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I think this doesn't account for what is, in my experience, the most common reason why engineering blogs fail: they have the wrong objective altogether. In a f

by alxlaz 7y ago

I think this doesn't account for what is, in my experience, the most common reason why engineering blogs fail: they have the wrong objective altogether. In a former life, back when printed magazines were still a thing, I used to do some (pretty bad) tech journalism, so every time $crt_employer wanted to run, or expand their blog, I ended up going to meetings (I now do that professionally as well, actually -- it helps keep those programming-related brain cells sane). The vast majority of posts (and blogs) that I've seen were awful not because of a tortuous approval process or lack of high-level support. They were awful because communicating substantial, serious engineering information was not the main point. Or one of the main points. Or a point at all, really. It was usually just an excuse to push out some marketing and "establish a presence", and management felt that involving technical people writing on technical subject would lend that effort the kind of credibility that ads don't have. This had repercussions over the whole publishing chain, and these efforts were doomed from the beginning. Topic selection was inadequate (topics were selected primarily so that they'd have the right "ring" to product/marketing/business development managers, rather than so that they'd be interesting for a technical audience). Editing was done with the wrong objectives and targeted the wrong metrics, and was often based solely on input from non-technical people who didn't understand what a technical audience wanted. Then this article -- on a topic that wasn't really interesting for a technical audience, and not really written for a technical audience -- was promoted mostly for a technical audience. Since the people who were doing the promotion were, inherently, in non-technical position, and they mostly consisted of a boring tech article with a mini sales pitch attached at the end, everyone ended up seeing them as marketing fluff. It doesn't help that our industry is still stuck in this world where "technical" and "non-technical" is a very strict dichotomy, where technical people are basically like a 2020 Mr. Spock and non-technical people can barely type on a computer. That hasn't been then case in more than ten years. A lot of people who are seen as "non-technical" -- people in sales, marketing, or in management positions -- have grown up with computers. Lots of people in decision-making positions used to hold a technical position at one point. The kind of depth that a non-technical, but not tech-illiterate audience appreciates can be very surprising.

andrewzah 7y ago
> people in sales, marketing, or in management positions -- have grown up with computers. This doesn't mean anything. Have you watched some 15-22 year olds interact with computers lately? (I'm 23, for reference). They don't hunt and peck on the keyboard in stereotypical fashion but they're just as clueless for anything besides basic interactions. They -are- essentially tech illiterate once they step outside of google sheets, etc, or the web browser in general. I'm tired of hearing people say "digital native" like it means anything with regards to tech literacy. We're going to have another generation come in and take power that has zero idea of how computers function. At least we understood this and factored this in about the last generation- now we just assume the new generation knows things because they grew up using apps. If anything, the new generation is more illiterate on average, but with better mechanical facilities and understanding of typical modern UX for apps.
- alxlaz 7y ago
  > They -are- essentially tech illiterate once they step outside of google sheets, etc, or the web browser in general. 25 years ago there were people who were essentially tech illiterate as soon as they were put in front of a computer, not just when they stepped outside of Google sheets or the web browser in general. You think having grown up with computers, in a world where technology is easily-available and part of pop culture means nothing, but it has been years since I've last had to explain a grown-up that some computers are faster than others, that something which is available on paper can be made easily made available on a computer (scanning, photography etc.), what a server is, or that a website can become unavailable if too many people access it. It used to be that writing for a non-technical audience entailed unthinkable effort for seemingly trivial things. Not just explaining technical terms. We had lists of words we had to be especially careful with because they also had non-technical meanings, and if someone wasn't aware of that, they could get the wrong idea. That list included words like "server", "mouse" and "window", and I've personally seen grown-up people standing behind imposing desks who got really confused upon hearing these words without the proper context. Eight year-olds who just learned how to read and write can pick up a word processor with way less effort than eight year-olds (and non-technical fifty year-olds) could twenty years ago. They understand, for example, how scrolling works. Teaching people how to use a word processor used to entail explaining things such as "you can keep typing once you're at the end of the page". You needed to say that explicitly because the interface didn't seem to have any way for you to get another sheet of paper once you filled one up. People would write things on a page until they got near the bottom, then proceeded to stare quizzically at the screen wondering how they could get another one -- because that's exactly what they did in real life. I'm not saying that people who grew up with computers don't need to be told what TCP is and what a load balancer does. But they do have an intuitive understanding of things that a non-technical audience from twenty years ago didn't have. Including super basic things that you take for granted now, but it used to be that you couldn't -- that things from the Internet don't show up on your computer instantly, that how quickly they do depends on the quality of a connection, that computers need to be given explicit instructions each time (i.e. they'll always ask if you want to save your work before quitting -- they'll never figure out that you always say yes).

by alxlaz 7y ago

andrewzah 7y ago

> people in sales, marketing, or in management positions -- have grown up with computers. This doesn't mean anything. Have you watched some 15-22 year olds interact with computers lately? (I'm 23, for reference). They don't hunt and peck on the keyboard in stereotypical fashion but they're just as clueless for anything besides basic interactions. They -are- essentially tech illiterate once they step outside of google sheets, etc, or the web browser in general. I'm tired of hearing people say "digital native" like it means anything with regards to tech literacy. We're going to have another generation come in and take power that has zero idea of how computers function. At least we understood this and factored this in about the last generation- now we just assume the new generation knows things because they grew up using apps. If anything, the new generation is more illiterate on average, but with better mechanical facilities and understanding of typical modern UX for apps.

alxlaz 7y ago
> They -are- essentially tech illiterate once they step outside of google sheets, etc, or the web browser in general. 25 years ago there were people who were essentially tech illiterate as soon as they were put in front of a computer, not just when they stepped outside of Google sheets or the web browser in general. You think having grown up with computers, in a world where technology is easily-available and part of pop culture means nothing, but it has been years since I've last had to explain a grown-up that some computers are faster than others, that something which is available on paper can be made easily made available on a computer (scanning, photography etc.), what a server is, or that a website can become unavailable if too many people access it. It used to be that writing for a non-technical audience entailed unthinkable effort for seemingly trivial things. Not just explaining technical terms. We had lists of words we had to be especially careful with because they also had non-technical meanings, and if someone wasn't aware of that, they could get the wrong idea. That list included words like "server", "mouse" and "window", and I've personally seen grown-up people standing behind imposing desks who got really confused upon hearing these words without the proper context. Eight year-olds who just learned how to read and write can pick up a word processor with way less effort than eight year-olds (and non-technical fifty year-olds) could twenty years ago. They understand, for example, how scrolling works. Teaching people how to use a word processor used to entail explaining things such as "you can keep typing once you're at the end of the page". You needed to say that explicitly because the interface didn't seem to have any way for you to get another sheet of paper once you filled one up. People would write things on a page until they got near the bottom, then proceeded to stare quizzically at the screen wondering how they could get another one -- because that's exactly what they did in real life. I'm not saying that people who grew up with computers don't need to be told what TCP is and what a load balancer does. But they do have an intuitive understanding of things that a non-technical audience from twenty years ago didn't have. Including super basic things that you take for granted now, but it used to be that you couldn't -- that things from the Internet don't show up on your computer instantly, that how quickly they do depends on the quality of a connection, that computers need to be given explicit instructions each time (i.e. they'll always ask if you want to save your work before quitting -- they'll never figure out that you always say yes).