Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

youteam.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 332 posts

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

#141

Post by twicetwice »

dehrmann wrote: post #94
josephmosby wrote: post #2

Eng 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…

The longer I work in tech, the less silly it seems to have "English minor" on my resume.

These comments are making me feel a lot better about having "Philosophy major" on my resume.

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

#142

Post by mprovost »

wyclif wrote: post #82
Swizec wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People read if it’s written well. Don’t make it long to be long, make it long because it needs to be long. My favorite feedback is when someone replies to a 1000+ word newsletter with “Wow, short and to the point! Thanks”.

It's a lot harder to write something short and concise that efficiently communicates to team members than something long and wordy that requires a lot of reading.

"I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

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

#143

Post by capableweb »

thesz wrote: post #122

And I think it supports Dijkstra's argument [1]: "Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer." https://twitter.com/CodeWisdom/status/1318597850411008006

Not sure why it's "one's native tongue" and not "same language as the people you work with", as many of us hardly use our native language once we move away from the country we were born in, especially when talking about programming.

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

#144

Post by MattGaiser »

soneca wrote: post #104
MattGaiser wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I often write very unique cover letters, so I want to force them to at least be skimmed.

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

#145

Post by gingerlime »

soneca wrote: post #96
gingerlime wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed one thing -- in my opinion the most crucial: cover letter. I wrote about it on https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/who-doesnt-want-to-be-hired...

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…

my limited experience there is from reading hundreds of applications. The cover letter definitely made the biggest difference in our process (small remote company, no HR department, no headhunters or agents).

You mention things like “representative of my skills”, which I’m sure these were. I would however stress out the importance of representing the match to the employer. A good cover letter makes it obvious. And yes there’s an overlap between skills and match, but they are still different.

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

#146

Post by ako »

tayo42 wrote: post #111
cik wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This echoes OPs point about culture. One absolutely should not do what you've mentioned in my location. Here we lay out the arguments, and the conclusion at the end. The reverse is seen as jumping the gun, and not being well reasoned. It is looked down upon, and frequently discounted immediately. Cultural bias is very much a thing.

How is that cultural? Even through elementary school we were taught to have an intro with what your point is, follow up with supporting arguments, then conclude by reiterating the point the you made. How could you read anything without knowing the point in the beginning. Even research papers start off with an abstract.

This approach depends very much on culture. For example, US culture is very much, get to the point, start with the conclusion. German culture requires you to outline how you got to the conclusion.

Interesting book on this topic: The culture map, by Erin Meyer. (https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Map-INTL-ED-Decoding/dp/16103...)

It has a whole chapter on this topic: 3 - Why versus How, the art of persuasion in the multicultural world.

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

#147

Post by watwut »

tchalla wrote: post #137
cik wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This echoes OPs point about culture. One absolutely should not do what you've mentioned in my location. Here we lay out the arguments, and the conclusion at the end. The reverse is seen as jumping the gun, and not being well reasoned. It is looked down upon, and frequently discounted immediately. Cultural bias is very much a thing.

> One absolutely should not do what you've mentioned in my location. Here we lay out the arguments, and the conclusion at the end. The reverse is seen as jumping the gun, and not being well reasoned. It is looked down upon, and frequently discounted immediately. I would like to understand why the reverse is "jumping the gun". I am assuming the arguments have not changed, the reasoning remains the same. Why is a mere…

Theory: If people read conclusion first, then people tend to evaluate whether they agree or not after reading conclusion. Emotional reaction toward conclusion will bias interpretation of arguments.

The remaining arguments are more likely to be accepted or rejected based on what you know conclusion is. So instead of asking "is this true", people will start either with "I am looking for nitpick cause I see this is going toward bad conclusion" or with "yeah sure, it shows what I think".

However, they will still feel like they evaluated arguments on merit. If the conclusion is last, people can and some will go back to arguments to bias them, but it is easier to see what they are doing.

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

#148

Post by Veen »

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…

With some of my clients, I go even further. Where possible, I figure out what the possible answers to my question might be and write them in a concise numbered list (with a “something else” option at the end”). Ideally, the response is a number with a little context. At the very least, it prompts a response that challenges my assumptions, which is useful too.

I started doing this because I received so many short and incomprehensible or long and incomprehensible responses that rarely included the information I asked for.

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

#149

Post by IshKebab »

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…

Does a CS degree really matter? I suspect not. Where I work there are more programmers who did maths, physics, engineering, or something else (or nothing!) than there are programmers with CS degrees. Based on random people I've talked to it's probably like 1/4 of people have a CS degree.

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

#150

Post by Leherenn »

capableweb wrote: post #143
thesz wrote: post #122

And I think it supports Dijkstra's argument [1]: "Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer." https://twitter.com/CodeWisdom/status/1318597850411008006

Not sure why it's "one's native tongue" and not "same language as the people you work with", as many of us hardly use our native language once we move away from the country we were born in, especially when talking about programming.

It's especially surprising given Dijkstra wasn't a native English speaker.
Post reply on HN