swipe right on writing well as an engineer
why writing matters for engineers
I stopped trying to be the loudest voice in every meeting. The truth is, yelling in Google Meets doesn’t win respect or get things done. Instead, I learned that writing is how you influence decisions without being in the room.
In meetings, it’s easy for your ideas to get lost because people interrupt, ask “quick questions”, or talk over you. Being loud doesn’t mean you’re right. It means you spoke the loudest. The best engineers I know don’t rush to talk first or louder. They write first. A clear proposal doc or a well-timed Slack thread often does the heavy lifting that a meeting can’t.
When you write, you create something that sticks. It lives beyond the noise of a call. The doc, your words guide the team and stop confusion. Instead of fighting for air time, you’re influencing the direction from a different angle. One that scales far beyond the hour on the calendar.
Writing also scales your impact beyond GitHub commits. Your code fixes the problem now, but your writing helps people understand it later. When you write well, you multiply your influence. You become more than a coder, you become a force multiplier.
The ironic part is that writing clarifies your own thinking. I’ve spent hours stuck on a problem, but when I wrote about it, the answer became clear. Writing forces you to untangle your assumptions and makes contradictions stand out. If you can’t explain your design in writing, you don’t understand it yet.
This is why good writing is often a quiet form of leadership. You don’t have to dominate the room or interrupt to move things forward. Instead, you set the record straight in text, letting your ideas breathe and take root. Your writing becomes the single source of truth when the meeting ends and questions pile up.
Of course, many engineers tell themselves writing is not their job. “I’m a coder, not a writer,” is a phrase I once used. But real impact in tech requires more than shipping clean code. It demands aligning teams, reducing confusion, and building trust. None of which happen without clear communication.
The engineers who influence the most are often the ones who write the most. They write RFCs, proposals that stop extra work and get everyone to support the idea. Their influence lasts far beyond a meeting slot.
So next time you’re tempted to jump into the fray and shout louder, remember: writing is your quiet power. Write your ideas down, send the doc, share the proposal. That’s how you scale your voice. That’s how you make decisions happen without being in the room.
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Until next time,
Adlet
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