This kind of outlook and having a grammar test doesn't make me think that you'd be a great boss to work with, nor does it make me want to work for you. I may not be the cultural fit you're looking for, but undoubtedly you're shrinking your potential talent pool and removing exceptional candidates by just sounding like a stiff and non-flexible place to work, as a programmer.
I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
241–250 of 334 posts
Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
#242anyone else like how the URL is shortened to "i-wont-hire-people-who-use-poo"?
/12yearsold
Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
#243Earlier 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…
What about this parsing of your text?
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.
Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
#244He may only hire people who can do grammer, but can they recite PI to 27 places, I think now. He is a word racist as I call them. His loss.
Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
#245Earlier 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…
As a non-native speaker of English, I have been wondering how much signal it would be appropriate for me to infer from the kind of sloppy grammar that is typical only for native speakers of English? [1] I learned English at school as a second language, and we would always start with the written form, and then learn how to pronounce. So my "hash table" is primarily organized based on the written form, and it would be…
My gut tells me (there's a scientific statement, if ever there was one!) that it correlates mainly to people who haven't read much in print. Print publications tend to be edited better than online ones. Unfortunately, bad spelling is reinforced by spending a lot of time online and being exposed to misspellings that are not corrected.
As a child I didn't have access to TV, so I read everything in sight and I read constantly. The end result is I have a particularly sensitive eye for spelling and grammar mistakes. I find the misuse of, e.g., "loose" instead of "lose," to be tremendously irritating. The people I know who read a lot simply don't make trivial mistakes like that unless they're in a hurry and mistype.
Is it sloppy? I would say it's sloppy if writing is a large part of your job. Otherwise, it's mainly an indicator of someone who doesn't read print very much.
It is also getting worse at an increasing rate. I remember when mispelled words and bad grammar in reputable magazines and journals was rare, now it's almost expected that anything I read will have a few.
Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
#246Once 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…
I know the NFL gives the Wonderlic to potential draft choices. I guess they must have done some tests showing Wonderlic is useful to get around disparate impact.
Oddly, Wonderlic scores have never been proven to have any positive link with future on-field performance. In fact, one study[1] actually found a negative correlation at some positions.
But as with many silly personnel evaluation techniques that are in common use, general managers will never get punished for doing what everyone else is doing.
[1]: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08959280902970401
Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
#247Once 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…
META: Karl that's a tremendously massive comment. Wonder if it might be more useful as an online FAQ that you could link to? I know I lost interest about 3 sentences in, but it looks like some great material in there. Just a thought.
I agree on the length. Ironic how, in an article on the importance of grammar, and presumably communication, the parent while most likely using perfect grammar, fails to convince [1] simply because of the amount of the material and the way it is presented.
I've done consulting for busy people who don't want to spend time reading a long email. They want to know the bottom line, however I also find it good practice to provide backup information in case they or someone they forward the email to want to know how I came to the conclusions.
I start the email with a summary and a list of actions they can take or questions that I have. Typically no longer than a few sentences. Below that is a demarcation point to all the backup, links and further details (should they want to forward or in all honesty to CYA as well for the conclusions).
Edit: [1] Because if people don't read they won't be convinced and they won't learn anything. One of the reasons I typically avoid books by academics: to much difficult verbosity.
Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
#248Earlier 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…
Here's a thought: you're assuming I care equally about grammar and programming. If I use the wrong form of "it's" in a sentence, someone might wince somewhere (possible even rage a bit). No one is going to die. If I use the wrong form of const, it's possible that all hell will rain down upon the Earth and millions will die in horrible gut-wrenching pain, clasping their loved ones to their chest and bemoaning the gods…
No one is going to die
Since you brought it up...
I am a software developer for a medical device manufacturer. Poor spelling and grammar can change the meaning of a requirement, leading to a software error. Down the road someone can certainly die.
More likely, however, is that grammar and spelling errors in Requirements, Design, Procedure or other documents, or in code commit comments, or code comments themselves implies to an auditor for a Regulatory Body that our code itself is sloppy. That leads the auditor to dig deeper. Dig deep enough and you will find enough to hang someone.
For just this reason, we must pay attention to proper documentation, down to appropriate word choice. No, we don't test for usage of written English during interviewing, but it's strongly enforced during day-to-day work.
Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, wow, someone nitpicking this guy's grammar — never saw that coming. What an unhelpful, predictable comment. FWIW, I don't believe the author was talking about style guides at all anyway. Rather, he seems to be discussing general and very basic principles of English.
Very basic in whose judgement? If it's the author's (and presumably yours), fine, but then it's not a business case, it's a shibboleth. If you're agreeing with the author's claim that there is a "silent majority" (which I always find a dubious argument) of people who have their confidence in your business impacted, then you're far better off investing in a process that catches these errors--many of which can be cause…
I actually don't agree with the author, so I'm not going to defend him. However, I don't disagree with the author based on the fact that he made some completely understandable mistakes in his own post.
Re: I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
#250Earlier 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.
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.