I have no regret studying at the University.

Many of those have rules about how if you have a Masters, you earn X more and you can just keep earning more the more degrees you get. $4000 lets the payback period Be quite fast.

University of Populi

Homines University

University of the People is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission (DEAC), a national accreditor recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). CHEA recognized accreditors can be browsed here: https://www.chea.org/chea-recognized-organizations

DEAC is a US-based, non-profit accreditation agency founded in 1926. Our university (quantic.edu) was also accredited by DEAC. It was a multi-year process, and extremely rigorous; we were evaluated across all aspects of our organization: academic, operational, financial, etc. Many schools that begin the accreditation process do not successfully complete it. As the name suggests, DEAC specializes in distance education, so it's a good choice for a university that offers purely online programs. Some accreditors have requirements that implicitly or explicitly exclude online universities; for example, there might be a requirement for a physical library of a certain size. Regional accreditation also often takes longer, or requires you to have been in operation for more years. However, when comparing notes with my retired academic family members, there were similarities in the required documentation for DEAC to what was needed in the regional accreditation renewal process.

A prerequisite for accreditation in the US is licensing at the state level and compliance with all state laws within which the university has a physical presence. This means that you need to be very careful about where your school has physical offices and from which states you advertise and enroll students. Note that licensing is also required for issuing certificates, not just degrees; this is a common mistake for education startups, especially bootcamps. Lambda School [1] and Flatiron [2] were both slapped for this.

The differences between regional and national accreditation often boil down to "regional accreditation means credits are more likely to transfer." However, one thing that's thrown a huge wrench into this is that in 2019, the US Department of Education revised its rules to eliminate the distinction between national and regional accreditors! [3] This rule change will take effect in July 2020. The impact of this (and related) rule changes on credit transfer and how universities market their accreditation are open to speculation.

Regarding the University of People's pricing, it's important to note that they advertise as "tuition free." Terms like tuition have a very specific meaning in the world of higher education, and are considered distinct from "fees," for example. This is why UofP does not market itself as simply being "free," like we do for our early career MBA program. To use the word "free" unconditionally, DEAC requires us to prove our early career MBA students can apply, enroll, study, and graduate having paid no tuition or fees whatsoever. On the other hand, if you do charge for tuition, like we do for our Executive MBA, DEAC requires you to disclose all payment details up-front; this is why almost anywhere on our website where we reference a price, or even affordability, we also include a link to display a breakdown of tuition, payment plans, scholarships, discounts, and other potential fees.

The higher education space is very regulated, so innovation can be challenging. It's important to remember that most innovative organizations have to (at least initially) make tradeoffs to better serve a subset of the market over incumbents. Our raison d'etre is active learning, for example; we eschew passive lectures (no video professor) in favor of a proprietary interactive learning format that's mobile-first and broken up into small modules. This has numerous advantages for the learner, but it also means that our bespoke curriculum structure can't be easily packaged up into transfer credits. As a graduate school, we decided that was a reasonable tradeoff to enable innovation in the core learning experience. Likewise, we decided to pursue a quality-first strategy (see: Tesla master plan), building a deep, challenging curriculum with a selective admissions process (less than 10% admitted) to establish the value of the school and alumni network, with the plan to launch more open programs down the line.

If you've read this far, I hope that you at least take away the fact that building something new in the higher education space is hard. If some aspect of a program appears odd at first glance, consider if the diversion from the norm might also confer an advantage with a specific audience. And when evaluating educational program options, don't discount the value of a licensed and accredited provider recognized by the US Department of Education or CHEA.

[1] https://www.educationdive.com/news/running-without-state-app... [2] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2017/ag-schneiderman-announc.... [3] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/us-department-education...

[EDIT: some sentences tweaked for clarity]

In general, universities in Europe tend to be free, so I agree with you, 100USD per class is indeed tuition for me. But, it is not the US-centric "tuition" of the brick-and-mortar schools.

One of my short-term goals is to help the community where I am living now and my home country with this degree.

Uopeople might not be accepted yet in other regions but I heard that they are working on it. When you want to help, you can get the most out of "a little". Uopeple degree helps you make that happen!

Howbeit, I 'have enjoyed the company and experience with good and positive professors and students. Thank you for raising the bars of education and professionalism

It is borderline fraudulent for schools like this to operate without being very clear on the limits of the credits earned and their portability.

What is there to against a revolution that serves a great purpose of demolish education shortage in different parts of the world. I personally enjoy the flexibility the school gives me so i can be partly working or traveling.

I would prefer a more rigorous program, but for what I pay I accept it for what it is.

And you're right that many of the students struggle with even the basic courses, and there's very little in the way of support for them. Then again, that tends to be the nature of online education in general.

I don't know of any low cost "top tier" bachelor's programs, but I do know the University of Texas Austin and Georgia Tech both offer online master's for ~$10k. As I understand the programs, they're supposed to be more for students who didn't major in CS in their undergrad though.

I actually find some of the coursework in the Tech program interesting like Computational Photography.

"tuition-fee free"? I would hope you get at least some tuition!

Well, UoPeople is both good and bad, as everything in life.

On the bad side, some teachers are not only useless, but actively making your experience worse. This is mostly cultural, but teachers coming from Africa and some Asian countries really make you want to stick to the tiniest details of rules and assignments.

For example, if you have to write a learning journal (and you will), and the example of an LJ contains entries starting with date such as "DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM", African and some Asian teachers will ask you to correct it from any other format. I found this infuriating. What's more, when I had questions, most often, I got no help from these teachers. Some teachers would be amazing, most teachers would give me a non-helpful question, some would ignore my question outright.

I also feel like there's a ton of hoops you have to jump through. An associate CS degree consists of a number of health/philosophy/econ classes that I have zero interest in. This is, again, cultural, as UoP is highly US-centric. If you're coming from other country, you'll realize how many assumptions you had (and how silly the UoP/US system can be).

On the good side, however, I do feel like I'm learning a lot. If you really spend time in reading the materials, I have found the exercises in courses quite useful. I'm 100% sure it's not as rigorous as a brick-and-mortar university, no. They will let pass students who have learnt nothing as long as they put in work.

But, if you want, you can surprisingly learn a lot. Even after being a number of years in IT (engineering and now architecture), I found something new (especially their Database and other specialized courses are quite good). I haven't done math since high school (my brick-and-mortar degree was not in CS) and some of the math courses were really kicking my ass, which is great.

It's also insanely flexible in that it's online. You decide when to do stuff. You decide when to read. There's only deadlines for every week. Other than that, it's up to you.

Overall, I think my experience with UoP is quite good, but it takes a very specific mindset. If you're from a poor non-US and non-EU country, I'd say UoP is great for you (provided you can pay for it, since it's still not free). If you're from US or any EU country, UoP degree will have almost zero value in terms of having a degree, but might provide you with a lot of new knowledge. If you're in for the knowledge, I'd say it's nice. If you're in for the degree, I'd say go for Georgia's Tech OMSCS.

Feel free to ask any questions if you'd like. I'll be checking replies to this post for a day or two.

It looks like a lesser education. And it further makes it look like there’s something strange about you that made you pick it.

There are also students compiling lists of schools which will consider and/or accept UoPeople credits/degrees.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UoPeople/comments/g55smv/list_of_in...

The idea that UoPeople is some kind of academic dead-end is simply not accurate. It's not going to get as far as a degree from a no-name state uni on its own, but it can definitely be leveraged to further one's goals.

You said 'Nationally accredited. Not regionally accredited. Hence useless for academic purposes.'

But, as Stanford and Harvard show us, being neither nationally nor regionally accredited does not make it useless for academic purposes. Saying they don't need accreditation - yeah that was my point.

Stanford and Harvard don't need accreditation because they are among the premiere universities on the planet. Stanford is regionally accredited by the way, I'm not sure why you keep arguing they're not (your confusion is probably that they dropped their ABET accreditation in CS which is not required for CS although some universities do maintain it). Actually, now that I went back and looked it up, even Harvard is accredited, as is every other ranked university I looked up -- Carnegie Mellon is accredited, Georgia Tech is accredited, MIT is accredited.

The two things are entirely independent, you're correct -- but you're making an argument that isn't supportable in comparing the premiere universities on the planet who could, if they wanted, theoretically, eschew the concept of accreditation because they don't need to prove anything about their curriculum with a college that has nothing -- no accreditation, no reputation, nothing at all.

Have you ever hired someone and stopped to check if their college was accredited?

You can make the argument that legal teams exist to relieve the very potent pressure of this uncomfortable situation for those on both ends. There are truths here that flow right up to the top and all the way to the bottom. Attacking those perspectives is too hard. Better in some ways to set up social norms around it. Thus, lawyers, the concept of win-win negotiation, etc. Just when your anger is boiling over you learn that the C-levels want you to drop the moral crusade.

> It's honesty vs. dishonesty.

Kind of like you're either a criminal or you're not. If you drive 58mph on a 55mph zone you are. Otherwise you're not.

Binary positions are always convenient, once you pick a side.

It's a bit difficult for me to believe that there are highly competent people who would be effective employees now, but for whom cheating is easier than doing the work. Remember: cheating (without getting caught) takes time too.

I can write a few page essay on any given topic much faster than I can figure out how to copy/pasta that essay without getting caught.

I can implement most undergraduate programming assignments faster than I can figure out how obfuscate someone else's code enough to fool cheat detectors.

Etc.

The subset of people who are truly competent but for whom cheating is easier than doing the work has to be vanishingly small.

Most exams have a cutoff of 66.6%. Above that is a pass and below that is a fail. The university doesn't assign a GPA grade therefore you graduate with an automatic GPA of 3.0 regardless of how well you score. Since there's no intensive for a higher score and I already know the material from working in the industry (SQL, HTML, Java), I'm speed running the curriculum for the Bachelor's degree.

I think that top-tier universities are different in the top 20% and bottom 20% of students. The top 20% because you won't find those types of people at no-name. The bottom 20% because they're at least not completely incompetent (unlike the bottom 20% at no-name).

Here's how I break it down:

Top 20% of students at top universities: They really are that good. Also, they are the ones who benefit most from the intense curriculum at top universities. So they start off really good and actually do get a force multiplier effect from the comparatively very rigorous course-work. Most of these students end up on rapid trajectories in industry or with NSF fellowships.

Average students at top universities: Most of these students would be in the top 10% of the class at a no-name college. Still quite good, but nothing special.

Bottom 20% of students at top tier universities: Really nothing special. Comparable to the average student at no-name. Contrast with the bottom 20% at no-name, many of whom couldn't fizzbuzz on their first attempt in our senior interview prep course.

So, top tier places are really characterized by their top 20% and bottom 20%. The top 20% really are quite amazing to work with. The bottom 20% are at least not incompetent.

One last note:

> Or maybe the best of these students go on to work at companies that pay 250k/yr and I just don't meet them.

Most of my students at top-tier had offers in the $150K - $250K range. So if your sample of top-tier university CS students is sampled exclusively from non-entry-level engineers who did not receive offers in the $250K range, you're almost certainly sampling from the bottom 20% of top-tier graduates.

A large majority of students who start at the University of Phoenix fail to graduate. The guarantee you speak of does not exist, not because the standards are high, but because the average student admitted to these universities is incapable of the work, or too disorganized to do so. There are plenty of not for profit universities who admit similar students and they don’t graduate either.

But given who holds the majority of the money being devalued, given the extent that money is already being devalued for the benefit of some at the expense of others, and given that the idea of taking a relative to wealth portion from the group for the benefit of the poor is a form of redistribution the group already engages in regardless of the consent of the giver, I think you can easily construct an argument that it is not immoral to use counterfeit money as long as you pick the right targets.

I have two options; Read the super boring textbook for 5 hours, take the test legit and get an 80% or I quizlett the test get 100% and spend the next 5 hours listening to Dan Carlins "Hardcore History" Podcast which i find much more informative and enjoyable.

Psychiatrists are medical doctors, and the rules on who gets to practice in the US are for practical purposes written by the AMA. That guy was not a licensed psychiatrist. He wouldn’t even be allowed to sit the first levels of the requisite exams.

> Baccalaureate or Licenciatura degree; or Post-Secondary Diploma or Post Secondary Certificate and three years' experience.

Now you and I know this is pretty much just a sheet of paper, but what's the cheapest/easiest way for someone who already has professional accomplishments to get that sheet of paper?

https://www.coursera.org/degrees/msee-boulder

https://www.coursera.org/degrees/master-of-science-data-scie...

The fact that they're masters programs with performance based admissions make them even more suspicious to me, but if you're looking for bachelors programs like this I think the ASU bachelors hosted Coursera also has such an admission path.

What more do you know about this strategy? Can you introduce me to anyone who has done this?

You would probably need to check to make sure it counts.

So I don't really care about the details. I learn more, great, but otherwise I'm happy because I just want to be able to apply to get into Europe or Asia as a software developer in the future and not worry about whether I have enough points, etc to pass the rigor.

All of that being said, the first course was a gong show with lots of academic violations, but like all things in life it's what you put into it and I plan on graduating with Honors, so even if it's a weak degree I'll still be able to respect my work and effort.

The problem with all forced group work and not being able to choose the group is you get a very mixed quality of effort and talent. I'd stay away from any program that pushed that heavily.

I should hope not given the fact that they are not regionally accredited and now that they have finally applied they likely won't be for another 2-3 years. Assuming they pass.

I remember very well reaching an understanding of a subject by different means than what the teacher expected(?) or was taught to expect. That path of learning was rejected (despite the result being the same) and accordingly graded as a failure. Such resistance to different learning paths, a "status quo" of how people should learn, and the tendency to try and fit everybody into well-defined boxed is frustrating and counter-productive.

Everything I've ever heard about and learned of the college admissions and pricing situation makes me prefer that latter.

Though, in the case of UoPeople, it's purely about nationally accreditation lacking the prestige (and sometimes rigor) of regional accreditation. It's been that way for at least a couple of decades since I started reading up on higher ed.

Spending three years at a community college and expecting the credits to transfer to a major university makes no sense for the institution. At that point they did a minority of your training, why would they recommend you?

Do you remember which state and university?

It led to many fewer questions by students, teachers assistants (something the other institution did not have and did not need because one professor could attend to all of his students), and in general less interaction between students with each other and with professors/TAs.

The curriculum at both were essentially the same for this set of classes.

From talking to people further along the plagiarism spectrum than myself, they see it as developing good taste or almost coaching.

Yeah yeah in a writing class its hard to justify not learning to write. But in any other class...

Lets hypothetically say we're in a computer science class and our assignment is to write an essay on the supremacy of the C++ language. There's all these English department goals of becoming a better writer that would be met by my pitiful attempt to glorify polymorphism. But the C++ goal of learning to be a better C++ programmer would be best met by extensive reading and research to find the best Stroustrup quote. If I were involved in the academic scene of converting papers into salary via cooperation with other researchers, I need to quote my coworkers accurately to share the revenue appropriately. However what if I don't have the goal of playing that game? In a learning environment in casual verbal conversation I might tell my C++ instructor that C++ main() returns an int. Yet if I write that down as I just did, I'm committing the academic sin of plagiarism by not properly footnoting Stroustrup, that's a direct quote from him. But I'm not trying to play the academic game, I'm trying to learn to program, and develop good taste by copying the right people. It seems a little unfair to grade students based on playing a different game than they signed up for. Even if the institutional goal is to produce little academics, in practice almost none of the kids will become academics.

That's a very authoritarian example of copying a guy at the top; but it also applies to lower level copying.

They're not necessarily wrong or self destructive, just kids on a different path with different priorities.

Uh, did I say that, or were you intuiting? Not exactly a learner's approach :D

> Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you.

Except when it benefits you? This is the subjective perception I was talking about. That their mindset differs does not instantly make them wrong, especially when you can throw a dime out the window and hit an educated professional who falls short of the best (heaven forbid the "perfect") ethical standard.

Ethics is, and should be, hard. If you put words into my mouth, is your position ethical? This stuff requires the ability to stick around, listen, learn, and stay in the game, moreso if you plan to claim the high ground.

Except learning isn't really the reason most go. It's to get a well paid job at the end of it.

and a job well done is its own reward right? i think it's very pretentious to say that to a person who's attending school in order to improve their lot in life (because credentials count for so much); that what's more important than the credential is some abstract notion of improvement. you might as well cast it in terms of sin and salvation.

Funny enough, this idea is almost certainly one you are plagairising. Perhaps you could find nuance, depth, and understanding by turning those words on themself?

Somehow I feel like most of the debate here centers on these words:

> The purpose of <foo> is <bar>.

That little word "the" there at the beginning seems a bit myopic to me. I mean, clearly, something like writing functions in more ways than one. Here are some other potential purposes of writing, off the top of my head:

* Deconstruct your personal ontology,

* Intrinsic artistic value,

* Emotional expression,

* Elucidation of unconscious grammatical habits,

* Social signaling.

Any of those are perfectly functional operations of the writing act, and a few of them actually benefit by plagiarising (Identifying these is left as an exercise for the reader). Of course, saying that "university should allow students to operate under any possible goal framework" is a different matter, but hopefully that at least points toward one way of thinking with more nuance about plagiarism.

> Except learning isn't really the reason most go. It's to get a well paid job at the end of it.

There's no contradiction here.

In the US, maybe. Do people take ridiculous loans for their degree outside of US? Some loans, sure, but loans that amount to 5-10x their future yearly income? I don't know...

This is not objectively true but I understand what you're trying to say. I'm sad to hear that your experience of science and truth has been only that which society has given you, or at the least that you feel that others are only experiencing it in that way

The lack of responsiveness comments have to one other on the internet is disorienting to me, because I would have thought that this would merit acknowledgement. Your anecdote may as well have dropped out of the sky in response to basically any comment in this thread.

Why do you believe that college can teach making subjective decisions?

We had to go to computer lab at school to use the computer. But then my parents spent a fortune on getting us one. Now that I think about it, it was like half a year's rent. Jesus Christ, what were they thinking?!

Mostly played games. But then got a Linux CD from a magazine when I was 13. Wiped the drive accidentally trying to partition it. Disaster. Path to writing code begun.

This doesn't have to do with me either -- the market will determine whether any one person is valuable enough to employ (or promote). My only claims are that being able to write makes one more valuable, and that plagiarizing assignments at school fails to teach one to write.

If students don't bother to do the work, they won't develop any competence in the discipline.

It would be like sending someone for Scala training, only to have them skip all of the work, buy the answers to the quiz, get the accreditation.

University is about much more than 'skill acquisition' but there is a lot of that. Cheating is almost universally pointless.

> And this is a big part of why "hyper ethical" subjective ethics people struggle--they assume their view is right and don't ask questions of others.

That is itself quite the assumption.

I don't remember a lot from my undergraduate course on Ethics, but I do recall that literally in the first lecture, the professor presented us with questions about things like how should one behave or treat others, and then presented us with "edge cases" that directly challenged what most of us had answered.

As a young person, it's very easy to think that our problems are novel and unique, and the ethics course very clearly showed that many of these problems are millennia old, with people having given names to better-realized versions of what most of us think of as the way we should behave, and that people have spent lifetimes of work writing and arguing about the ramifications and "edge cases" of such philosophy.

I feel like the biggest benefit from the course was not any particular ethical guidance, but rather the challenging of our beliefs, and the realization that these things _are_ hard, and are not something we can trivially answer with something that fits on a Hallmark card.

Definitely. Communication full of casual txtspeak and/or broken English all over. I suspected my first job's recruitment emails to possibly be some kind of scam at first because they were made in 3 different fonts in the same email with random words capitalized or colored various colors for emphasis, of course full of broken English - and I'm not talking about just terms like "do the needful" which are valid Indian English, that's fine, but even evaluating as that language so much of the communication is just terrible and nobody seems to care. I guess it works out fine and ultimately doesn't matter much but it still feels unprofessional.

Communication skills -- especially in writing -- are increasingly important, rare, and valuable.

I've been doing software-related work for a living since 1998. The trend toward remote and async collab -- which has only ever increased in that 22-year span -- strengthens my conviction.

I see some really brilliant problem solvers in my company, for instance, that are definitely being held back by their inability to communicate well. Communication allows you to scale your impact several times over.

I would think that writing well is at least a requirement for promotion into a technical leadership role (above senior individual contributors).

By writing well, I don't mean in the style of journalists or novelists. Rather, writing clearly and concisely to effectively convey one's points and reasoning should be very valuable in engineering.

I'm not sure how much weight this argument holds.. The whole "gen ed" thing is a rather US-centric concept.

I don't know of any universities in the UK that require a PHIL intro course of students. When you go to university, you overwhelmingly study the one course ("major") that you picked beforehand. There's often a small amount of room on many courses for optionals from other fields, if you want to take them, but this is by no means mandatory and I'd say the proportion of folks doing philosophy modules studying a different degree at my alma mater was slim.

The vast majority of philosophy classes are absolutely garbage at teaching either of those things. Sure, in theory, logic is part of philosophy, but in any of the philosophy classes I've taken, we didn't talk about logic. The things we did talk about were often examples of how not to think, yet they were presented as equally valid next to much more rational ideas.

For example, one of the things we covered in my ethics class was Kant's categorical imperative. The categorical imperative falls over instantly if you apply even the most basic logic to it, but no mention of this was made in any of the course discussion or materials. I'm sure lots of people walked out of that class thinking that the categorical imperative was a perfectly reasonable way to make ethical decisions. If this is the sort of "learning how to think" philosophy classes are doing, then I'd prefer we didn't--I'd rather let people figure out how to think on their own than to teach them unequivocally incorrect ways of thinking. Philosophy could be useful if these classes were taught as, "Here's a bunch of historical ideas, and here's how we apply logic to prove them wrong." But until that happens, I'd strongly oppose introducing any more philosophy to curricula.

Other fields are better-equipped to teach people logic and evidence. Science is all about evidence collection, and logically applying the collected evidence to the evaluation of hypotheses. Math, especially around proofs and derivations, is all about logic, and probability and statistics give you tools that are very broadly applicable. History, if taught well, teaches you how to logically analyze artifactual evidence and logically contextualize the present in terms of the past.

But, there are two problems: first, many college students don't focus much on these areas. And second, the parts of these fields which I mentioned aren't particularly well taught even by these fields. Many students get A's in science classes thinking that science is memorizing a bunch of facts about chemicals or living things, without ever having learned how to obtain new facts themselves. Many students get A's in math classes having memorized a bunch of formulas without being able to derive even basic proofs. Many students get A's in history classes having memorized a bunch of historical events, without knowing the difference between primary and secondary sources, and without ever considering that an author might have bias. Even the classes which do teach people how to think, to some extent, generally do a piss-poor job of it.

That's not to say that these fields (and other fields not mentioned) have no value. Even if you think well, your thinking is only as useful as the evidence you feed into it, and colleges do a very good job at moving vast amounts of evidence on a variety of subjects into people's brains. Further, colleges often do a lot of work getting people skills: lab techniques, using computers, effective communication, etc. You can argue that the purpose of college is learning how to think, but the implementation of college is much better at teaching people information and skills. Learning how to think would certainly be valuable, but de facto it's not what colleges are doing, and the things colleges are doing do have some value.

That said, modern colleges often put teaching of any kind behind profits, and that's not something I see any value in for society or students.

They're only low caliber people when it comes to writing. Otherwise they're exceptional engineers. The company historically and currently is a market leader. We're not talking about a small shop.

> I don’t consider people for positions who cannot write well

And this is exactly what I'm talking about. If you're in a setting that values it, and set up filters for it, then of course writing is important. If you're in my company where it isn't valued, then not only is it not important, it has little benefit. No point in writing well if people aren't going to read it.

> Really, can you take a poorly written engineering spec or RFP seriously?

In the case of my company, yes - if you want to keep your job. Unless it's inscrutable, I can't go to my manager and refuse to work on something because the spec is poorly written. He'll immediately tell me to go contact the author and sort it out. Occasionally the author will be nice enough to fix the spec and release a new document. But it's hit and miss. The reason many don't fix the formal spec in these cases? Their managers don't value it.

Specs are for major efforts. At the intermediate level: "What the heck is a spec? We just communicate requirements via PPT."

(No, I'm not kidding).

But that is your personal preference enforced only where you personally can enforce it. That is not imply your decision making is typical for industry.

This sounds somewhat idealized. As much as writing well is an asset, the understanding and ability to navigate office politics is what increases one's chances at career advancement. In the simplest form, just doing what the boss wants/expects one to do, not doing the unwanted things. No matter big or small company, a lot of subtle things that are said and done matter more, than the ways things are put in writing.

I could go step by step, but really? This sounds to be so far out of reality. There is reason engineers dont write blogs - they dont matter.

> 1. You often have to write design docs to communicate what you are making and gather feedback. These documents if badly written won't be as well received.

In my company this is entirely up to the culture of the org. Some parts of the company will require it. Other parts treat it as a formality (i.e. few will read it). And other parts don't require it at all.

> At many companies, you have a million things to work on, so in a way, you get to choose who you work with at some level. If someone communicates badly to the point of annoyance, it will take something special for you to decide to work with them or not.

The key phrase is "to the point of annoyance". If most people are poor writers, they are not annoyed at the fact that their peers are poor writers. Even worse, being a good writer is not an advantage.

If your culture doesn't value it, then it is not of value.

> 3. To convince execs and managers to approve your project ideas, you often have to write a document explaining your idea. If it's badly written, the exec isn't going to be as interested in it.

I addressed this in my comment and won't repeat what I've said.

> 4. To get fame as an engineer, you often should write compelling blog articles. Badly written blogs tend not to be read.

I suspect this is reflective of the SW point of view. My company is an engineering one. It is a giant, and is usually the top company in its discipline. I've worked with engineers who are likely the best in their discipline globally, and often way ahead of academia.

Not one of them has a blog - internal or external.[1] Very senior leaders tend to have them, and they usually are not technical, but corporate speak.

Keep in mind: Most of the engineering world is very different from your typical SW company.

> 6. Promotion is often done by a committee of people who don't know your work, and all they are going to do is review what you wrote. And promo is often based on leadership of projects. And how do you become the leader of projects? You write compelling documents.

In your whole comment, this most reflects how unreflective your perspective is in the engineering (and even SW) world. Yes, I do know some companies that do promotions via a committee of people who don't know your work (Google, etc). For the rest of the tech world, this is rare. People get promoted because they have a manger who will root for them in front of the committee. The committee is typically the next level manager, and he/she likely is aware of your work. There's no "promotion packet" that one writes. There's the annual review (under 2 pages), and the committee only scrutinizes it if your manager is pushing for a good bonus or promotion. And as long as its readable, it's good enough. Of course, this means that spelling errors and poor grammar are OK.

When you want to get to a really senior role (usually takes 15+ years in the company - less than 1% of employees reach that level), only then does a wider committee get involved and will scrutinize your work. Do you have patents? Do you have external publications? And this is only for a technical role. You're not subjected to this scrutiny to get into senior management. Which is why surprise, surprise, we have a larger number of senior managers than senior engineers.

> And how do you become the leader of projects? You write compelling documents.

Oh heck no. You get an idea and pitch it verbally to management.

Trust me - a very consistent feedback I've gotten from management at work is "You write too much. No one will read what you wrote" - almost always delivered after I write an email that has 4+ paragraphs. I'm not claiming I'm a great writer, but they don't give up because they find my writing hard to read. They give up after seeing that the email doesn't fit on their screen. If I have a "tldr" they'll read that and talk to me in person (only a tiny minority will read the actual email).

Culture is king. Writing well will serve your career only if you are in a company that values it. Let's not pretend that writing well will take you places in organizations that don't value it.

[1] I should say that they do not openly have a blog. Some may have ones they don't publicize. Having a technical blog you spend a lot of time on would not be viewed positively, and the more senior you are, the more people will be concerned you'll leak IP. The company is pointlessly secretive and senior management doesn't want to allocate resources to vet your blog's content for IP violations.