To progress as an engineer career-wise, become a great communicator From 2014 to 2020 I had a title of CTO at VMware, first for the networking business and then for the Asia Pacific region as a Field CTO. While CTO officially stands for Chief Technology Officer, the standard jokes are that it’s either Chief Talking Officer or Chief Travel Officer. I embraced all of those roles, especially the …
"the reason I was not as averse to writing as many engineers had a lot to do with the way I was educated in Australia. High school English was a must-pass subject if you wanted to go on to university"
Is it possible to become a graduate engineer without a passing grade in English (or the National language) in your high school matriculation years?
I remember in my time the local Uni (not Melbourne) had just recently dropped a "foreign" language requirement (typically French, German or Latin, Greek) for admission to Arts or Sciences but English was mandatory.
The final two years of high school English was a major subject covering broadly the language (grammar & basic linguistics) and literature (prose, poetry, speech & drama) from Chaucer to contemporary works with a large reading list and copious assignments.
Unfortunately in the many decades since I suspect the subject has been split into a mandatory veggie English subject and various, some basket weaving, electives as has been pretty much the case with mathematics and the sciences.
I remember it as the most challenging by far of my subjects and in hindsight was the most University like of those subject in requiring a lot of research and reading on your own initiative.
Sadly many contemporary University courses have leaned in the other direction mostly for purely commercial reasons leaving capable and talented students unchallenged and frequently frustrated.
Recent graduates are possibly better oral communicators but tend to fare poorly in written communication sometimes to the point of borderline illiteracy which is worrying if maintaining documentation is part of the role.
If candidates were required to compose with pen and paper (A4) only, a one page essay on a given but straightforward topic, I believe that would filter 95% of applicants out of the hiring process in most cases.
The idea that strong written communication is still a gatekeeper for engineering is laughably outdated. In many countries, “engineer” isn’t even a protected title - anyone who can code or solder can call themselves one, and often outperform their formally educated peers. The corporate world doesn’t care if you’ve read Chaucer, it cares if you can ship features and fix bugs under pressure.
Ironically, obsessing over old-school essay skills in a hiring process would just filter out talented, practical problem-solvers - the very people who keep systems running while managers debate semantics. Communication matters, sure, but let’s not pretend we’re training novelists. Most engineering output today lives in Git commits, Slack threads, and half-written Confluence pages. Making people jump through 1980s-style academic hoops just to prove they’re literate is performative gatekeeping, not good hiring.
Being unable to read doesn't stop anyone from becoming an engineer (or so-called engineer) as you rightly noted but it does keep them firmly in the trenches doing all the menial work the rest of us are too lazy to automate away yet.
*Those* are the jobs the AIs are coming for. And I long for the day I no longer have to try and gleen anything useful from their half-arsed git commits and barely-written confluence pages.
Or retirement, whichever comes first.
>Communication matters, sure, but let’s not pretend we’re training novelists.
It doesn't sound like what we're trying to do. More and more, I'm encountering people who can technically read and write, but are unable to actually do this in a useful fashion. I waste sooo much time, on emails that consist of a screengrab and one line with no actual information on what the problem is, or on people who read an error message stating "the process cannot proceed because the engine on conveyor M23 is not starting" and then have to call me to ask what that means, or on meetings where somehow everyone agrees but it takes half an hour to figure it out. And it's been steadily getting worse. Doing something about this is probably a good idea.
"and often outperform their formally educated peers"
Up to a point. If you just want to be a code monkey grinding away in the dark, then this is fine.
But at some point you are going to have to interact with higher-ups and even customers directly. Being able to communicate with people who are not as tech savvy in a way that they can understand and being able to interact with customers in a way that makes them feel special and doesn't open up your company to liability are skills you will need.
"practical problem-solvers"
These people are often the most broadly educated. If you are hyper focused it can be all to easy to miss something.
The moment engineers are expected to act as salespeople, PR reps, and customer therapists on top of their actual job, it just shows how companies keep squeezing more roles into one salary - right before tossing you out in the next restructure.
Also, calling it “your” company is rich unless you’ve got equity worth mentioning. For most people, it’s just a job - and pretending it’s anything more is how you end up burned out doing emotional labour for free.
Yes, communication is useful. But let’s not dress up exploitation as professional development.
Yes and no. If you work in a huge company and are happy to be a cog in the machine then it is acceptable to behave in that way. One of the quickest ways to get yourself a black mark is to utter the phrase 'that is not my job'. I witnessed a (now ex) colleague utter these words in a meeting with management and it went down VERY badly.
There are times when you are going to have to face management or a customer as you rise through the ranks.
That depends what kind of company it is, but most of the problems they're referring to aren't only encountered when programmers are told to do every job. You don't need to be talking to a customer for the need to communicate to be important. They can employ all the customer talkers they want who will polish up your message for the customer's enjoyment, but if your message is so unclear that the polisher can't understand it, there's still a problem.
If you're going to have the situation you describe where it is your company, then chances are that your company will be small and you can't afford to employ enough polishers to deal with unclear output from an uncommunicative tech team. In that case, you will actually need them to be able to do both of those things, and a tech who can write code but can't document will be unsuitable. Those companies who try to ignore this often find that they have a product and no customers, and it often ends badly from there.
The downvotes are because it presents a straw man (you have to be knowledgeable about literature to be hired), when nobody suggested that. The point they actually suggested, that people be tested on their ability to communicate, is a good one, and elsergiovolador was clear that they disapprove of this, using unconvincing arguments to oppose it.
The kind of communication that needs to be tested is not particularly extreme. Can you write a readme for your code that, when read by a person who hasn't read your code, does these things:
1. Tells the reader what the code is for.
2. Tells the reader what else you need to use it.
3. Explains how to run it.
These aren't high bars. This is one of the few types of communication where typos aren't a fatal problem, as long as they're not in commands or change important meanings. You don't have to work too hard to accomplish it.
Some people can't do this or hate it so much that they refuse to. Some of them have convinced themselves that, because they can't, it's okay if they don't. It's not okay if they don't. In some cases, you might want people with even more communication skills than this, which is still not a high bar, but most of the time, the readme and similarly detailed notes and emails to colleagues is fine. A good grade in a literature class would probably demonstrate you had that skill, but you certainly wouldn't need that to prove it and could gain that skill in other ways.
You certainly don't need English lit. I never even took the exam! I did pass English language which was a requirement for my post GCSE education.
As you say, it is not a high bar to reach but I have worked with people who have somehow managed to miss even that. I am probably slightly biased as I am quite severely dyslexic and went to school in an era before widespread home computer ownership and long before spell checkers and autocorrect.
Growing up in England it was always the other way around. You couldn't get onto a science or engineering degree course without various other qualifications, admittedly at 'O' level (nothing fancy). These would include English Language, a foreign language (often French) and things like History. It was common practice for people to get onto Humanities degree courses without even the most rudimentary qualification in Mathematics, though.
The US doesn't specialize like England used to. You do humanities courses through high school. There's no such thing as a spiral curriculum so you just do, say, a year of "Physics" or "Chemistry", cramming everything you need to know into that short interval. The kicker here is that courses have "pre-requisites" and often you can't get the appropriate credits to do advanced work like Calculus unless you do at least one summer session. University is just as messed up -- you get to spend the first two years doing 'general education' with only the last two years being spent on your declared major (and possibly minor). (I'm not sure how the current English system works but it seems to have adopted what sounds like a low budget version of the American secondary education system -- grade inflation and all.)
I've been defined as an Engineer throughout my career (1st by the job description, then by me). I've been fortunate enough to have that take me to most of the northern hemisphere and a little of the southern. What I've learned - no matter what the spoken language - is that you'll find success hard if you fail to communicate. Take the time to talk with colleagues and customers, even through a translator, as you'll find improved understanding at the end. I've seen way too may things/jobs slowed up by a lack of communication in the planning and then execution phases. Especially the planning bits.
My favorite people to work with? Those who believe that 'Every day is a school day' and 'There are no dumb questions'. My least favorite? People who want to keep what (usually little) they know to themselves, and those who look down on you if you ask a question to which the answer is something obvious to them, but not to you.
To avoid being the latter, remember that someone outside of your field or project may not know what you're talking about. Just be tolerant and honest with your answers if you are able to. Your first answer should usually be the question 'Why do you ask?', as that lets you reply in-context without appearing condescending. Where did I learn that? Several years of 'translating' between teams with different skillsets.
That's my typically British offering, anyway.
Then again, perhaps you shouldn't listen to me as I've ended up single again and obviously can't communicate :-)
Good points! (plus Love and Marriage, Horse and Carriage, ... ;)
It's also probably worth noting in this that the required outcome #3, of ABET's criterion on "Student Outcomes", needed to accredit a BS-level Engineering Program in the US, is indeed that such programs' curriculum must imbue students with:
"3. an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences".
That's in addition to tech stuff (1,2,6), the ability to "function effectively on a team" (5), ethical conduct (4), and lifelong learning (7).
But yeah, some students do come out with more tech skills than comms aptitudes, and vice versa (with both meeting requirements for passing courses). Still, students that get everything right (4.0 GPAs, all A and A+ grades) worry me the most, for some reason ...
This is another classic case of corporate wisdom being preached from the top - advice that sounds noble but is wildly out of touch with how things actually work. It assumes engineers have the time, energy, and incentive to become polished presenters, when in reality, most are treated as disposable headcount on a spreadsheet.
Unless you're aiming for management (and even then, good luck - especially if you come from working class), there’s little point in going above and beyond. In today’s climate, the rational strategy is to do the bare minimum required to not get fired. That’s it. Don’t waste time crafting the perfect document or rehearsing your all-hands speech - that effort won’t protect you when budgets tighten or some executive decides to “realign resources.” Spend that energy on yourself, not a system that won’t return the favour.
advice that sounds noble but is wildly out of touch with how things actually work. It assumes engineers have the time, energy, and incentive to become polished presenters,
Nobody expects any engineer (or other functional specialists like accountants, logistics and the rest) to naturally have world class presentational skills, but it doesn't take long to polish what you start with. The problem is that most people simply don't even think about it and don't try. In reality it's basic stuff: If we bore our audience, their attention wanders, and we've lost them. Speaking in great technical detail will mean they don't understand us. If we don't work on it, most of us default in presentations to the corporate monotone of death. What to us is a compelling case is to other people often an assemblage of random facts and a conclusion that doesn't persuade. Everything needs a narrative, a story, and it needs to be projected. Anyone can get 95% of these skills via free "Tell it like TED" videos.
Of course, good presentation is vital but can't help if the audience are not receptive. Imagine you were Marks & Sparks CTO in February. It's budget time, and again you put in a big uplift for security, with new hires, pricey expert ITsec consultancy and pen-testing. You make a strong case, backed by evidence, and grim warnings about how everybody is out to get you. The board become the bored, the CFO tells you just like last year that there's only so much cake, and you have to slim things down - headcount has to go down not up, and after all even when retailers get hacked it's usually just a modest fine from the ICO and a few customers data gets stolen, isn't it? Then Easter arrives, and Bad Saturday follows on from Good Friday.
when in reality, most are treated as disposable headcount on a spreadsheet
That's the reality of being either an employee or a contractor; We live with it, or go and become monks. I must say there's times when simple order and routine, a cloistered life away from the family, and a life involving no technology more advanced than the Middle Ages sounds fantastic. Are there any Trappist orders in the UK?
The idea that engineers should have to wrap every technical insight in a TED Talk just to be heard is a symptom of how broken things are. If a CFO or board member tunes out because the message wasn’t delivered with enough jazz hands, that’s not a communication failure - that’s a leadership failure. Being able to understand critical information even when it’s dry is part of the job. If they need it spoon-fed with narrative arcs and dramatic tension, maybe they shouldn’t be the ones making decisions about technical infrastructure.
This whole “engineers should tell stories” narrative is just a way to shift the burden of comprehension. It’s not that engineers are bad at presenting - it’s that the people in power often can’t be bothered to listen unless it’s packaged like an episode of Dragon’s Den. And that’s the real problem: the further you are from the technical reality, the more you expect form over substance.
Meanwhile, the engineer who spent hours crafting the perfect pitch gets the same outcome as the one who sent a bullet-point email: ignored, until something catches fire - and then it’s their fault anyway.
"The idea that engineers should have to wrap every technical insight in a TED Talk just to be heard is a symptom of how broken things are."
You've misunderstood. Doesn't need to be "every technical insight", it is about knowing your audience and communicating with them on their terms. Discussion with coders or tech architects is very different from sharing insights with non-expert colleagues, or time poor senior leaders. Some of your audience you want to bring problems to, others solutions, others options for decision.
"Being able to understand critical information even when it’s dry is part of the job"
In your perfect universe, perhaps. But if that were true, we wouldn't see corporations getting hacked day in day out due to under-investment in ITsec. The reality is different, you need to adapt for human nature, and then also for other issues like power politics, budgets, prior knowledge. Now factor in that any senior leader actually has a large span of control and lots of plates to keep juggling, and have very little time then no, it's not their job to understand all critical information when poorly presented. That's the job of the people who go to them.
Some people send papers to a board meeting accompanied by "pre-read" materials that the sender thinks are important; This shows these people don't think about their audience, and don't attend (even in silent capacity) any senior level meetings, because for every senior leader who reads the pre-read, I'll find you around 50-100 who won't.
It is simple: Know your audience, present your information concisely to get the right outcome, telling them only what they need to know, in terms they understand. I'm not sure why you're fighting against this?
Sad, sad facts.
STEM has not been a guarantee of job security and a comfortable life for decades. In fact, ALL professions have become commodities.
You folks who have not experienced this? Lucky you. You have no idea how lucky.
That said, being a crude jerk does you no favors either. You don't need finishing school, but learn SOME manners and how to act in polite company. You're not some romantic rebel, just a jerk.
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Most of the time, we're not talking about being great at presenting a sales pitch or a viral public presentation, but discussing a technical matter with your colleagues. The programmer who can write the code and it works scores lower than the one who can do that and describe it well enough that a new colleague can modify it quickly instead of having to parse through everything from scratch.
And since you still have your fixation on managers being universally bad, increasing in badness as you go up the org chart, one major situation where this is important to the career of that person is whether they can describe what they did, are doing, or want to do to the boss without making the boss go through everything. Those who can summarize clearly, accurately, and with the right details included and excluded, make sense and are more likely to retain their jobs. In the real world, that's because the boss has a lot of things to do and their job is to direct and monitor, trusting the engineers to build what they decided needed to be built. In your world, you can put it down to managers being lazy. Either way, though, it means that the bare minimum policy you recommend includes being able to communicate well enough that management doesn't worry that your poor communication is a smokescreen for not being able to do anything. I have had the experience of someone using poor communication skills to distract from their poor technical skills. I think they actually could communicate better, but that would involve saying that they couldn't do any of the work, so they disguised that with terse and unclear statements. It didn't work.
When I entered university, poor communication skills were already so common that my school required first year Sciences and Engineering students to write an English test upon entry. If you didn't pass, you were required to take a full semester (or perhaps it was a full year) no-credit English course that you had to pass in order to graduate.
Already having a fully course load, I wasn't keen on another course, and I've always had trouble with things like pluperfect tense compared to "regular" perfect tense, and things like that. I needn't have worried, as the test was so basic I expected any first grade student could pass it easily. Questions like "in the sentence 'Dick and Jane ran up the hill', which word is the verb in the sentence?", "is the sentence in past, present, or future tense?", and the like. It was a 60 minute test that I wrote in 10 minutes, I got 100%, and I assumed everyone else would, as well.
I was wrong. Something like 40% of the students failed it. And the majority weren't foreign students whose first language was not English, either. If fact, many of them spoke English more formally, and more correctly, than the native Canadians who had been raised speaking English as their first language.
I sat in on one of these remedial English classes, on Friday at 3pm, because I was catching a ride home with a student in the class, and I wanted to make sure he didn't drive off without me (as he had the previous Friday). Students were reading their lab reports to the class, and the teachers were grading them. I have a fond memory of the female first year Chemistry student whose lab report included the phrase "and then I fellated the tube". She was interrupted by the professor asking her "Miss, [pause] do you know what that word means?". "To suck in", she replied. There was a long pause, and the professor responded with "well... [pause]... yes....".
It was hilarious, though not to the student. Although she did get lots of offers for dates in that class. I thought it was a one-off, an aberration, and I wouldn't see things like that in real life.
One of the first bug reports I was ever given at a company was "We has finded when pickuping of icon and is not setted default, drop cannot is". Yes, that was submitted by a native English speaker.
One of my grandmothers was a teacher of English (not an "English teacher", she was Scottish/Irish, and she loathed the 'bloody English') so I had always been corrected quickly when I used the language incorrectly. I really hadn't thought about it, but in my career, I think that at least 30%, or more, of the promotions I received, and the jobs that I was hired for, can be attributed to the competitors for those positions having poor communication skills.
When I reached the level where I was reviewing resumes, I quickly had to dispose of the old "throw away any resume with a spelling or grammatical mistake" rule, because they all had grammatical and spelling mistakes. At least for applicants from Russia/China/non-English speaking countries, I could be sympathetic, but I've seen resumes from graduate students that have me doubt whether they could write a declarative sentence that was more than three words long.
I doubt that leetspeek and texting culture will increase literacy and communication skills in the younger generation, unfortunately.
"When I reached the level where I was reviewing resumes, I quickly had to dispose of the old "throw away any resume with a spelling or grammatical mistake" rule, because they all had grammatical and spelling mistakes. "
Grammar and spelling we now have pretty good tools to check. There's some jargon that those tools miss, but aside from that, if somebody submits an application with errors in it then clearly they didn't use the functionality included in any office suite, and in several browsers. That's a doubtful mark in itself. Often though, these are the same people who clearly have not read the job advert, and/or have not followed the guidance on what they need to demonstrate in their application. I recently had to sift 134 applications for a junior admin role (because it was working for a director, not because it had anything to do with me directly). The advert was long, but very clear on what the job was, what experience and qualities we were looking for, and how our assessment process would operate and what the candidate needed to do to demonstrate their skills. We struggled to get six people to interview, because most people applying for this not-very well paid job did not meet the essential criteria that were clearly laid out, or because they didn't comply with the simple process. Several were clearly heavily over-qualified, they were out immediately. Several others used the same AI that spat out the same examples of things that the AI thought demonstrated competence in this type of role (any perceived use of AI in this manner was a straight fail). A good few had zero experience in the required field but still applied. Others ignored our process that included the statement "in the event of a large number of applications, the first sift will be on the basis of the candidate's personal statement". And others had massive errors of their own making - numbered paragraphs that didn't follow, or went a, b, c, 2, g, or employment history that had no logical order, or was missing huge chunks of recent time, had personal statements that referred to jobs that weren't listed in the employment history.
If you want to be long term successful, anyway.
Contrary to some comments, this doesn't mean you studied Chaucer or necessarily the classics (although that doesn't hurt).
I have had to effectively communicate with people at all levels of organisations and the interesting thing is that they all effectively speak different languages, even though (in most cases) it has been English.
It isn't just about fixing problems quickly, either. Can you explain how the problem occurred so it can be prevented in the future? In my experience, being able to clearly explain what a problem was / is and how to prevent it is a very important skill.
Senior management wants to know there is a solution. Engineering management wants to know the solution and how it might be implemented. Engineers want to understand the solution and the practical effect.
QA wants to know how this will be documented and applied.
If you have junior engineers who you are mentoring (you really should be) then it is perfectly possible you will need to be able to explain a concept in at least two different ways.
If you are helping with bid work then you need to be able to explain how your part of the bid will solve the customer's problem.
As far as getting jobs goes, the fact I really know my core subjects (and a lot of tangential ones) would not be very useful if I cannot explain clearly how and why I know those things.
The list goes on but that is the gist of the subject. Explaining how a fix affects the business to a senior manager is a lot different to explaining how that will affect day to day engineering to the line manager.
Well said.
I've met many erudite people who could not effectively communicate the time of day. I've also met many professionals who refuse to document anything, even though ti was an absolute job requirement.
Some days, we'd all like to be left alone in the back office and judged solely by our work and skills, but that's not life.
My career accomplishments are not so sparkling, but I've made a decent living for years as an engineer who could write and present to audiences.
In my large American high school, I was denied participation in the first-ever advanced placement course in English, despite straight A's previously. The single guidance counselor for 1300 students advised me to seek a technical education because I had straight A's in math and science. I was worthy and financially deserving of a scholarship for full tuition and books at Case Institute of Technology, a forerunner of Case Western Reserve. I did passably well in courses there, including two programming courses and four semesters each of Calculus/Differential Equations, Chemistry and Physics, including lab work. But my liberal arts leanings made Case and uncomfortable fit. I gave up the scholarship, began working as a programmer, transferred to Western Reserve next door, losing credit only for a course in which I attained a "D", a barely passing grade. I completed my studies with a BA in English Literature, taking graduate level courses in linguistics, old English and non-Shakespearean middle English literature. I graduated at the end of the summer rather than the spring of my senior year.
So I have been an English lit major masquerading as an engineer for decades, working variously as a software developer, customer-facing support person, project leader, manager, presenter to a couple of thousand tech people, negotiator and self-employed personal computer fixit guy. It has worked out well for me, enabling me to live in different areas and climates including one year in the old Yugoslavia, one year in Belgium and four years in Italy, fulfilling my dream of living outside the monolithic and provincial United States. Financially, it has been good, but I am not exceptionally wealthy.
Being able to communcate clearly and succinctly is most important, in engineering and in ANY career.
Bruce Davie> All of these experiences led me to appreciate the value of both written and spoken communication
elsergiovolador> This whole “engineers should tell stories” narrative is just a way to shift the burden of comprehension.
My father became a computer engineer in the 1950s. The thing he most wanted to pass-on to me was that he wished he had worked on his communication and persuasion skills as much as his brilliant logic minimization. (I now think he was wrong here: he got caught in the collapse of RCA while Sarnoff retired and died, and nobody talked/wrote their way out of that.)
I recently found an article he wrote in 1953. As my father's son, I see his shortcomings in me. Enthusiastic about possible results without explaining the groundwork or the advantage over other routes. He had it all in his head but did not get it on paper. He wrote about computer-guided war in an era when computers would just about do a payroll or inventory. Many of his readers probably wondered what loco-weed he was smoking. Not a way to sway decision-makers.
I grew up surrounded by electrical engineers that worked for the power company, and also hang around mechanical engineers that work on everything from lawn mowers to "I can't talk about it", and even civil engineers with that much-coveted PE stamp that makes them big-r Responsible if a bridge falls down. A large portion of an engineer's work is communicating through reports, meetings, and presentations. It really isn't that useful if one guy knows that the vibration readings from the generator with a warped shaft at Bumshuckle Flats Coal Belching Station means that its bearings are going to have a 28.3% reduced lifespan and that the risk of vibration-induced stress fractures on the turbine blades is increased by 700 times. They need to communicate that with colleagues that are performing the risk analysis, and all that is sent to management who then get to make the decisions who need you to fly half your division to corporate HQ to explain why this needs to be dealt with right now at great expense rather than during the scheduled major overhaul that was only a year and a half away.
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