Episode 302: Bad boss movies and well-written emails

Published: May 2, 2022, 1 p.m.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

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    My boss keeps recommending bad movies. I watch most of them but I feel bad because they\u2019re not good and I don\u2019t want to disappoint my boss. They are \u2018okay\u2019 but are really mediocre. Do I just ignore my boss\u2019s suggestions or should I keep watching these terrible action-heist movies even though I don\u2019t like them?

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    Does it matter if my emails are well written?

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    I\u2019m a software engineer. I asked my partner how I should word a part of my email. After reading my email they were appalled. They said that it was \u201cabysmally written and lacked refinement\u201d. I\u2019ll admit that it wasn\u2019t my best written email, but who cares? It was just an email letting a team member know that I had followed up on a ticket a while ago, so it wasn\u2019t like this was going to a client or something. Plus I felt like the email conveyed the message that it needed to.

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    In my mind as long as the email isn\u2019t offensive or covered in grammatical errors and conveys the message, isn\u2019t that good enough? My partner argued that I should write my emails more eloquently since my \u201cterrible\u201d emails will reflect poorly on me. I told other engineers care more about the content and less about how well-written any given email is, but they wouldn\u2019t budge. In addition to that, some of the emails I\u2019ve gotten from our senior and staff engineers seem like they were written with someone who has the English skills of a middle schooler and they seem to do fine for themselves.

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    Thoughts?

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\n\nShow Notes\n

This episode is sponsored by Compiler, and original podcast from Red Hat. Check it out

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Reference to the Dragon book on Wikipedia

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Robustness principle: Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send