DRY your code, WET your communication
Make it WET, don’t DRY!
As you all know DRY stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself, and that is common for engineers to say all day long. But communication is different; people tend to forget when a communication only happened once. So we need to make sure that we have a follow to make sure that people don’t forget. Or make your communication WET; Write Everything Twice. Now let’s get down into the nitty-gritty why I wrote this.
As I progressed in my software development career, I learnt that coding is not the only thing that matters. I naively believed that when I first made a commit on my first job. There’s more to it than just the coding part. Though I’m not saying that you don’t need to be smart on software development, right I consider communication as the most important soft skill that you need in order to accel on your career.
There are important things that you can achieve by having a good communication skill, eg.
- You can help your coworkers and also other people to understand and to accept your solution because you can transfer your thought process easily to them
- Have a better timeline for your projects because you can convince your project manager make them understand what is the reasoning behind it
- And of course, this skill will play an important role into your career path no matter which route you choose, but more important for people that goes into the management route
Those are just some examples on how communication skill can be an important thing in software development that might be brushed off among engineers.
First-World problem
Now to real life story about why I’m sharing this thing. I’m currently working as a remote engineer for a startup company in Mountain View, called LogicHub. I used to work there in the office, but I didn’t get the H1B Visa, so here I am working remotely with odd hours from my country, Indonesia.
The number 1 problem for me by working remotely is of course the odd working hours, and that leads to a limited communication with the core team in Mountain View. And thus it requires me to communicate better and more effectively with the team, or else the turnaround time is going to be very expensive — a day turnaround time. And from there I learnt a lot from my 1–1s with my VP of Engineering, Peter Kwan, that I have to develop a skill that will overcome that issue by never DRY my communication, especially when I don’t see my coworkers face to face.
People gets emails everyday. People get Slack messages everyday, every time. There’s always a possibility as a human being that we skipped those information. And this is where one form of the communication skill that is important. Repeat yourself multiple times. I know it’s redundant, but as you know our medium of communication — which is our language and whatever they may be is not the most effective way to communicate. And to overcome that we need to redundantly communicate the things that we need to communicate.
Not nitty-gritty anymore
So what I’m trying to share here is that, don’t be ashamed to repeat yourself multiple times; message the same person about the same thing multiple times. It’s something that might be counter intuitive as we don’t usually do that when writing code. But we have to do that because our medium of communication is not code, it’s a language that is inefficient.