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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

#251

Post by nirvdrum »

nessus42 wrote: post #236
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…

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…

I didn't downvote you, but my guess is you were downvoted for making a rather tenuous and almost insulting relationship. There's a big difference between someone with an actual disability and those that just don't care about what they write. And I don't think anyone is even advocating for a zero tolerance policy. People make mistakes all the time. But calling it a "typo" or a triviality or otherwise getting defensive really doesn't help anything. It does however suggest how you might react when a "triviality" comes up in a codebase.

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

#252

Post by larrys »

" I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts."

I take issue with this.

Assuming you could, assuming they were available to work because they couldn't find any other job, would you hire a Rhodes Scholar?

If you are hiring for a blue collar type position like "stocking shelves" you want someone who is qualified enough and happy to be in that job and planning to stay at that job. Not thinking it's an interim job until they find something better. A person who is academic enough to have perfect english many times will be an under achiever who might have issues and that is why they are only "stocking shelves".

There is a reason why companies often say "you are over qualified for the job" as a reason someone isn't hired. The job has to fit the person roughly.

As an aside the OP didn't exactly define what is meant by "poor grammar" or place any links to the "mandatory grammar test" so readers can even decide for themselves.

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

#253

Post by melissajenna »

As an interviewee, the grammar test reinforced my confidence that iFixit was the right fit for me. I don't want to work with leadership that doesn't "put their money where their mouth is." I love that Kyle is uncompromising in this regard, as it sets the bar high, and we all continue to strive for excellence.

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

#254

Post by AkThhhpppt »

adavies42 wrote: post #221
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there's no rationale beyond convention? Other linguistic conventions get changed so why is this one sticking around and why do its supporters promote it - is the more logical [to me] method somehow confusing?

it's old printers' stuff to do with physical properties of lead type, i think. as to why it won't go away, i have no idea. i happily ignore it in almost all my writing....

Inertia, I assume.

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

#255

Post by snambi »

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…

I agree. Less words are better. Someone is looking for grammer to hire, may be he should move to publishing industry.

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

#256

Post by fishtoaster »

rprasad wrote: post #229
Alex3917 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great post. Thought this was interesting from the Schmidt & Hunter article: "This meta-analysis found that the validity of GMA for predicting job performance was .58 for professional managerial jobs, .56 for high level complex technical jobs, .51 for medium complexity jobs, .40 for semi-skilled jobs, and .23 for completely unskilled jobs." Apparently having a high IQ is a better predictor of being a good business guy…

Take any "meta-analysis" with a large grain of salt (or better yet, and industrial size vat of salt). Meta-analysis suggests that men under the age of 26 have a 60% chance of being sex offenders. This same type of meta-analysis is also the reason that all sex crime offenders (including drunk people pissing in a park and amorous couples getting it on in a dark parkin glot) are lumped together for sex offender registra…

Would you care to elaborate on what, specifically, is flawed about meta analysis? I'd definitely be interested in a source on that 60% number and how that source arrived at a number that seems, on it's face, so incorrect.

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

#257

Post by blahedo »

einhverfr wrote: post #158
nollidge wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I'd point out that LaTeX does kerning independent of number of spaces after a period.

This is misleading. Yes, LaTeX ignores how many spaces you put after the period in the source; but it does lay out extra space after sentence-ending characters. To avoid the extra space (e.g. if you have a mid-sentence abbreviation) you have to backslash it!

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

#258

Post by trustfundbaby »

I see where the OP is coming from but this is the kind of mindset that could ensure you miss out on brilliant technical hires. I have a co-worker who only started learning English 15 years ago ... he speaks very good English, but every now and then he'll make written grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Brilliant developer.

I'm a bit OCD about grammar myself and am definitely partial to people who are excellent writers and speakers of English, but I think making an allowance for non-native English speakers could

a. help increase the diversity of people and ideas in your workplace b. make sure you don't miss out otherwise fantastic hires

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

#259

Post by nessus42 »

nirvdrum wrote: post #251
nessus42 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I didn't downvote you, but my guess is you were downvoted for making a rather tenuous and almost insulting relationship. There's a big difference between someone with an actual disability and those that just don't care about what they write. And I don't think anyone is even advocating for a zero tolerance policy. People make mistakes all the time. But calling it a "typo" or a triviality or otherwise getting defensive…

I've never been diagnosed with a disability, and now I am supposed to jump through hoops to try to prove to people that I should be given some sort of special exemption? As if I need more humiliation in my life than to notice after the fact that what I've written is riddled with unintended little mistakes?

As to people caring about what they write: The litmus test should be whether they can effectively communicate, not whether they have the same arbitrary bees in their bonnets that someone else has. I might not want to hire anyone who can't give me their opinion on whether or not Frege would have discovered Godel's Incompleteness Theorem decades before Godel, if Frege hadn't been so discouraged by Russel's Paradox as to give up his entire endeavor to derive math from logic. After all, someone who hasn't put in the effort to study even the basics of modern philosophy can't be trusted to really think deeply on any issue, can they?

This, no doubt, is true, but it would also be a morally indefensible hiring practice.

As for making tenuous and almost insulting relationships: I find your claim that there is any correlation between having issues with "its" vs "it's" and the like, and the care with which one puts into their code, to be a tenuous and insulting claim. You're insulting my code-writing ability, and you've provided no evidence for your claim. That's pretty tenuous. You've also confounded caring with performance. Although it may or may not be the case that caring is a general personality trait that spans across all one's skills, performance can be quite different between skills.

As to whether such grammatical distinctions are trivial, I assure you that they are. Having some linguistics background, I feel qualified to assert this. (MIT degree in cognitive science.) If we were to all agree today to just use "its" all the time, rather than using both "it's and "its", the world would be no worse off.

P.S. I do know how to use const in C++.

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

#260

Post by khwang »

bguthrie wrote: post #200
kamaal wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>In short, I don't see the problem. You don't see the problem because you look at it from a different direction. Hiring good programmers is already hard enough. And you are likely to hire a bad programmer despite having them run through many programming interview sessions. If you put all sorts of irrelevant criteria in between, you are likely to get people who have mastered the art of beating interviews by specializ…

I claim that the mathematics of hiring aren't all that different from the mathematics of beauty: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/ The OP generated a lot of strong negative reactions. But it also generated some strong positive reactions from programmers who share the author's frustrations and would enjoy working at a place where everyone punctuates impeccably. Like the author, my experience…

It's too bad you failed to use the subjunctive properly then. ;)
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