"One of these ones is writing." - I couldn't help but laugh at this. Would have been a little more concise to drop the "ones."
Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
311–320 of 385 posts
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#312Writing 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…
In what sense is it under -valued? There is a fabulously popular musical about how the ability to write well can propel you to the heights of leadership of a nation. In my experience, people believe that the ability to write well is key to professional success. Where are the people who believe that writing is not a valuable skill?
In my experience developers tend to underemphasize improving their writing or communication skills (related but separate skills) as a part of their professional development. I seldom see managers suggest and send their reports to workshops or classes for professional writing. I have seen it, but only twice ever, and only an executive doing it for an upper level manager.
In reality, I think this should be an almost universal type of job training for developers.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not a native English speaker. Half of the team I manage are native English speakers,the rest are not. The recent project they did on communication templates was checked by the French colleague,while I no longer forward some of the files to English native speakers because they can't form sentences thst are clear enough to understand by others. It is not easy for a lot of people.
I work with a team that spans native speaker to barely able to form English sentences, and communicating clearly in a mixed audience like that is really a completely separate skill from native language use.
For the ones with minimal English it's often clearer to use phrasing that a native speaker would say is obviously wrong, but matches their native language patterns. Or use simpler but not-quite-appropriate words.
And for the native speakers, the awareness (or self-regulation) to eliminate idioms and less common vocabulary is nigh-impossible for some people.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#314Writing 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…
Those tweets from David Perell are amazing. Thanks for sharing!
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is undervalued in that a lot of engineers, especially early in their career/before they've worked at a real job, do not take it seriously enough. Time and time again, I have heard jokes in college about the social ineptitude of engineers, and I have seen people not value basic social skills. As people get older, these problems go away, but I really feel that we let new engineers down by letting them underappreciat…
I feel like we let new engineers down by not guiding them toward resources where they can improve their social/writing skills. Where is the brilliant.org for social/emotional/communication skills? Social skills are presented as an obvious thing and the lack thereof is grounds for ridicule and derision rather than pointers to resources. (Note: How to win Friends and Influence people is a good base, but the Harvard Neg…
I think it's important to separate the skills out. Communication, social, and writing skills are three different things, and it's quite possible to learn all three without a literature class. You can thank the middle school and high school curricula for the unfortunate association.
Once you're in college, you can get the writing without the symbolism by taking writing classes, especially creative writing ones. But I amost never saw engineers do it, often out of a "what am I going to do with it? Write short stories for my documentation?" reaction. Their loss.
After college, there are plenty of books and classes you can take, but like programming it often comes down to practicing and getting feedback. There are websites and your local area likely has writer circles. You can get into short story writing and you'll get good feedback from others. Unlike programming, writing is an inherently social activity. In order for your writing to work, it must pass through the lens of another human.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
You might like the additional followup standard, RFC 6919: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6919 > RFC 2119 defines a standard set of key words for describing requirements of a specification. Many IETF documents have found that these words cannot accurately capture the nuanced requirements of their specification. This document defines additional key words that can be used to address alternative requirements scenarios.…
What's the difference between "OUGHT TO" and "SHOULD"?
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#317I am from India and here writing skill for engineers is not valued at all. As someone into research, I found it important when I started sending papers. Academia here is not giving importance to the writing of its students.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#318Writing 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…
I disagree that writing is undervalued. I think that writing is highly valuable and highly rewarded...but that the path to overcome challenges with writing is bafflingly mysterious. Does anyone know of a therapist who has experience helping people overcome writing anxiety? I genuinely don’t know how to find one. Therapist-shopping is baffling. I ask this as a software engineer who can produce pretty solid writing if…
Are you terrible at writing in general, or specifically for self-evaluation?
Personally I feel very confident at writing, to the point where I fantasize about a professional writing career. But I can completely imagine freezing up at a self evaluation.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the end all writing or speech is about communicating an idea. My opinion is these people have learned it doesn't matter. If an idea can be conveyed in smsesque and still get the point across while being quicker to write, then why not? I have a feeling power/authority/expert status matters here because the listeners will power through unclear communication just to gleam a glimpse of the underlying idea from this id…
exactly!
i am reading all these replies and i found them really interesting. i think the same people being annoyed by sms-like writing, would get mad at me not using proper casing with my sentences.
at the end of the day, i think it does not matter. i am not writing a book or an article. and when i am texting, i would rather keep it short, sms-like.
i would like to understand, truly, why people get mad at such things. it has nothing to do with being disrespectful or anything.
last time someone was mad at a particular emoji. i believe it's the next form of shortening messages. and guess what? i would rather have an emoji than type a sms-like message. maybe some of us just like being efficient?
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#320Engineers should write more science fiction, especially software engineers.
I’ve already died on this hill tho.