Developers need to write more than code

Developers need to be able to in write their primary spoken languages as well as they can writing in their primary programming languages. It takes effort and practice, just like programming does. And you get rusty if you stop for awhile, just like in programming. I started blogging in part to make sure I was writing on a regular basis. When I worked at AFSC I was writing and editing everyday for my work, but the next two jobs I had didn’t expect much writing from me. I’ve written before about the value of my liberal arts education, and the last few weeks have been a testament to effort Hamilton put into making sure I learned the fundamentals of writing.

In my new job we work hard to provide a great deal of information to our clients and to make sure they can understand that information. While each team member brings a different set of strengths and weaknesses to the projects, we are all expected to communicate clearly with each other and our clients. All of us are expected to explain our parts of the project so that our clients can understand our advice and make can informed choices about how the projects should proceed.

In the last month I’ve been responsible for presenting basic overviews of platforms and highly technical reviews of parts of projects. I have contributed to large architectural design documents and focused detailed designs for small subsystems. All these materials were done collaboratively by teams of highly skilled technical people, but our client’s technical skills are much wider ranging. Often they are experts in other areas who need to use the tools we’re building. Others are experts in the technology we work with, and we are serving as added capacity to their in-house teams. We are expected to explain ourselves equally well to all these people, which means we need to both be clear and thorough.

One of the things I try to bring to the project teams is a willingness and ability to edit and be edited.  Because I spent time responsible for all the digital communications of a large organization, I have experience quickly and aggressively editing documents of all sizes. I also know how important it is to have an editor who catches your mistakes, and while I carefully review someone else’s work I am always supportive of anyone who is editing a section I wrote. Not everyone is equally comfortable with these roles, but they are things I believe all developers should try to master.

We have socially come to expect that technical people do not explain their work clearly. We are too often allowed to use a great deal of jargon, skip lightly over hard to understand details, and belittle those who cannot keep up. Complex systems are indeed complex so it does take effort to clearly explain and fully understand them. But the vast majority of developers are perfectly capable of explaining what we do when we take the time. And the vast majority of people are capable of understanding clear descriptions of our work.

Developers who are unwilling to take the time to learn to explain their work well do a disservice to their colleagues, clients, and themselves. Their work will suffer from a lack of good feedback, and so will not be as good as it could have been with more support. Those weaknesses will become bad user experiences, bugs, and other flaws in their final products.

A well done code review (one that’s meant to be supportive and doesn’t include yelling) and a good edit aren’t that different. In both one person is looking over the work of another to try to understand it and check for errors. Done well both give a chance for the reviewer to learn from the material and to help the person whose work is being reviewed do their best work.

When we explain our work well we open ourselves of up for feedback. That feedback gives us chances to validate our designs, improve the experiences of our users, and generally create more awesome products.