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I disagree. If a programmer cannot articulate their thoughts and ideas clearly, and cannot effectively communicate with others through writing, I would questio
by rleigh 5y ago
I disagree. If a programmer cannot articulate their thoughts and ideas clearly, and cannot effectively communicate with others through writing, I would question whether they fully understand the concepts themselves, and whether they are actually a good programmer.
Being able to write is a skill in its own right, but it's one which anyone can acquire with practice, and it's one which many programmers would benefit greatly from. Writing code is only one part of the job, and writing documentation, requirements and design is a big part of the rest, and these parts are just as important. It's often the case that the act of writing down these things identifies inconsistencies and omissions which have not been picked up on during design or code review. And, ultimately, your libraries or application need to be used by other people, and if it isn't properly documented it's going to fall short of expectations since people won't be able to use it as intended.
- Spooky23 5y agoThat’s a fair point, but good technical writing is a skill in of itself. Just like having dedicated UX SMEs on a team improves a product, technical writers do the same, especially for complex systems. It’s not that a software engineer isn’t capable of writing, but more that it’s not their primary responsibility. I also anecdotally believe that having people in roles like this who are accountable for documentation, design, etc improve the overall product as they provide another layer of review.
- valuearb 5y agoGood technical documentation needs dedicated technical writers. Comments and internal docs can be handled by the engineers themselves, but turning that into an organized and properly formatted manual in a consistent style and voice for outside consumption is a specialized task that can’t be done piecemeal by the same people writing the code.
- lanstin 5y agoI sort of think this except I had a job for several years where we had really good technical writers who would sit with various developer and produce far more accessible writing than I ever have. It is valuable for my career to be able to write somewhat well but I am hired and earn my salary in other ways, debugging weird technical things; two days experiments, code reading, and maybe gdb and then one small PR and a short email explaining the issue. Write some nice network server to solve a network issue; implement some feature in a maintainable way. Etc. lot of work and mostly the way of thinking about it is a small piece of that work. The tech writers made a small book that could be handed and/or emailed to people who then integrated with my API with no further interaction between me and them. It was very helpful.
- Jetrel 5y agoI completely agree. Of the various coders I've worked with over my career, I've noticed an astounding correlation between quality-of-writing and quality of code. It becomes most curious with exceptionally talented people who are terrible communicators - they can engage with exotic and difficult pieces of code, but almost everything they write ends up being a trainwreck that nobody dares to use, nobody understands, and is typically riddled with bugs. Code is built to be used, and at the very least, you have to hand it off to other developers, or you're stuck maintaining it yourself. (In several cases like this, I've seen one of these programmers hand something off, and have others basically struggle to use it, and work around that by writing something much more rudimentary to replace it.) I feel like a programmer needs to understand writing for the same reason a general needs to understand what it's like to be on the front line - even if they're doing very little of it themselves, they need a clear understanding of what needs to be accomplished and what the difficulties will be.