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I disagree with this advice in the general sense. There is a trend right now in Silicon Valley to have all manner of meetups and presentations. I've worked with

I disagree with this advice in the general sense. There is a trend right now in Silicon Valley to have all manner of meetups and presentations. I've worked with tons of these guys and the majority of them are not going anywhere. You still need something worthwhile to present. A top-notch presentation about another new Ruby DSL for migrating data from MySQL to PostgreSQL is not going to help your career as much as writing Anywhere.FM in 3 months. If your work is good enough, you can always get someone better than you to do the talking. Improving your communication skills can't hurt but it isn't the single most important thing you can do.

michael_dorfman 19y ago
It depends on your role in the organization. I've hired a lot of coders in my time, and I have to say that (given a baseline of competence) I'll hire communication skills over additional coding prowess pretty much every time. For a coder who is part of a team (and not the founder of a start-up) you can't "always get someone better than you to do the talking." In most corporate situations, coders who can't effectively communicate with their peers or supervisors are essentially worthless, regardless of how slick they code.
DanielBMarkham 19y ago
I think you misread the article. The article was about improving your programming career, not creating solutions, forming a startup, becoming a great programmer, etc. To improve a career, you need to communicate better. It didn't say that it was the single most important thing to do overall. It was specifically about career advancement. Even in the startup arena, there are lots of capable coders who have created awesome solutions who just don't know how to connect and communicate to the right people. After all, it's not the idea -- heck, it's not even the code, it's the ability to communicate effectively to people that makes a startup run. You can have the next best thing to sliced bread and if you're not able to communicate (market, sell, persuade) it doesn't really amount to much, right?
- comatose_kid 19y ago
  I'd still disagree. Empirically, it seems that career success in programming happens to people who approach a technical problem in a novel way (eg - ZFS, gmail, Asterisk, off the top of my head). Communication is important, but it is secondary. Of course, if your definition of career success is ascending through various ranks of management, I can see your point.
- menloparkbum 19y ago
  I didn't misread the article. I disagree with it. While he mentions improving communication skills in the general sense, specifically the article seems to be about presentations and public speaking. I don't think this is the most important thing you can do to improve your career. In fact, within the spectrum of interpersonal communications, you are probably better off learning how to schmooze on a personal level before you hone your presentation skills.
raganwald 19y ago
First, +1. I think there is a lot of room for debate around this subject, and frankly this was exactly the debate I hoped to provoke (which is why I included a video of Jobs introducing macintosh, a product he really did not create in the engineering sense). Should we be like Woz? like Jobs? Should we strive for a partnership like Woz + Jobs? Hire a "Sales Animal" and a PR firm as Paul has described doing with his company? And what is the role of an incubator/angel/YCombinator? Can it help programmers focus on programming? Or is there something really fundamental in "communicating well" that is necessary to successfully creating programs? I think there's a lot of room for discussion around this, and I hope it's as productive for you to weigh the various options and outcomes as it has been for me in my life.

michael_dorfman 19y ago

It depends on your role in the organization. I've hired a lot of coders in my time, and I have to say that (given a baseline of competence) I'll hire communication skills over additional coding prowess pretty much every time. For a coder who is part of a team (and not the founder of a start-up) you can't "always get someone better than you to do the talking." In most corporate situations, coders who can't effectively communicate with their peers or supervisors are essentially worthless, regardless of how slick they code.

DanielBMarkham 19y ago

I think you misread the article. The article was about improving your programming career, not creating solutions, forming a startup, becoming a great programmer, etc. To improve a career, you need to communicate better. It didn't say that it was the single most important thing to do overall. It was specifically about career advancement. Even in the startup arena, there are lots of capable coders who have created awesome solutions who just don't know how to connect and communicate to the right people. After all, it's not the idea -- heck, it's not even the code, it's the ability to communicate effectively to people that makes a startup run. You can have the next best thing to sliced bread and if you're not able to communicate (market, sell, persuade) it doesn't really amount to much, right?

comatose_kid 19y ago
I'd still disagree. Empirically, it seems that career success in programming happens to people who approach a technical problem in a novel way (eg - ZFS, gmail, Asterisk, off the top of my head). Communication is important, but it is secondary. Of course, if your definition of career success is ascending through various ranks of management, I can see your point.
menloparkbum 19y ago
I didn't misread the article. I disagree with it. While he mentions improving communication skills in the general sense, specifically the article seems to be about presentations and public speaking. I don't think this is the most important thing you can do to improve your career. In fact, within the spectrum of interpersonal communications, you are probably better off learning how to schmooze on a personal level before you hone your presentation skills.

raganwald 19y ago

First, +1. I think there is a lot of room for debate around this subject, and frankly this was exactly the debate I hoped to provoke (which is why I included a video of Jobs introducing macintosh, a product he really did not create in the engineering sense). Should we be like Woz? like Jobs? Should we strive for a partnership like Woz + Jobs? Hire a "Sales Animal" and a PR firm as Paul has described doing with his company? And what is the role of an incubator/angel/YCombinator? Can it help programmers focus on programming? Or is there something really fundamental in "communicating well" that is necessary to successfully creating programs? I think there's a lot of room for discussion around this, and I hope it's as productive for you to weigh the various options and outcomes as it has been for me in my life.