Assumed audience: People, especially engineers, who might be unpersuaded about the value of investing in improving their personal productivity and velocity on things like writing.
I have been thinking about Dan Luu’s post Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity for years.
I certainly agree that working on the right thing is important, but increasing velocity doesn’t stop you from working on the right thing. If anything, each of these is a force multiplier for the other. Having strong execution skills becomes more impactful if you’re good at picking the right problem and vice versa.
An example:
One thing writing quickly unlocks for me is the ability to use code review as a major teaching tool. At a former job, some colleagues would actually go stalk my GitHub to learn from my reviews! That was because those reviews were not just “LGTM” or “Please do __ instead.” They came with explanations of why something was better, or questions about someone’s goals. I often outlined tradeoffs in approach. I would leave links to other relevant materials for them to read.
If that sounds like it would take far too long, well… no, because I have practiced writing quickly and clearly for literally decades now. I could review a non-trivial change and give it non-trivial feedback in
Takeaway — engineers, do yourself and all of your teammates a huge favor and learn how to write quickly and cogently. That means practicing it! But the dividends are huge.
I posted a version of this to social media yesterday. But social media is ephemeral, so I always try to pull anything substantive like this back over into my website.