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'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…

"when r u going to do this?" Why is that annoying? Its perfectly clear and concise. Good writing imo.

As with most things in life, it's about signaling. At work I always type with correct grammar to seem professional. On twitter I deliberately don't use capital letters or apostrophes to seem relaxed. Not because I actually care (and I don't care what anyone else does), but it influences how I'm seen. I really have no idea why it matters so much to some people, other than generic "its just our culture" arguments.

Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

#232

Post by sixstringtheory »

everyone wrote: post #191
sixstringtheory wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well the hypothetical manager would have no control over the images of people you apparently form for whatever reasons.

Solipsism. In communication, intent and perception are both factors that affect how the parties view each other. This is what "know your audience" means.

> apparently form for whatever reasons

I already gave you the reason: they aren't communicating professionally. They do have some control over how they project their image to others. After all, they're the one writing the message.

Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

#233

Post by JoshTriplett »

alexpotato wrote: post #193
Maro wrote: post #180

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…

> I wonder if they have a junior person that does/did the writing for them.

Many senior non-technical people have a "technical assistant" or similar, a talented generalist who helps wrangle the thousand different technical things the non-technical person needs to deal with.

Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

#234

Post by alexpotato »

Maro wrote: post #198
alexpotato wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Afaik in "modern times" at "modern companies", ie. startups, everybody does their own emailing. I worked at Facebook, maybe Zuck/Sheryl has somebody helping them with email (I don't know), but they're obvious outliers.

I meant more in the sense of "They have other people write and then send the important email/docs etc" and not the "hey, can you help me write this email".

I've helped several managers over the years write emails and I'm pretty sure they didn't then go tell everyone "Yep, I had help with this email" so I think it be surprising to some folks how often this happens.

Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

#235

Post by JoshTriplett »

bloopernova wrote: post #184
jsty wrote: post #4

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.…

When you say "must" with the weight of RFC 2119, you need to consider the "or what?". If you're writing a standard, what force does it carry? Is there a certification? Is it a marketing issue? Will other implementations put the bad implementation on a blocklist? Will they actually fail to interoperate in practice? Or can someone get away with violating the "must"?

Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

#236

Post by tombert »

samirm wrote: post #169
tombert wrote: post #6

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'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'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. This might seem paradoxical at first, but upon further inspection you realize that those who learn a language (as opposed to acquire it) are better at it.

I also think it has to do with the fact that in order to write in a second language, you have to more-closely monitor what they're writing, because it doesn't come as natural.

I don't know any second languages, but I suspect that in order to communicate with the native-speakers of that language, you have to be a lot more deliberate about it.

Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

#237

Post by lightsighter »

aphextim wrote: post #201
alexpotato wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I recently got to ride in the co-pilot seat of our company plane and it was a neat experience to see everything and listen to the radio chatter and the view was amazing to watch the sun rise and the moon set at the same time. He showed me how as a fighter pilot he was trained to spot other aircraft. When one would show up on the radar he would point and be like see that plane over there? I could never see it until we…

Actually there is some vision science behind this phenomenon. Your fovea is what you use to focus on things and it's got lots of cone cells that are good at picking up colors and specific details but are not so good at picking up motion. The rest of your eye though has tons of rod cells that effectively see just black and white, but are really good at doing motion detection (mainly to recognize predators and prey in your peripheral vision). So instead of trying to use your fovea to find the plane (which it really sucks at doing), you instead keep your eye moving which exposes much more of the scene to rod cells and let their natural motion detection abilities go to work.

Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

#238

Post by kazinator »

> It is with a larger organisation that writing becomes important for messages to reach a wider group of people.

I'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.

The larger the company, the more of a cog you are with specialized tasks. Writing? That'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.

If the engineer started in a small organization which grew, but that engineer's responsibilities grew in proportion also, then that is apples and oranges. You have to compare how much writing is required in comparable roles.

Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

#239

Post by chrisseaton »

walshemj wrote: post #230
jknoepfler wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty asinine response to a point that is substantially correct. Insisting upon a set of rules for otherwise commonly understood words (an RFC defining "MUST") is usually a pedantic waste of time, and will actually reduce the quality of the finished product. No one is here to dispute the usefulness of approximately correct contemporary grammar. I would dispute the usefulness of insisting that design docs co…

You are assuming that everyone working with the document is a native English speaker and / or has worked to a standards based development system. Even so back in the day ICL managed to ignore a counter MUST start from Zero in implementing an X.400 stack - and you wonder why the uk No longer has a mainframe supplier.

If people can't understand the simple word 'must' how will they understand the more complicated words that RFC 7322 uses to define it?

Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

#240

Post by aphextim »

lightsighter wrote: post #237
aphextim wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently got to ride in the co-pilot seat of our company plane and it was a neat experience to see everything and listen to the radio chatter and the view was amazing to watch the sun rise and the moon set at the same time. He showed me how as a fighter pilot he was trained to spot other aircraft. When one would show up on the radar he would point and be like see that plane over there? I could never see it until we…

Actually there is some vision science behind this phenomenon. Your fovea is what you use to focus on things and it's got lots of cone cells that are good at picking up colors and specific details but are not so good at picking up motion. The rest of your eye though has tons of rod cells that effectively see just black and white, but are really good at doing motion detection (mainly to recognize predators and prey in…

Thanks! I always like to know the meaning behind things and this was very insightful!
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