Agree, but this does skew in favor of people who's first language is English, which shouldn't really be an indicator of engineering quality.
To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
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Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#22This isn't my experience, I find that people who are quick to initiate communication do really well. Doesn't matter too much about the writing (maybe some people are much worse than us at writing) as we simply voice chat if things weren't clear
This is how it is at my company (100% remote). Having Zoom on stand-by is key for us. Anytime things get complicated, we just hop on a Zoom call. All of us can communicated well in writing, but I don't know of anyone on my team who prefers it. For me, in particular, I'm an incredibly slow writer, so it's just painful to write too much.
It’s big where I work, too - I’m very into the little slack (there might be a teams one?) plug-in, where you can just message people “/zoom” and it instantly makes a meeting with whoever’s in the chat.
It makes little 5-minute meetings for debugging or clarification super painless, which means we do more of them, which is huge for the team being on the same page.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#23I've been working on remote teams for almost 20 years. The key to success is overcommunicating. In other words--don't assume people have full context or share assumptions. Write emails that lay out assumptions explicitly and detail problems completely. As a manager I sometimes feel like a Habsburg bureaucrat buried in the Chancery offices sending painstaking messages to a far flung empire. Come to think of it, remote…
I strongly relate to your comment! I was recently brought into a project where my company was working with a vendor to use their platform to reduce tedious work. Only by repeatedly emailing the vendor specific questions was I able to discover that the internal team had made some significant incorrect assumptions about what the vendor's product does.
To prevent dozens of wasted work hours, we can't be afraid to ask specific questions, even if they might make us look dumb!
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#24Agree, but this does skew in favor of people who's first language is English, which shouldn't really be an indicator of engineering quality.
I don’t think it skews towards English speakers in particular: it actually skews towards strong communicators in the preferred communication language of the team. A great engineer who can’t communicate effectively with the team due to a language barrier isn’t a very useful team member. It’s tempting to think that technical ability should be the sole measure of someone’s worth as a engineer but that simply not true outside of working in a vacuum.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#25How do you interview for developers with strong writing skills? Do you give a writing assignment, etc
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#26> To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills I strongly agree! Looks like many other commenters agree too. how do I find companies that are hiring and agree with this statement? I've had a hard time finding those companies. I've had a slew of interviews recently, and none of them asked about my extensive online writing. None of them seemed to have clicked through to my website. A…
Amazon celebrates good writing.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#27Agree, but this does skew in favor of people who's first language is English, which shouldn't really be an indicator of engineering quality.
If they can't even communicate in person because they aren't familiar with English, they shouldn't even be considering a remote job where they have to write and overcommunicate in English all the time.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#28To be honest, this fetishization of writing is very Anglo-centric. I don't think that people say this for example in Germany.
This is a strange comment. >this fetishization What part of Mr Tien's post implies that he fetishizes writing? I read it twice, the logic behind prioritizing writing skills in a remote-first world is reasonable. Why is it suddenly a fetish? >I don't think that people say this for example in Germany. What experience are you drawing this statement from? Are you saying people in Germany don't prioritize good writing ski…
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Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#29“If you’re a strong writer and you can consume information in written formats really well, you’ll probably have an easier time transitioning to a remote team than someone who prefers face-to-face communication.”
Inspiring young employees to read and become more articulate is something the best managers and organizations do. Few people enter the workforce being ultra-literate. Who writes love letters, anymore? Who bothers to inspire, or to be inspired? A scarce currency is only more precious.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#30I joined a new company recently (during pandemic; July). The onboarding was not so smooth. I was constantly following up here and there to get things done (e.g access to tools with IT), more importantly to get to the part with whom do I need to follow up and how to follow up; figuring this out was another follow up.
I created an onboarding guide last week (for my team) which was a very small thing for me (created a document on confluence in an hour). But the amount of response I got was overwhelming (IMO bit too much compared to how i expected to be yet-another-document).