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I won’t hire people who use poor grammar (2012)

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Re: I won’t hire people who use poor grammar (2012)

#11

Post by pdevr »

jleyank wrote: post #3

Hmm…. Working from the title, the author won’t hire people who aren’t native language speakers? Last time I checked, different languages had different grammar and usage which makes it difficult for people to learn new ones. Anecdote: decades back, had a great coworker of Russian extraction. Hell of a time getting him to put articles in his documentation. Code was spot on, though.

He does provide for an exception for them[1].

[1] >Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.), if job hopefuls can’t distinguish between “to” and “too,” their applications go into the bin.

Re: I won’t hire people who use poor grammar (2012)

#15

Post by lloydatkinson »

klwantr wrote: post #14

"if job hopefuls can’t distinguish between “to” and “too,” Why do English speakers consistently label spelling mistakes as "grammar" mistakes? Doesn't English have a distinction between spelling and grammar?

Same reason a whole English speaking country also says "on accident" instead of "by accident" and "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less"... lack of critical thinking and momentum.

Re: I won’t hire people who use poor grammar (2012)

#16

Post by modestygrime »

klwantr wrote: post #14

"if job hopefuls can’t distinguish between “to” and “too,” Why do English speakers consistently label spelling mistakes as "grammar" mistakes? Doesn't English have a distinction between spelling and grammar?

Someone using to vs too is not misspelling a word; they don't know the difference between two words. That's a grammar mistake. Would you say this is a misspelling?

"I hope they share there food with me."

Re: I won’t hire people who use poor grammar (2012)

#17

Post by jraph »

It feels so narrow, almost like the author hasn't met enough people in their life.

People get grammar wrong all the time for many different reasons that are not always "logical": tiredness, loss of focus, focus elsewhere (on the actual content, for instance), dys-something, lack of sleep, something else. And for some reasons, it's not always easy to spot our own mistakes when proofreading. But that's a very well-known fact.

I myself make a lot of mistakes when writing even when I'm pretty sensitive to grammar and pretty good at it. And many very clever people don't seem to be wired for liking / being sensitive to grammar as much as I am.

By not hiring people who make grammar mistakes, you are missing out on great people. Your loss, I guess.

I guess it makes sense to hire people able to write well in writing jobs, but even then, if you need error-free texts, the only way is proofreading by other people and good tooling. So… unless the person does a lot of mistakes without being able to fix them… meh?

Also, I very much prefer reading a text full of mistakes but of which I can follow the logic, than an error-free text that I can't follow.

Maybe a better solution is to make society more tolerant to mistakes when reading? Saying this as somebody who' reading is easily disrupted by writing errors in others' writings.

Re: I won’t hire people who use poor grammar (2012)

#18

Post by automatic6131 »

coldtea wrote: post #4
jleyank wrote: post #3

Hmm…. Working from the title, the author won’t hire people who aren’t native language speakers? Last time I checked, different languages had different grammar and usage which makes it difficult for people to learn new ones. Anecdote: decades back, had a great coworker of Russian extraction. Hell of a time getting him to put articles in his documentation. Code was spot on, though.

You can also be a great programmer or a great hardware technician (since we're talking about "iFixIt") and suck at grammar and/or spelling, even without having dyslexia. Perhaps you never cared for non-programming languages, and was bored at school when you were not programming... The author just has some prejudices and ossified criteria, and since they are in a position to judge people based on them, they do. Famous…

Einstein probably would have made a bad software developer for ifixit. There are many companies who primarily do boring work and do not need brilliant minds, and what they need are merely competent minds in x domains. And I'm not surprised if that also includes native-level {language}.

Re: I won’t hire people who use poor grammar (2012)

#19

Post by SilasX »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #15
klwantr wrote: post #14

"if job hopefuls can’t distinguish between “to” and “too,” Why do English speakers consistently label spelling mistakes as "grammar" mistakes? Doesn't English have a distinction between spelling and grammar?

Same reason a whole English speaking country also says "on accident" instead of "by accident" and "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less"... lack of critical thinking and momentum.

I get the problem with “I could care less” (taken literally, it’s the opposite of what they meant), but what’s wrong with “on accident”? It’s just an arbitrary convention that the common expression is “by accident”, and the other one makes sense by being parallel to “on purpose”.

Edit: also “on command”, “on request”, “on occasion”.

Re: I won’t hire people who use poor grammar (2012)

#20

Post by gerbilly »

I remember writing what I felt was thoughtful essay for a history class I took in first year UNI. I did a lot of research, and being a CS major, I Think I crafted a solid logical argument.

The week after the TA started complaining about people's grammar, specifically saying that you can't communicate you ideas if you can't form grammatically correct sentences. She specifically called out the difference between 'it's' and 'its.'

At that point I knew she was talking about my paper, so I chimed in: "Oh you're talking about my paper!" Sorry about that!

I think this is where CS hurt me, cos we are used to consistent rules. When used like this 's denotes possession: "Dave's car." So I sometimes still over-apply this rule to "it" i.e.: "It's car."

I found the whole exchange peevish, which is why I decided to lean into the critique with the TA in front of everybody. I told her to scan the room and look at all the faces assembled.

I told her that if she only was going to consider an argument valid if the grammar was perfect¹, then she wasn't likely to be pleased. Almost everybody in the room had a different mother language than English, including myself.

1. This was in an era before spellchecking became common.

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