Why Engineers Need Strong Writing Skills

Want to be a great engineer? Get better at writing. Here's why: - unblocks teammates by reducing repetitive conversations and eliminating knowledge bottlenecks - breaks information out of silos (DMs, emails) so others can reference, build upon, and expand your work - supports remote teams, different timezones, and helps colleagues catch up after time off - prepares you for the lest of your career. Senior+ roles ARE writing roles: architecture docs, code reviews, technical specs. Software engineering is a team sport. As you advance, you spend less time coding and more time communicating complex ideas in human language; the most expressive tool we have. Writing externalizes your thinking and allows others to give feedback, making everyone more effective. Your technical skills are your floor, writing ability is your ceiling.

Great SWEs don’t just write clean code. They also write clear English. Here are 4 fundamentals of technical writing you must master: 1. Problem > Solution > Implementation - Why are you solving this problem in the first place? 2. Speak to real user stories, not hypothetical improvements. - Is this idea tied to a proven pain point? 3. If it’s not measurable, it’s not manageable. - Which metrics can you build a compelling argument around? 4. Know your audience. - How much technical expertise will they need to understand your writing? Distilling technical ideas on paper is hard. And there’s no shortcut to becoming an effective communicator. But if you nail these 4 fundamentals, you can begin scaling your knowledge to influence engineers well beyond your immediate team.

The best engineers don’t just write great code. They make their work impossible to ignore. Because here’s the truth: • Clean architecture doesn’t speak for itself. • Optimized queries don’t announce their own speed. • Fixing tech debt doesn’t get you an automatic thank-you. If nobody knows why your work matters, they won’t value it. So make it visible: • Explain why a refactor saved weeks of future pain. • Share how your design choice made scaling 10x easier. • Write docs so the next person doesn’t spend hours untangling what you built. Silent impact is wasted impact. The engineers who grow the fastest? They don’t just solve hard problems. They make sure people understand why those problems matter in the first place.

I have seen software engineer's doing: - Write: about their new system design - Write: how they will be executing projects - Write: roadmap alignment - Write: their achievements and promo stuff To be honest, I’ve seen awesome engineers writing words more than lines of code. Seeing this, I’ve always thrived to get good at writing Initially, I used to read posts and docs written by senior engineers and would mimic their structure. Generally, they used a template like TL;DR, context, etc. I tried using the same approach for all my writings inside Meta. A lot of times, my mentors commented that I was writing more than required. Additionally, I used to spend hours drafting it. Slowly, I realized one key thing that accelerated my speed and helped me get better at writing. It is to 'understand my audience.' This is powerful when writing anything. One needs to understand their audience to deliver any message effectively. For example: 1. For a design doc, if your audience is technical folks, you can talk about layers like caching and internal systems. But if it’s XFN's, just giving simple examples and speaking at a high level helps. 2. Another area is writing your launch posts. You don’t need to include technical details; it can be as simple as stating the problem, the way to solve it, how it impacts, and attaching relevant docs for deep readers to keep it clean. But at the beginning, I used a common template that covered everything. However, I realized that people don’t have time, and writing what the audience needs can make your words worth their time. In the end, it’s no different from the features we ship. We ship products that meet user needs, not what we think is good for them. It’s the same with what we write. Writing is a powerful way to communicate when it’s done the right way.