[rp3]

Where to begin? First, let's start with the most specific. Patrick claims to have written almost 3,000,000 words, which is almost 3 times the entire Harry Potter series. I'm not passing judgement on him. It's great that Patrick can write so prolifically, but such an undertaking can only be described as Herculean. Success in writing for the public typically follows a power distribution. Using words written as a proxy for popularity, it can likely be assumed that impact will be exponentially lower for someone who writes less.

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.