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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

In what sense is it under-valued? There is a fabulously popular musical about how the ability to write well can propel you to the heights of leadership of a nation. In my experience, people believe that the ability to write well is key to professional success.

Where are the people who believe that writing is not a valuable skill?

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I agree that when people talk about writing, it seems like they value it. But in practice I believe it's undervalued. I essentially don't know anyone that, given the choice of leveling up their writing skills vs their job-specific skills, actually focused on writing.

In the sense I've never seen any interview require a writing sample from a dev.

While almost never seen, some do. I've had to write a few pages narrative of a professional experience for a Lab126 (Amazon) interview.

You have to write at least a few coherent, error-free paragraphs in your resume typically. It's something of a good filter to toss out people that either can't, or can't be bothered to, write clearly for that small sample.

People generally don't read prose in technical resumes, moreover, I'd never hold it against a candidate because they're nudged into writing in a highly summarized, notation style. Unless there were blatant issues with language, and then I'd be super concerned about blowing off an 'english as a second language candidate'. About 1/2 of devs it seems are from 'somewhere else' and we can't expect them to have world class technical chops and perfect fluency.

In my experience developers tend to underemphasize improving their writing or communication skills (related but separate skills) as a part of their professional development. I seldom see managers suggest and send their reports to workshops or classes for professional writing. I have seen it, but only twice ever, and only an executive doing it for an upper level manager.

In reality, I think this should be an almost universal type of job training for developers.

It is undervalued in that a lot of engineers, especially early in their career/before they've worked at a real job, do not take it seriously enough.

Time and time again, I have heard jokes in college about the social ineptitude of engineers, and I have seen people not value basic social skills.

As people get older, these problems go away, but I really feel that we let new engineers down by letting them underappreciate social/writing skills.

I feel like we let new engineers down by not guiding them toward resources where they can improve their social/writing skills.

Where is the brilliant.org for social/emotional/communication skills?

Social skills are presented as an obvious thing and the lack thereof is grounds for ridicule and derision rather than pointers to resources. (Note: How to win Friends and Influence people is a good base, but the Harvard Negotiation Project has many more good books. Also, Charisma on Command is a great youtube resource)

We have them be taught writing by literature majors who insist there’s some meaning to blue curtains but can’t be bothered to explain why or what the principles behind making that judgement are. (Note: a great explanation of how symbolism works can be found by putting “extra credits symbolism” into google)

I think it's important to separate the skills out. Communication, social, and writing skills are three different things, and it's quite possible to learn all three without a literature class. You can thank the middle school and high school curricula for the unfortunate association.

Once you're in college, you can get the writing without the symbolism by taking writing classes, especially creative writing ones. But I amost never saw engineers do it, often out of a "what am I going to do with it? Write short stories for my documentation?" reaction. Their loss.

After college, there are plenty of books and classes you can take, but like programming it often comes down to practicing and getting feedback. There are websites and your local area likely has writer circles. You can get into short story writing and you'll get good feedback from others. Unlike programming, writing is an inherently social activity. In order for your writing to work, it must pass through the lens of another human.

Anecdotal evidence: in large corporations good luck finding leaders who can write anything in a clear and concise way. There are some, but by far and large they are exceptions. So much for "write well can propel you to the heights of leadership of a nation", playing politics is definitely the more important predictor than anything else.

Here, here.

FWIW, "Writing Without Bullshit" by Josh Bernoff (Harper Business, 2016) tackles this truth head-on. I liked what I saw when I took a look at my local bookstore and it's gotten excellent user reviews on AMZN.

It'd make a great gift for the PHB manager/director/CEO in your life <smirk>.

(me: no affiliation, just sharing)

Largely in how companies seem to store and transmit information either verbally or via PowerPoint rather than the written word.

Apparently some engineers who believe writing code is all that matters (myself included at some point in time).

Maybe undervalued is the wrong word, as clearly the economy rewards people who can write well. It’s just that it often seems overlooked. Job ads and CVs sometimes vaguely mention ‘good communication skills’, but I rarely see any specific mention of writing.

Which musical might I ask? Nothing comes directly to mind. A quick search doesn't yield any immediate results.

Hamilton

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