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We used (enforced) a writing method for software developers of three categories: So Far, More To Go, Save It For Later. It was something like a personal Kanban

We used (enforced) a writing method for software developers of three categories: So Far, More To Go, Save It For Later. It was something like a personal Kanban board for project members sharing a real schedule in weekly compiled/tested feature deliveries. This was a visibility feature for schedule and release rationalization. There were no Hail Mary pass negotiations or requests permitted. The prose mattered and project leads were forced to read them. It was not anything that could be rushed at the end. "Save it for later" kept team time boxed and synchronized and gave managers features to schedule for future version releases and sales messaging. We fired people who could not write English right alongside their Java and PL/SQL. It worked great. 100% project completion over 125 projects. I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks. Software is 100% a product of communicative action. There are few excuses for execution failure absent bonafide academic grand challenges.

asciimo 9y ago
There's some dry satire.
bartread 9y ago
"We used (enforced) a writing method"; "project leads were forced to read them"; "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" (emphasis mine in all cases). Forgive my bluntness, but your place of work sounds awful. "I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks." Ironic, considering how poorly constructed this sentence is. You treat people like children and they will act like them. Let me reiterate: your place of work sounds terrible.
- Chiba-City 9y ago
  Smart clever people loved racking up resume win after win with high profile clients. Liking it is not in your job description.
  - dvt 9y ago
    > Liking it is not in your job description. Of course it is. Culture is very important to one's job. In fact, if you don't like you're job, you're not going to do a good job. Some companies make millions off of that premise (see Bonusly). I actually completely agree with the idea of prose being written alongside technical requirements, but the work environment (and your tone) sound god-awful. And for what it's worth, I'm a gamer.
  - hyperpallium 9y ago
    Can't argue for those results, but I wonder who decided "who could not write English"? Some other effect may be at work... e.g, perhaps having people who thought and communicated in compatible styles.
  - michael_storm 9y ago
    Nah. Sounds like you fired everyone who didn't drink the Kool-Aid, then told yourself that whoever remained was smarter than those who'd left.
  - Chiba-City 9y ago
    Back then educators and technical writers knew about pervasive passive voice writing problems. Brad Cox (Objective-C) ran our library and formalized onboarding. These were dark ages. Blog writing was yet to be. We walked people through "Dynamics of Software Development" and handfuls of shorter articles during lengthy onboarding. We shared examples of good writing. Project kickoff automaton was still instruction based and tarball then. We ran an internal early "best practices" Wiki to let people write more. We worked in groups on special projects more than task fulfilment. Group composition was important to clients. Our developers often shared our office space with clients on daily or weekly bases. We did a good job of doing a good job possible for that era. [Edits: typos]
  - bartread 9y ago
    I think that's short-sighted because if smart, clever people don't enjoy working for you they can and will find work elsewhere. Net result: you have to spend a lot of money and time hiring yet more smart, clever people, and so on.
- klibertp 9y ago
  > "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" The rest of the "features" of the GP workplace aside, this one is something I wish I've seen more often. Would you read a novel riddled with language errors? Where no sentence connects seamlessly to the next? Where there's an order of magnitude more implicit content to track than what is actually written? Where all the usual rules of orthography and punctuation are casually ignored, for no apparent reason? Where there's no structure to follow and things happen in a pretty much random order? I wouldn't. Yet I have to read hundreds upon hundreds of pages of code written in such a fashion. It's not just about aesthetics - code like that is harder to work with and, I think, in most cases is a net loss in productivity, ie. it would be better if that code was never written. I understand not all the code can be written with sufficiently well-worded comments and docs, but there should be a limit to how bad things can get! In other words, if you don't want to be treated like a child, please start writing like a grown-up instead of like a 5 years old who's convinced he's the best writer in the world.
  - bartread 9y ago
    I think we may be in danger violently agreeing, and perhaps I should have added a bit more nuance to my previous comment: - I've worked with plenty of people over the years whose first language is not English, so I don't necessarily expect the most wonderfully written prose in comments and documentation (or anywhere else). - I'd much rather somebody used expressive variable, method, type, or function names than wrote a ton of comments. Nowadays, with reliable auto-complete, and masses of storage there's really no need for terse naming. That being said, the odd comment to convey intent can be great. Reams of comments tends to be a smell because, even with the best intentioned teams, when the pressure's on they tend to rust, which in itself can obviously become a problem. Some might argue that incorrect documentation can be worse than none at all. - I do like people to write descriptive commit and PR comments: "fixed a bug" or similar is obviously not acceptable. But a lot of the above is about professionalism and taking pride in what you do, rather than being something that needs "enforcing". In other words it's something you want to deal with by hiring and promoting the right people, who are going to provide an example for others to follow. In my experience people who work in tech are not on average known for their love of being told what to do (although to be fair that applies many people) so it's more about creating a culture that leads to the outcomes you need than trying to enforce behaviours.
- nine_k 9y ago
  OK, replace "forced" with "mandatory", and "prose" with "issue tracker". "We have mandated that every task be tracked in Jira, with a predefined set of fields filled in." Does it still look unreasonably oppressive? Is this an example of treating engineers like children? (To me, expecting a person to write concise, mindful, well-structured prose is expecting them to show qualities of a well-developed grown-up.)
- Chiba-City 9y ago
  I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I was playing with words. A method is a protocol defining a group for a project duration together. We call numerical recipes methods but they are more like refined tools we apply selectively. Methods are more than a point solution preferences. I have yelled at the BSOD and typed harder at the machine. But software engineering is a pure communicative discipline. The "enforced" was rhetoric. All methods are mutually enforced like a grammar.
foo101 9y ago
Wow! With such a hostile environment, I am surprised that you are able to hire any developers at all. I am also surprised that you have the luxury of firing employees. I would imagine that the unfortunate developers who joined your company to sprint and go as far as possible from company like yours.
qualitytime 9y ago
I see what you just did there. From the article: "Simply writing about your feelings may help you perform an upcoming stressful task more efficiently"
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tudorw 9y ago
Your English is okay, you used initial caps after a colon for a sentence that is a dependent clause. 'It was not anything' needs help. Team time, should probably be team-time. Proofing is reasonable, though you missed the 'grammar of' which I assume should read 'grammar or', then the education should not be pluralised. I don't disagree with your point though :)

asciimo 9y ago

There's some dry satire.

bartread 9y ago

"We used (enforced) a writing method"; "project leads were forced to read them"; "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" (emphasis mine in all cases). Forgive my bluntness, but your place of work sounds awful. "I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks." Ironic, considering how poorly constructed this sentence is. You treat people like children and they will act like them. Let me reiterate: your place of work sounds terrible.

Chiba-City 9y ago
Smart clever people loved racking up resume win after win with high profile clients. Liking it is not in your job description.
- dvt 9y ago
  > Liking it is not in your job description. Of course it is. Culture is very important to one's job. In fact, if you don't like you're job, you're not going to do a good job. Some companies make millions off of that premise (see Bonusly). I actually completely agree with the idea of prose being written alongside technical requirements, but the work environment (and your tone) sound god-awful. And for what it's worth, I'm a gamer.
- hyperpallium 9y ago
  Can't argue for those results, but I wonder who decided "who could not write English"? Some other effect may be at work... e.g, perhaps having people who thought and communicated in compatible styles.
- michael_storm 9y ago
  Nah. Sounds like you fired everyone who didn't drink the Kool-Aid, then told yourself that whoever remained was smarter than those who'd left.
- Chiba-City 9y ago
  Back then educators and technical writers knew about pervasive passive voice writing problems. Brad Cox (Objective-C) ran our library and formalized onboarding. These were dark ages. Blog writing was yet to be. We walked people through "Dynamics of Software Development" and handfuls of shorter articles during lengthy onboarding. We shared examples of good writing. Project kickoff automaton was still instruction based and tarball then. We ran an internal early "best practices" Wiki to let people write more. We worked in groups on special projects more than task fulfilment. Group composition was important to clients. Our developers often shared our office space with clients on daily or weekly bases. We did a good job of doing a good job possible for that era. [Edits: typos]
- bartread 9y ago
  I think that's short-sighted because if smart, clever people don't enjoy working for you they can and will find work elsewhere. Net result: you have to spend a lot of money and time hiring yet more smart, clever people, and so on.
klibertp 9y ago
> "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" The rest of the "features" of the GP workplace aside, this one is something I wish I've seen more often. Would you read a novel riddled with language errors? Where no sentence connects seamlessly to the next? Where there's an order of magnitude more implicit content to track than what is actually written? Where all the usual rules of orthography and punctuation are casually ignored, for no apparent reason? Where there's no structure to follow and things happen in a pretty much random order? I wouldn't. Yet I have to read hundreds upon hundreds of pages of code written in such a fashion. It's not just about aesthetics - code like that is harder to work with and, I think, in most cases is a net loss in productivity, ie. it would be better if that code was never written. I understand not all the code can be written with sufficiently well-worded comments and docs, but there should be a limit to how bad things can get! In other words, if you don't want to be treated like a child, please start writing like a grown-up instead of like a 5 years old who's convinced he's the best writer in the world.
- bartread 9y ago
  I think we may be in danger violently agreeing, and perhaps I should have added a bit more nuance to my previous comment: - I've worked with plenty of people over the years whose first language is not English, so I don't necessarily expect the most wonderfully written prose in comments and documentation (or anywhere else). - I'd much rather somebody used expressive variable, method, type, or function names than wrote a ton of comments. Nowadays, with reliable auto-complete, and masses of storage there's really no need for terse naming. That being said, the odd comment to convey intent can be great. Reams of comments tends to be a smell because, even with the best intentioned teams, when the pressure's on they tend to rust, which in itself can obviously become a problem. Some might argue that incorrect documentation can be worse than none at all. - I do like people to write descriptive commit and PR comments: "fixed a bug" or similar is obviously not acceptable. But a lot of the above is about professionalism and taking pride in what you do, rather than being something that needs "enforcing". In other words it's something you want to deal with by hiring and promoting the right people, who are going to provide an example for others to follow. In my experience people who work in tech are not on average known for their love of being told what to do (although to be fair that applies many people) so it's more about creating a culture that leads to the outcomes you need than trying to enforce behaviours.
nine_k 9y ago
OK, replace "forced" with "mandatory", and "prose" with "issue tracker". "We have mandated that every task be tracked in Jira, with a predefined set of fields filled in." Does it still look unreasonably oppressive? Is this an example of treating engineers like children? (To me, expecting a person to write concise, mindful, well-structured prose is expecting them to show qualities of a well-developed grown-up.)
Chiba-City 9y ago
I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I was playing with words. A method is a protocol defining a group for a project duration together. We call numerical recipes methods but they are more like refined tools we apply selectively. Methods are more than a point solution preferences. I have yelled at the BSOD and typed harder at the machine. But software engineering is a pure communicative discipline. The "enforced" was rhetoric. All methods are mutually enforced like a grammar.

foo101 9y ago

Wow! With such a hostile environment, I am surprised that you are able to hire any developers at all. I am also surprised that you have the luxury of firing employees. I would imagine that the unfortunate developers who joined your company to sprint and go as far as possible from company like yours.

qualitytime 9y ago

I see what you just did there. From the article: "Simply writing about your feelings may help you perform an upcoming stressful task more efficiently"

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tudorw 9y ago

Your English is okay, you used initial caps after a colon for a sentence that is a dependent clause. 'It was not anything' needs help. Team time, should probably be team-time. Proofing is reasonable, though you missed the 'grammar of' which I assume should read 'grammar or', then the education should not be pluralised. I don't disagree with your point though :)