On this note, can someone suggest good practical resources to learn how to improve writing skills?
William Zinsser's "On Writing Well" is a good starting point.
To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
31–40 of 332 posts
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#32Eng manager at a team that was remote pre-pandemic and I will 100% confirm this is critical to getting things done. I'll add on that it is tough to find someone who is a great writer and a great engineer early on in their careers. You just haven't had a lot of time to practice both. When you're looking for junior candidates, they will often fall into two camps: they'll write too much, or they'll write too little. If…
For a junior candidate, which do you think is easier to train? The engineering skills, or the writing skills? At first glance, I think writing... But as I think more I personally think the writing / communication skills are more challenging to teach, especially to engineers because it is more of an "art" than a fixed talent.
Considering the number of people who have good engineering skills vs good writing skills (I think very few people are good at writing), I think writing is more difficult.
Most people are not used to paring their writing down and getting rid of the fluff while also being articulate.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#33On this note, can someone suggest good practical resources to learn how to improve writing skills?
I've had good experience with Steven Pinker's book The Sense of Style.
Also journaling every day helps immensely.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#34It's not really about 'writing skills', it's 'communication skills'. 'Writing' usually implies the ability to be creatively articulate, for example, like writing a long form news article. People can be great writers and poor communicators. For coherent team communications you even don't need proper grammar - what you need the ability to be clear, succinct, appropriate, provide context, timely etc.. It's not about 'wr…
"you need the ability to be clear, succinct, appropriate, timely etc.." These are the basics of technical writing. But to be fair, technical writers are also called technical communicators.
That's true - but the article is not about technical writing, nor is technical writing the key to smooth communication for remote workers. (Obviously it might help though.)
Many great writers are far too verbose and indirect to be great examples of how to succinctly communicate.
Again, the term 'writing' is totally misapplied.
Most people have sufficient writing skills, the issue is content which is where most of us are lacking.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#35Agree, 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 anything I would think this is the opposite. Written communication above verbal/face-to-face gives the non-native speaker greater time to formulate their correspondence, look things up if necessary, and use translation tools for help. On the flip side they may get less from language-agnostic channels such as body language, but I think that is a small loss compared to the gains.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#36Agree, 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 ou…
But English skill is a major component of being a strong communicator in English.
Native English speakers who practice speaking English every minute of their lives would be at a huge advantage.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#37I'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 sp…
In marketing world a common way of ensuring good communication is the client will write a brief of what they want, then the agency will reply with a 'response to brief'. Here they basically write the same thing in their words back to you.
It helps on several levels to ensure understanding is aligned vs emailing back 'I got it' and off to work.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#38I'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…
The other thing working remote forces me to do is to actually think before I assign a task to someone or ask a question. It's a lot easier to casually interrupt someone with half a thought than to write a poorly thought out email.
That is also the main advantage of email over IM. Email kind of forces some effect of the remoteness you described even when everyone is in the same office.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#39> 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…
Stripe
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#40To 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…
The part where he says that writing matters for remote work. Like these types of articles tend to pop up in different contexts but it's always vague.
I'm drawing on the experience that people in Germany don't talk about the importance of writing as much.