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Comment by tilne | Hacker News Reader

One of the points from the article was that writing helps you scale yourself. If you were a great engineer on my team I would want you to write everything down regardless if that was the way you thought through the alternatives or if it was just recording the understanding after you’d gotten to it.

That said, I don’t buy the idea that you reach the same clarity of thought by talking through an idea as compared to writing that same idea down with the intention of communicating it clearly to another person. The latter requires significantly more command over an idea.

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Why? Because you can’t? You’re illustrating my point. You are asserting something about my experience without having had it, based on your own. On my teams everyone writes stuff down to their ability, for instance a lot of non native speakers just can’t do a good job of this. But I always have the writer, and everyone works with them to be sure everything of importance is written down in a high quality way. But I judge people by their contribution, not the mode of the contribution. I’ll betcha my teams are more functional, but I’m sure you will disagree so I suspect we have to agree to disagree (but I’ll still poach your nonwriters and non English speakers with aplomb!)

I have to agree with tile and the OP. Even if you have a dedicated formal writer for writing formal documents like briefs or proposals, every engineer should be decent at writing. Especially now that more and more communication is asynchronous.

I've worked with many engineers who couldn't write, and it always came across in the aspects of the work mentioned in the thread — less ability to parse error messages, to describe things to others over email/Slack/comments, and most critically, to understand things that others wrote. Fundamentally, a huge amount of engineering is reading and writing. And I find those skills are very often linked.

Sorry I think I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean there was a dedicated writer any more than there’s a dedicated speaker or dedicated coder. The conversation is about the mode by which people gain their clarity. A person who gains clarity by writing will naturally gravitate to doing that and will be the dominant writer in the team. But that doesn’t obviate anyone from writing. There are people that gravitate to drawing things out to think things through. That’s where the gravitate, and they’ll likely end up doing a lot of the diagramming. Etc. But everyone participates in every aspect to their ability. The key is recognizing everyone isn’t the same, and that’s not a flaw but a feature. Many managers have a prescriptive view of an engineer and evaluate them like quality control in a widget factory. An excellent manager evaluates the people for their strengths and aligns their work to those strengths. In the foot ball analogy the core skill is running. Everyone runs. But some are really really fast runners. So you have them run really really fast. You let the person who’s really good at throwing be the quarter back. They still run, but it’s not expected they run as well as the fastest runners nor is it a problem. Because the fastest runners are the catchers. If you think engineers don’t come in the variety and shapes and skills as a football team, I don’t think you really understand how teams or humans or engineers work yet and I hope you consider looking at them as individuals and not a prescriptive skill set.

I feel you are putting yourself, and others in a box. We all can gain more clarity from an idea by talking, writing or drawing about it. You don't have to be good at it, it will still improve your grasp of the problem. Of the three, writing is the slowest, meaning your mind takes more time and effort. And the time spent on something has a direct relation to its quality.

Long story short, you will become an even greater engineer by drawing and writing out your ideas.

Sure, of course everyone has different strengths. That might apply to things like one's ability to work with other teams, or being detail-oriented versus being able to see the big picture.

I don't think that applies here. Writing and reading are very basic skills that will help you in all aspects of your job as an engineer, and everyone should be as good as they can be at them.

If we’re going to get pedantic about who can assert what about which experiences: you are asserting that you’re able to reach greater clarity of thought when talking as opposed to writing, correct? But how do you know that’s true? You’re unable to try talking first and writing first for any given task. So although I may be asserting something about your experience without having had it myself, so are you.

On a (somewhat) less pedantic note I would add that “asserting” is a bit strong of a word to describe the statement I made. Perhaps you should be a bit more precise with your words. Writing more could help :).

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