261–270 of 332 posts
I'd say effective communication is more important than strong writing skills. I used to work with someone that could write 300 pages to communicate something that could have been communicated with a single sentence. I used to work with someone who wold span the team channel for hours to communicate something that he could take them time to properly craft a complete message. Prolixity and noise can happen on both writ…
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.
Programming ability is related more to language ability than to math: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60661-8
This study used a 10 session beginner Python course, and was graded almost entirely with multiple choice quizzes rather than actual problem solving. Seems like they ended up testing participants' ability to quickly memorise syntax and language constructs rather than more general programming skills. I have seen blog posts by middle/high school comp sci teachers saying that language skills are a greater predictor of su…
You can be a good coder (writing) but not a great engineer (math). Likewise the converse is also true.
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…
Please write a collaborative doc instead of an email if you have that much detail. Having an effective discussion over email is actively painful and worse yet no one can refer back to your detailed documentation later. Good on you for communicating. Personally I've found that details are great, but being able to distill that core message down to a quick code really helps. Call it an elevator pitch, sound bite or what…
I am interested in trying out Asana and Facebook Workplace to see if they have solved this in a more natural way.
I expect it would be more fruitful to create a workflow around a combination of video calls and writing that would take the strong sides of each to buttress the weaknesses of the other.
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…
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.
Alternative example: early on in my career, I was a software developer for a PR agency and then a news organization after that. At these organizations, solid writing and editing is drilled just as much as good code review or test coverage is taught in engineering organizations. Their lunch-and-learn sessions aren't about new JavaScript frameworks; they analyze how a particular piece of text was created and find ways to improve it.
My single largest "level-up" in this domain was when I started reading more on character creation in fiction. It forced me to think about how I'm telling stories, which then meant I had to think about how I constructed paragraphs, which then... you get the idea. Some great books I read:
- Robert McKee's "Story," which analyzes how great screenwriting is constructed. You will view action movies in a totally different way after this.
- Corbett's "The Art of Character," which focuses on how characters are created
- Roman/Raphaelson's business writing book, which was recommended by PR legend David Ogilvy
- the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff manuals (https://www.jcs.mil/Library/CJCS-Manuals/). These are rigidly structured texts with strange language that forced me to consider writing for a different audience than I normally would (military officers versus tech engineers)
One of the people I previously had the pleasure of working next to was absolutely brilliant in his field (malware reversing, broadly), but watching his presentations was an awkward experience. He just could not communicate his work effectively, either in a written or spoken medium and was someone who would have benefited immensely from a writing and presentation workshop.
I recommend hiring at least one person who actually knows how to get the job done. I also recommend making sure you don't interrupt them with senseless meetings, spam them with a doom scrolling e-mail stream, or force them to be in useless chat rooms that keep interrupting their train of thought.
> I recommend hiring at least one person who actually knows how to get the job done. I totally agree. Having "strong writing skills" is a plus -- but it is way less important than being qualified to the job.
Conversely, I think employers should actively promote writing and communications training programs to send staff to. One of the people I previously had the pleasure of working next to was absolutely brilliant in his field (malware reversing, broadly), but watching his presentations was an awkward experience. He just could not communicate his work effectively, either in a written or spoken medium and was someone who w…
How did we end up here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxjT7veKi9c