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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

#291

Post by derleth »

nollidge wrote: post #284
derleth wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a description of an existing evolved system. This is not how the people who get angriest about grammar see it. They demand that splitting an infinitive is wrong, they demand that the passive voice is wrong (and those demands get stronger the more often they themselves use it), and they demand any number of other idiot things of the language, because they don't know the difference between grammar and style, and…

> Don't give this test to people who speak AAVE: You'll be considered racist. Perhaps, but probably not. In my understanding most AAVE speakers (and other "low-class" dialects, for that matter) are bidialectical with Standard American English and can code-switch to it in more formal situations. And, those who aren't able to do so likely haven't been exposed to the education and training necessary to even be qualified…

Well, you'll be getting closer to looking like you're discriminating based on race, and that likely isn't worth it from a legal or PR perspective.

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

#292

Post by derleth »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #250
klawed wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of using grammar as a litmus test for all new hires is akin to saying that nothing is more important than natural language grammar. That could not be further from the truth. I've read plenty of extremely thoughtful, info-dense specs in the open-source community that had typos and grammar errors. I've seen countless emails from colleagues that were clearly quickly written and thus contained errors. The essent…

> I've read plenty of extremely thoughtful, info-dense specs in the open-source community that had typos and grammar errors. I've seen countless emails from colleagues that were clearly quickly written and thus contained errors. The essential ideas were none-the-less transmitted. And because people tolerate it and allow for this to happen, we live in such ugly world, where people don't give a damn about quality.

> where people don't give a damn about quality.

Similarly, nobody has fine tapestries on the walls of their server rooms. Nobody cares about the insulation properties, apparently, but worst of all, nobody cares about the attention to detail and quality a fine tapestry represents. Thus we live in a terrible world with no appreciation of the finer things, because if you don't mind the lack of tapestries, how can you possibly care about a lack of code quality?

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

#293

Post by ricardonunez »

excuse-me wrote: post #223
ricardonunez wrote: post #176

My mother thong is Spanish, I also know English, Portuguese and some Italian. I'm not a good in either language. In the last few years I put a lot of time in getting better at English. By reading that post and some comments you will assume I don't read, I'm lazy, slow learner, sloppy and unmotivated. Proper grammar is important, but I'll not make it a priority while looking for talent.

It should be "your mother's thong is Spanish" However in the USA it's unusual to take the provenance of parental lingerie into account in the hiring process.

Thank you for the correction.

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

#294

Post by praptak »

rprasad wrote: post #232
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."…

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…

The canons of statutory interpretation forbid absurd, unreasonable or unjust interpretations. I believe that ultimately this is what lets the courts discard the odd parse trees.

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

#295

Post by ricardonunez »

adavies42 wrote: post #219
ricardonunez wrote: post #176

My mother thong is Spanish, I also know English, Portuguese and some Italian. I'm not a good in either language. In the last few years I put a lot of time in getting better at English. By reading that post and some comments you will assume I don't read, I'm lazy, slow learner, sloppy and unmotivated. Proper grammar is important, but I'll not make it a priority while looking for talent.

no, just illiterate. the original author and the commenters here all made allowances for non-native speakers of english, which apparently you couldn't be bothered to read....

My bad, I apologize. I still think I'll not use grammar as a very important issue (at least for some positions) while hiring.

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

#296

Post by lotyrin »

irahul wrote: post #287
lotyrin wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to imply that programmers never write natural language or that their ability to do so is unimportant. If you're writing more code than natural language (documentation, discussion of specs, interaction with the team, etc) something is extremely wrong.

> If you're writing more code than natural language (documentation, discussion of specs, interaction with the team, etc) something is extremely wrong. As long as we are just throwing claims around, I posit unless the code you write isn't 99% of what you write, something is extremely fucked up, and the orcs will take over the world. I don't see how your claim is more valid or invalid than mine. None of the claims are…

Perhaps, except that hypothetical code-hungry orcs are imaginary and have nothing to do with anything while the value of any of my very real examples is well understood by pretty much anyone. (Though - if you'll forgive me drawing further from our mystical beastiary - trolls might be an exception?)

Edit to explain why I'm so dismissive:

I think that it's a fairly accepted axiom that specified and documented projects are easier to maintain than the alternative. Likewise with code size versus feature set. I think it's self-evident that teams that communicate in natural language (even if only via a ticket system) are more functional (or at least more tolerable to be a member of) than teams that do not.

Deriving my claim from these seems reasonable enough, to me, given the context of the discussion (a comment thread of a relevant topic on some website a minority of people care about).

Not everything is science and while it might be nice to have 5-sigma data to reinforce my opinon, it fortunately doesn't need to be so reinforced in order to be valid, or even valid to be worth sharing.

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

#297

Post by snowwrestler »

alayne wrote: post #108
allwein wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general job X, that may be true. But when you're being hired at a company where your job is going to explicitly be writing clear technical prose, I don't think it's unimportant at all.

"Still, we give our grammar test to everybody, including our salespeople, our operations staff, and our programmers."

Grammar is probably more important for sales than it is for developers. I get a few sales pitches and tend to dump the ones with poor grammar. I feel like: if they can't bother to send a clean pitch, how well are they going to manage my account?

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

#298

Post by vehe »

irahul wrote: post #283
nirvdrum wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> The proxy in this case is your native language and seems to work rather well. No, it does not. The very notion that someone who always uses "its" and "it's" understands const-correctness is ridiculous. Command over native language doesn't signify programming prowess. You are imagining things or extrapolating your personal anecdotes to absolutes. Please provide citations if it's a proven fact. > For what it's worth,…

I think someone else pointed it out, it's a cultural affinity test. The shit about grammar indicating code quality is just rationalization for wanting someone who is culturally similar to you - has the same values as you. That is, someone who holds arbitrary things like grammar, facial hair, etc. in the same value as you do.

Some of my coworkers are from India and China. I could make up similar things about how chewing with your mouth open and not wearing deodorant indicates a lack of awareness of manners and means they are unaware of memory leaks and race conditions in their code.

It's on me to come to terms with people chewing with their mouth open, not fire them because of subconscious cultural supremacy issues.

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

#300

Post by Tycho »

On the flip side, I'm suspicious of people who immediately comment on typos and grammatical mistakes when they read something. Usually I don't even register such mistakes, my brain must just automatically make sense of the text. People who notice small mistakes that don't hamper the actual meaning/communication at hand - I wonder if they are really thinking about the meaning much at all, or just focussing on superficial details.
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