Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well
I have been coaching several experienced software engineers to further grow professionally, since transitioning to being an engineering manager. I have noticed a few skills that people often underestimate the importance of developing. Skills that add a significant boost to the impact of any developer. One of these is writing.
Most software engineers primarily focus on becoming great at writing code. And this makes perfect sense. This is an essential step to become a great engineer within a reasonably sized team.
Successful companies, however, grow continuously. Sooner or later, the software engineering team will be beyond a few dozen people, where everyone can easily talk with everyone else. People will be split across different floors. New offices in different locations will be opened. Face-to-face communication starts to be insufficient. Channels like email, chat or video calls become more important. The pace of which this growth happens varies by company: for some, it takes years. For some of the really successful companies, it happens much more rapidly.
It is with a larger organisation that writing becomes important for messages to reach a wider group of people. For software engineers, writing becomes the tool to reach, converse with and influence engineers and teams outside their immediate peers. Writing becomes essential to make thoughts, tradeoffs and decisions durable. Writing things down makes these thoughts available for a wide range of people to read. Things that should be made durable can include proposals and decisions, coding guidelines, best practices, learnings, runbooks, debugging guides, postmortems. Even code reviews.
