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I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

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Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#61

Post by jabroni_salad »

azalemeth wrote: post #58

I cannot tell you how un productive I am in Microsoft Word. I use LaTeX, often in overleaf, often natively in linux, often on MacOS. Naturally, the latter has a Word version available in it and as a scientist at the interface of physics and biology/medicine I (un)fortunately have plenty of experience in both. Some of my colleagues carte-blanch refuse to try TeX (interestingly, I've never had a doctor refuse to write…

>mucho texto

OK, but what if your applicant had this in his CV? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#62

Post by bluedino »

The amount of calls that come to the helpdesks around the world, that are caused by people not knowing anything about Word/Excel is astounding.

In the old days of office applications you needed to know all the keystrokes and macros and control codes. Remember the keyboard overlays you could buy for each word processor/spreadsheet? You basically had to be an expert to be proficient.

Then they went and dumbed it down, adding menus, buttons, giving everyone mice, the power of WYSIWYG. Now every idiot in the office could print out a mispelled sign about keeping the counters clean in 48 point comic sans, print it in landscape and tape it to the microwave.

Microsoft continues to screw stuff up by adding things like 'Reading Mode'. I've seen office staff brought to tears when a document is automatically opened in reading mode by a middle manager who thinks that matches the print layout, and lays into them about how it looks.

These days you unknowingly launch a document in Word for the web and it's in read-only mode because of Sharepoint permissions that aren't clear, so you can't toggle the checkboxes and it takes 3 co-workers to figure out what went wrong.

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#63

Post by bambax »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #57
bambax wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There is such a thing as proficiency in word processing. Most people don't use styles, or use them improperly, or modify every instance randomly. They use forced line breaks to adjust page breaks because they don't know about forced page breaks, or the "keep with next" paragraph setting. They've never heard of non-breaking space. They align numbers with spaces. They don't know that you can (and should) have accen…

> Most people don't use styles, or use them improperly, or modify every instance randomly. This is (one of the reasons) why I write everything in Markdown and export it to Word or PDF with Pandoc. There's no temptation to "fix" the formatting as I go along; it's just text, and I can apply a style sheet after the fact.

Yeah, well, ironically enough, working like this makes you a very proficient Word user.

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#64

Post by csydas »

culturestate wrote: post #13

Maybe I'm the one misunderstanding this, but... This piece isn't about Word or nerd-shaming or the author's self-perceived mastery of desktop publishing. It reads like a take on the absurdity of people constantly adding inane things like "must be proficient in Microsoft Word" to job postings and, consequently, their appearance on the CV of every person who applies to be a corporate drone in the western world. On the…

It goes both ways.

Office is both an expectation on postings that don't actually know how to assess technical knowledge so the creator(s) of the postings just make up whatever is tough for them and also seems like it's a highly technical skill.

At the same time for fairly highly technical roles I see persons frequently adding not just Office as a skill but each of the office apps without further detail.

For me when a candidate for more high level roles advertises their office skills, I see it as a negative usually. It's not an immediate mark against, but I do end up with lower expectations on the tech I am interested in. If the role isnt oriented towards heavily doing office work, I'm not that interested in Office.

I have the same feeling about when someone lists Linux experience and mentioned Kali as their distro; unless they're a security specialist usually it means they played with Kali in a college crash course/intro network security course, and only know a few specific applications + flags to get some result for a network pen test.

Hiring is really hard because in general it's difficult to describe the domain that most jobs encompass unless it already had a narrow focus. Maybe it's not true anymore but I seem to recall if you ask 10 people what DevOps is you'll get 12 different answers, all of them disagreeing. This gets even worse for general tech roles that are basically low level system troubleshooting positions. It's hard for those doing the job to really summarize their day to day in a series of core tasks, and it's even harder for non-technical persons to even know what to ask the technical persons to build a proper posting.

I've only worked with one good Recruiter team and they are so good they convinced me that recruiters can be not just good, but excellent, and I'll defend any such blanket statements lumping all recruiters together. But it is a skill like any other, and it's not something you can do by passively writing buzzword copy on LinkedIn.

For me the article is a satire of modern hiring in general, whether highly technical or not. It's a response to an imagined dedicated question about proficiency in Word for a highly skilled position, and it's poking fun on why such a skill that should be a given now for modern professional business is given so much attention still. No one (should) be doing tons of design in Word for the business. It's fine for collaborative notepad with office365 and as a generic "okay" looking document, but just like I hope my candidates don't need help with stuff like putting their socks on or brushing their teeth, I expect they can punch out a relatively okay looking document in word and make a simple spreadsheet in excel and know that PowerPoint exists

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#65

Post by Damogran6 »

I can wield and control tens of thousands of systems and bend them to do my bidding. But my inability in Office Products is my biggest source of impostor syndrome stress.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to keep snapping to the beginning and end of a really long column in Excel, trying to see what’s in the middle.

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#67

Post by tpoacher »

azalemeth wrote: post #58

I cannot tell you how un productive I am in Microsoft Word. I use LaTeX, often in overleaf, often natively in linux, often on MacOS. Naturally, the latter has a Word version available in it and as a scientist at the interface of physics and biology/medicine I (un)fortunately have plenty of experience in both. Some of my colleagues carte-blanch refuse to try TeX (interestingly, I've never had a doctor refuse to write…

> Seeing "Proficient with Microsoft Office" on a CV for me is a bit of a red flag; highlighting another job skill is probably a better use of space, at the very least.

Well, it shouldn't. The candidate does not know what kind of checkbox exercise their CV ends up on, so they should not be penalized for trying to cover weird edge-cases.

True story: I once applied for a 'ranked' job which needed me to "prove" IT skills. By that point I had a masters in advanced computer science (with specialization in machine learning). The scoring for the job went as follows:

- Demonstrates IT skills proficiency via European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL): 2 points

- Demonstrates IT skills proficiency via other means: 1 point.

- No IT skills demonstrated: 0 points.

I scored 1 point. Given the competitive nature of this process, apparently that single point cost me about 1000 places down in the rankings, so I got none of the positions that interested me the most.

According to the infinite wisdom of the recruitment checklist, being able to program your own word suite was pittance compared to being able to type in one.

I literally had to drag my ass to the nearest public library, subscribe to, and actually ATTEND (due to mandatory attendance) an ECDL course for the next 6 months, just so I could score more highly in the next round of job applications.

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#68

Post by auxym »

culturestate wrote: post #13

Maybe I'm the one misunderstanding this, but... This piece isn't about Word or nerd-shaming or the author's self-perceived mastery of desktop publishing. It reads like a take on the absurdity of people constantly adding inane things like "must be proficient in Microsoft Word" to job postings and, consequently, their appearance on the CV of every person who applies to be a corporate drone in the western world. On the…

Powerquery is a much more powerful alternative to pivot tables in modern excel.

For one thing, you can chain queries, SQL style. IE, you can use the table that is the result of a query as input to another query.

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#69

Post by mauvehaus »

lapsed_pacifist wrote: post #54
scollet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would personally replace "Tools" with "Cognitive models". A hammer and a nail gun really don't differ all that much when your task is binding wood.

As someone in the trades, I really disagree. Most applications that require a hammer could not be accomplished with a nail gun. Nail guns are great for attaching thin materials over thicker materials, like putting MDX onto a frame or attaching roofing materials. You don't generally frame with a nail gun because you want to use larger and heavier nails driven a lot deeper. For very light or precision work on finished…

Oh man, if you haven't seen "Reality Contains a Surprising Amount of Detail", prepare to be delighted.

Also: I thought there were framing nailers that fire larger coated sinkers like you'd drive with a hammer? When are those appropriate, and when should nailing framing be done by hand?

Re: I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word

#70

Post by mauvehaus »

hyperman1 wrote: post #53

A contractor billed us for some work. He opened the laptop, filled in item prices and item counts as we requested. All of this in a very nice excel template. Then he took his cellphone calculator app, multiplied counts with prices, filling in the subtotals in the excel sheet. Another round of the calculator summed these to a grand total, and a final round calculated taxes. Both were dutifully typed in at the bottom o…

Futurama nails it once again?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG1D8XeLDA

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