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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

#41

Post by jennyyang »

dartdartdart wrote: post #21

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.

An engineer that can't communicate properly is a poor engineer, regardless of their coding ability. I've worked with too many great coders who were terrible at communicating. This includes engineers who were fluent at English. Communication is an extremely important skill.

This is a reality of life. If I moved to Nigeria and could barely speak the language, should I expect people to accommodate my poor communication skills? Or would I get passed over for a local who is possibly sub par in terms of coding quality but is more effective in all parts of their job?

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#44

Post by peterangular »

envolt wrote: post #30

I 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 d…

I've been the "over the moon" guy when someone comes aboard who wants to improve stuff. Sometimes when you're in the trenches competent help arriving can be a godsend. Not saying this is your situation, but people may just be excited.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#45

Post by VectorLock »

I'm really interested in finding resources to help my team members develop their writings skills. Tech skills are comparatively easy to find materials for, I think. At this point I think writing skills are so important it's the biggest priority for further their careers, given the level of technology experience they have.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#46

Post by tomjen3 »

dartdartdart wrote: post #21

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.

Not really, unless you assume that a great writer is someone with perfect grammar, as opposed to someone who is good at communicating their ideas in text (and image) form.

In fact you should probably deliberately include some grammatical errors and omissions so that you can flush out the people whom are unable to understand which things matter and which don't.

First language is Danish btw.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#47

Post by baby »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #13
keithnz wrote: post #8

This 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.

This doesn’t scale well, every time someone needs to understand, or onboards, or wants to audit a process then they have to go through that. It’s really hard to improve on something not documented.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#48

Post by mqrs »

Since we’re at the topic of eloquence, might I add that horribly-written codebases are unbearable to work with during this time, or perhaps even during regular times for as long as the set up is remote. I get it that codebases inevitably rot over time, but the amount of rot can be mitigated by good dev practices such as unit testing, code reviews, best-effort (not perfect!) documentation, and standardizing dev practices. Dev teams that simply don’t care about code maintenance practices because the code “works” won’t be able to move fast enough during regular times, much less during a pandemic remote-setup scenario.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#49

Post by rorykoehler »

alach11 wrote: post #23
hodgesrm wrote: post #11

I'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…

I've also worked remotely for 15+ years. I constantly ask dumb questions. It's amazing how much comes out of the woodwork doing that. Doesn't seem to have hurt career progression either.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#50

Post by cambalache »

jennyyang wrote: post #41
dartdartdart wrote: post #21

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.

An engineer that can't communicate properly is a poor engineer, regardless of their coding ability. I've worked with too many great coders who were terrible at communicating. This includes engineers who were fluent at English. Communication is an extremely important skill. This is a reality of life. If I moved to Nigeria and could barely speak the language, should I expect people to accommodate my poor communication…

> If I moved to Nigeria and could barely speak the language

English?

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