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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

#101

Post by dehrmann »

VectorLock wrote: post #45

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.

> Tech skills are comparatively easy to find materials for, I think.

Sorta, but most of the tech skills that are easy to find information on are closer to grammar and punctuation than to writing.

Just like software development, the way you train people to write is have people write and, importantly, have people review and edit it.

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

#102

Post by soneca »

capableweb wrote: post #93
soneca wrote: post #80

I believe I am a good writer. On my first job as a developer I kept getting very positive feedback on my writing. I ended up even starting a newsletter with writing advice for software developers[0]. So 4 months ago I started looking for a remote job. I applied to 250+ positions. All very suited to my skills (e.g. I wouldn’t apply to any job asking for “senior” or “fullstack”). I got about only ~15 interviews, 1 offe…

> I applied to 250+ positions That sounds wrong. It's common, but it still sounds wrong to me. When I look for new jobs, I find a couple of companies (3-4) that match with what I'm looking for exactly, read up on the companies, tell them explicitly how I fit into what they need and write them personally. I have a 100% success rate when it comes to interviews, and most of the time I get a offer, but drop out when my c…

”I’m sure your success rate will improve then”

I think you are wrong. I don’t have a CS degree, I don’t have top brand college or employer.

You also assume wrong that I didn’t dedicated myself to apply to specific jobs where I was a very good fit. I did that. And it didn’t got me offers.

If you tell me more about your profile, I am sure I can pinpoint why you get 100% success rate and I don’t. I am pretty sure it is not for the reasons you mentioned.

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

#103

Post by fxtentacle »

irrational wrote: post #72
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone in a corporation is unwilling to read more than a paragraph of a colleague's thoughts, it's amazing anything of any remote complexity is able to be produced by collaborative software organizations. Unless it's one guy in a corner, talking to nobody.

> it's amazing anything of any remote complexity is able to be produced by collaborative software organizations. Unless it's one guy in a corner, talking to nobody. Honestly, I have seen this happen so many times that I rather suspect it is fairly common.

Agree. It's usually one or two people building all core features and then an army of so-so skilled maintainers.

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

#104

Post by soneca »

MattGaiser wrote: post #100
soneca wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am on the fence on cover letters. I am pretty sure they are not the most crucial part though. I did write cover letters for most of my applications, a relevant part of them following all the good advice for cover letters, some just copy and paste. I couldn’t see correlation in my application of well-thought cover letters and interviews. My copy-paste one was very well written and representative of my skills. Good e…

How do you deploy the cover letter? I always package it in with the resume to force it to be read rather than just in the dedicated cover letter spot.

I always use the cover letter spot, never occurred to me that trick. Might be a good idea. Still, the GP argument is that a hiring manager would read the cover letter first. This trick would help with other type of managers

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

#105

Post by a-dub »

jariel wrote: post #7

It'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…

100% this. grammar, punctuation and all the like are nice to haves. (and can be good social signaling) but the real skill is the ability to communicate complex ideas completely in a way that is easy for others to understand.

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

#106

Post by tobinfricke »

shalmanese wrote: post #90
BeetleB wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a manager, you can probably get away with this. As an IC, people rarely read my emails if it doesn't fit in their screen (so 3 paragraphs is the max). The only thing I've found that works is to send details, and then probe the recipient on each important item in there to make sure they understood what I wrote. If I'm too detailed, they will get lost. If I'm very concise (but still complete ), they'll misinterpret.…

> As an IC, people rarely read my emails if it doesn't fit in their screen (so 3 paragraphs is the max). You need to learn how to restructure your writing. Most logical people naturally write in a way where it’s premise, premise, premise, conclusion. Instead, you need to write conclusion, premise, premise, premise. One way I’ve found to help my team learn to write this way is to institute a rule that any writing long…

We called this BLUF: Bottom line up front.

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

#107

Post by will_pseudonym »

3pt14159 wrote: post #76
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put your ask at the top, don't be afraid to use bullet points, keep things short and sweet. Most things can be effectively communicated in 2 or 3 paragraphs - if you need to communicate more than this, send it in a follow-up email after they respond. If you need to communicate more than this, you should really set up a quick call to communicate the thing and ensure they understand, then send the long email afterward.

Using checkboxes in GitHub issues is my secret weapon. There is no way to mark an issue as done or glaze over the details that way. Checklists in general are a great thing. I wish there was a startup that made community sourced checklists for common tasks like opening up a PR or writing an email asking for a raise.

Checklists also save lives!

> But a year after surgical teams at eight hospitals adopted a 19-item checklist, the average patient death rate fell more than 40 percent and the rate of complications fell by about a third, the researchers reported.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151103232100/http://www.nytime...

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

#108

Post by keutoi »

soneca wrote: post #80

I believe I am a good writer. On my first job as a developer I kept getting very positive feedback on my writing. I ended up even starting a newsletter with writing advice for software developers[0]. So 4 months ago I started looking for a remote job. I applied to 250+ positions. All very suited to my skills (e.g. I wouldn’t apply to any job asking for “senior” or “fullstack”). I got about only ~15 interviews, 1 offe…

It is likely that hiring practices are not updated for a remote job. With remote jobs increasing I think that writing skills will be taken into consideration.

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

#110

Post by rmk »

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…

Sadly this sort of thing rarely matters when performance review time comes. I have never received any significant benefit career wise or money wise from doing this, despite this kind of stuff making a huge difference for the new joinee.
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