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Comment by itsronenh | Hacker News Reader

I agree with most, if not all, the points raised in the post. I'm curious how people deal with:

1. Organizing knowledge. Too often I've seen a lot of well-written and well-intended information thrown into a shared cloud drive or wiki to rot and grow stale. You end up with multiple, sometimes contradicting documents about the same topic, finding what you're looking for is difficult, and before you know it people revert to tribal knowledge and slack DMs to find out what they need.

2. A writing culture can penalize and demoralize non-native speakers whose writing skills may not be as strong as their peers. I've worked with brilliant individuals who felt like they're perceived as "stupid" because their language skills weren't as polished.

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> 1

If you have a writing culture, you have management support to not mark work as done until documentation is updated. If someone asks for support because the documentation didn't answer their question, the support ticket is not closed until the documentation's language is improved and clarified. This is usually a good trade-off for management: the time spent keeping documentation up-to-date is repaid many times over by people who are able to help themselves instead of having seniors be continually interrupted. Note that this return is not necessarily realized for very small companies or companies where employee churn is low - this is generally true for large companies and growth-stage companies.

> 2

Companies have a choice, they can: a) decide not to hire people who won't be a cultural fit, b) invest in training to try and align people to the preferred writing culture, c) invest in dedicated roles like technical writers who can sit alongside engineers with poor writing skills, at the gain of being able to hire engineers with poor writing skills, at the cost of additional overhead due to the additional technical writer hire.

> A writing culture can penalize and demoralize non-native speakers

Couldn't you say this about basically any skill?

> I've worked with brilliant individuals who felt like they're perceived as "stupid" because their language skills weren't as polished

The problem there isn't that the company has a writing culture.

> The problem there isn't that the company has a writing culture.

English is my second language... not that anyone would notice. I've spent enough time writing fiction that I'm better at it than most people for whom it is native. Recently I've noticed I've started making the same homophone errors that actually native speakers tend to make; not sure if that is good or not.

But that's a huge time investment. If such companies want to pay people to spend three or four hours a day, for years, training their writing skill -- then sure, I don't think anyone will mind. Otherwise I don't think it's a reasonable request.

For #2, I think any company employing people where the going language is not their native language should invest in language courses.

I live and work in NL but a lot of companies have international employees, which means the going language is English. But it's English where nobody speaks it natively, so you end up with this kind of expat-English.

Companies like that should invest in either weekly class-based lessons, or mandatory one-to-one language classes through e.g. online. Spelling, grammar, writing and speaking practice, as well as culture classes.

And related to the article, typing classes. I've encountered multiple people now working in IT, whose job is reading and writing (code, documentation, emails, whatever) who cannot touch type. I don't think not being able to express oneself on a keyboard in a quick way is acceptable anymore. I can recommend typing.com, five minutes a day at least, it doesn't take that long to learn touch typing.

>expat-English

So this is a big thing in EU politics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English

Regardless of skill, you're always going to have to be tolerant of others and their limitations. You probably have a couple of good people in your company with dyslexic tendencies, for example.

Is touch typing really a big deal for most people who aren't copying documents? I'm a pretty fast typist but not a touch typist. It just never seemed like a big enough deal to learn. My typing speed certainly doesn't seem to get in the way of anything.

re #2: Being a non-native speaker is fundamentally going to make things more difficult, but when the alternative is meetings with different accents and no time to look unfamiliar words up, a document culture seems far more accessible.

That's a good point. The wider issue is of course that some people are smart, but not good at writing, and they might be sidelined in an organisation that leans heavily on writing. However, the corollary of that is smart people who are not good at talking get sidelined in an organisation that does a lot of talking. So that's an issue you will always have: the form of communication you focus on will always put some people at a disadvantage. It just means you have to be aware of that, and try and keep an eye open for people who have important things to say, but are struggling to get them across.

I find listening to heavy accents and persons struggling to find the correct words far more taxing than reading materials with confusing grammar and choice of words.

Surely in a company setting, it is possible to seek clarification from the original writer and then jointly rewrite the confusing parts.

Writing is way easier than speaking for most non-native speakers.

It is also a good idea to partner such persons with a good native writer, even if they are not as advanced technically. Then both persons improve in their respective areas.

1. Dedicated curation. Part of what makes the NodeJS project so successful is the formal curation applied to its documentation.

2. Writing takes practice. Ignoring this due to any bias is a case for institutionalizing ignorance. At my current employer I see much better writing coming out of India from non-native speakers/writers.

If you don’t have the necessary language skills, perhaps you should work in your own country?

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