Bruno Unna

Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit - Seneca

What do Paul Graham and Jason Fried have in common?

11/24/05

Permalink 01:12:00 pm, by Bruno Email , 144 words, 27050 views   English (US)
Categories: Languages, Literature, Education, Business, Communication, Economics

What do Paul Graham and Jason Fried have in common?

Or at least: what do both of them consider of the utmost importance when hiring someone?

Good writing abilities.

Paul Graham writes:

I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

Whereas Jason Fried writes this:

If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill your position, always hire the better writer. I don’t care if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, whatever. Assuming your candidates are fairly equally skilled and qualified overall, always hire the better writer. This is especially true with designers since copywriting is interface design.

How come both of them value the writing abilies of the people so much?

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Trackback from: Ben Casnocha: The Blog [Visitor]
Good Writing Abilities Doesn't Just Communicate Ideas; It Generates Them
Amen. This is something I continue to work on - I want the written and spoken word to be my secret weapon when going up against people smarter and more talented than me. Link: Bruno Unna - What do Paul
PermalinkPermalink 11/25/05 @ 15:45
Comment from: Pre [Visitor] · http://dalliance.net/
Paul Graham said it extremely well, as he tends to do, so I'm not sure why you're asking the question.

Words are the tools that we use to think with as well as to communicate with. Sure, there are other ways of thinking and they're damned useful at times, but if they're gonna be any practical use to anyone ELSE then you've got to be able to TELL them to someone else.

Which means writing them, becasue it's easier to get complex ideas out through writing, the reader can go at his own pace and isn't constrained by how quickly or slowly you talk.

The most brilliant man in the world is doomed if he can't express his ideas simply enough for others to understand.

Heh. I should know ;)
PermalinkPermalink 11/25/05 @ 16:00
Comment from: rob [Visitor]
Good writing means the person is able to take their ideas/information/whatever and organise it according to a pre-defined structure, so that other people can understand/use it.

Sound familiar? It should do, as this skill is fundamental to most businesses, both internally and externally, and if you employ a person who can't write (read: communicate) well, then they come with their own overheads that have to be paid for somewhere else.

Of course, they may have some superhuman skill in antoher area that you just can't do without ...
PermalinkPermalink 11/25/05 @ 16:42
Comment from: Chris Yeh [Visitor] · http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com
One other reason why good writing is critical is that good writers also understand their audience.

Good writing doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is a product of understanding both your subject and your audience.

To write well, you must listen well and understand other points of view. That may be just as important as the ability to organize one's thoughts.
PermalinkPermalink 11/25/05 @ 19:31
Comment from: James Britt [Visitor] · http://www.jamesbritt.com
Good Writing Abilities Doesn't Just Communicate Ideas; It Generates Them.


This is one reason I argue for Comment-Driven Development. Writing down, in plain (non-computer) language, what code is supposed to be doing helps clarify goals and behavior. It uncovers things that production or test code will not; those will test a given implementation of assumptions, but not test the assumptions themselves.


Writing is a like unit tests for your thoughts; you often don't really know what you're thinking until you try to write it down.

PermalinkPermalink 11/25/05 @ 22:21
Comment from: Dan Phillips [Visitor] · http://dp.id.au
In "Writing, Briefly", writing about style, Graham wrote, "cut out everything unnecessary". That's pretty clever, being self-referential like it is, but something bothered me when I read it, and I realize now what it was. Cut and cut out are two different verbs (cut out is a phrasal verb) with two slightly different senses. I would say that in this context, cut out would mean to excise, and plain cut would mean to curtail. The precise meanings aren't important here. If Graham decided that cut was the right verb to use there, then that is of course fine, but the implication that the out is a mere redundancy is wrong because removing it shifts the meaning slightly. I wonder if Graham was following, or even echoing, Strunk & White's bad advice to "omit needless words" when he wrote that. Okay, that's enough of me analyzing people's jokes to death.
PermalinkPermalink 11/26/05 @ 04:19
Comment from: Andy Valencia [Visitor] · http://www.vsta.org/
Along these lines, when choosing between comparable programmers, get each of them to sit down and type out some text. The one who types smooth and fast is always my preference, because the keyboard is less of a distraction on the path from mind to computer.
PermalinkPermalink 11/26/05 @ 11:21

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