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

4 points

11 years ago

I'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/html/css frontend). It'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'd like to help me, you can email me responses to swsieber [at] [that one google mail site].com

But feel free to post it as well. It'd be great to have a general discussion - it'd be interesting to see how the experience differs workplace to workplace. I think this is a vital part of programming that's often missed. I know I need work on it.

Here are the questions:

- What do you program?: the languages, the type of program and in what domain (medical, developer tools, etc)

- What kind of writing (and other communication) do you do?

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

- How much time do you spend writing during a typical workday?

- How important is writing (and other communication) to such things as salary, prestige, and promotion?

- What would you focus on in learning and preparing to write better for a programming job?

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