Since becoming a technical manager, I have trained several experienced software engineers to develop myself even more professionally. I noticed a few often underestimated skills to develop. Skills that greatly increase the impact of any developer. One of them writes.
Most software developers focus primarily on the ability to write good code. And that makes a lot of sense. This is an essential step in becoming a great engineer within a reasonably large team.
However, successful businesses continually grow. Sooner or later, the software engineering team will consist of more than a few dozen people, where anyone can easily talk to anyone. People are divided into different floors. New offices are opened in various locations. More and more, personal communication is no longer enough. Channels such as e-mail, chat or video calls are becoming increasingly important. The rate at which this growth occurs varies from company to company: for some, it takes years. Some of the really successful companies do it much faster.
Especially in a large organization, writing becomes important for messages to reach a larger group of people. For software developers, writing becomes a tool to reach, speak to, and influence engineers and teams outside of their immediate peers. Writing becomes essential for sustainable thinking, compensation, and decision making. By writing down these thoughts, they are made readable to a wide circle of people. Things to do sustainably can include suggestions and decisions, coding guidelines, best practices, tutorials, runbooks, debugging guides, and postmortems. Even code reviews.
For people to read what you write, it has to be well written. If you grab people's attention early on, they'll continue to read and understand the message you're trying to convey. More of them will respond, and without too much misunderstanding of what you meant. Good copywriting can increase your ability to communicate effectively across multiple teams, an organization, or your entire business. And the ability to communicate and influence beyond their immediate team is the essential skill for engineers as they progress in seniority from senior engineer to what companies would describe as a leader, manager , a respected employee or engineer.
So how can you work to improve your writing? Write in a clear, concise, and easy-to-read manner? As with all skills, it's about knowing the basics, practicing them, getting feedback, and repeating them.
Ola Hansen