TL;DR You gotta learn how to properly communicate in long form text.

Common knowledge in advertising states that a person must see an ad 5-7 times before paying attention.

That is: your content must appear front and center for multiple times, for a person to buy, follow, subscribe or whatever you want them to do.

For this to happen, you must first wake them up from the lethargy of mindless scrolling, a.k.a. you gotta hook’em!

It’s the same with email. Especially those with everyone and their grandmother in  CC.

If you have a sloppy-written email, don’t expect it to be read fully and understood in the first go. Moreover, if you have a poorly written subject line, don’t expect it to be opened.

You see, school makes us techies believe that the most important skills for us are technical: programming, software design, architecture, diagrams, debugging.

What school misses is that IRL we spend a lot of time explaining our work and talking about our work.

Whether it’s showing something to a coworker, or giving a stakeholder a walkthrough of a feature we’re working on, we are talking. Unfortunately, we tend to use the same vocabulary and tech jargon to talk to everyone.

And this is one of the reasons business people complain that tech people simply don’t get it.  They walk out from a tech meeting more confused than when the meeting started. 

This is why my interview process focuses more on communication and collaboration skills and less on hard tech skills. Of course, tech knowledge is still important but I can tell if you’re going to do well within the team by the way you write me an email or a chat message. 

So if you’re a tech person, do the following: