[HN Gopher] Writing better by answering why, what, how
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Writing better by answering why, what, how
Author : 7d7n
Score : 102 points
Date : 2022-06-12 03:26 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eugeneyan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (eugeneyan.com)
| drieddust wrote:
| > Here's a story from the early days of Amazon Web Services:
| Before writing any code, engineers spent 18 months contemplating
| and writing documents on how best to serve the customer. Amazon
| believes this is the fastest way to work--thinking deeply about
| what the customer needs before executing on that rigorously
| refined vision.
|
| Good luck explaining this to the new age Scrum certified gurus
| who wants to complete all design work in 2 weeks of sprint 0.
| leetrout wrote:
| Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
| m463 wrote:
| I don't know how to reconcile this with my view of amazon.
|
| "the customer" to amazon is not only the customer buying
| products, but the "other customer" paying for search results.
| The interests of the two are in opposite directions. I wonder
| if they have some sort of laffer curve.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is more an AWS thing, I imagine, where the business is
| providing the client with cloud computing resources in a
| secure and efficient manner. That at least seems to be a
| straightforward goal (although I wonder about how their
| billing really works under the hood, I imagine there are ways
| to push customers into more expensive tiers than they really
| need).
|
| Amazon, the warehouse & shipping outfit, is riven with
| conflicting interests and is probably something of a
| nightmare to work as a dev at because of that. Current
| legislation exposes this:
|
| > "The bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)
| and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) would stop sites including Amazon
| and Google from giving their own products a leg up in search
| results. (NYPost Jun 2022)"
|
| Also, consider the people responsible for Amazon's "Time on
| Task" warehouse worker monitoring system... kind of sadistic
| at best.
| lupire wrote:
| > 18 months
|
| That's either an utter lie or one very specific research
| project not performed by the "engineers".
| mpyne wrote:
| Yeah, unless they mean some other Amazon than the one that
| believes in "2 > 0" in product portfolio management and that
| "communication between teams is terrible!" (a quote
| attributed to Jeff Bezos).
| Etheryte wrote:
| Granted I don't know the context of the given quote, but I
| definitely agree with at least one interpretation of it. If
| you need communication and synchronization between teams to
| achieve your goal, there's a lot more room for missing
| memos, misunderstanding etc. In that sense indeed,
| communication between teams is terrible in the sense that
| it adds extra drag to the whole process. Of course, there's
| ways to spin this quote in a number of other ways too,
| which is why I think the quote without any additional
| context doesn't really illustrate any one point.
| Sujan wrote:
| The linked article spells out exactly what project it was
| about:
|
| > Take AWS. It reached $10 billion in revenue in less than
| four years. But what's remarkable is that they didn't get
| there by forming a team, writing a lot of code, and then
| testing and iterating. In fact, it took more than 18 months
| before the engineers actually started to write code. Instead,
| they spent that time thinking deeply about the customers they
| were trying to serve and forming a clear vision for what AWS
| should be
| csdvrx wrote:
| These are great sections to have - along with "Who" to delineate
| responsibilities between teams for say future maintenance in case
| several teams are involved.
| 532nm wrote:
| A neat guide for good technical writing goes as follows:
|
| 1. Tell the 'WHAT' (i.e what you have built/observed/intend to
| do/etc.)
|
| 2. Explain the 'SO WHAT' without which the WHAT is almost
| meaningless (i.e. that it reduces operating costs by X/.../etc.)
|
| I often find myself focusing too much on the WHAT, neglecting the
| SO WHAT. However, the succinct phrasing helps me to also keep the
| SO WHAT in mind.
|
| (I first stumbled upon this way of phrasing things in the neat
| little book 'Trees, Maps and Theorems' by Doumont)
| Swizec wrote:
| "So what" is otherwise known as why. And it often flows better
| if you put it before the what - why is it that you're doing the
| what and why should I care?
|
| Another good writing tip: replace every "and then" transition
| with a "and that's why" or "and despite that" transition
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _"So what" is otherwise known as why._
|
| These are often different. "Why" is often interpreted to mean
| why the _author_ did it, while "So What?" or "Why Should I
| Care?" is why the _audience_ should care and continue
| reading.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _"So what" is otherwise known as why._
|
| It's valuable to phrase it as "so what" rather than as "why",
| because people without focus in all fields end up writing
| only "why the thing being analyzed happened" and not "why
| this analysis/suggestion/whatever matters". The problem with
| "why" is that "why"ing the wrong thing ends up just being an
| extension of the "what". Or at least be up front and clear
| and say in its entirety "why you need to stop whatever else
| you are doing right now and listen to me". Writing advice can
| improve itself by careful attention to writer failure modes.
|
| > _And it often flows better if you put it before the what_
|
| Indeed. You want to quickly convince the reader to stick
| around. But often you need to give a little background first,
| so really it becomes "what, so what, what for real, how, etc"
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| now how do you get anyone to read your document? Is there some
| secret trick involved?
| amfactor3 wrote:
| Here's how it's done at Amazon: schedule an hour long meeting
| with the people you want to read it. Make sure that the meeting
| invite includes no description or agenda, and has only a vague
| subject. If anyone declines your meeting invite, forward the
| invite to their manager and say they are blocking you by not
| joining your meeting. Do not provide a link to the document
| until 1-5 minutes before the meeting starts.
|
| During the meeting, spend the first 5 minutes giving people
| access to the doc (which is made stupidly difficult because
| you're using the worst collaboration software known to the tech
| industry: Quip). Spend the next half hour in silence while
| everyone reads the document for the first time. Then spend 20
| minutes going over the comments left on the doc, bikeshedding
| about minor details. Finally, spend the last 5 minutes talking
| about how you ran out of time to discuss the important topics
| and have to schedule a second meeting while everyone groans.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| Ok, now does that mean that only a program managers can get
| his documents into consideration?
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