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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

#231

Post by stan_rogers »

excuse-me wrote: post #193
stan_rogers wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be hanged , actually, when referring to capital punishment, except when drawing and quartering are involved. It's a quirk of the language; hung is correct in most circumstances.

Yes we know, that's what made the comment funny - now you've spoiled the joke.

You seem to be using the word funny in a sense with which I am not at all familiar. Again, consider the non-native user of English, and the likelihood of encountering him or her on a site like this. "Ironic" grammar policing without an irony indicator isn't at all funny.

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

#232

Post by rprasad »

einhverfr wrote: post #35
s_henry_paulson wrote: post #8

I think it's a fair, but just to simplify the argument: Poor grammar often is an artifact of a person being inexperienced with reading, writing, or both. Either that or a sign of an unwillingness to learn. Both of these are red flags when hiring. On the other hand, if your "zero tolerance" policy includes things like my usage of an oxford comma, chances are I don't want to work for you.

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."…

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 [of the President] who shall not have attained to:

- the Age of thirty five Years, and

- been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

There, fixed it for you. It's not that difficult to understand when you know how legal parsing works. In this case, the use of two subordinate clauses at the end of the first sentence indicates that the first subordinate clause is subordinate to the phrase before it, while the second subordinate clause is subordinate to the ("super") clause preceding the third clause. The super clause consists of the first and second clauses, because they are joined by a coordinating conjunction.

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

#233

Post by SjuulJanssen »

Nice drama title. Of course the drama tanks when the reader finds out that it's for a job where people write for a living. That's like asking a programmer to do some coding in the interview. Which is, IMO, not weird at all and rather something everyone should consider.

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

#234

Post by quotemstr »

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…

> If writing is not particularly part of the work, don't worry about it.

I suspect the author is (perhaps unknowingly) using his grammar test as a proxy for general IQ. General IQ correlates _very_ well with performance across a broad spectrum of tasks. (The notion that there are different IQs for different areas of life, though sentimentally appealing, doesn't correspond to reality.) It's no surprise, then, that someone with a high IQ (as measured by this proxy) would do well in a position that requires solving other complex problems, even if these problems have nothing to do with writing per se.

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

#235

Post by rprasad »

einhverfr wrote: post #152
leephillips wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

However, by the standards of English then in effect, it makes perfect sense. Part of the problem is that written English prior to the 1900s included a large element of (conscious or subconscious) verbalization of what was written.

Try reading the Constitution out loud, taking appropriate breaks at the punctuation. It becomes a lot easier to understand and read; most (but not all) of the ambiguity will disappear.

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

#236

Post by nessus42 »

nirvdrum wrote: post #85
irahul wrote: post #17

My train of thoughts: > Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. Whoa. Who do you think you are - google? What makes you think I am going to sit through your grammar test? If I am agreeing to your grammar test, either you are one of the most desirable places to work for(never heard of you), or economy is about to collapse and this is the only job…

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…

Personally, I feel that to focus on trivialities such as the difference between "it's" and "its" to be morally indefensible. It's like being unwilling to hire people who are blind or deaf, or who need a wheel chair. (Uh oh! Is "wheel chair" one word or two? Or maybe it's hyphenated–oh no! I'm going to get fired!)

There are plenty of people who are quite smart and motivated, but are borderline dyslexic. Or maybe even not so borderline. For instance, I fully know the difference between "it's" and "its", and between "there", "their", and "they're". But I can stare at a paragraph for an hour and not be able to see such subtleties. Or sometimes even notsosubtle-ies. It's quite frustrating. And now I'm allegedly a poor employee to boot. Fan-fscking-tastic.

On the other hand, I am rather galled whenever I drive by the restaurant named "Your's".

Edit: I'd be willing to bet good money that whoever voted me down is not dyslexic. And despite making such mistakes frequently, I've often been commended for my clear writing. I received the highest grade given in several years in Creative Writing in college, got above 700 on my verbal SAT, and graduated from MIT. And yet some people want to judge me on whether I might type "it's" for "its" sometimes, and then utterly discount my opinion on that issue. Oy!

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

#237

Post by mamoswined »

pnathan wrote: post #204
irahul wrote: post #17

My train of thoughts: > Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. Whoa. Who do you think you are - google? What makes you think I am going to sit through your grammar test? If I am agreeing to your grammar test, either you are one of the most desirable places to work for(never heard of you), or economy is about to collapse and this is the only job…

As a programmer - I can't stand working with coworkers who have lousy grammar and communication abilities. Most of my work either is communication, or will require communicating what I did to someone else, or communicating with someone else about what they did. I can endure the relaxed grammar texts and IMs can use, but in practical & formal terms, I want decent writing and competent communication . I absolutely have…

Me too. And it does affect their programming in some obvious ways. Particularly if you are working with English language-heavy languages like Javascript. But even if you aren't, comments that are absent or unreadable can make working with someone's code a nightmare. Forget about documentation. And I'll never forget having to work with some code where a variable was "pubic_key."

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

#238

Post by gcv »

bigtech wrote: post #155
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?

I was wondering about this as well. Is this a correlation number, and should I translate it as "the best tests give no better than a coin flip of selecting a good candidate"?

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

#239

Post by mamoswined »

bguthrie wrote: post #69
irahul wrote: post #17

My train of thoughts: > Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. Whoa. Who do you think you are - google? What makes you think I am going to sit through your grammar test? If I am agreeing to your grammar test, either you are one of the most desirable places to work for(never heard of you), or economy is about to collapse and this is the only job…

This is very much a cultural fit test. If people who use poor grammar are going to drive the author nuts, then as the the person running the company I think he's perfectly justified in treating the candidate as a poor cultural fit. Additionally, as someone who employs writers as well as programmers, he might reasonably want to hire a programmer who is also a writer for the same reason that you'd want to hire a progra…

as Tokenadult's comment points out, such "cultural fit" tests may be illegal http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768

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

#240

Post by AYBABTME »

I wish I had a personal grammar nazi who'd poke me everytime I make a mistake in English. Unfortunately, I don't have such an individual, so I'm left with myself and my doubts.

I have to balance between near-perfecting English as my second language, or learning and concentrating on stuff that is relevant to my domain. Although I am a perfectionist, I also am a realist and consider that there are, in the end, things more important to my life than writing perfect English. Perfect English will not help me building all the great projects I have in mind.

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