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Comment by dx87 | Hacker News Reader

In general, technical people severely underestimate the value of good writing. My wife has a MS in Professional Writing, no technical background, and got hired to work in the IT department at a major publishing company. While there, her entire job was writing up guides, announcements, etc., that were going to be disseminated to the rest of the company. Management had identified that a bunch of time/money was being wasted because the IT team had nobody who could write in a non-technical matter, so non-technical employees were giving a lot of pushback on IT changes that they didn't see the benefit of.

Even though the IT employees would constantly make snide remarks about her having a "soft degree", management loved her because she could take technical information, even if she didn't fully understand it herself, and translate it into a format that could be understood by the rest of the company.

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At the risk of offending many HN'ers, I think many (most?) technical people severely underestimate the value of most "non technical" things. Sales, marketing, writing...

This is true in all fields. Everyone always over estimates their own profession's impact on the big picture.

Everyone of course estimates that their own field is most important, but IT often estimates that some non-technical fields are completely worthless.

Agree.

Not worthless, but trivially easy, to be fair to the misguided folks I've worked with in the past.

Non-technical fields are essential but the training and replacement is much easier compared to programmers profession. Not because programmers are genious talented people, simply because in order for a programmer to stay relevant to the field it becomes a norm to spend every possible waking hour in learning new software frameworks, updating skills. I feel guilty even when i watch competetive programmers youtube channel for entertainment. It is possible to treat the software job as a 9 to 5 job and dont have to spend time in updating the skills outside of working hours which is what a significant portion of the developers in service based software companies do. But it comes with a cost. You are at the mercy of the current employer and if they go out of business your chance of getting employed as a software developer is very low. The skill acquired in personal time is used to make the current employer profitable. With this context when people from non-tech departments like hr and accounting does not respond and tries power play is what makes the developers so arrogant.

All humans tend to overestimate the importance of themselves, what they do, and what they see.

So it is encouraging that technical people display some human traits :)

Having swung away from the technical somewhat and back again, my opinion is that many techies could make a decent fist of the non-technical side if they were forced into it, whereas the reverse would end in absolute disaster.

Agreed. Tech has a built-in gatekeeping mechanism due to the steep learning curve most people hit right at the beginning. No one is getting taught the fundamentals in school and it can be very hard to wrap your mind around it at first. Meanwhile, many other skills that are dismissed are ones where we got over the initial hump as children in school and the curve gets steeper much later, once you're trying to become a professional.

Once high schools actually start offering programming classes, and CS departments open their courses to the rest of the college, this gate keeping will evaporate overnight.

A lot of 'coder-first' programmers might see themselves at a disadvantage in job prospects in the future, especially compared to a math, stats, engineering, chemistry, physics, biology, history, geography, accounting, business, or any other majors really, who not only know how to code well enough for most jobs, but most importantly, how to apply their knowledge of programming to unique problems in their complex field.

A lot of other fields do a great job at training you to be an independent investigator first and foremost, specific knowledge second. This is one of the shortcomings mentioned to me from my friends who graduated with CS degrees: a lack of solid reinforcement on hypothesis driven analytical thinking especially, and too much emphasis on algorithms they never used again once they passed that particular exam.

A hiring manager therefore might take the polymath who knows programming over one of the thousands of applications they get every year from dime a dozen computer science graduates with great grades from a big school and some random capstone project on their github.

> A hiring manager therefore might take the polymath who knows programming over one of the thousands of applications they get every year from dime a dozen computer science graduates with great grades from a big school and some random capstone project on their github.

Sadly not my experience in the UK - it's all top grades in maths/physics/comp sci, x years experience on x ridiculously long and highly specific list of technical skills.

I used to be a game developer, which involves working with lots of people across different domains. I've seen no evidence that programmer art is any better than artist code. Given the choice between working with a programmer-turned-artist or an artist-turned-coder, I would almost always prefer the latter because they tend to be more aware of their deficiencies and able to accept help from others.

The kind of black-and-white thinking that programmers are understandably prone to often leads to them denying the existence of their own blind spots.

Interesting point that I hadn't thought of, though I'd counter that art as it's involved in video games is very much a technically skilled endeavour, no?

I think you just proved the parent post's point.

Not at all. I was easily successful enough to have continued in the non-technical side, but chose not to. And you should have seen what the marketing team were coming up with back then - we recreated one of their PPT slide backgrounds with the remains of a Thai meal one boozy team night out.

Plenty of techies can (and do) do it all. The opposite - not so much.

Again, you prove the point.

No, not at all. Want to carry on?

SUre. You've made it a point (twice now) to point out that you were able to be successful in non-tech roles but decided instead to go back into a tech role. You've pointed out that non-tech people weren't likely able to do the same, going so far as to put down the work of some colleagues who were non-tech by saying that a food menu was easily used as a substitute for their work.

I'm not sure how you don't recognize that that is EXACTLY the point being made: tech people think that the work of non-tech people is less important, less critical, and more easily done then their work. And that their work is special in that non-tech people are not capable of taking up a role at a keyboard and doing a good job.

I'm having a difficult time understanding how your statements can be interpreted any other way.

A big part of the challenge of many of those other things is that, they're not "fun", the way coding is. Well, they can be, but programming is a job that is regularly enjoyable, and that's something rare.

I told myself for years that it would be "easy" to quit smoking, and in the end, it actually was. The hard part is that it just plain isn't fun. In a funny way, quitting smoking gave me more empathy for nontechnical work.

That's an interesting observation. My experience was different: I learned how to program a bit and found the process so mind-numbingly boring that I gave it up entirely. A developer friend once told me, "I don't have a good feel for a project until I've written the first 1,000 lines" which is literally the moment I decided to stop trying to be a real programmer.

As for quitting smoking our experience is different there too. But glad we both quit. :)

I'm glad you quit. Would be interested to hear your experience.

And yeah, I think for the most part people learn to find some kind of joy or at least entertainment in what they do for work. Or they learn to be miserable sustainably.

Yep. Look at how many comments on HN are something along the lines of, “This looks like marketing BS.” But YC funds JuiceBro for Soup and nobody says “This looks like VC/startup BS.”

It sounds to me like they had technical people, but no technical writers, and a non-technical writer is proving a better compromise than a technical non-writer.

ironic, because the author is the exact opposite, stating that good writing is more important than iterative technological advancements.

He says, "Good writing is a business advantage that goes beyond almost anything outside of real transformative technological leaps," just after explaining how the Tesla Model S is basically the same as the Ford Model T.

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