How some good corporate engineering blogs are written
I think this doesn&#x27;t account for what is, in my experience, the most common reason why engineering blogs fail: they have the wrong objective altogether.<p>In a former life, back when printed magazines were still a thing, I used to do some (pretty bad) tech journalism, so every time $crt_employer wanted to run, or expand their blog, I ended up going to meetings (I now do that professionally as well, actually -- it helps keep those programming-related brain cells sane). The vast majority of posts (and blogs) that I&#x27;ve seen were awful not because of a tortuous approval process or lack of high-level support. They were awful because communicating substantial, serious engineering information was not the main point. Or <i>one of</i> the main points. Or a point at all, really. It was usually just an excuse to push out some marketing and &quot;establish a presence&quot;, and management felt that involving technical people writing on technical subject would lend that effort the kind of credibility that ads don&#x27;t have.<p>This had repercussions over the whole publishing chain, and these efforts were doomed from the beginning. Topic selection was inadequate (topics were selected primarily so that they&#x27;d have the right &quot;ring&quot; to product&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;business development managers, rather than so that they&#x27;d be interesting for a technical audience). Editing was done with the wrong objectives and targeted the wrong metrics, and was often based solely on input from non-technical people who didn&#x27;t understand what a technical audience wanted. Then this article -- on a topic that wasn&#x27;t really interesting for a technical audience, and not really written for a technical audience -- was promoted mostly for a technical audience. Since the people who were doing the promotion were, inherently, in non-technical position, and they mostly consisted of a boring tech article with a mini sales pitch attached at the end, everyone ended up seeing them as marketing fluff.<p>It doesn&#x27;t help that our industry is still stuck in this world where &quot;technical&quot; and &quot;non-technical&quot; is a very strict dichotomy, where technical people are basically like a 2020 Mr. Spock and non-technical people can barely type on a computer. That hasn&#x27;t been then case in more than ten years. A lot of people who are seen as &quot;non-technical&quot; -- people in sales, marketing, or in management positions -- have grown up with computers. Lots of people in decision-making positions used to hold a technical position at one point. The kind of depth that a non-technical, but not tech-illiterate audience appreciates can be very surprising.