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I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

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Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

#151

Post by nirvdrum »

kamaal wrote: post #147
nirvdrum wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt your ability to know what form of "const" to use in C++. At the very least, lack of proofreading suggests to me you might be rash with your code as well. Many disagree with me on this point of view, but routinely I've found that those that express themselves wel…

>>I've found that those that express themselves well in their native language write better code. If this is true, then apart from US and UK people who write good code don't exist elsewhere??? Its difficult to take you seriously after reading this.

Huh? I never said you had to communicate well in English. Even in your quoted text you can see that I said "in their native language."

And clever use of "its" there :-)

Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

#152

Post by einhverfr »

leephillips wrote: post #148
einhverfr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, I so want to go there, apply, and write at the bottom of the page: "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."…

This is crystal-clear to me. What's the problem?

By Contemporary Standard American English standards comma placements are strewn throughout the sentence with very little regard for clarity (removing a few would make it clearer), and the logical relation between clauses leaves something to be desired.

Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

#153

Post by gjm11 »

jfoutz wrote: post #81
irahul wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saving the google search for people who don't know what an oxford comma is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma "Portugal, Spain, and France" (Oxford comma) "Portugal, Spain and France" (Not Oxford comma)

Even oxford discourages its use in public writing. http://www.ox.ac.uk/public_affairs/services_and_resources/st...

That's the University of Oxford, but the term "Oxford comma" is a reference to the Oxford University Press. As you can see at http://www.oup.co.uk/academic/authors/AuthorGuidelinesMain/H... the OUP does require the use of the Oxford comma.

Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

#154

Post by cafard »

impendia wrote: post #28

Along these lines, let me ask advice from HN. I am buying a home in need of some repairs, and my real estate agent recommended a contractor whom he has personally used a lot. The contractor inspected the home and prepared a competitively priced five-figure estimate. From his estimate: "These conditions, if left to deteriate [sic] further, will make the building unsafe. ... The following recommended work is described…

I wouldn't hire the contractor to work as an editor. But I would read the estimate to see whether it makes sense--has he identified all the true problems? Is he proposing to fix things that aren't broken? Is he proposing to use materials and fixtures of good quality? If I were satisfied with the answers to these questions, I would not worry about the writing.

Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

#155

Post by bigtech »

tokenadult wrote: post #94

Once again here on Hacker News we are talking about hiring procedures for technical companies. Many people find this topic interesting, because most of us have applied for a job at least once, and many of us have been in a position to recommend someone else for a job, or to hire someone for a job. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathere…

Could you illuminate 'but only about at the 0.5 level' this a bit?

Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

#156

Post by kamaal »

Ah! The Irony.

These days programmers don't want to be bothered about the language syntax they use and heavily depend of autocomplete and intellisense to do even simple tasks. While its this grammar that they should be actually learning and mastering. Yet this isn't even the criteria for hiring programmers these days.

And by the way where does this stop. I can argue physical fitness is important for programmer so can I ask you to sprint a 1000m track as a part of my interview process?

Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

#157

Post by [deleted] »

calinet6 wrote: post #26
einhverfr wrote: post #10

Now I want to know the following: 1) Will he hire people who can't tell active voice from passive? (Check out the Language Log archives for how many grammar and style nazis can't tell the difference.) 2) Does he require that you can tell who and whom apart and use them in their correct cases? If the answer is "yes" to both of these then I would assume that the people who pass the test are English majors with minors i…

Why not? A friend of mine was an English major who went on to do programming for several startups. He's still a programmer. It's an incredibly fitting path, especially for him. He's a stickler for detail and writes beautiful code.

[deleted]

Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

#158

Post by einhverfr »

nollidge wrote: post #118
dedward wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a sneak test - it's an actual grammar test. If you are asked to document something, and you can't observe basic english grammar, I see a problem too. Zero tolerance may be taking it a bit too far, but one would imagine he can tell the difference between a typo in a big test and actual fundamental lack of knowledge of the grammar you should have learned by the time you were 14. (Yes, the double space after th…

> but nobody seems to care one way or the other. Typographers do! Double-space is OK for monospace fonts, but otherwise single-space is almost universally preferred for avoiding so-called "rivers" of whitespace. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_an...

Indeed. I'd point out that LaTeX does kerning independent of number of spaces after a period. I usually put two spaces when I type because I do a lot with monochrome fonts including all my LaTeX sources, but really, it is no substitute for proper kerning.

Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

#159

Post by nirvdrum »

irahul wrote: post #139
nirvdrum wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt your ability to know what form of "const" to use in C++. At the very least, lack of proofreading suggests to me you might be rash with your code as well. Many disagree with me on this point of view, but routinely I've found that those that express themselves wel…

> My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt your ability to know what form of "const" to use in C++. Eh, how about asking me about const-correctness than inferring from my use of "it's" and "its"? You know, you can actually talk about const-correctness instead of inferring from the grammar test. > At th…

While I could exhaustively ask about every aspect of every language you might have to work in, it's far simpler to use a proxy. The proxy in this case is your native language and seems to work rather well. And since your job certainly isn't going to be writing code for 8 hours straight, the ability to communicate well is a good skill to have.

For what it's worth, I use other aspects to proxy fit and ability as well. If you can't bother to clean up before an interview, I have a pretty reasonable idea of how you conduct yourself.

Re: the non-native speaker part. I've had to help a lot of people out over the years on various support channels because someone wrote "then" instead of "than" or "loose" instead of "lose." Since many people seem to be able to read & write in foreign languages but not necessarily speak them, homophones are easily confused. Personally I know enough French & German to follow along with most technical materials, but easily get derailed by misspellings. Is it an idiom I'm unaware of? Is it a word I don't know? Is it some sort of slang?

Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

#160

Post by einhverfr »

irahul wrote: post #23
einhverfr wrote: post #10

Now I want to know the following: 1) Will he hire people who can't tell active voice from passive? (Check out the Language Log archives for how many grammar and style nazis can't tell the difference.) 2) Does he require that you can tell who and whom apart and use them in their correct cases? If the answer is "yes" to both of these then I would assume that the people who pass the test are English majors with minors i…

> If the answer is "yes" to both of these then I would assume that the people who pass the test are English majors with minors in Linguistics ;-) I don't know. I am not a native speaker, and am not an English major, but the answer is "yes" to both of them. Am I understanding you correctly that you are saying people can't make out active and passive between "I wrote a letter", "A letter was written by me"? "Who" and "…

For example, consider "Are you responsible if papers were left on your desk?"

Passive voice.

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