I think you can reasonably attribute ~7% of our engineering team to me (2020)
twitter.com
twitter.com
If you want to hop in the time machine and steal what was working wonderfully: back in 2018/2019 we'd routinely run Remote Coffees, which were just "get a few engineers and EMs on a Zoom call to chat in a semi-directed fashion about what they work on daily", and I'd drum up a few hundred attendees for those coffees every month, and then observe how the funnel performed over time.
Patrick is chiming in on how his public writing may have greatly benefited Stripe.
Linking to what tweet out of context is probably going to get Patrick a lot of undeserved hate.
This is exactly how twitter is intended to work.
The UI does not clearly present the prior tweet in a conversation when linking to an individual tweet. This makes it easy for people to ignore the context since they have to work to see it. Combine this with the preference for using real names and it is easier to make the "look at what an asshole this person is" posts.
This is shocking to me, as I highly value good communication skills, and I assumed my industry did as well. For example, I think the main reason Rust is as popular today is thanks to Carol Nichols' & Steve Klabnik's excellent writing, and Steve's unrelenting advocacy (be it talks, blog posts, or online comments). The impact of a technology is nothing if it can't be communicated well.
I've been working in improving my technical writing, contributing significantly to our team's docs, and I have more respect for my colleagues who do the same.
Have other people experienced this scorn for writing that Dan Luu refers to?
Sort of. At a point >10 years into my career I had a junior dev ask me to remove my method comments during code review because they might become out of date some day.
Just to clarify, I don't think he's saying that 7% of their value is him specifically, I think he's saying that 7% of Stripe's engineers are there because of his blog. He's replying to Dan Luu's note about recruiting fees and how valuable a popular blog can be.
With no leadership aspirations, that is career incoherent work for me.
Maybe, though it can also be a way of learning. You crystalize & organize your thoughts with words. Regardless, the aphorism is old, tired and just plain wrong. Both writing and teaching are amazingly valuable skills.
Even so, saying "Writing is a form of teaching." needs more justification, especially in this context. Leaving that half-connected and confusing invites a downvote or two.
"Have other people experienced this scorn for writing that Dan Luu refers to?"
Frankly anyone who finds my reply half-connected and confusing is perhaps not very good at the skill that writing is meant to serve.
Or perhaps they're tired, or otherwise preoccupied. But reflection should enable them to see that as being the case.
To be clear, it's easy to see how your post connects to the post you're replying to. The problem is that internally, your post is not fleshed out at all, and it's not clear how you came to the conclusion that writing and teaching should be interchanged in this context.
There was nothing in the comment to indicate that you were not, either. It wasn't in quotes. Especially here, people take what's written at face value. I guess that's a communication lesson.
If you know about some of his pre-stripe past, this is a very funny comment on multiple levels.
Super throwback:
launch post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9173939
shutdown post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12415786
The idea that Patrick works there and thinks it's a great place to work at is "lending Patrick's personal brand to stripe". If you have a lot of trust in his judgment (and thus his brand), you're more likely to think that "hey stripe is probably a great place to work" and then apply there, because if it Wasn't then why would he still be working there? Or why would he be endorsing it? It also puts his personal brand/reputation at risk; if Stripe Isn't a good place to work, that hurts his brand
In summary, culture is downstream of hiring decisions. If a company is doubling headcount each year, then after two years 75% of the population will be new. If the newcomers' culture is different from what old-timers prefer, then attrition increases, which further skews the demographics.
This effect is strengthened when the hiring pipeline is focused on alumni from specific companies. For example, if you hire three layers of management from Amazon, and they replace tenured engineering leadership with newly hired ICs from Amazon, your team's culture will become that of Amazon.
Some blog posts I've found to be relevant to current circumstances:
* https://danluu.com/people-matter/
* https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Without writing thought process is single threaded and linear. With writing it becomes multithreaded and non-linear.
Generally speaking, blogging increases your personal profile more than it increases your company's profile, if any. I can name several HN famous bloggers, but at this point many have job hopped frequently enough IDK who they even work for anymore. Even when you hire someone like Patrick who's already a celeb, the recruiting pull only lasts as long as his employment. (I imagine Stripe is fine since there aren't many companies willing to hire remote workers in Japan while paying SV wages. YMM very much V).
I really expect most tech bloggers to fall into one of three camps:
1. Consultants, who need to build a name brand around their niche expertise. The typical consultant formula is spending 30 percent of your year working for clients, 30 percent finding new clients, and 30 percent skill building.
2. Product Evangelists who need to get people excited about a tech platform their company profits from.
3. New grads whose career hasn't taken off and consumed their free time yet.
This guy strikes me as pretty egotistical.
When he was writing about the bingo cards, I had side projects making more money for far less effort, but people knew about his while I didn't write about mine. I like to imagine the tone was (and still is) less about "Look at this amazing stuff I'm doing" and more "I'm amazed at doing this stuff."
The takeaway from his tweet likely isn't intended to be "Look how great I am" but "Here's an example of the power of writing, might be useful to consider". Presented with minimal tone, maybe people misread the intent.
Next, let's get a little more general by talking about opportunity cost. Assuming Patrick's writing really is responsible for 7% of Stripe's engineering team (which is a huge assumption), what would happen if Patrick had never written anything? Maybe the company would flounder and die, or, more likely, engineers would still be attracted to a high growth startup and Stripe would largely be in the same position.
Finally, I'd like to make a statement about writing in general. The goal of writing is to convey an idea. What constitutes an acceptable conveyance of an idea is context-dependent, but generally you want to convey an idea for a reason, e.g. you may want to convey the design of a system you're building. In these cases, creating the idea to convey (e.g. designing the system) is so much more important than the actual conveyance of the idea (e.g. explaining the system), unless you're so bad at explaining that people are hopelessly lost after reading your writing. Most people know when they understand something and know when they need clarification. Humans are consensus builders by default, which makes ok writing and great writing equally good in many contexts. The person who started this discussion may have been offended at the insinuation that they can't program, but I largely agree with such an assumption. Writing is a tool ultimately used in our profession to aid in the building of things. To focus only on writing means you're not focusing on building.
He might be going by interacting with team members and a couple dozen saying things like "I got interested in Stripe because of you talking about it" or "I was reading your blog for years, and tipped me towards joining Stripe instead of [other offer]."