I noticed the article appears to contain a single point of evidence supporting its main claim:
> Don't take this advice just from me. Take it from others, like employee #8 and now SVP of engineering at Google, Urs Hölzle who also says that writing clearly is an important superpower for engineers.
The link goes to a LinkedIn page with a brief quote captured in raster image format. This is weak evidence for a topic that will certainly be met with strong resistance from the target audience.
The author could make a much stronger case by interviewing a few people at top companies specifically on the topic of engineer writing. These people should be in a position of making promotion decisions. The author might coax out of them illustrative anecdotes that show exactly how poor writing skills can keep an aspiring engineer down.
How much money in lost wages is my crappy writing costing me? What are my job prospects if my writing doesn't improve? What exactly will better writing allow me to do that I can't already do? These are all questions that demand answers (and evidence) from people with 10 other things they might be doing.
Another idea: what studies (if any) have been done on the correlation between writing quality and promotion within technical organizations? For that matter, how does one objectively measure writing quality? After all, you're much more likely to improve something you can measure.
A hallmark of good writing (of any kind) is ample evidence to support claims. Engineers and scientists are a skeptical bunch, and so this point applies even more to technical writing.
> Don't take this advice just from me. Take it from others, like employee #8 and now SVP of engineering at Google, Urs Hölzle who also says that writing clearly is an important superpower for engineers.
The link goes to a LinkedIn page with a brief quote captured in raster image format. This is weak evidence for a topic that will certainly be met with strong resistance from the target audience.
The author could make a much stronger case by interviewing a few people at top companies specifically on the topic of engineer writing. These people should be in a position of making promotion decisions. The author might coax out of them illustrative anecdotes that show exactly how poor writing skills can keep an aspiring engineer down.
How much money in lost wages is my crappy writing costing me? What are my job prospects if my writing doesn't improve? What exactly will better writing allow me to do that I can't already do? These are all questions that demand answers (and evidence) from people with 10 other things they might be doing.
Another idea: what studies (if any) have been done on the correlation between writing quality and promotion within technical organizations? For that matter, how does one objectively measure writing quality? After all, you're much more likely to improve something you can measure.
A hallmark of good writing (of any kind) is ample evidence to support claims. Engineers and scientists are a skeptical bunch, and so this point applies even more to technical writing.