Engineers & Writing

Engineers generally tend to underestimate importance of good writing skills…

As we step into senior and lead roles, there is an expectation to start writing or reviewing various artefacts like technical documentation (e.g. Request for Comments, Architecture Decision Records etc.), sprint reviews, retrospectives etc.

Our ability to concisely formulate an idea, an issue, or relay context can do a lot for team performance. It is valuable for onboarding new engineers and keeping organisational know-how. This has become very important when many teams switched to async work mode recently.

It is not easy to improve writing at once. We can easily get discouraged and perceive 500 words essay as a huge mountain ahead of us.

One of the best advice I have received, is to treat writing as a tree. First to try reducing our idea, concept or story to essentials, condensed into smallest format possible, just one or two sentences. And then to think and expand it to paragraph. Nothing more. And then to expand to a page…and nothing more. You get the point.

Going back to technical documentation, instead of tackling all angles of proposed solution, what if we try to describe our approach in one of two sentence. Even if the medium can store thousand words, we are limiting ourselves on purpose, to be more concise, and expand primary topic gradually.

As with any skill, writing requires a lot of practice and humbleness, but it can be very rewarding skill.