Has anyone released a GTP-3 annealing program that will take what you wrote and make it perfectly clear to someone with less reading comprehension by some fixed amount?
That would be amazing..
To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
201–210 of 332 posts
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're using IM wrong :) You don't have to read the message when it arrives just because it instantly arrived.
Sometimes it’s my colleagues that are using IM wrong. > Hey I have a question People are too lazy to type the rest of their request until they see a response from me indicating I’m listening.
Ignore it until they ask the question. Eventually they'll learn.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. It's usually one or two people building all core features and then an army of so-so skilled maintainers.
This however happen exactly when communication is bad. When two people monopolize core, won't explain what they meant by what and effectively make it impossible to split work and effectively work for others. The army of maintainers suggests that original people just move on to new functionality having others fixed their bugs. It works better when team has mechanism for knowledge sharing and core developers fix their…
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Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's amazing anything of any remote complexity is able to be produced by collaborative software organizations. Unless it's one guy in a corner, talking to nobody. Honestly, I have seen this happen so many times that I rather suspect it is fairly common.
Agree. It's usually one or two people building all core features and then an army of so-so skilled maintainers.
It's hard to have more than 2 developers working on the core of something. Development is a very non-concurrent activity.
Speaking from experience, when there's multiple people trying to take over the same bit, they only create conflicting changes all over the place and deadlock the project. It's worse than if no work was not done. Now somebody needs to take the lead and remerge things manually and discard what cannot be merged.
Regarding maintenance, the later army of maintainers is typically a bunch of contractors mostly sitting idle billing for time. The size of the maintenance team has little correlation to the workload.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#205My two cents: 1. English is not my first language, and Grammarly helps a lot. Small things like correct punctuation and articles make the text much easier to read for native speakers. 2. I try to make communication "modular". There is tension between over-communicating (giving full context) and under-communicating (leaving out details). The first sentence of each paragraph summarizes the point. If you know that stuff…
1. Writing is FOR THE READER and your effort reflects this point.
2. This style is very effective across non-native languages and helps facilitate future communications by organizing back-and-forth discussions with topic numbers
3. Focused topics provide transition space in the reader's mind for internal language translation and context framing for improved comprehension. Each topic sits in its own compartment of the Bento Box for consumption and consideration
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#206I believe I am a good writer. On my first job as a developer I kept getting very positive feedback on my writing. I ended up even starting a newsletter with writing advice for software developers[0]. So 4 months ago I started looking for a remote job. I applied to 250+ positions. All very suited to my skills (e.g. I wouldn’t apply to any job asking for “senior” or “fullstack”). I got about only ~15 interviews, 1 offe…
> I applied to 250+ positions That sounds wrong. It's common, but it still sounds wrong to me. When I look for new jobs, I find a couple of companies (3-4) that match with what I'm looking for exactly, read up on the companies, tell them explicitly how I fit into what they need and write them personally. I have a 100% success rate when it comes to interviews, and most of the time I get a offer, but drop out when my c…
What is high quality applications supposed to mean? Most tech jobs are simply sending a resume and maybe filling a short form. There's no difference between applications.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
”I’m sure your success rate will improve then” I think you are wrong. I don’t have a CS degree, I don’t have top brand college or employer. You also assume wrong that I didn’t dedicated myself to apply to specific jobs where I was a very good fit. I did that. And it didn’t got me offers. If you tell me more about your profile, I am sure I can pinpoint why you get 100% success rate and I don’t. I am pretty sure it is…
I don't have any CS degree, nor studied at any college, nor worked at any famous employer neither. So probably irrelevant. I sure knows that when I'm doing the hiring, I rarely if ever read what colleges or what previous companies the candidate worked on. All that matters is what their experience is, what they learned so far, what they tell me they wanna do in the future and how they are as a person. > You also assum…
> I sure knows that when I'm doing the hiring, I rarely if ever read what colleges or what previous companies the candidate worked on. All that matters is what their experience is, what they learned so far, what they tell me they wanna do in the future and how they are as a person.
You are not the only hiring manager. I have seen decision makers openly read college name or even high school name and use that information to judge candidate. I am talking about people who did it very openly, I am pretty sure that there are also people who don't broadcast it and are still affected by that.
Most of it was "bonus" for someone with known school, but I have seen also negative judgement.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#208And I think it supports Dijkstra's argument [1]: "Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer." https://twitter.com/CodeWisdom/status/1318597850411008006
Not sure why it's "one's native tongue" and not "same language as the people you work with", as many of us hardly use our native language once we move away from the country we were born in, especially when talking about programming.
This might be splitting hairs a little bit, but I wonder if he didn't mean native tongue so literally. Perhaps native tongue simply means "the language you are most comfortable with" -- along the same lines of "use whatever tool you like, as long as you can use it /well/"
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
”I’m sure your success rate will improve then” I think you are wrong. I don’t have a CS degree, I don’t have top brand college or employer. You also assume wrong that I didn’t dedicated myself to apply to specific jobs where I was a very good fit. I did that. And it didn’t got me offers. If you tell me more about your profile, I am sure I can pinpoint why you get 100% success rate and I don’t. I am pretty sure it is…
Hmm. I don't agree with you. My degree is chemistry from a good-not-great institution. Since getting into SE, I've progressed to technical leadership very rapidly. I have dedicated myself to applying for jobs, but it's not that much work. It's about making sure you advertise matching strengths. I make sure my CV only has the minimum information needed to sell this. Then only job of my CV is to get a callback. After t…
It seems you're on your first job in tech? You were lucky to get a position out of your first batch of applications.
>>> My first jobs were low paying roles in non-tech companies.
Strong hint that a major factor in you getting the job was that you were cheap and that the companies were struggling to fill the position. Expect the next jobs to be get exponentially harder to get as you try to find a job that pays more and companies have much higher expectations.
P.S. The poster was applying to remote jobs which are orders of magnitude more competitive to get. It's almost a miracle he even got an offer as a new graduate.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#210I'd note that "strong writing skills" here means being able to communicate information fluently, not having perfect grammar and spelling.
Those skills are not always in alignment - I've worked happily with great written communicators who couldn't spell for shift.