trympet

The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.

They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.

Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."

"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"

In my experience, this includes high level writing skills all the way down to sentence structure, but not including the ability to write in a formal or "educated" register. Basically, it shouldn't take a lot of effort to read what they write, on a macro level (what is this about? what are the points being made, and how are they related?) and the micro level (what does this sentence say?)

This doesn't correlate nearly as directly with formal education as you would think. Some people with a degree and an impressive vocabulary write text that looks like a courtroom transcript of their train of thought, and some people with very little formal education write nicely structured text that is easy to read, even if their dialect of English isn't what you'd find in the New Yorker. It's less about formal education than it is about their ability to organize your thoughts and their ability to see their work from another person's perspective, which are important skills for many aspects of programming, including writing the code itself.

The downside of this criterion is that if you don't read someone's native language, you can't judge them by it, so if you're looking at multiple candidates for the same job, it's problematic to give one candidate credit if you can't judge all of the candidates. On the other hand, writing well in the language the company works in is almost always a valuable skill in its own right, so it's rare that you would want to completely disregard a weakness in this area. You just have to be aware that an excellent engineer might struggle a bit in a language that isn't native for them.