Where do these mythical jobs exist where being able to write well is a requirement for career growth? Certainly not at engineering companies.
I wish what you said were true, but in my experience, "being able to write and communicate well is critical in the workplace" is one of the top lies taught to me when I was at university. We had to take a regular writing class, and a technical writing class to graduate with an engineering degree. And when I get to industry, I see no signs of people practicing what they're taught, and it doesn't hold anyone back.
Edit: I should say my experience is more about writing than communicating as a whole. People do need to be good speakers/presenters. But writing? Not really.
I've updated my original comment to reflect that I was referring to writing and not general communications in general (although I wrote it more broadly).
I've seen people really value presentation skills and PPT. Persuasion on 1:1 and via presentations is definitely valued.
But via writing? No. They're atrocious when writing emails. And they rarely write docs/briefs. If they do the latter, it's really meant to be a teaser to get someone interested, and then that person will go talk 1:1 to get the details or ask for a presentation.
My experience at work: Writing anything longer than 1-2 pages is a good way to ensure no one will read it. And again, if I have a good enough "lead", what will happen is the senior person will read the lead, stop reading, and schedule something to talk to me in person so he can understand in detail. At some level, I understand why he would do that - it can be an interactive conversation where he can interrupt, ask for clarification, etc. Whereas if he read the thing, he would have to write up a response, or even worse, make notes to ask me the next time he sees me.
I almost never get anything as well written as a typical HN comment. Even (internal) documentation/manuals/Wikis are poorly written.
1. You often have to write design docs to communicate what you are making and gather feedback. These documents if badly written won't be as well received.
2. At many companies, you have a million things to work on, so in a way, you get to choose who you work with at some level. If someone communicates badly to the point of annoyance, it will take something special for you to decide to work with them or not.
3. To convince execs and managers to approve your project ideas, you often have to write a document explaining your idea. If it's badly written, the exec isn't going to be as interested in it.
4. To get fame as an engineer, you often should write compelling blog articles. Badly written blogs tend not to be read.
5. Good docs make popular libraries, popular libraries get attention.
Which leads to:
6. Promotion is often done by a committee of people who don't know your work, and all they are going to do is review what you wrote. And promo is often based on leadership of projects. And how do you become the leader of projects? You write compelling documents.
Bad writing is not a good sign. It's like saying, at my company, we don't write tests and we don't have alerting & monitoring on our servers.
^ not to be confused with strong writing skills!
Brevity is crucial. Learning to compress ideas, eg limiting emails to 5 clear sentences, is part of this rare and important skill. Sorry you haven't (yet?) experienced a work env where there's good writing. Such places do exist!
Definitely. Communication full of casual txtspeak and/or broken English all over. I suspected my first job's recruitment emails to possibly be some kind of scam at first because they were made in 3 different fonts in the same email with random words capitalized or colored various colors for emphasis, of course full of broken English - and I'm not talking about just terms like "do the needful" which are valid Indian English, that's fine, but even evaluating as that language so much of the communication is just terrible and nobody seems to care. I guess it works out fine and ultimately doesn't matter much but it still feels unprofessional.
Communication skills -- especially in writing -- are increasingly important, rare, and valuable.
I've been doing software-related work for a living since 1998. The trend toward remote and async collab -- which has only ever increased in that 22-year span -- strengthens my conviction.
I see some really brilliant problem solvers in my company, for instance, that are definitely being held back by their inability to communicate well. Communication allows you to scale your impact several times over.
I would think that writing well is at least a requirement for promotion into a technical leadership role (above senior individual contributors).
By writing well, I don't mean in the style of journalists or novelists. Rather, writing clearly and concisely to effectively convey one's points and reasoning should be very valuable in engineering.
Electrical, computer, and SW.
I'm not saying communicating well is not needed. I'm saying writing well is not needed. What I've seen: A good presentation (including PPT skills) is much more valued than writing. Decisions are usually made because of them, not because someone wrote a good brief outlining positives/negatives. Emails longer than a few lines tend not to be read, so people don't focus on it. Documents are usually not read by many except those beneath them, etc. I almost never see a senior management write anything of substance unless it is required by Legal/HR - they'll always get an underling to write them (and no, writing them is not how underlings become senior management).
I'm not saying I like the state of affairs, but it is how I've seen it.
Just in case you are serious, counterpoint for others who may not know, all forms of communication are very important to succeed and move up.
