Wow, I would have to sit down and think for a bit in order to come up with something I disagree with more than this. Being able to write well is a golden ticket to getting things you want, especially economic opportunities. If you can communicate well, people will trust you with important, valuable things. If you aren’t writing, you’re not thinking as well as you could be, and therefore not communicating as well as you could be.

Really? I see people in my job doing far less writing than they ought to. Little to no documentation, little to no design docs, and where stuff is written, the document fails to explain the why/how of its design, includes grave errors about how preexisting system work, etc.

None of that seems to hold them back: they plow into code head first … and … stuff comes out the other end.

Even Slack messages from many of my co-workers are broken fragments of terrible grammar. The syntax is corrupt … let alone the semantics of whatever the hell they're trying to convey.

And I see no correlation between these people, and failure in the corporate world.

That tells us that people aren’t writing as much as they should, not that writing isn’t a valuable skill.

Looking at the top quartile of every profession I have been involved in, those people consistently write more and better than their peers.

> That tells us that people aren’t writing as much as they should, not that writing isn’t a valuable skill.

It depends on what it means by valuable. We may value it, sure, but in his example the poor communication didnt hurt their performance reviews or salaries.

Valuable means “having a significant positive impact on one’s career opportunities”.

Can you quantify that though? I mean if you look at people who study writing in college the salary outcomes are pretty bad. Im not saying its not useful, or that its easy.

This is a classic main effect vs interaction. Looking at “people who study writing” is not the useful category here, since it’ll include literature degrees (and probably exclude skilled writers who haven’t formally studied writing, to boot). More useful is to consider skilled writers vs unskilled writers within a same profession.

In engineering, writing can be extremely valuable. Multi-million dollar proposals are won and lost based on the quality of writing. It is very important.

Well if the average is quite low, being above average might not have much of an ROI.

Being a strong writer is incredibly valuable, marketable, and in my experience a pre-requisite for success in the "knowledge economy" (outside of some people that are able to get by on deep technical skills alone).