
Engineers Should Blog - patgenzler
https://insights.excitingrole.com/why-engineers-should-blog-88ecf97d2628#.olwjketnr
======
pavfarb
Engineers should blog publicly when they have something to say. Something
useful for their colleagues. Engineers shouldn't waste time forcing themselves
to blog instead of work just to push their career forward: frequently they
just expose they don't have anything to say in extremely unreadable way. What
a waste of time for everybody.

Soft skills helps you grow as an engineer, it's true, but I think it's
important to understand that not every exercise should become a public
material.

But, in a generation publishing their every 2nd gym workout on instagram, who
am I kidding anyway.

~~~
pcmonk
> Engineers should blog publicly when they have something to say. Something
> useful for their colleagues.

This sounds a lot like saying, "You should only learn to code when you have
something useful you want to build. Something useful for other people".

You can't write a good blog post without having already written some number of
bad ones. If you think you might someday have something to say, you should
practice blogging.

~~~
patrick_haply
> You can't write a good blog post without having already written some number
> of bad ones.

To add to this, I'd say: if you don't have a writing habit, the barrier to
actually writing something when you _do_ finally have something useful to say
will be incredibly high.

I am willing, however, to give the GP the benefit of the doubt because they
said "Engineers should blog publicly when they have something to say", not
"Engineers should blog when they have something to say". Practicing writing
does not mean that you have to publish everything.

~~~
thr0waway1239
So how do you get feedback for non-public work? On _technical_ blogs, I always
read the comments. Even for obscure/somewhat poorly written articles. Because
someone who knows more than the author will sometimes leave feedback which
will lead you in a better direction and expose you to more ideas.

And thankfully, technical blog articles don't attract too many comments on
average. Quite often I find that a blog article on a technical point
_actually_ advances discussion on that idea.

All I would say is to make a honest effort. Try and do a basic rewrite before
hitting publish.

~~~
cookiecaper
People have been practicing privately and only occasionally getting
checkpoints of public feedback across all kinds of skillsets for centuries.
It's silly to act like we don't know how to practice in private.

Yes, you need a good guide, good general principles so that you're not
practicing in the wrong direction. And yes, you need occasional "recitals"
where you test audience reactions. But 99% of the work involved in developing
any skill is just raw, rote repetition that most audiences are not only not
interested in, but actively avoid.

~~~
thr0waway1239
>> People have been practicing privately and only occasionally getting
checkpoints of public feedback across all kinds of skillsets for centuries.
It's silly to act like we don't know how to practice in private.

Fair enough. I can see why my comment came across as if I said there were no
other options.

But my point is to use resources at your disposal. One of the amazing resource
at our disposal today is the ability to cost-effectively publish a half-baked
idea on our website knowing that a) that could still be useful for a small
section of people and b) its mistakes could be corrected by another small
section of people who know the topic in greater detail and c) all this happens
in such a way that everyone is, quite literally, "on the same page".

------
mooreds
I love blogging. The OP makes some great points about how it exposes you to a
different set of people than answers on stackoverflow or HN do.

I have been blogging for over a decade and have definitely had some positive
experiences, including a co worker finding a post when searching for a
solution and an interviewer checking out my blog and mentioning it. I have
also had a small bit of work come to me directly because of my blog. (However
my blog is pretty unfocused in part because I am a generalist and primarily
wrote for myself. I am sure a focused blogger could do better.)

However, the most important thing is to get started with some kind of public
presence. If SO or HN or github are what you feel comfortable with, start
there. Don't be an anonymous programmer.

If you are looking to blog, I think you should plan to stick with it for at
least a year. Nothing is sadder than the abandoned blog. Here are some
motivational tips:
[http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2129](http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2129)

------
bloaf
I'm surprised he didn't encounter the 4th reason for not blogging:

4\. The topics I want to blog about are controversial.

That is, strong but controversial opinions on certain technologies are just as
likely to help you get noticed as hurt you (i.e. get noticed in a negative
way.) Even if the topic isn't technically controversial, it can still be a
negative. Revealing that you helped {religious minority church} set up their
network, or that you solved a problem with {porn website} can also put a mark
on you that is not automatically good. Heaven forbid you worked for/supported
{political organization} this election cycle.

So the answer is, of course, to self-censor. You have to strip out your
opinion and context and only blog about technical details that you are very
confident are correct. Keep your jokes gender neutral and your insights
limited to your profession.

But that's boring. That's not blogging, it's writing a corporate memo. We've
just ratcheted up the difficulty, limited the new thoughts you're allowed to
think, and made you invisible to all hiring managers who can't recognize when
your technical manuscript applies to their industry.

~~~
mooreds
I don't know if this is strictly true. I don't deny that blogging about
controversial subjects will turn off possible employers or close doors. That
is definitely something to be aware of.

But you could look at the flip side of that and say that this is actually
filtering out opportunities wouldn't be a fit. Much like qualifying leads in
sales is something you want to do as quickly and easily as possible, doing the
same for employment opportunities can help you focus on organizations where
there is a culture fit.

With respect to your example, if an employer was offended by your support for
a minority group or political candidate, is that an employer you'd feel
comfortable bringing your whole self to work at?

I may be hopelessly Pollyanna, but I think I'd avoid that type of situation.
If you are a software developer and those are the only type of opportunities
you have access too, I agree, you should avoid blogging about such
controversial topics. Or get good at remote work.

~~~
bloaf
Strictly speaking, the only way my post can be untrue is if "fear of
controversy" was _not_ a reason people avoided blogging, or they feared
controversy for an entirely different reason than the one I provided.

------
JCDenton2052
No, every engineer should not blog. It is hard enough to find the right
information when you have to shift through clickbait and the signal-to-noise
ratio is abysmal.

If I was interested in assessing someone's caliber, I'd rather look at their
Github than their blog. Anyone can write a blog post, not everyone can write
good code.

Blog if you have some insight into technology that hasn't been already
elucidated or if you disagree with what's out there.

Having said that, I plan to start my own blog at some point. What will I be
writing about? I'll start with reviews of technical books. Why? Because I have
read a couple since the beginning of the year that I was unhappy with and had
to return, but bought them in the first place because other people said good
things about them. Hopefully if someone in the future considers them they will
come across my view and take it into consideration.

~~~
mgkimsal
I don't particularly want everyone publishing code, really.

"not everyone can write good code"

Not everyone can tell what's good, what's not, and why.

And searching through 20x the amount of code now to find something that a)
works, b) is documented, c) is kept up to date (and is also accurate/correct)
- just gets harder the more 'stuff' gets published.

------
donovanm
Yeah I agree with this that most software engineers should consider this. It's
another way to set yourself apart from the masses that most people will never
put in the time and effort to do. The idea that other people put forward that
you should only write about things if you think your ideas are innovative
always seemed silly to me. A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up
being useful and important information to someone else. Besides how are you
supposed to know if what you're saying is 'innovative' before you say it and
get feedback on it?

~~~
jlgaddis
> _A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up being useful and
> important information to someone else._

This is very true. There have been many, many times when there's a technical
article on the top of HN on a topic that I would never have imagined writing
about simply because it seemed too basic or "entry-level". There have even
been a few topics that I had actually considered writing about but dismissed
it, thinking to myself "nah, everybody already knows that".

~~~
holdenk
Some of the highest traffic blog posts I've written have been on the "entry-
level" side of things.

~~~
mdpopescu
Now that I think about it, one of the pieces of advice I got most comments on
was helping an indie writer figure out the intricacies of the "a" HTML tag :)
[I left a comment on her blog and a lot of other indie writers thanked me for
the details - they needed them when formatting books for Kindle.]

------
blueyes
One of the rarest and most under-appreciated skills in tech is the ability to
explain things. As an industry, we mostly focus on building and selling, and
the twain don't always meet. Many of the builders have deep and excellent
understanding of the tech they work with; many salespeople are excellent at
persuading customers to do x. But there's a very important and underused
bridge between insiders who understand, and everyone else. Blogging is a great
exercise for deeply technical, because it's a chance for them to actively ask
themselves: What do others not understand, and how can I explain it clearly?

~~~
saxonklaxon
"If a thing be really good, it can be shown to be such. If you cannot
demonstrate its excellence, it may well be suspected that you are no proper
judge of it."

\-- William Godwin

goo.gl/wylZZm

------
jlgaddis
I maintained a blog for a few years (mostly while preparing to take the Cisco
CCNP exams) but I haven't wrote regularly for going on five years. It was
extremely beneficial to me in several ways.

I ran into an issue with some HP ProCurve switches that HP basically said
"yeah, that can't happen". It was only after writing it up -- along with a
video -- and someone from HP reading it that they reached back out to me, flew
an engineer out to "witness" it firsthand, and fix it. Later, they flew me out
to Roseville for a few days to hang out with some of their engineers. Later,
they invited me (and paid all my expenses) to attend an HP Tech Day as well as
Interop NYC.

In addition, I was invited to attend several Net Field Day [0] events where I
got to hang out with some very smart people in the networking industry in
Silicon Valley. Stephen Foskett, the guy behind NFD, knew about me from my
blog.

Also, while I was at one of the NFD events, I got an e-mail from someone who
"knew me" from my blog. An ISP in my area needed a new Network Engineer to
replace their main guy who had just left. They were about to start doing some
new things and needed someone with lots of experience with OSPF and BGP in
particular. After I returned, I met the owners to chat over breakfast one
morning. I've been working there a little over five years now.

I've done a handful of small "side jobs" as well, mostly for smaller companies
whose IT guys found me via a Google search and reached out to me for
assistance.

Last, it's certainly not making me rich but (even though I really haven't
written much in the last five years) the ads that appear on my blog (and
Youtube videos) still earn enough so that Google has to send me a 1099 every
year. Beer money. :-)

 _ETA_ : I actually wrote up a similar post, "Why You Should Be Blogging" [1]
in 2011. It was kinda sorta aimed at others studying for Cisco exams but I
think it's probably general enough to apply to the HN crowd as well (I haven't
re-read it recently, TBH).

[0]: [http://techfieldday.com/](http://techfieldday.com/)

[1]: [http://evilrouters.net/2011/10/20/why-you-should-be-
blogging...](http://evilrouters.net/2011/10/20/why-you-should-be-blogging/)

------
lossolo
You should certainly blog if you did something different, something that is
innovative, if you solved an interesting problem. But.. lets be honest,
political correctness aside. Most software engineers have nothing to blog
about, they just glue some libraries and make couple of db requests and that's
about all they do. Nothing what they do is innovative or worth blogging about.
Not every engineer should blog or we would see tens of thousands of new links
everyday on HN that would point to another blog that writes about how someone
wrote an api and did 3 mysql requests - That's called spam. We already have
thousands of resources/articles/blog posts that solved those problems and
unless you are bringing something new to the table, what you wrote was already
written.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
The specific problems encountered and methods that proved to be a workable
solution for an engineer when gluing any set of arbitrary modules is
practically guaranteed to be unique information, though mired in a ton other,
more mundane information.

It'll be the mark of a good writer to properly cut the content from the fat.

But this isn't about being a good writer. It's about improving your own
understanding and simply widening our dataset of known engineering practices.

------
exratione
I think this misses another equally important reason, which is to do your part
to help build the gift economy upon which we all rely in our day to day work.
Near every common solution and recipe has been written up by someone,
somewhere, and we all make use of these gifts.

When you learn to do something useful that other people will likely also have
to accomplish at some point in time, write it up. Not only will it benefit
people out there in the world, but it is also a great way to ensure that you
yourself don't have to reinvent the wheel a few years down the line. Who
remembers the details after that long? So write it down, and if you write it
down, you may as well publish it.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
While I agree generally with what you've written here, my only issue with it
is that _writing it up_ takes about as long as building the thing, _and_ I'm
pretty lazy.

Also, if someone, somewhere, has written up nearly ever common solution, how
do I know which ones are novel enough to put the effort in to publishing. Most
of things I build aren't novel or new in any way, I'm fairly sure.

~~~
wazanator
You will know what to write. When you spend time searching for an answer to an
odd problem but don't find it and have to do it yourself you will want to
write about it afterwards because you will want others to know you figured out
the solution.

------
xiphias
When I read ,,the only thing you need is an editor'', I thought how cool it
would be if what I write would be reviewed by some people before going
public...it would make me less shy about it.

Then I realized he means a text editor (though he's an editor himself)

~~~
PretzelFisch
That's my biggest problem, how do you improve your written communication
without an editor? You can do the same thing over and over and call it
practice, but without a reviewer how will you magically improve this skill?

~~~
graeme
1\. Post stuff for people to view. Pay attention to what is popular, and what
isn't 2\. Read stuff aloud before posting 3\. Read widely, and pay attention
to writing you like.

I've built a business off of writing:
[https://lsathacks.com/explaantions/](https://lsathacks.com/explaantions/)

I got started by writing a travel blog during a yearlong trip. I posted each
entry to Facebook. When an entry got a lot of comments/views, I could tell it
was better. I also got confidence that I was writing well.

As I kept writing, I always made sure to show my work. And I found that
reading aloud helped me find awkwards parts.

Finally, I got started during a time when I was reading lots of blogs and
novels. Good reading will help your writing.

That's about it. Practice, tempered by feedback and observing the work of
others.

~~~
kedean
The problem doing that with technical writing is that your audience isn't
going to be judging you on your writing skills, they'll be judging you on the
technical content. OP isn't worried about their technical content, they're
worried about their writing skills. The technical audience is going to be
affected by writing skills (it'll affect how well points are made, etc), but
they aren't going to give feedback on that part. "Just ship it" doesn't work
with soft skills.

~~~
graeme
They don't have to start with technical writing. I didn't. I wrote a travel
blog and shared it with my friends on facebook.

That transferred directly to my later technical writing.

You can also do technical writing, share that with a few technical friends,
and get feedback.

I don't think any of my comment was about doing technical writing immediately
though.

------
codr4life
I find that blogging helps me untangle messy reasoning, to the point where I
often end up improving the code to make it easier to explain. The marketing
angle is less interesting to me, I'm not selling anything. What's missing from
the article is the bigger perspective; by sharing ideas and knowledge openly,
everyone wins.

[https://github.com/codr4life/vicsydev](https://github.com/codr4life/vicsydev)

------
smdz
> Marketplaces like UpWork and ELance, which were originally designed to match
> US companies with global talent, have literally made it impossible for US
> engineers to find work...

As a freelancer working from India - this stands true even for the good
experienced freelancers in India. Upwork (and Elance that is now Upwork) make
it hard to get good rates - forget about raising rates. And when Elance merged
to Upwork - it just made it harder to filter out good clients (I had some
respect for the former Elance). Most buyer's have this perspective - "You are
from India, your cost must be cheap!". Add to that rated courses on Udemy that
underline "Get your work done at 1/10th the cost" (that I subscribed too) and
similar stuff on YouTube.

Blogging helps. Mine is a pretty small one. But I got quite a few leads from
my blog and at one point I was heavily overloaded with requests that would
give me acceptable rates. I stopped writing for 6-8 months and the leads
stopped coming in. Also, these days video-bloggers(good ones) get to take much
of the leads.

------
ChuckMcM
Ok, I'm kind of cynical when a recruiter says "You should blog! It will make
it easier for us to find you." It sounds like the hunters suggesting to the
game wardens that deer would be better off if you painted them international
orange. :-)

I certainly agree that public comments on the internet can help people get a
sense of who you are, but just like sharing on Facebook or any other
infinitely long lived expression of opinion there is also a huge down side to
it. A number of good engineers have been fired over the years by blogging an
opinion that their manager didn't like or mentioning an activity that their
employer felt violated the inherent NDA in place in any employee/employer
relationship.

------
mikehain
I used to have an issue with writing classes in college. Since the writers-to-
be in the class aren't experts in any particular field, they are forced to
pick sides in ridiculous polemic topics just to fill a page. This transfers
over to the real world in the form of frivolous articles written to provide a
constant stream of content to a readership.

People like engineers and other folks with technical jobs have some of the
best writing material to work with - all they really need to do is recount
their day's work and the problems they've encountered, and any non-expert
interested in the field can read and learn from it.

There is a plumber who lives in my state who publishes video documentation of
every job he goes on. Since I'm not a plumber, I learned a ton from these
videos. All of the things he did would seem basic to anyone in his field, but
for a lay person like myself, his videos were extremely educational.

~~~
mdpopescu
> recount their day's work and the problems they've encountered

Damn... I never thought of this. Great idea.

------
rdtsc
I just like discussions on HN. I think if I aggregated them all over the years
it would make a decent blog. I am lazy. With a blog I think I would just end
up not updating it and after 2-3 years it would be abandoned. Is it better to
see an abandoned blog or not blog at all...? I don't know I never really
considered blogging for the recruiters, which it seems this article advocates.

I also prefer a conversational style so that needs a others who are engaged
and want to discuss things, otherwise it seems like I am broadcasting into the
ether with nobody potentially ever reading or seeing it. Well technically it
would be showing off for the potential recruiters here. But so far I never had
problem getting good offers without the blog. I don't have Twitter Facebook,
G+ or a LinkedIn. My GH profile is probably how they find me, which is fine so
far. Also probably language specific mailing lists.

------
aarongeisler
I think there is some truth to this. I landed my first startup engineering
position via a blog post.

This particular post only took 30 minutes to write - they can be short and
sweet.

~~~
srcreigh
This is awesome! Did you expect the post to get you a job? Do you have a link
to it?

------
shruubi
Reading this, at least from my perspective, makes it seem like the author asks
three questions, then provides an answer that doesn't really actually answer
the three questions.

In particular, from my own experience in blogging/twitter etc, getting an
audience is a really hard thing to do, so much so that years later I haven't
succeeded yet.

On top of that, what about people who don't blog because they feel they have
nothing interesting to say? Why should I write about my experiences with
moving to modern javascript practices when 500 other people have already
written the same thing, said all the same things I would have and actually
have an audience that gives a shit?

------
lithos
READ: I target engineers with email advertising/recruiting, and want you to
make my job easier.

------
ajharrison
Engineers should stop telling other engineers what to do :)

------
striglia
By far the most frustrating part of blogging for me (though certainly not the
only one) is the assumption that no one will ever see it. I can probably solve
this by options I dislike -- giving up ownership to Medium or obnoxiously
cross-posting to all social media platforms -- but the end result is I am
discouraged before I even start.

Oddly I love speaking at conferences...maybe because some nonzero audience is
more or less guaranteed?

------
tomjen3
Thanks to Beeminder I stuck to blogging for a while (my results, such as they
are, can be found on my website) even though I wasn't happy, and they are all
full of horrible grammar.

The only thing I learned from the project is that I really don't like
blogging, I want to build stuff.

~~~
srcreigh
What's the link to your blog?

------
Buge
>Recruiting systems are optimized to filter out false negatives (i.e eliminate
people that don’t satisfy their bias) at the expense of false positives (i.e
miss out on good people).

I thought the definitions of false negative and false positive were the
opposite.

~~~
rev_bird
Yeah, I had trouble parsing that sentence, but I agree. Recruiting systems
usually _encourage_ false negatives.

------
ericjherrera
I think the biggest thing is that any kind of writing makes you visible to the
right audience. The key though is to know who you are writing to and make it
tailored to them on their level.

I think far too often people try to get their name out there and even though
they should be writing for a specific crowd, in reality, they end up
alienating the very people they were trying to tailor to. The writing should
always be for yourself and in that way you will reach the right people. Let
the rest fall into place.

------
pleasecalllater
Yep, they definitely will. My blog posts usually make my job interviews
easier, as usually I hear "oh, we have read your blog post, so let's omit some
of the questions we usually ask".

Another funny thing is that you never know which posts will be popular. On my
blog three old posts generate over 70% of the traffic. Some people have found
them informative, and linked on a couple of pages.

------
maxdemarzi
The best way I've found is to blog what you learn. There is always somebody
who is learning what you are learning and is a day behind you. They will
benefit from your "experience" and being able to teach what you just learned
means you know it well. 5 years and I haven't stopped learning.
Http://maxdemarzi.com

------
someguydave
If I wrote an engineering blog the first post would be about how meaningless
the word 'engineer' has become.

------
noobermin
May be some hacker should make a NN to produce hipster-hacker blogposts so
they don't need to. Just do a couple posts, train on those, and sit back and
get both the creds for having a happening medium profile while maintaining
your productivity.

------
Rapzid
What do people view as good blogging platforms for this stuff these days?
Jekyll on Github? Something else? I'd like to get going fast focusing on
content, but of course want good syntax highlighting, comments, and such
features.

~~~
joshvm
Jekyll is pretty great (just chuck a disqus block in your footer), there's a
real risk of getting bogged down in setting up the 'perfect' system with it
and never getting round to publishing anything.

I think Wordpress still has one of the most outstanding install experiences,
but keeping it up to date is a pain.

~~~
Rapzid
Cool, I may give Jekyll another shot(had a false start couple years ago).

I have tons of experience doing hardened WP installs(and compromise root
cause) but almost no experience USING it haha. I'd prefer not to go down that
rabbit hole if something like Jekyll is sufficient.

~~~
UweSchmidt
If you only publish an blogpost once in a while, you wouldn't even need
Jekyll. Figure out your template, and save your post in an .html file, add a
link to the index.html and upload both to /var/www/ on your own cheap Linux
cloud webspace. Markdown is nice, but if you don't need much you can sprinkle
some <h..> and <b> tags on your post and you're done. There are browser based
syntax highlighting tools where you can paste in your code from your IDE and
get it back nicely formatted with the appropriate CSS.

Might not be right for you, but I had to bring up the easiest, the truly
minimalist, hey, the _original_ way to it.

------
0x006A
ok then, lets turn this around: every blogger should code!

~~~
greglindahl
Most jobs have "good communication skills" as a prereq. Compare with the
fraction of jobs that require coding.

------
nunez
I agree. Such an easy way to market yourself and get your name out. Also,
being able to write clearly is an incredibly useful skill to have.

------
Animats
1999 called. It wants personal websites back.

------
xiaoma
The title was editorialized. The word "every" was added to the title of the
article.

~~~
dang
Ok, we restored the original title, except for the leading "Why", which we
typically remove.

------
mememachine
No, they shouldnt.

------
jconway45
I stopped reading when you started to suggest engineers might work on Elance
and the like..

------
Chyzwar
Blogging is waste of time. Most of blogs are paid PR/Marketing/SEO content
that is low quality click-bait. Like this blog post that is PR piece for
company that author works.

Engineer should sharpen theirs skills on github. During interview github
profile is much larger hiring factor than blog.

~~~
zzzcpan
> Blogging is waste of time.

It certainly is a waste of time for improving your engineering skills, it's a
myth. But it isn't for PR, which is very important these days even to get
somewhere in software engineering, not to mention for pushing any kind of
product or attracting other engineers to hire.

~~~
Chyzwar
You are either Engineer or not. Writing blog post will have less of effect on
your engineering skills than writing code.

~~~
saryant
I was able to step up to a major tech company because they noticed my blog
posts, Stack Overflow answers and conference talks.

That nearly doubled my income.

