Recently I was listening to Jason Fried in the chase Jaris podcast, for you who doesn’t know Json Fried he is the chief executive officer of Basecamp, in this podcast Jason mentioned how basecamp hire and it was mind-blowing for me, the first criteria they see in a candidate is their writing skills, and when you think about it, it actually makes sense, now people tend to work remotely with different timezone, the good writer knows how to communicate, he can make difficult things easy to understand, this clear writing leads to better communication in a remote team.
So the question here is what are other benefits that a developer can learn from writing?
1. A good writer is a good thinker
In the Getting real book there is a quote “Clear Writing Leads To Clear Thinking”, basically what this means is writing will help you organize your mind by arranging information and arguments in a systematic fashion that will help your reader understand the topic.
Imagine that you are working with someone in a different timezone, your communications will not be in sync, so when sending a message before your day ends it needs to be understood, a misunderstanding can have a big impact on productivity, time-wasting as he needs to wait until you are around the next day.
2. It helps you learn more about the topic.
If this was the only argument for why you should improve your writing it will be enough.
Generally speaking, writing will improve your learning, sometimes as a developer, you’ll find yourself writing about certain solutions or technologies, in the process of writing about the topic you’ll find yourself learning more about it.
3. It will improve your critical thinking
This one is from DR Jordan Peterson, when he was asked how to develop critical thinking he said:
“the best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them how to write”.
With critical thinking you’ll be able to:
- understand the connection between ideas.
- Identify, construct and evaluate ideas.
- detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning
- solve problems systematically
- identify the relevance of importance of ideas
Final thought
As developers, we usually tend to be better at coding/programming and learning new technologies but we don’t pay attention to other skills that can improve not only our career but our lives, and writing is one of them.