I was programming from the age age of 13, got a law degree after my computer science degree, loved English literature and philosophy at school, and my career path went straight from engineering to architecture and only recently back to eng. My hot take: Most engineers are aggressively illiterate.
Not to mention they're all reading ai summaries of their emails and asking copilot to write responses for them using said summary as a prompt. It's dire.
My company has an engineering cohort of over 800 which is huge for its type and industry. They're flocking to AI to 'do the boring bits' like 'write documentation' for them. They don't know how to communicate in written form and they're too embarrassed yet arrogant to admit it. It's beneath them.
I think that this is a bigger problem with a text-drenched world than we have been admitting for a long time actually; reading and writing is very hard, and draining, and I'm interested in ways we can make that easier for folks without losing the value of their critical thinking, etc
Speaking from my experience not with software teams but with tutoring students for a long time, struggles with reading and writing are truly widespread and I tend to look at this not as an individual problem but as a societal problem that we fail to provide the right supports for
But indeed, environments that stifle admittance of vulnerability, and aggressively divide "technical work" from "non technical support work", seem like they would entrench and enlarge these fault lines
150 years ago, nobody expected everyone to be able to read and write. Maybe our aspirational ideas about universal literacy were ableist. Everyone is owed equal access to education, but perhaps a large number of people fall through education, get technical jobs, then dig damaging social defences?
It's truly horrifying. I don't expect these guys to be Milton but they can't put a sentence together or read subtext. I’ve worked with engineers in the petroleum industry.
I'm lucky: I was able to hire my own team, so I selected for the soft-skills I prioritise alongside the technical skills. But interacting with the wider org is hugely frictive because so few of them write anything down. Nevermind tech docs - I can't even get copies of annual/probation reviews!