Could you quickly summarise what you do for work?

I’m a software engineer. My job involves programming (coding) as well as design and testing. I also lead a small team of other software engineers. I’ve worked on software for many kinds of devices, including mobile phones, smartwatches, and medical devices.

‍

Do you think being able to communicate in writing matters in your field? Why or why not?

Some people might consider programming to be a solitary activity. But almost all useful software is written with other people, and forms part of a system that is more complex than a single person can understand. 

‍

When you work on software collaboratively, you are building a shared understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and the solution you have designed together; it may even be necessary for other people to understand your solution long after you have moved on. So it’s important that you can communicate clearly and accurately. 

‍

While we write code mainly to tell computers what to do, it also serves a second purpose: it is an artifact that captures the behaviour of the system that has been built. We add comments to the code to add context for humans who read it later, even though it means nothing to the computer. The code will later be used by other engineers - maybe in an emergency or time of great stress - to diagnose faults or look for problems. So I think it can be treated like a piece of writing as well. 

‍

What, if any, parts of your work require you to write?

Before writing any code, we write documents that capture the requirements for the software, which are normally gathered by speaking to other disciplines - product managers, designers, and even potential users. We turn these requirements into software design documents, which are a kind of technical documentation that describes how the finished system will work, and the decisions that were made. 

‍

We write testing plans that describe how to make sure the software is working as expected. And if something ever goes wrong, we may write a postmortem: a document that records what happened, why, and how we can avoid it in the future. These documents may be used years later, as an input to another piece of software.

‍

I work with engineers who are spread across the world, so being able to communicate efficiently with them is very important. It’s very frustrating to lose a day of work because someone on the other side of the world needed to ask you for clarification on something that you wrote!

‍

How is writing as part of your job changing with time, especially regarding recent technology?

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more common and more powerful, I’m finding that I am writing less computer code, and instead describing the behaviour I want in natural language (English). This generally means specifying what I want to do clearly and concisely.

‍

It’s also true that we can use AI to write technical documentation as well, but so far I’ve had much less success with that. Documentation that I’ve tried to write using AI has had obvious errors and little depth - not to mention that it’s obviously detectable as AI-written. I’m interested to see what progress is made in this space, but for now I’m writing as much as ever. 

‍

Does writing help you to think? If not, what other methods do you use to think?

It depends what you mean by “think”. I scribble and draw diagrams to come up with ideas and I don’t generally write prose to solve problems, but I do start to write when I want to put structure to my thoughts. Often, seeing my thoughts in writing helps me to spot holes or logical disconnects, and it helps me to think about how someone else might respond.