

Ask HN: What is the role of communication in a programmer's career - swsieber

I&#x27;m a senior in a CS major at BYU. For an assignment in my advanced writing class, I need to interview a professional in my field (programming, preferably python backend or javascript&#x2F;html&#x2F;css frontend). It&#x27;s short notice, and probably a little presumptuous to ask this online to a community at large, but I feel like this would be the place to try. If you&#x27;d like to help me, you can email me responses to swsieber [at] [that one google mail site].com<p>But feel free to post it as well. It&#x27;d be great to have a general discussion - it&#x27;d be interesting to see how the experience differs workplace to workplace. I think this is a vital part of programming that&#x27;s often missed. I know I need work on it.<p>Here are the questions:<p>- What do you program?: the languages, the type of program and in what domain (medical, developer tools, etc)<p>- What kind of writing (and other communication) do you do?<p>- What kinds of audiences do you write for? Who&#x27;s the hardest to communicate with? How is this influenced by your seniority and role?<p>- How much time do you spend writing during a typical workday?<p>- How important is writing (and other communication) to such things as salary, prestige, and promotion?<p>- What would you focus on in learning and preparing to write better for a programming job?
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MalcolmDiggs
> _What do you program?: the languages, the type of program and in what domain
> (medical, developer tools, etc)_

Javascript, end-to-end. I build RESTful APIs for consumer-facing web
applications (social and ecommerce mostly); and the occasional single-page-app
client. I lead a small cross-functional scrum team.

> _What kind of writing (and other communication) do you do?_

Lots of emails, lots of shared google-docs, lots of diagramming and
flowcharting, the occasional powerpoint or PDF presentation, and the
occasional proposal or technical spec.

> _What kinds of audiences do you write for? Who 's the hardest to communicate
> with? How is this influenced by your seniority and role?_

There are 3 distinct audiences: Higher-ups (product stakeholders and
managers), team-members (people actually building the products with me), and
the support team (offshore QA and pentesters, etc, who aren't really part of
the core development team, but are still helping quite a lot). Communicating
UP the foodchain is by far the hardest. Stakeholders often have only a vague
understanding of what the team does all day; and might have an understanding
of the product that is outdated or simply false. These communications have to
be tailored to each specific listener. You have to understand what that
particular investor/manager/product-owner thinks before you can attempt to
inform that opinion. You also have to gauge their technical expertise before
you can "talk tech" to them. Otherwise you'll sound like you're from Mars.

> _How much time do you spend writing during a typical workday?_

I'll go days or weeks without needing to write anything substantive; then a
report or presentation will be due and I'll have to write all day.

> _How important is writing (and other communication) to such things as
> salary, prestige, and promotion?_

Important for your _TEAM 's_ prestige, not for your own personal benefit.
Writing (especially to stakeholders) should praise team effort, but IMHO, a
good team-leader will fall on the sword for any shortcomings in the product.
So, the writing you do should get your team-member's well positioned for a
promotion or salary-increase; but not necessarily you.

> _What would you focus on in learning and preparing to write better for a
> programming job?_

Two things:

1\. Learn how to communicate technical problems to non-technical people.

2\. Learn how to communicate business problems to technical people.

There's often a "ships-passing-in-the-night" problem there. So my role as a
senior person is often one of "translator" or "ambassador" between the two
camps.

