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Comment by Chyzwar | Hacker News Reader

Writing, You need the ability to clearly communicate in code and within team. This get more important as you get promoted.

Inner peace (mental strength). You need to manage stress, bad code and broken business process. In most cases coding is mentally exhausting.

Ability to listen people. This cannot be overstated, It helps to align effort and value. You want to do things with the highest value with the least effort.

Introspection. You need to investigate your experiences and decisions to learn. It is about learning from own and others mistakes.

I would argue that from some point in your career coding is easy part. Other aspect get more important.

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>> In most cases coding is mentally exhausting

I have the opposite experience. Every thing in software development other than the coding is mentally exhausting.

When I'm all-in writing code time stands still, it's just brilliant.

People always mention writing, but in my experience that's a platitude.

Most senior devs I've been downstream from throughout my career write extremely carelessly. Their email, code comments, and docs (if they ever write them) are often borderline incoherent. It is the interns and junior devs who carefully "craft" emails and tenderly compose comments to remove any hint of ambiguity.

Once you're so senior that your company relies on you to announce new tech to a broad audience, you will almost certainly get the help of a technical writer.

Taking time to write well is a waste and an affectation, and it carries the stigma of insecurity. One should avoid it.

It is about the message. My messages are full of typos and grammar errors But I would ask for right things, choose right level of technical jargon and cut through bullshit.

I think a lot of coding is about writing for the computer and your future self/team. You want to favor simple and easy to understand. For non-native speaker is not obvious when to use remove vs delete. For me writing/language skill is a problem.

I wrote "careless" and "incoherent," not "ungrammatical" or "full of typos." I mean actual failure to communicate because of an apparent lack of interest in communicating effectively.

For me careless often lead to typos, ungrammatical might look incoherent. Failure to communicate is when people do not listen to each other not based on message quality.

Since I misread your message it was your fault for not communicating it clearly.

If you wrote something like this:

  Most seniors I worked with had poor writing skills. They were failing to communicate because of lack interest in effective communication.

I would be unable to interpret you in different way. You either made you message ambiguous or you are shifting the goalpost.

The immense irony of this comment made this thread worth reading.

> Taking time to write well is a waste and an affectation, and it carries the stigma of insecurity. One should avoid it.

That sounds bizarre. Good writing is a skill, and the opposition to it sounds similar to anti-intellectualism.

I have always viewed coding as a form of writing. The challenging parts of coding are the architecture, solving for original problems, and reduction (maintaining simplicity via refactoring). The same things apply to writing.

A common pattern I have observed is that developers most challenged at writing tend to be the developers most challenged at providing an original code solution.

Good communication is the key to any system working well.

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