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Hire Good Writers

gettingreal.37signals.com

14 pointsgetp10 comments

I will admit, we do see 37Signals blog posts on here just about every other day on every topic imaginable. Sometimes I wonder if they do more writing than working on their own products.

So it's no surprise that they'd write a post about liking writers. After all, it's just human nature to like someone that closely reflects one's self.

blog posts

They aren't blog posts. They're "chapters" in a "book". Your confusion is completely justified, though. People who would try to pass off blog-style entries as chapters in books should not discuss "good writers" much less try to determine what exactly good writing signifies.

I got a BSc, read half of On Lisp and then wrote a screenplay which got accepted to be read by a Hollywood agent. A good screenwriter is a good technical person! Compression is important, too, due to the confines of the screenplay (~100 pages). As opposed to a novelist, who has to write a lot more than a screenwriter.

"As opposed to a novelist, who has to write a lot more than a screenwriter."

They are different art forms.

Otherwise we should be looking for greeting card writers.

LOC comparisons for literature is a goofy idea.

Bleh. That "book" (notice quotation marks) of 37signals' has more horseshit per word than the book of Mormon. Okay, let's "get real".

Candidate A doesn't know what a binary tree is--but he knows how to properly stamp out dangling participles.

Candidate B knows how to code.

The first rule of a good writer isn't clarity, style, correct semicolon deployment, etc, but is rather saying things that aren't patently false.

Who said anything about "style, semicolon placement" &c? I got the impression that when they said "a good writer", they were more specifically requiring a good rhetorician. (Also, how often do, say, fiction writers say things that aren't patently false? At least some writers' worths are absolutely uncorrelated with stating the "patently false", so you can't say it holds for "good writers" in general.)

The thing about good writers is that they understand communication at a higher level than most people, because they practice it consciously rather than subconsciously. Therefore, a good writer is necessarily a good learner (the read-side of communication), and, assuming no specific mathematical-related learning difficulties on either side, would probably become a better programmer than the "actual" programmer.

You beat me to it while I was busy making the same point. I prefer to assume that you started at least 13 minutes before I did :)

I like your second paragraph very much. A guy who'd been teaching programmers at a technical college for a long time told me that the only predictor he ever found for programming aptitude was a combination of math and English skills. Neither one in isolation was correlated with success, but if you were good at both then you were more likely to do well at programming.

Sorry. Re-read the "book's" "chapter" again. He's not making any qualifications as you are. He's saying, "Hire the best writer," which is utter namby-pamby rubbish. Between two otherwise identical candidates, sure, hire the best writer. If you define "good writer" so that it correlates perfectly (by whatever means) with intelligence and problem-solving, then maybe hire the best writer.

But if I have to choose between Bill Shakespeare and an MIT grad for a programming position, guess who I'm hiring, despite 37signals' crappy, abbreviated, unsupported advice?

I find the 37 Signals Dear-Abby brand to be annoyingly oversold, too. But you're unfairly narrowing the definition of writing to make the point sound ridiculous. Obviously good writing involves more than correctly placing semicolons (though come to think of it, punctuation is probably about as important in code, mutatis mutandis, as it is in natural language).

Programming is writing, so good programmers are good writers by definition. I think the relationship between writing code and writing prose is a rich and interesting one. For example, each involves a great deal of reworking and editing before it is gotten right. Each requires the ability to think clear thoughts and to organize and express them. Each is about communicating to others (even when the only 'other' is yourself later on).

I've observed that programmers whose writing I have difficulty following tend to be programmers whose code I have difficulty following. The converse is also the case. So I think the point is a good one, even if I wouldn't express it the same way. And of course it doesn't mean I would hire Andrew Sullivan or Paul Graham to write me a binary tree - oh wait :)

This is an old thread, but I ran across the following statement by Philip Greenspun on p. 325 of Founders At Work:

The people who were really good software engineers were usually great writers; they had tremendous ability to organize their thoughts and communicate. The people who were sort of average-quality programmers and had trouble thinking about the larger picture were the ones who couldn't write.

I wish I had remembered this earlier. That the point was articulated by a sharp observer like Greenspun illustrates that it deserves attention beyond the rather glib formulation in the post we were discussing.

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