[pavfarb]

>I actually miss the days when engineers blogged more rather than accumulating karma on Stackoverflow.

100% hit. I do write sometimes on StackOverflow to give back some help to the wonderful minds over then Internet, because, sharing knowledge is what makes the whole engineering better. What percent of clickbait attention-craving blogging does share some useful insight and/or knowledge?

>I find it strange that this is the top comment on a forum that wouldn't exist if engineers didn't write publicly.

Maybe because you didn't understand the core meaning of the comment? (I address this equally to my writing skills: English is not my first language). It's not "engineers shouldn't write", at all.

[flocial]

Your explanation is very different from the interpretation I made from what you wrote. Yes I agree that clickbait only adds noise but your comment seemed dismissive of engineers writing unless they were exceptional engineers.

[pavfarb]

Not so, regular engineers should write, it's a question of what they write. I'm a regular engineer, my colleagues are as regular boring folks as possible, yet we're writing stuff from time to time.

Look, here's an example, which emerged this morning as a pure coincidence:

I have a almost-finished blog post draft in front of my eyes my colleagues and I have been writing some time now. It outlines a problem we've stumbled, and, we believe, many other engineers have stumbled or will stumble upon quite soon (while migrating their code from Go 1.3 to 1.6 and further). The problem is exceptionally boring and stupid. We took extremely boring un-brilliant way to solve it.

The engineer who first encountered could've just written something like 'go memory management sucks', or 'how go moves forward and breaks my stuff in production', a million-and-first post about minor opinion. This is what I call useless noise, and, when used for self-promotion, quickly becomes click-bait out of desperation to get at least some attention.

Instead, we've fixed the issue, and in spare time have been slowly adding detail, reproducing cases and generating isolated statistics exactly for this case, and it grew into useful piece of knowledge for regular engineers (like we are) not to repeat the stupid mistakes we've done.

It is not as immediately rewarding, to sit on it longer until your writing has at least some utility for others, and will pay them off for the time and attention and context switch they've invested into you. This is what matters, not the "exceptionality" of engineers who are writing this.