Communication blindspots of software engineers

Communication blindspots of software engineers

Sometimes software engineers get carried away and interact with humans in the same way we write code. Yesterday I unconsciously sent a message to someone using nested brackets (writing a message with a bracket (inside another bracket)). I don't even know if that's a thing in English language. I laughed at myself for a couple seconds afterwhich I ensured the other party understood my message.

In software engineering (backend development to be precise), we have nested instructions we give to the machine, it is common in most backend languages to use curly brackets to write code, a lot of code won't run if they're not enclosed in a bracket. However, there are times when we want a particular instruction to execute separately and the result of that instruction be used to execute other instructions, these require nested brackets.

It is however bad practice to have too many nested brackets in a code. A block of code with multiple nesting within itself is known as spaghetti code, it's confusing and quite hard to read. There are measures and principles that exist to ensure software engineers don't have to nest multiple times thus increasing maintenability of the code base.

As a software engineer, you have to be intentional about your communication skills, this is something that can make or mar your ability to work in a team. Proofreading your messages, working on your code comments and Readme documents are great ways to help people who work with you so as to reduce communication gaps.