Saying the obvious thingStating the obvious is surprisingly useful. Most of your knowledge lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, so it’s possible for a piece of writing to remind you of what you already know. It’s common to know you don’t like something without being quite sure why, and reading an obvious statement (such as “accuracy matters, even when you agree with the broad strokes”) can help clarify why you find certain things distasteful.
Sometimes you can see some obvious truth that nobody seems to be talking about, and reading it in someone else’s words can prompt an “oh god, I’m not crazy” moment of catharsis. For many junior engineers, it’s almost a rite of passage to notice that some percentage of software engineers do virtually no work. Since nobody talks about it (how would you even bring it up in the workplace?), they often feel like they’re losing their minds: surely this state of affairs wouldn’t be allowed to continue, so they must be completely misreading the situation. But in fact it’s true.
Stating the obvious is hard. It can even be dangerous: sometimes there’s a good reason nobody says the obvious thing. But I think the bigger reason it’s hard is for the same reason that it’s hard to draw what you actually see. When I look at a person and try to draw them, I’m not drawing the lines and shades my eye sees (like a printer or camera might). I’m drawing what I know the person looks like, which is a kind of stick-figure approximation. It takes time and effort to drop the layer of interpretation and draw what’s actually there1.
Many of the posts I’m most proud of are times when I’ve managed to articulate something I think is obviously true: engineer reputation is determined by ratchet effects, good engineers are right most of the time, you shouldn’t just do JIRA tickets (or glue work), and so on. These are all things I’ve believed for a while, but have only (relatively) recently been able to notice that I believe them. Sometimes I’m helped along by reading something I vehemently disagree with (like “nobody gets promoted for doing simple work”, or ”big egos have no place in tech”).
Stating the obvious doesn’t mean avoiding nuance. Every obvious claim carries with it a host of subtle, non-obvious claims. For example, I believe that having a big ego can be very useful as a software engineer. But why exactly is that, and what do I mean by ego? Obviously it’s not good to be constantly flexing your status on other people, or to be unable to tolerate the possibility of being wrong. However, I do think you need to be able to take firm technical positions even when the situation is uncertain, which means you have to be confident in your technical instincts. Teasing out that distinction (and its implications) is very interesting, but in order to do it you need to be able to first articulate the obvious part.
I’ve been talking about stating the obvious in technical blogging. But this principle applies just as well to other kinds of communication. When I write a technical design document at work, it’s very important to state the obvious. In fact, technical communication is so hard and general understanding is so poor that just getting people aligned on the obvious things is often enormously valuable. Much great literature and poetry aims to bring out some obvious but hard-to-articulate part of human experience.
Don’t avoid writing something down just because you think it’s obvious. The thing you think is obvious now might recede into your subconscious in an hour; get it written down while you can! And don’t avoid writing something down because you think it’s dangerous to say and everyone already knows it. For people new to the area, reading your words can help them feel like they’re not losing their minds. Finally, once you write down the obvious thing, it allows you to go on and draw out the parts that are less obvious, in a way that you couldn’t do if you try to just skip straight to the subtleties.
Incidentally, this is why most people cannot draw a bicycle on their first attempt. Unless you’re a mechanical engineer, you probably do not have a stick-figure-level approximation of what a bicycle looks like in your head, so you begin confidently (after all, you’ve seen a thousand bicycles) and get stuck after the first few lines.
If you liked this post, consider subscribing to email updates about my new posts, or sharing it on Hacker News.<br>Here's a preview of a related post that shares tags with this one.<br>Writing for AIs is a good way to reach more humans<br>There’s an idea going around right now about “writing for AIs”: writing as if your primary audience is not human readers, but the language models that will be trained on the content of your posts. Why would anyone do this? For the same reason you might want to go on podcasts or engage in SEO: to get your core ideas in front of many more people than would read your posts directly.<br>Continue reading...
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