On the importance of writing for for computer-type-people:
1. It's learnable.
2. The goal is to make whatever you're writing about look obvious.
3. This is a problem if your goal is to look smart.

Back in grad school, I used to write crypto papers like they were the House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's what I describe now as "deep semantic buffer" language: you have to be able to keep track of 17 million clauses and sub-clauses just to finish one sentence.

The vocab used is also often well beyond what most people use, especially people who speak English as a second language. Using those words means that a lot of people have a cache miss right in the middle of reading a sentence and lose the thread of meaning.

I literally wrote crypto papers like that. Seriously. Crypto papers have a heck of a lot of new syntax you have to pick up and throwing in sentences that fill paragraphs doesn't help. At all.

(Not doing this is a lot of what I learned in grad school. Thank you, @dawnsongtweets.)

But I was still not good at writing. I'm still not great, but I got a lot better when I learned that: a) most people don't have a deep semantic buffer

b) my goal was to make the conclusion look obvious.

(I'm sorry that I forgot who taught me (b). Thank you.)

Making whatever you're writing about look obvious is absolutely fantastic for getting things done. People will get to the end of your design doc, go "well, duh", and then work together to do whatever it is.

Fantastic. You made it happen.

Writing well gets things done. People understand the problem, the reasoning, the solution. They can make adjustments as they go along because they have the goals and constraints in their mind.

But this is terrible if your goal is to look smart.

I'm not kidding about the smart part. I can't even count the number of times where I wrote a design doc and came up with an elegant solution and people said "well, duh" when they got to the end. They may even think that it's their idea.

With clear writing that makes things obvious, some people will miss that you had to be clever to come up with the solution. They will miss that writing takes skill.

But here's the thing: you solved the problem. That's the most important part. And good people will appreciate it.

If you want to work with people who are good at solving problems smoothly, I recommend recognizing people who solve problems smoothly. Good designs and docs are one way. There are lots of others. (If you like I'll tell a story about another.)