Writing Well: A Must-Have Skill That No One Teaches Software Developers
By: Nityesh Agarwal
Tags: Careers, Software Development, Programming, Startup, Writing

Being a Good Writer Boosts the Arc of Your Entire Career

Being a good writer helps you get a new job. A better job.

But more importantly, it helps you do your everyday work better, and therefore, changes the arc of your entire career!

Effect of good writing skills on the progress in your career

Here are three ways it boosts your career:

1. Grabbing the valuable attention of people around you

You need your peers to read that awesome idea you propose.

You need your subordinates to pay attention to you.

You need hiring managers to read your next job application.

You need interesting people that you admire to read and answer your cold emails.

You need your connections on LinkedIn or Twitter to pay attention to your posts — we all know better connections mean better opportunities.

Yet, you can’t rely on the awesomeness of your ideas to grab their attention. Everyone has loads of them.

What differentiates successful people is their ability to convey their ideas in ways that make people want to pay attention.

“Being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit.” — David Heinemeier Hanson and Jason Fried, founders of Basecamp

2. Finding new career opportunities

Writing on the internet can advance your career. A well-written article, published on the internet, works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to find new opportunities for you!

Therefore, your blog is like a resume, only better.

Writing a useful article is the quickest way to establish yourself as an expert in that field. No degrees required.

Two years ago, I wrote an article to help people get started with reading Deep Learning research papers. It still fetches me LinkedIn connections from PhDs in universities around the world. The funny thing is that I have read only one research paper in my life — when I wrote the article!

“By making it easy for people to find you online, you’ll create a vehicle for serendipity.” — David Perell, creator of the popular course Write of Passage

A good online presence allows you to connect with like-minded people around the world who you would never be able to meet in real life. And meaningful social connections are often the source of surreal career opportunities.

3. Improving your thinking

“You don’t just write to share what you think. You write to discover what you think in the first place.” — Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the company behind Wordpress

Compressing your thoughts into the written word removes noise from your thoughts. Clear writing induces clear thinking.

This is why Jeff Bezos makes his executives prepare six-page narratives instead of 20-slide PowerPoints before any meeting. Bezos believes that PowerPoint presentations conceal lazy thinking. Instead, he wants his employees to think deeply and take the time to express their thoughts cogently.

I’m often amazed to see how writing an idea leaves me with a better version of the idea itself. It makes me realise how sloppy my thinking usually is.

Writing clearly can have the same effect on your thinking too.

These three benefits create a self-sustaining flywheel that accelerates your career

So, how do you start?