It's shocking how many people don't have the ability to organize their thoughts.
I'm ashamed that I was completely guilty of this myself.
At some degree of professional development in software, you start to verbalize things, so as to 'explain them to yourself' and it helps clear things up.
This helped me understand that 'writing skills' (in this context) are frankly more matter of being able to organize concepts more than anything else.
A dev who can articulate is literally worth at least 50% more than one who cannot.
And to your point, yes, it's funny and scary when someone can't describe something they ought to be able to.
If someone can't explain something they are actually a risk to the code.
I think if someone takes the effort to make information widely known and notice whether people understand it and adjust, they will make progress.
The real problem is that for those with authority, it seems to pay off that their disorganization affects other people. It makes others artificially reliant on them, which establishes their position even further, and there’s not really any consequences.
Imo, this is cheating at life and the authority someone gets from being disorganized isn’t real success. Real success comes from having true influence and respect from others due to helping them a lot. This is a lot more difficult though.
Oh well. All the people who rule molehills don’t stop anyone else from achieving real success, so they’re only holding themselves back at the end of the day.
Lately I've been trying to explain to people that the Category Error they make is that we have memorized our own code, but when we look at the code of others it all has to fit into working memory. It's very hard to anticipate how other people will see your code.
One of the advantages of mentoring people is that you can run User Studies whenever you want. Tell them what the code is for and what you want them to do, and then watch them try to figure it out themselves, see how far they can get before you have to stop the experiment (due to them getting frustrated).
Yes! What's threatening about AI isn't that it's smarter than humans, but that it's cheaper and more scalable. And sometimes smarter. But usually a whole lot dumber.
You reminded me of a fun idea that I'll probably never do anything with:
Train an AI which is judged on its ability to quickly teach/train _another_ AI how to do the task. So, optimizing for ability to explain.
Train an AI which is judged on its ability to train humans. I don't think we're ever going to really trust AI until it can explain itself clearly to humans. And that's pretty close to being able to teach.
I'm ashamed that I was completely guilty of this myself.
At some degree of professional development in software, you start to verbalize things, so as to 'explain them to yourself' and it helps clear things up.
This helped me understand that 'writing skills' (in this context) are frankly more matter of being able to organize concepts more than anything else.
A dev who can articulate is literally worth at least 50% more than one who cannot.
And to your point, yes, it's funny and scary when someone can't describe something they ought to be able to.
If someone can't explain something they are actually a risk to the code.