Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

blogs.hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 334 posts

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

#271

Post by nessus42 »

nirvdrum wrote: post #265
nessus42 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, n…

Whenever you confuse the two, you cause me to have to reparse the sentence. "it's" becomes "it is" and then I have to determine that that doesn't make any sense and go back to substitute it. Vice versa. I also have a linguistics background. So I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

> Whenever you confuse the two, you cause me to have to reparse the sentence. "it's" becomes "it is" and then I have to determine that that doesn't make any sense and go back to substitute it.

I'm sorry. When they come up with a cure for dyslexia, I'll be sure to get it. In the meantime, I suspect that most people are just dyslexic enough (dyslexia is a spectrum) that these little things cause them a great deal of trouble. It's not that they don't care; it's that if they did care, it would drive them crazy. Me, I do care about details. That's no doubt, in part, why I became a programmer.

As to throwing you off, since this mistake is so common, it would seem to be easy enough to train yourself to treat the two words as hominyms of each other. After all, you have no problem, I take it, with all the other homonyms in the language. (Yeah, I know, wheelchair ramps are annoying!) The fact that the words are pronounced identically proves conclusively that we don't need the words to be distinguished, other than by context.

As to having linguistics backgrounds, in my classes they beat prescriptivism out of me. How did yours survive?

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

#272

Post by derleth »

nollidge wrote: post #89
benihana wrote: post #40

Oh please. I can understand not hiring someone who communicates poorly. That makes sense. But grammar is just a set of arbitrary rules that some person or group of people decided were correct. It's like a secret handshake that lets people know you're part of some smart boys club (by and large it seems like men are the only ones who enjoy bitching about grammar). To me, it says, "I went to a good school system and was…

> But grammar is just a set of arbitrary rules that some person or group of people decided were correct. That's like saying the evolutionary tree of life is just a set of arbitrary rules someone came up with. It's not, it's a description of an existing evolved system. Grammar wasn't handed down from on high by an authority, it's an evolved, undirected cultural artifact. There were definitely influential actors, like…

> 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 they fail to realize that dictating style requires taste, which they lack entirely.

> "which sentence is more correct" and one of the sentences has an improperly conjugated verb

Hm. Don't give this test to people who speak AAVE [1]: You'll be considered racist.

[1] AAVE is 'African-American Vernacular English', or what the conservative yammer-heads called 'Ebonics' back in the 1990s. It has a rich inventory of verb conjugations considered incorrect by standard English.

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

#273

Post by angersock »

Produce wrote: post #208
terryk88a wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely you do not have to subject yourself to his whims. You would be free to walk out the door if you found the grammar test offensive, or the push-ups test, or the rope-skipping test. You do not deserve respect. Ever. You must always earn it.

Oh god. I hate this attitude. Respect is a right, not a privilege. Why should anyone have to earn something so basic? Do we also have to earn our privilege to breathe air? We're all equals and equally deserve respect. Yes, even you after you muttered that banality.

Equals? Hardly. Some people, for example, are worse than others at English grammar--thus the OP.

What does respect mean to you, out of curiosity?

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

#274

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…

> Many disagree with me on this point of view, but routinely I've found that those that express themselves well in their native language write better code.

Many people with perfect grammar communicate terribly, and many people with much less than perfect grammar communicate very effectively. If effective communication is important for a job position, perhaps looking directly for that skill would be more productive and fair?

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

#275

Post by impendia »

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 can't seem to edit my post, but thanks to everyone who replied, upvotes all around.

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

#276

Post by stephencanon »

maw wrote: post #143
jfoutz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In one case I discourage it as well, because with it you can't write the funniest sentence ever composed: "I would like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God." Otherwise, no strong opinion, although I usually use it myself.

On the other hand, with the serial comma you get "I would like to thank my mother, Ayn Rand, and God."

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

#277

Post by gciii »

I interviewed at iFixit, and I took the grammar test.

iFixit is a great company with a solid mission, and a reasonable grammar test considering the nature of the company. It was a local radio interview a few years ago featuring Mr. Wiens which reignited my ambition to move out of the manufacturing/shipping sector by learning to code. I am still learning to code, and still have a long way to go before I'm ready to earn a paycheck doing so. However, I applied for a position I was well qualified for in the ifixit shipping department in hopes of further immersing myself in the 'culture'. I traveled six hours by train for the interview. I was left scratching my head when only a few minutes of the lengthy interview centered on my relevant experience, or the requirements of the shipping position. A far larger segment of time was spent on grammar tests and logic puzzles (and no, they were not sku, or 'shipping' themed puzzles).

I think the key to success with novel interview tests is to make sure you are filtering for the correct result. You don't want to inadvertently filter out highly motivated individuals.

Overall, the interview was a good experience, and probably results in the hiring of great gearheads & coders.

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

#278

Post by drpgq »

m_myers wrote: post #246
drpgq wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks, I'll have to check that article out.

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

#279

Post by maw »

stephencanon wrote: post #276
maw wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one case I discourage it as well, because with it you can't write the funniest sentence ever composed: "I would like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God." Otherwise, no strong opinion, although I usually use it myself.

On the other hand, with the serial comma you get "I would like to thank my mother, Ayn Rand, and God."

True! And it's also very funny. (But a shade less so than the parents sentence.) Maybe our descriptivist/purist friends should start a campaign to bring back the dative.
Post reply on HN