[chadly]

Something I've known for a while (but have really come to terms with more recently) is just how important writing skills are even for technical people (even coders). It's hard to get anything done if you can't convince people why they should listen to you.

Especially in this increasingly remote-connected world, writing skills are key.

[carlmr]

>how important writing skills are even for technical people (even coders).

Especially coders. Writing clear programs is a lot like clear writing. A function is like a paragraph of a text. It should meaningfully abstract one concept of your higher level logic. It should be introduced by a clean input from the previous "paragraph", and produce an output that is the input for the next "paragraph".

If your higher level function becomes too large, you can create larger structures like sections in writing.

Having this ability to mercilessly copy edit, paring down your functions to their core concept and putting them into meaningful context is really useful if you want others to understand your code.

[tom_mellior]

All this that you write about code is correct, but I think you are missing the parent's point. Coders also need to be good at writing non-code text for humans. There is documentation to be written, and bug reports, and proposals for new features, etc. I have colleagues who are brilliant developers, and when they propose something I'm sure their idea is technically sound, yet often I don't understand what they are trying to say because their writing is much poorer than their coding.

[carlmr]

I wouldn't say I'm missing the point. I agree that coders need to know how to write text. My point was that for coders writing is not the thing you do on the side, coding itself IS writing.

That's why I said that "even" should be "especially".

[closeparen]

Could not disagree more. Documents are props. They exist to help your stage production evoke feelings of gravitas and rigor, but this is driven more by form than substance. It’s a similar story for large officially scheduled meetings. Real communication happens in the hallway outside just after the official document review, and is pretty much independent of what was in the document.

[t-writescode]

Technical writing is absolutely a skill that developers need to know, among many other kinds of writing and it doesn’t have any gravitas.