The Real Reason Silicon Valley Coders Write Bad Software

Totally agree. When people learn to code, it's important to teach them that code is written for other humans to read and understand.

I'm making CodeHS (http://codehs.com) to teach beginners to code and stress coding style and code readability.

We give every students real live tutors who help them out and critique their code to improve their understanding.

Engineers are hired, and paid, to code and write new functionality. It's unsurprising that they're generally not going to prioritize the quality of documentation, since that effort primarily benefits someone OTHER than the author.

While it's great to encourage better composition by the developers, companies should also consider the benefits of hiring proper technical writers - people who work primarily to improve and refine the quality of internal and external communications.

There's an added benefit: sometimes it's harder to write documents for people unfamiliar with a subject when you yourself are very deeply immersed in it. (E.g. an API is written a certain way BECAUSE that made sense to the guy who designed it. He's not going to see what has to be explained to a third party, because he sees it as intuitive.) Having a technical writer provide a more detached perspective on the quality of a document can be invaluable for both the developer and the final reader.

"Telling somebody to "look it up in the Wiki" is tantamount to telling them to go f* themselves." Ha! So very true.

This article is wrong. Here's why: http://ikaisays.com/2012/10/09/why-the-real-reason-silicon-v...