Previously at Uber, Skyscanner, Skype/Microsoft. I love to help people grow and share what I learned. I write longer articles on software engineering at blog.pragmaticengineer.com.
As someone who's worked at companies with great tech blogs and wrote on them a few times, here's my take: getting developers to write on the company blog is really hard without some sort of "carrot" or incentive.
Here's why: this kind of writing is pretty thankless to most many engineers. It's a lot of work and they have to write it in a more moderated fashion -it needs to sound more professional than a personal blog and it needs to make the company not look bad, so nothing too controversial. And it will also be in front of a lot of people.
Is there a reward for this? Are blog posts parts of performance evaluation? Do they help get promoted? If the answer is yes, and this is clearly communicated, managers will suggest this as growth areas for experienced engineers and those developers will come volunteering. If it's not then you're left with the enthusiastic developers who write one or two articles. Those who are good writers quickly realize they can just blog on their own, with less moderation, instead of using the company blog. And those who find it difficult and realize there's no reward - implicit or explicit - might not spend the effort on this.
At Uber, writing posts is something that's explicitly recognized in performance evaluations and promotion cases. This helps ensure people know it's not "invisible work" and a lot more people step up. Managers also encourage people to grow in this direction, knowing they are helping people in the right direction and it's something the company explicitly values.
So I would ask the CTO what incentive they are giving to developers to write and make sure it goes beyond a "thank you". And don't forget that C-level executives, who are invested in the company due to their position already have a large incentive to write: developers won't have the same.
Of course, none of the above helps if there's no infrastructure and professional help in place, to make it easy to write, for those who want to. It sounds you've done a remarkable job getting things off the ground all by yourself - well done! But you'll probably need organizational support to make this sustainable, over the one-woman-show. Wishing you best of luck!
Thanks a lot for your input (it made me head over to Uber's blog to read more :))) )! I agree with everything you said about organizational support and it's actually familiar to me since this happens in my case as well.
Without the CTO upping the ante in this regard, I wouldn't have been able to do what I did. He was the one who wrote the first tech pieces, who initiated a writing call to action at the beginning of the year and who helps programmers spot a lot of writing opportunities. And yes, writing is rewarded across performance reviews and in free days (matters for promotions as well).
"Those who are good writers quickly realize they can just blog on their own, with less moderation, instead of using the company blog." -> since we're not a big company, it hasn't been the case for us (yet). People are encouraged to write using their own voice, blog on their own platforms as well, and there haven't yet been cases of blatant differences from the 'brand voice'. But I'm assuming this is way harder to control in a big company so I'll bear it in mind for the future.
The best thing for me, at the end of the day, is that (regardless of the number of articles I manage to facilitate), I can see the snowball effect: someone writes for the first time, some others see that and then they write for the first time. And so on :))
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As someone who's worked at companies with great tech blogs and wrote on them a few times, here's my take: getting developers to write on the company blog is really hard without some sort of "carrot" or incentive.
Here's why: this kind of writing is pretty thankless to most many engineers. It's a lot of work and they have to write it in a more moderated fashion -it needs to sound more professional than a personal blog and it needs to make the company not look bad, so nothing too controversial. And it will also be in front of a lot of people.
Is there a reward for this? Are blog posts parts of performance evaluation? Do they help get promoted? If the answer is yes, and this is clearly communicated, managers will suggest this as growth areas for experienced engineers and those developers will come volunteering. If it's not then you're left with the enthusiastic developers who write one or two articles. Those who are good writers quickly realize they can just blog on their own, with less moderation, instead of using the company blog. And those who find it difficult and realize there's no reward - implicit or explicit - might not spend the effort on this.
At Uber, writing posts is something that's explicitly recognized in performance evaluations and promotion cases. This helps ensure people know it's not "invisible work" and a lot more people step up. Managers also encourage people to grow in this direction, knowing they are helping people in the right direction and it's something the company explicitly values.
So I would ask the CTO what incentive they are giving to developers to write and make sure it goes beyond a "thank you". And don't forget that C-level executives, who are invested in the company due to their position already have a large incentive to write: developers won't have the same.
Of course, none of the above helps if there's no infrastructure and professional help in place, to make it easy to write, for those who want to. It sounds you've done a remarkable job getting things off the ground all by yourself - well done! But you'll probably need organizational support to make this sustainable, over the one-woman-show. Wishing you best of luck!
Thanks a lot for your input (it made me head over to Uber's blog to read more :))) )! I agree with everything you said about organizational support and it's actually familiar to me since this happens in my case as well.
Without the CTO upping the ante in this regard, I wouldn't have been able to do what I did. He was the one who wrote the first tech pieces, who initiated a writing call to action at the beginning of the year and who helps programmers spot a lot of writing opportunities. And yes, writing is rewarded across performance reviews and in free days (matters for promotions as well).
"Those who are good writers quickly realize they can just blog on their own, with less moderation, instead of using the company blog." -> since we're not a big company, it hasn't been the case for us (yet). People are encouraged to write using their own voice, blog on their own platforms as well, and there haven't yet been cases of blatant differences from the 'brand voice'. But I'm assuming this is way harder to control in a big company so I'll bear it in mind for the future.
The best thing for me, at the end of the day, is that (regardless of the number of articles I manage to facilitate), I can see the snowball effect: someone writes for the first time, some others see that and then they write for the first time. And so on :))