I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

by fogus • 14 years ago

222 325 14 years ago

blogs.hbr.org

This is the take-away point for me:

  > Everyone says they're detail-oriented in an
  > application; I just make my employees prove it.

CVs are great, certifications and qualifications are great, but if you claim you can do something, I want to see the evidence.

When I'm hiring I want to see that the candidate has

* ... thought about what I will want and/or need,

* ... makes direct claims that they can provide it/them,

and then

* ... provides evidence to support their claim(s).

All the talk about FizzBuzz, trial runs, grammar Nazis, choice of typography, and every other hiring cargo cult comes down to:

    Show me you understand the job you're applying
    for, then provide evidence that you can do it.

Evidence that you've even thought about these issues will get you through the door.

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

"Show me you understand the job you're applying for, then provide evidence that you can do it."

In return, I ask that an employer provide some substantive description of what I'll be doing, giving me the opportunity to think about it.

Actual job posting I saw recently:

----------------

Requirements:

* Object Oriented PHP

* Efficient in MySQL

* Experience with programming logic, great code writing style

* Understanding of HTML

* Strong database architecture and implementation skills

* Team Leader

* Ability to work independently

--------------

This tells me pretty much nothing.

bru• 14 years ago

Actually, I think it does:

"You'll be all by yourself on our website/webapp. A designer will deal with the CSS, but all the rest is up to you"

GFischer• 14 years ago

There's sometimes a huge mismatch between what the employer is asking, and his needs.

For example, at my current job we're asking for an expert in HTML5, JQuery, CSS2.1, CSS3, JavaScript, Ajax, Mobile Web Development, Mobile Web Performance, Cross-Browser, Cross-Platform Development; debugging tools (Firebug or equivalent), DOM, Internationalization, Localization, Apache.

The truth is, we have one of the ugliest websites, on an awful CMS, and our webpages are on ASP (not .NET, plain old ASP circa 1999) with VBScript hosted on IIS 5.

What such a rockstar web developer will be doing here beats me (the company does pay way above average wages locally, but such a developer can work for the US).

We've already wasted somebody who was a decent web programmer (he's doing mailing lists for the Marketing department), I guess that the selected applicant will end up doing ASP pages (maybe they'll let him migrate portions of the website very slowly).

dsr_• 14 years ago

Many job descriptions are actually a listing of the problems that happened with the last employee.

"Efficient in MySQL" = the current SQL queries are not performing well. "great code writing style" = the existing code is unreadable "Understanding of HTML" = they spent more time fixing divs and attributes than writing new code "Strong database architecture and implementation skills" = we can't afford to hire a DBA as well "Team Leader" = there are existing employees who we don't trust in a management role "Ability to work independently" = that last person was always asking questions that could have been Googled

tokenizer• 14 years ago

Is it just me, or is, blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html a bad choice for url on this subject?

mapleoin• 14 years ago

As a spare-time grammar nazi, I find it quite fitting.

rheide• 14 years ago

I think that's perfectly reasonable. Although I'm not a native speaker I quickly get annoyed at people's inability to form proper sentences. But only in formal situations, such as the job application scenario in the original article.

I went to a Barclays bank in the UK the other day to try and open a business account. One of the main reasons I didn't go with them was that the guy who was going to be my 'personal banker' could not spell the words maintenance ('maintainance') and developer ('devloper'). This just makes you seem incredibly unprofessional and unworthy of future dealings.

debacle2• 14 years ago

I don't know, sometimes I misspell maintenance on purpose out of spite for the English language.

DannoHung• 14 years ago

Really? That's a rather phonetically spelt word, aside from the "s" sound at the end.

ianterrell3• 14 years ago

Don't get me started on 'curiosity' and 'judgment'.

philbarr• 14 years ago

It's amazing how many times I see the word "devloper". Maybe having to type "e" twice so close together is what causes the typo..?

irahul17• 14 years ago

I think it's more phonetic in nature. That isn't a mistake you will see often in India. We say all letters loud and clear:)

espinchi• 14 years ago

I do the same: unstructured e-mails, poor grammar and, in general, bad writing style make me reject applicants instantaneously.

However, I wonder if I'm letting good candidates go just because of my grammar nazism.

How do you (folks in HN with more experience at hiring) feel about this?

einhverfr17• 14 years ago

In my view the ability to structure communications is important. I don't think that's the same as being a grammar nazi. For example if you have a zero tolerance policy for it's vs its, or for commas making things confusing, the framers of the US Constitution would fail the test. Not only is 'it's' is used as a possessive but try to parse this:

"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."

Yet I doubt we would doubt the authors' intelligence, creativity, and professionalism.

The simple fact is that grammar mistakes and grammar of non-standard dialects is one thing, but an inability to structure an email or other communication is a much bigger deal. You can't fault the guy who learned English as a second language, whose native language has no gendered pronouns and gets confused all the time, and the same goes for non-standard English dialects like AAVE.

So that's where I'd draw the line.

hkolek2• 14 years ago

I don't know, I don't think your example sentence is particularly hard to parse, and I'm not a native speaker. But I have to say, even as a non-native speaker, I just can't understand whats hard about "its" and "it's" and "their", "there" and "they're" and it makes me cringe every time to read such mistakes (as does confusing "loose" with "lose"). That said, I don't expect perfection but if I read a text that is littered with such mistakes and makes them consistently I won't read it because, for me, it's arduous to correct all those mistakes in my mind while reading.

adavies429• 14 years ago

> For example if you have a zero tolerance policy for it's vs its, or for commas making things confusing, the framers of the US Constitution would fail the test.

that's a question of knowing something about history. i wouldn't hire anyone with perfect grammar and style who was too dim to know that both are subject to change over time.

ctdonath• 14 years ago

Would you rather miss hiring a good candidate? or hire a bad one? Easier to recover from the former mistake than the latter.

kenjackson• 14 years ago

It really depends. If you've looked at 100 candidates and one guy just knocks it out the park. He's an expert at everything you need. He wrote the framework that your company relies on and wrote the book that your team uses as the reference bible. Upon contacting him one of his sentences is "Im not available next week." It would seem foolish to not hire him -- at least IMO.

s_henry_paulson• 14 years ago

I think it's a fair, but just to simplify the argument:

Poor grammar often is an artifact of a person being inexperienced with reading, writing, or both. Either that or a sign of an unwillingness to learn. Both of these are red flags when hiring.

On the other hand, if your "zero tolerance" policy includes things like my usage of an oxford comma, chances are I don't want to work for you.

irahul17• 14 years ago

Saving the google search for people who don't know what an oxford comma is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

"Portugal, Spain, and France" (Oxford comma) "Portugal, Spain and France" (Not Oxford comma)

jfoutz• 14 years ago

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

einhverfr17• 14 years ago

Dude, I so want to go there, apply, and write at the bottom of the page:

Edit: I think I would add to that "Also, in your opinion does this mean that once you have been in the country for 14 years you are no longer eligible to be President?"

praptak2• 14 years ago

Combining "not" with "and" or "or" leads to ambiguity - there are no operator precedence rules in spoken language. I remember a "eating and drinking forbidden in the lab" notice with "not (eat or drink) == not eat or not drink" scribbled underneath (in math notation).

leephillips3• 14 years ago

This is crystal-clear to me. What's the problem?

rprasad3• 14 years ago

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 to understand when you know how legal parsing works. In this case, the use of two subordinate clauses at the end of the first sentence indicates that the first subordinate clause is subordinate to the phrase before it, while the second subordinate clause is subordinate to the ("super") clause preceding the third clause. The super clause consists of the first and second clauses, because they are joined by a coordinating conjunction.

nollidge9• 14 years ago

Right, that was one thing I thought of. Is he testing just for actual grammar rules like verb conjugation and such, or is he also including superficial style rules like "avoid the passive" or typographic things like how many spaces after a period?

bane5• 14 years ago

It probably depends if he's one of so many ignorant "grammar nazis" that don't understand how language works. Once you wade through the thin veneer of rule vomit, most prescriptivists have little to no clue about the language they are enforcing -- only demonstrating an ability to remember lists of uninformed, anachronistic and often ignorant rule sets that are usually intended for application in a specific milieu. They're usually foolish enough to then go and demonstrate this nonsensical approach in public. Usually as a pedantic and insufferably pretentious, high-friction social interaction: correcting minor typos, misapplying and enforcing meaningless rules, "correcting" conversational and idiomatic prose into stilted formal styles (thereby losing nuance and ultimately meaning). They then claim that it's important they do this because language is used to communicate, but they then demonstrate an almost perfect ability to use language in a non-communicative fashion.

On the other hand, even descriptivists can get a little frustrated when "too" and "to" are mixed up; "their", "there" and "they're" are conflated; "its" and "it's" are misused, and so on. It does demonstrate somebody who is unfamiliar with handling the language in the written form, but indeed the correlation between intelligence and understanding the complex English grammar in its fullness are undeniably low. It may simply be that a programmer with poor grammar has spent more time handling code (which also happens to be a milieu with very clear right and wrong feedback mechanisms for incorrect syntax and structure) than in handling written language. Feynman for example, wrote very little prose of his own.

tl;dr This employment tests only filters for people who have spent a great deal of time handling language and provides almost no information on their time handling code.

jorgeleo• 14 years ago

So... Yoda and all the internet kitties are out of luck...

sad it is;

or . , ;; :

one of those

einhverfr17• 14 years ago

Now I want to know the following:

1) Will he hire people who can't tell active voice from passive? (Check out the Language Log archives for how many grammar and style nazis can't tell the difference.)

2) Does he require that you can tell who and whom apart and use them in their correct cases?

If the answer is "yes" to both of these then I would assume that the people who pass the test are English majors with minors in Linguistics ;-)

irahul17• 14 years ago

> If the answer is "yes" to both of these then I would assume that the people who pass the test are English majors with minors in Linguistics ;-)

I don't know. I am not a native speaker, and am not an English major, but the answer is "yes" to both of them.

Am I understanding you correctly that you are saying people can't make out active and passive between "I wrote a letter", "A letter was written by me"?

"Who" and "whom" is a bit tricky, but I follow the rule about "who -> he"(who broke the vase? he did), "whom -> him"(whom do you trust? him). There might be edge cases I am unaware of.

einhverfr17• 14 years ago

First, "whom" today is more or less reserved for formulaic usage. You write "To whom it may concern," but you don't say "Whom did you meet yesterday?" If you start rigidly using whom as objective (a use that Sapir noted was dying in 1912), you sound stilted and put people off. It's the sort of grammar nazi thing that alienates customers.

Similarly passive voice, split infinitives, etc. all sound like great rules until you realize that there are plenty of cases where these so-called rules are actually good to break. For example, perhaps his productivity would more than double if he would stop worrying about whether his employees split their infinitives.

bane5• 14 years ago

"Whom" is also almost impossibly archaic and no longer considered part of modern English (having almost completely fallen out of usage around the start of the 20th century). It survives almost entirely in discussions of when to use it and almost never appears in modern writing except as a demonstration of what linguists call a "prestige form".

"To whom did you give it?" vs. "Who did you give it to?" the latter is more modern and natural in modern English.

einhverfr17• 14 years ago

For example, consider "Are you responsible if papers were left on your desk?"

Passive voice.

calinet6• 14 years ago

Why not?

A friend of mine was an English major who went on to do programming for several startups. He's still a programmer.

It's an incredibly fitting path, especially for him. He's a stickler for detail and writes beautiful code.

einhverfr17• 14 years ago

My point was that it becomes a small pool of potential hires. I was a history major with a love of natural language, btw.

StavrosK5• 14 years ago

Or have English as a second language.

scottcanoni• 14 years ago

LOL... "I won't hire people who use POO"

Best URL truncation from a serious topic, EVER.

hkolek2• 14 years ago

I agree. I think Eric S. Raymond nails it:

"While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers."

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

kahawe2• 14 years ago

The 90s are unfortunately long gone but the one good thing about this is that we could finally just NOT give ESR and his populism any more attention...

amackera• 14 years ago

Could you expand a bit on this? I've read his Cathedral and Bazaar book, and quite enjoyed it. I didn't realize there was a whole context that I should be aware of.

rafitorres• 14 years ago

I agree with this. There's also a strong correlation between sloppy writing and poor reading comprehension. This is usually someone who never takes time to sit down and read edited or well-crafted prose.

Why is good reading comprehension important for programmers? You see it often: A fellow programmer complains they can't find an answer to a particular problem they're having, even when the solution is staring them right in the face in the first Google search result. Good reading comprehension helps you help yourself.

cafard3• 14 years ago

"And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil's in the details."

A grouchy pedant might remark that this parses as "When good writing and good grammar come to programming, they are in the details; so also is the devil when it comes to programming."

I would not hire somebody who writes badly to be a technical writer, or to do any worth that requires a lot of writing. However, I have worked with a number of persons who did not write well but were very effective at complicated work.

[edit: for 'worth' read 'work']

maxer• 14 years ago

i wont read an article about people who use poo

blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

timepilot• 14 years ago

I'm guessing he isn't a big Steve Jobs fan.

irahul17• 14 years ago

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 can find, or I am so incompetent and/or desperate that I will take anything that comes my way(beggars, choosers etc).

> Of course, we write for a living.

Oh, should have mentioned it earlier. I won't have gone into internal monologue.

> But grammar is relevant for all companies.

May be it is. But not as relevant as you make out to be.

> In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have.

Apart from my words, I have my intent, thoughts, opinions, facts. Words are a medium. You are giving them undue importance. If I am reading an article about face recognition using opencv, I am interested in code snippets and concepts. My mind auto-correct "there, their, they're" or "its, it's". If I am reading about "infant mortality rate in India", I am interested in figures, reasons, solutions. That is not to say grammar or writing style doesn't matter. I am saying it's not as important as you put it to be, and good writing doesn't automatically come with proper grammar.

> If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use "it's," then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with.

You are assuming someone good at something is assigning equal amount of weight and is equally interested in grammar as he is in whatever he is good at. I know good programmers who write weird English. Anecdote, data etc. Neither of us have data, anecdotes don't count for much.

> So, even in this hyper-competitive market, I will pass on a great programmer who cannot write.

Don't worry about it. To pass on a great programmer, you will have to get them interested in you first. It's a win-win situation. They aren't going to flock to your offices to take your grammar test, and you won't have to pass on great programmers due to bad grammar.

> Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English. 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.

Citations please. Also, unless you are stocking shelves, how does it matter? Never came across a programmer whose desk is always messy(I never came across one whose desk is clean)?

> In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code.

Citation please. And how do you know it's not the other way round?

> And I guarantee that even if other companies aren't issuing grammar tests, they pay attention to sloppy mistakes on résumés. After all, sloppy is as sloppy does.

I am all for proof reading resumes and cover letters, but "sloppy is as sloppy does" assumes someone who is sloppy at something is sloppy at everything. That's as far from the truth as it can be.

> Grammar is my litmus test.

You must be fun to work with. A CEO whose litmus test to hir a programmer isn't programming finesse or cultural fit or drive..., but how good is his grammar.

Sunlis• 14 years ago

What's so bad about a grammar test? Any competent person (excluding extenuating circumstances: dyslexia, etc.) should be able to pass a simple grammar test. It's not some hardship that you have to study for or anything.

irahul17• 14 years ago

It's more like I am applying for a programming job, and I don't see why I have to subject myself to your whims.

Consider that instead of grammar, I am advocating I will only hire people who can do 50 push-ups. After all, what can I expect from people who are sloppy towards something as important their own bodies. What's so bad about 50 push-ups? Any fit person(excluding extenuating circumstances) should be able to do 50 push-ups.

The thing is, I don't see the correlation between grammar and the job I am supposed to do, but more importantly, by doing that, you aren't warranting me the respect I believe I deserve. I have a particular job and screening procedure in mind. If you ask me to skip rope, irrespective of my ability do so, I will have to deny.

klawed3• 14 years ago

What's so bad about it is that unfounded assumptions are being drawn from the performance of said test. Any competent person should be able to make a bed neatly and quickly. Would you apply for a (non-hospitalitly-related)job that required you to demonstrate your bed-making abilities?

bane5• 14 years ago

good writing doesn't automatically come with proper grammar.

In fact I'd say good writing usually eschews many "rules" of proper grammar.

nollidge9• 14 years ago

Sure, but typically it's deliberate on the part of the author.

dedward• 14 years ago

It's not a sneak test - it's an actual grammar test. If you are asked to document something, and you can't observe basic english grammar, I see a problem too. Zero tolerance may be taking it a bit too far, but one would imagine he can tell the difference between a typo in a big test and actual fundamental lack of knowledge of the grammar you should have learned by the time you were 14.

(Yes, the double space after the period is a built in habit from typing class, and a debatable item in the computer age, but nobody seems to care one way or the other.)

irahul17• 14 years ago

> (Yes, the double space after the period is a built in habit from typing class, and a debatable item in the computer age, but nobody seems to care one way or the other.)

Well, it does serve a purpose in the computer age - grepping for sentence ending.

nollidge9• 14 years ago

> 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...

klawed3• 14 years ago

>You must be fun to work with. A CEO whose litmus test to hir a programmer isn't programming finesse or cultural fit or drive..., but how good is his grammar.

Love the typo in your last line. Love it even more if it was unintentionl.

devb• 14 years ago

There are far too many typos and grammar errors in that post for its writer to be playing around. I think someone is bitter about their poor grasp of grammar constructs.

bguthrie2• 14 years ago

This is very much a cultural fit test. If people who use poor grammar are going to drive the author nuts, then as the the person running the company I think he's perfectly justified in treating the candidate as a poor cultural fit.

Additionally, as someone who employs writers as well as programmers, he might reasonably want to hire a programmer who is also a writer for the same reason that you'd want to hire a programmer who also has ops experience: it makes them a more appealing hire for the kinds of problems his startup is trying to solve.

In short, I don't see the problem.

kamaal4• 14 years ago

>>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 specializing in those criteria and diverting your attention from actual issues. Then we all go back and complain why its so hard to hire 'good' programmers.

Ultimately you get what you truly want.

mamoswined2• 14 years ago

as Tokenadult's comment points out, such "cultural fit" tests may be illegal http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768

nirvdrum13• 14 years ago

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 well in their native language write better code. That may be a self-reinforcing feedback loop because a lot of bad projects have a lot of terrible or non-existent documentation. And on a personal level I don't want to work with someone that communicates like a tween (NB: I'm not saying that you do, but I've run across it many times).

I also take a lot of issue with the "you know what I mean so you're being a pedant" retort. Not only is it wholly counter-productive, but it's not even accurate when you're talking about globally connected people. Quite frequently a non-native speaker will stumble upon what is written and be thoroughly confused.

irahul17• 14 years ago

> 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++.

Eh, how about asking me about const-correctness than inferring from my use of "it's" and "its"? You know, you can actually talk about const-correctness instead of inferring from the grammar test.

> At the very least, lack of proofreading suggests to me you might be rash with your code as well.

It's hard to be rash with code if you aren't copy pasting. It isn't the same as posting comments on HN.

> And on a personal level I don't want to work with someone that communicates like a tween

As I already said elsewhere, you are assuming things to be binary when they are not. The spectrum between "liek dis if u cry everytim" crowd and "People with bad grammar should be hanged" people is quite wide.

> Quite frequently a non-native speaker will stumble upon what is written and be thoroughly confused.

Not an excuse for bad grammar, but a non-native speaker is fine with both "didn't go" and "didn't went". I don't see how he is going to be confused. Non-native speakers are confused when they encounter phrases, idioms and slangs they don't know. Fun exercise - ask an Indian if he/she would like to go out with you sometime. He/she would most likely say yes/no without understanding what you meant. Do you have any examples where simple grammar mistakes confuse non-native speaker? I am a non-native speaker, and am curious to know.

kamaal4• 14 years ago

>>I've found that those that express themselves well in their native language write better code.

If this is true, then apart from US and UK people who write good code don't exist elsewhere???

Its difficult to take you seriously after reading this.

sampo2• 14 years ago

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 impossible for me to mix "two" and "too", "they're" or "their" or "there", or "its" and "it's" [2]. I hadn't even realized that "too" and "two" are pronounced the same, before a native speaker pointed it out to me, as my hash table doesn't support that kind of searches.

Also my native language (Finnish) uses a (nearly) phonetic writing, so phonetic misspelling of words is mainly restricted to people with no high school level of education, and who didn't do that well in primary school either.

I do, like the writer of the liked article, get that feeling of sloppiness, when I see those spelling or grammar mistakes in English text, but I don't really know how much signal it would be appropriate for me to infer from them?

I probably should not use as harsh standards as I do with Finnish, since those misspellings seem relatively common in English in the web.

[1] Well, typical of people who learned spoken English before written English, but in the modern world this pretty much coincides with native speakers.

[2] Well, "it's" and "its" is maybe a border case, maybe not totally impossible to mix those two, just very unlikely.

drivingmenuts• 14 years ago

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 (the desirability of such an outcome is a wholly different matter).

The two issues do not equate at all.

ED: fixed spelling of "grammar".

gizmo686• 14 years ago

>"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."

The difference is that const makes sense.

"Its" is the plural of "it", although we seem to use "they". "It's" is the possesive of "it", although we seem to use it as "it is". "It is" is proper English,although we tend to write it in slang "it`s". My use of punctuation respects the content of the quotations as the objects they are, although we seem to imply that "it" is spelled "it.".

nessus429• 14 years ago

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 not so borderline. For instance, I fully know the difference between "it's" and "its", and between "there", "their", and "they're". But I can stare at a paragraph for an hour and not be able to see such subtleties. Or sometimes even notsosubtle-ies. It's quite frustrating. And now I'm allegedly a poor employee to boot. Fan-fscking-tastic.

On the other hand, I am rather galled whenever I drive by the restaurant named "Your's".

Edit: I'd be willing to bet good money that whoever voted me down is not dyslexic. And despite making such mistakes frequently, I've often been commended for my clear writing. I received the highest grade given in several years in Creative Writing in college, got above 700 on my verbal SAT, and graduated from MIT. And yet some people want to judge me on whether I might type "it's" for "its" sometimes, and then utterly discount my opinion on that issue. Oy!

nessus429• 14 years ago

> 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?

michaelcampbell• 14 years ago

> 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 know the difference, and when I make a mistake I've found that every time it's been a mistake of my "finger muscle memory" when typing it rather than using the wrong word. In other words, I used the correct word, but I typed it incorrectly.

That is impossible to detect on any test where the answer is typed. Perhaps a followup to these sorts of tests are, "Here are all the places you used `its` and `it's`. Do you think they are all correct, and if not, which would you change?"

sopooneo• 14 years ago

"Apart from my words, I have my intent, thoughts, opinions, facts. Words are a medium." But in written communication all those other things must be conveyed by your words. That's what writing is.

irahul17• 14 years ago

> But in written communication all those other things must be conveyed by your words.

> That's what writing is.

So if I writing is just words, my grammatically correct words are as good as Orwell's, right? Writing isn't just about words - words are but a minor detail. Why did anyone read "A Clockwork Orange" when it butchered words in some very creative ways?

Do you have anything interesting to say, are you bringing anything new to the table, are you reporting facts, is this an opinion piece, and a thousand other things are what makes writing a powerful medium. How to use correct grammar is a very small variable in the scheme of things.

pnathan• 14 years ago

As a programmer - I can't stand working with coworkers who have lousy grammar and communication abilities. Most of my work either is communication, or will require communicating what I did to someone else, or communicating with someone else about what they did.

I can endure the relaxed grammar texts and IMs can use, but in practical & formal terms, I want decent writing and competent communication . I absolutely have zero interest in working with someone who has pathologically bad grammar & writing skills. We need to talk to each other, and grammar is a key component in unambiguous written communication.

mamoswined2• 14 years ago

Me too. And it does affect their programming in some obvious ways. Particularly if you are working with English language-heavy languages like Javascript. But even if you aren't, comments that are absent or unreadable can make working with someone's code a nightmare. Forget about documentation. And I'll never forget having to work with some code where a variable was "pubic_key."

snambi• 14 years ago

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

drx• 14 years ago

I will.

I don't give a shit about someone's grammar if they're good at what they do.

pbhjpbhj6• 14 years ago

If they're good at what they do and not an imbecile then couldn't you give them a lesson or two in grammar. I was never taught English grammar at school - French and Russian grammar but no English grammar beyond learning a poem about it at primary school. I was educated in England, English is my first language.

UK-AL• 14 years ago

How can you never be taught grammar? There are two English gcses, English language and English Lit. One is about the technicalities of the language, the other about literature. Everyone has to do English Language....

awestley• 14 years ago

I think that ain't no fiar!

mkup• 14 years ago

Now, Truss and I disagree on what it means to have "zero tolerance." She thinks that people who mix up their itses "deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave," while I just think they deserve to be passed over for a job — even if they are otherwise qualified for the position.

Putting comma inside quotation like the above could make grammar nazis happy, but when your newly hired programmer treats all algebraic operations as commutative, it will do no good to your company. Code is not a prose, and coders are not writers.

pbhjpbhj6• 14 years ago

I've never understood this putting punctuation that isn't part of a quote inside the quotation marks. It seems both wrong in terms of verity and in terms of logically constructing prose.

Can someone explain a rationale for this proclivity ?

AkThhhpppt2• 14 years ago

Because that's How It's Done. Programmers are almost the only people who routinely break it - because we're used to quoted strings being atomic units.

nollidge9• 14 years ago

That's not a grammar rule, it's a typographic one, and therefore subject to the house style of your publisher.

pbhjpbhj6• 14 years ago

I'm not sure you can say it's typographic. One still uses quotations in handwritten prose where there is no arrangement of "type" per se. It seems syntactical to me but perhaps is best categorised as orthography?

adv0r• 14 years ago

What it they are foreigners?

sebnukem22• 14 years ago

As a foreigner, I can try to answer that. I've noticed that in general foreigners have a much better grammar than English native speakers because we (at least in my case) went through boring English classes. Learning English was a conscious effort and every grammar rule had to be learned and understood.

Reading English also requires a conscious effort, and reading poorly written English requires an even greater effort to parse the bad and incorrect clauses, something a native English speaker doesn't have to do.

queensnake2• 14 years ago

> I've noticed that in general foreigners have a much better grammar than English native speakers

I have to disagree strongly - not my experience at all, with Indians, Chinese, Germans, Spaniards, Belorussians.. One exception, a Greek who could kick my verbal ass. But, of course, native speakers have the huge advantage of proper use being just intuitive but, still, you made an absolute statement.

You may be interested to know that when a conquered people adopts the conquerors' language, they take on the vocabulary but much of the grammar of the old language remains. I read an interesting paper about some grammatical trick you could do in Germanic languages, but not in English. Why? Maybe because, in this way, Celtic was shining through? No, non-British-aisles Celtic has the same trick. The paper speculated that it was a remnant of the grammar of pre-Celtic, pre-historic Briton. (Just to illustrate how hard it is to adopt a new grammar.)

Also, note, general foreigner, it's 'much better grammar' not '/a/ much better grammar'.

snorkel• 14 years ago

Yes, technical writers are required to use proper grammar. Why is that controversial? I do find it ironic that his prose has commas in places where most people would not put a comma, and his placement is probably correct, but still somewhat less readable.

impendia2• 14 years ago

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 by catagory [sic]: ... All leaks, disfunctional [sic] faucets & fixtures will be repaired or replaced."

It goes on. I'm shocked a professional would write something like this, especially since it is a MS Word document and so all the misspelled words are conveniently underlined in red.

But my real estate agent thinks I'm making a big deal out of nothing. Anyone have thoughts, experience, opinions, advice?

irahul17• 14 years ago

> But my real estate agent thinks I'm making a big deal out of nothing. Anyone have thoughts, experience, opinions, advice?

If you (trust|know|have worked with) your real estate agent, and he is vouching for the bag grammar and spelling guy, how does the bad grammar and spelling matter?

evilbit• 14 years ago

I think linguistic skills of someone who saws pieces of wood for a living are less relevant than for someone who conjures up high abstract concepts and communicates them to man and machine alike.

allwein2• 14 years ago

I think you're making a big deal out of nothing. You're hiring this guy because of his proficiency in using his tools: saws, hammers, wood, nails, construction knowledge, etc. It seems silly then to dismiss him because of his lack of proficiency in tertiary tools: words, word processing software, etc.

nollidge9• 14 years ago

Here is where I part from the OP. I do think of programming as a form of writing, and so I think it's OK to judge a programmer thusly, but I don't think it's got much to do with stocking shelves or plumbing or carpentry.

Moreover, based on your snippets that contractor has trouble with spelling errors, not grammar, which in my opinion is a different sort of skill altogether. Also I would not be surprised if he/she is dyslexic or similar.

clarkevans2• 14 years ago

Funny, I prefer misspelled to incorrectly corrected. Nothing worse than having a document littered with poor word substitutions -- at least with a spelling error I could know a bit more what the writer intended.

Speaking of home purchases, if I were to do it again, I'd get two home inspections. My primary inspector for my current house completely missed very expensive (and relatively standard/easy to check) masonry and electrical deficiencies that were not up-to-code. His report was meticulous... perhaps because it wasn't prepared by him, but by an intermediary in the same office?

On this topic, I think that being able to communicate clearly is an essential skill. Poor grammar hurts, although not anywhere as bad as completely poor analysis. However, if you're going to rank someone on grammar, you should also rank them on their visual/spacial diagramming skills. A good diagram can communicate much more effectively than text. I'd rather have someone who is good at both language and diagrams than someone who is an excellent writer but unable to illustrate visually.

shaggyfrog• 14 years ago

The one time I hired a home inspector, I got the report by the end of the 3-hour appointment, printed up by his laptop and portable printer. It wasn't until I read your comment that I now know how what a good thing that was.

mseebach• 14 years ago

Hire him, but look out for lack of attention to detail.

In my last job they talked a lot about the difference between being "done" and being "done done". The latter requires significant attention to detail, and especially a lack of "it's someones else's problem"-attitude.

While the substance of the work would likely be done satisfactory and on time, wouldn't you want him to do the equivalent of spending 30 seconds reading the letter over once, clicking on the red squiggly lines? If those 30 seconds are not invested when writing an estimate, is he going to get spend 30 minutes re-fitting the foo to the bar, so it's perfect rather than just "done"?

cafard3• 14 years ago

I wouldn't hire the contractor to work as an editor. But I would read the estimate to see whether it makes sense--has he identified all the true problems? Is he proposing to fix things that aren't broken? Is he proposing to use materials and fixtures of good quality? If I were satisfied with the answers to these questions, I would not worry about the writing.

impendia2• 14 years ago

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

damian2000• 14 years ago

Some advice - just because you happen to like perfect grammar, don't enforce your preference on others. Some of the best devs I've ever worked with have poor grammar, but it has never stopped them from making huge contributions to the team.

columbo• 14 years ago

Poor grammar (i wuld leik to apply 4 jorb) is an acceptable thing to use when rejecting a candidate.

With that said, I have no interest in a writing career and I'm getting tired of reading about all these new and creative ways to take interviews as far from the subject matter as possible.

And finally, anyone who considers their experience set the baseline of which everyone should aspire to isn't someone I would be interested in working for. You're a professional writer. Good for you. I'm not. How about we take your ego out of this process and actually talk about something related to the position.

benihana• 14 years ago

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 taught correctly!"

Sure, I get a little anxious when people misuse your/you're. But to think it's an early indicator of success is at best limiting yourself to missing out on talent, and at worse surrounding yourself with likeminded pedantic grammar nazis who care about unimportant things. In my time as a software developer, I've met a lot of people who got angsty about grammar who weren't very inspiring programmers. I've met more people who couldn't figure out their and there or you're and your to save their lives who were both fantastically good software engineers and effective communicators.

Lets keep a little perspective here: The goal of hiring isn't to find someone who's not going to annoy you by misusing grammar in emails. It's to find someone who's going to help you accomplish your goals. I get that details are important for your company. I just don't agree that knowing grammar rules indicates an attention to the proper details.

allwein2• 14 years ago

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.

UK-AlasGou2• 14 years ago

But he stated it should be recommended for most companies too.

alayne• 14 years ago

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

nollidge9• 14 years ago

> 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 the (IIRC) monks who first developed the capitals, lowercase, and italics we now use without a second thought, or Noah Webster's personal preferences for spelling which he published and we now largely accept.

> To me, it says, "I went to a good school system and was taught correctly!"

I'm not sure. I guess it depends on the test - if it's asking "which is the past participle form of 'run'", then I'd agree, that's just memorization. But if it's simply asking "which sentence is more correct" and one of the sentences has an improperly conjugated verb, that's not something one even needs to be formally taught if they've read much.

If you can't string a sentence together such that it can be read unambiguously, how can I expect your code to be readable?

> I've met more people who couldn't figure out their and there or you're and your to save their lives who were both fantastically good software engineers and effective communicators.

I'd be willing to bet if you laid out two identical sentences, one with "your" and one with "you're", these people you speak of would be able to choose the correct one. They may not always use the correct one in the quick, ad-hoc process of writing a sentence, but I'm sure they know right from wrong if asked to scrutinize.

FreebytesSector2• 14 years ago

Natural selection was not a conscious choice. There have been many choices in grammar that have been decided almost arbitrarily by higher authorities. Sure, many of these choices may have been based on their own experiences, but they were not necessarily the best choices. They were decided by a small group of individuals, but again, the choice was not strictly a natural selection of grammar rules. Language more often follows this pattern than grammar because people are more likely to argue over grammar than language itself, excluding etymology, of course.

derleth5• 14 years ago

> 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.

lotyrin3• 14 years ago

>it says "I went to a good school system and was taught correctly!"

I cant imagine how people can manage to make it past 25 without learning the majority of the rules simply through diffusion; eventually being exposed too enough correct righting that they know the rules without even realizing they know them.

There are subtle rules that you might see but not understand which aren't obtainable through such a method, and those are ones that Im willing to forgive. I'm sure I make some of them my self.

Irregardless errors in fundamental and extremely obvious rules such as this post say too me I have never consumed my first language in writing willfully and may possibly have zero attention to detail.

Tell me you didn't cringe - then tell me that the clients, colleagues or superiors of our prospective hiree won't.

A guy on my team uses "undue" instead of "undo" in commit messages. He's a nice guy and as much as I'd like to, I can't repair the damage that does to my image of him; "do", "due" and how "un-" works are first grade material at the latest. I simply cannot understand such a mistake.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

"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."

Sounds like every programming language syntax ever.

ericmoritz• 14 years ago

I freaked out at first. I couldn't believe that they were criticizing developers for poor grammar. As I read on, I realized that they make a living on the written word and it all made sense.

exDM69• 14 years ago

This practically excludes everyone who doesn't speak English as their native language. Depending on what business he's into this can be a serious handicap for recruitment.

excuse-me10• 14 years ago

No he says specifically that this doesn't apply to ESL or dyslexics.

As a writer he is objecting to hiring people who don't care enough about writing to use grammar correctly and he believes that this also strongly correlates with being a good programmer.

UK-AlasGou2• 14 years ago

Grammar can often be so complex, that you can get experts who disagree with each other.

rytis• 14 years ago

Grammar is a set of agreed rules, therefore it is not set in stone. Someone might disagree with the rules, and that leads to a slightly different grammar. And so on and so forth. Effectively, everyone has their 'own' grammar that they use. IMHO (especially not being a native English speaker) this article is rubbish (it's in URL BTW). One needs to know his grammar to write articles, but for a developer position? Don't think so.

kapupetri• 14 years ago

I wouldn't hire people who's eyes point to different directions.

DrJokepu• 14 years ago

When I screen, interview and hire people, I look for reasons to hire someone as opposed to trying to find reasons to disqualify people. This kind of negative approach (especially when dealing with people) is just not a good way to go about things in my opinion and experience.

pbhjpbhj6• 14 years ago

I'm sure you do both. Why would you ignore negatives?

Like "this guys skillset is great so were going to ignore that he was fired from his last job for laziness and that all his department left because of his sociopathic behaviour". Seriously?

baak• 14 years ago

You could write a similar article about why you only hire people who eat with their elbows off the table, and it would probably be just as meaningful. I agree that the basics are important, but I disagree that it matters to the extent you're suggesting.

raganwald2• 14 years ago

  Applicants who don't think writing is important are
  likely to think lots of other (important) things also
  aren't important,

"Citation needed." Or to put it another way, what is the difference between this statement and:

  Applicants who don't think wearing a tie and polished
  brogues to an interview are important are likely to think
  lots of other (important) things also aren't important

ianterrell3• 14 years ago

The difference between those two cases is well explained by the internal logic of the article (which I find spot on):

> In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence.

raganwald2• 14 years ago

I agree with the statement you quoted I don’t agree with the statement I quoted. I have no difficulty agreeing with him on one point but taking him to task on another.

kamaal4• 14 years ago

You could say the same thing about how a person presents himself.

If a person can't present himself well in an interview, what guarantees do we have he would do it well in a client/investor meeting?

samwillis• 14 years ago

> Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, ....

I'm Dyslexic and if I was applying for a job (obviously not to be a writer) and was told that there was a grammar test but I didn't need to take it, or it didn't count, because I am Dyslexic I would probably walk away. How do I know that they aren't going to hold my Dyslexia against me just as they would someone who has bad grammar? What's the difference between bad grammar and Dyslexia (obviously I know the difference ) the person you tested may have never been diagnosed with Dyslexia.

gawker3• 14 years ago

We will probably never know if anyone is really holding something against us. Sure, someone could tell you but others might choose not to disclose that information. We just go with trust and gut :)

fingerprinter• 14 years ago

To everyone saying it isn't fair...it's fair. I mean, they are his companies.

Stupid, incredibly shortsighted and very draconian, but fair.

crazygringo• 14 years ago

As long as it's a reasonable test, you can argue its merits.

But on a site of mine, I've gotten so many e-mails complaining that I say "the data is" instead of "the data are", or arguing that either "what year were you born in" or "in what year were you born" or "what year were you born" are variously wrong, and only one is right (but they all seem to disagree on which one).

Beyond a certain point necessary for clear communication, one person's proper grammar is another's irritating pedantry.

nollidge9• 14 years ago

Most people don't know where the dividing lines are between grammar, spelling, writing style, and typographic style. Cf. several posts on this very thread.

kwiens2• 14 years ago

The test covers a variety of topics, and you don't need to get anywhere close to a perfect score. And it really covers the basics: misspellings, usage of to vs two, etc. This is about basic communication, not pedantry.

FlyingSnake• 14 years ago

If he's talking about general grammar skills in any language then it makes sense. Poor grammar always stands out as a negative trait, but should not be the sole criteria to hire. Some of the best developers are immigrants and not always have the best command over the native language.

What if iFixit/Dozuki decides to expand into Germany or Japan and the OP fails on the basic level of grammar there? Will he be consider himself a sub par resource?

tokenadult2• 14 years ago

Once 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 gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274

http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...

interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the first place.)

The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6...

Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes.

http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...

Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann:

"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure."

http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...

But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)."

Integrity tests have limited validity standing alone, but appear to have significant incremental validity when added to a general mental ability test or work-sample test.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_integrity_testing

http://apps.opm.gov/ADT/Content.aspx?page=3-06&JScript=1

http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9042/9042.PDF

http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports...

Bottom line: if someone is hiring for a company that produces technical documentation, a company like iFixit.com, and one feature of the product is grammatically correct writing, it's a reasonable subpart of a work-sample test to include testing for revising English prose. If someone is hiring for managing a jewelry store (a local example I know) or for building wood-frame houses, it's quite possible that a work-sample test would completely disregard the issue of correct spelling and grammar. I know a very successful owner of a jewelry store (I know him as a fellow soccer dad who once coached one of my children) who has quite dodgy spelling and grammar and punctuation, but who can communicate in written English for emailing people. I'm aware of multiple local carpenters and other people in construction businesses, including managing construction businesses, who have varying degrees of punctilious correctness in English writing, but all of them making their reputations and their livings by how they construct buildings, not by how they construct sentences. If writing is part of the work (even just for exchanging ideas with colleagues in memos or emails), sure, test it. If writing is not particularly part of the work, don't worry about it.

DanielBMarkham• 14 years ago

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.

larrys2• 14 years ago

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.

jongraehl• 14 years ago

I found it an easy read, and more useful and interesting than the rest of the comments on this article combined. You can link a HN comment, too.

Alex39172• 14 years ago

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 than a good hacker.

excuse-me10• 14 years ago

Being prepared to do GMA style tests correlates with business guys.

Telling the interviewer to go XXXX himself and starting your own company correlates with good tech guys

rprasad3• 14 years ago

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 registration purposes, because the meta-analysis suggests that the recidivism rate for "sex offenders" (regardless of actual offense) is greater than 90% (without regard to the actual recidivist offense).

TLDR: Meta-analysis can be used to support any claim.

tripzilch• 14 years ago

> Apparently having a high IQ is a better predictor of being a good business guy than a good hacker.

By a very tiny margin. I'd have to dig to accurately say whether it's statistically significant, but I assume it's not.

(Assuming you refer to the high/medium level complex technical jobs with .56 and .51 versus the manager's .58)

drpgq2• 14 years ago

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.

m_myers• 14 years ago

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

bigtech• 14 years ago

Could you illuminate 'but only about at the 0.5 level' this a bit?

gcv• 14 years ago

I was wondering about this as well. Is this a correlation number, and should I translate it as "the best tests give no better than a coin flip of selecting a good candidate"?

quotemstr3• 14 years ago

> If writing is not particularly part of the work, don't worry about it.

I suspect the author is (perhaps unknowingly) using his grammar test as a proxy for general IQ. General IQ correlates _very_ well with performance across a broad spectrum of tasks. (The notion that there are different IQs for different areas of life, though sentimentally appealing, doesn't correspond to reality.) It's no surprise, then, that someone with a high IQ (as measured by this proxy) would do well in a position that requires solving other complex problems, even if these problems have nothing to do with writing per se.

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

It's a pity that you can't hire on the basis of general IQ. It almost seems discriminatory that you're being forced to not hire the best.

tectonic• 14 years ago

tokenadult, I found your comment extremely helpful. Thank you for spending the time to write it!

mathattack• 14 years ago

This is a treasure trove. Where were you when we needed you during this discussion?

http://workplace.stackexchange.com/q/2249/1279

nihilocrat• 14 years ago

If they did that here, we'd need to find a new CEO... but the programmers would be in good shape.

madink• 14 years ago

It's funny , I am a native french speaker married to an australian so my english start to be quit all right. What is funny is that "there, their, they're" or "its, it's" mistakes are painful to me, but at the same time I am unable to write 3 sentences in french whith no mistake. I probably made a few mistake in this post but remember english is EASY (at least from a european background). I am ashamed of my own french writting , I tried (not to hard) to fix it with very limited success , when I what kind of easy stupid common English mistake I'm really torn between empathy and disgusts.

mej10• 14 years ago

Caring about grammar is just a way to signal that you are of higher class than people that use poor grammar.

FourthProtocol• 14 years ago

Even if this ensures a cultural fit I'd not be so binary about grammar.

Just a few months ago I helped a government department find an architect. The brief boiled down to someone who can code, but can also liaise with department directors and its vendors, up to CxO level. Clearly grammar and communication ability in general was quite a key requirement.

The recruitment process involved submitting a resume and answering standard questions in an application form. There was a deadline beyond which applications wouldn't be considered.

Of all the resumes I reviewed one stood out. For two reasons.

First, his technical ability, if the resume was to be believed, was impressive. More than a government department could hope for.

The second reason was that his answers in the application form tanked. The very first paragraph answer simply stopped in mid-sentence. There were a number of spelling mistakes in the remaining answers.

I really liked the resume, so I invited him in for an interview anyway. Turns out he is in fact as good as his resume suggested.

The reason for the sloppy application form was that he only spotted the job advertisement at 4pm the day of the application deadline, and had to hustle to get his application in before 5pm. He'd heard about the project and was desperate to be a part of it.

He's been one of the best hires I've made. Being fanatically dogmatic about anything in life closes doors you'd never have imagined were even there. I hope I never become that myopic.

kwiens2• 14 years ago

I've hired last minute applicants, too, so I understand where you're coming from. We are very happy to make exceptions to the policy in situations like that.

We've hired dyslexic people who have worked out brilliantly. Candidates that don't speak English natively are another exception. We try hard to hire people that can speak multiple languages. (I have found that learning a second language usually makes people better at English grammar.)

We don't expect a perfect score on our grammar test, and that test is one of many deciding factors in our hiring process. Just as we test programming candidates for programming competence, we also test them for writing skills. If you can't FizzBuzz, we're not hiring you. If you can't complete a sentence, we're not hiring you. Beyond that, we use a lot of discretion.

kahawe2• 14 years ago

For me this comes down to the HR dilemma and why I feel sympathy for the dreaded HR drones and in this case for him having to make HR decisions: They are people responsible for making decisions about applicants they practically know nothing about based on nothing but a bit of self-presentation and ultimately they are in trouble when that applicant turns out to have been the wrong choice, so no wonder they turn to obscure "voodoo" and "dark magic" as sure-fire ways of weeding out allegedly "bad" applicants... in this case instead of a crystal ball he uses a grammar test to make decisions about, amongst others, staffing technical and engineering positions. I am sure a lot of excellent programmers and engineers aren't necessarily the best with words and you have no idea how well they might do by requiring them to pass a grammar test as the bare minimum. You might just as well ask them to paint you a few pictures and then derive conclusions about their mental abilities to picture things and software framework... while there could be correlations, it just has nothing to do with their job and the rest of their skills.

Here is an idea for hiring people and to end this strange fascination that comes with it: building on a core team of excellent people and a good, existing culture you then bring in people mainly through references. I saw this work especially well when bringing in students but it applies to former colleagues as well; they know who the good and the go-to people amongst their colleagues are/were and the good people know it more than anyone else. And they also know the person from working with them so chances are the applicant will be a great fit for the existing team. As an alternative you could let your people teach some classes or give trainings and they will very quickly know who the good students are. Then just hire the applicant and give them a realistic chance to prove themselves in a project. Chances are very good that within a few months or even weeks it will become very clear whether they are a good fit or not. Bad people WILL dis-qualify and alienate themselves, in any healthy organization you can trust on that and if you don't have any good people at all well then your whole hiring-voodoo is pointless anyway because the best new hire will drown in your swamp.

I have seen this work like a charm at my last employer - I was brought in by my Linux teacher who was working there and I went for a beer with the guys, I liked the atmosphere and the people and they could get to know me too and then I showed up to the interview with the CEO in a very relaxed environment and it was pretty clear they want me so we just discussed details and that was it. Efforts on their part were zero and on my part a mild hang-over after a great evening and no stupid self-presentation and applying shenanigans. I have seen people come and go at that place for a few years and without a fail the ones that left were a bad match or just bad employees. The good ones stuck around and I am best friends with all of them, even to this day more than three years after the place went belly-up and I moved to a different country. At that time each one of them found a new job very quickly and a lot of former customers continued to bring them business just because the people were so good and reliable. Each time we get together twice a year now that "old spirit" flares up again and we feel just like in the "good old days". This is also the best network you could ask for, it "grew naturally", if you will.

Hire through references and give people a realistic chance and be smart about managing your expenses, side-effects and repercussions from doing so. I can not see how this is not way more efficient and more reliable than the whole bloated fortune-telling HR mumbo-jumbo.

cgmorton• 14 years ago

Everyone who is getting angry, listen:

This isn't a test for suitability for the position. It's a matter of signalling.

This is a cheap test (surely can't take more than 5 minutes to complete a grammar test), but with the property that the only candidates who will -fail- it are candidates unsuitable for hiring. Since the author gives no statistics, we can only assume that enough people are weeded out to make it worthwhile.

It's much the same as a FizzBuzz test. I certainly don't feel offended if I'm given such a test at an interview, I just smile and do it.

hythloday4• 14 years ago

Just to illustrate what a morass "poor grammar" is, I have, wearing my ex-professional proofreader hat, gone through the article to highlight the areas where I could find fault with the article for incorrect usage.

People Who Use Poor Grammar should be: People Who Use Grammar Poorly.

I have a "zero tolerance approach" should be: I have a zero-tolerance approach.

people who mix up their itses should be: people who mix up its and it's.

passed over for a job — even if should be: passed over for a job—even if.

I don't point this out to be pedantic or to level at the author a tu quoque, but to point out that the idea of an "English grammar" that you can apply universally to writing is a myth. At best you can create a style guide, or follow an existing one. Expecting employees to be able to follow a known style guide is a reasonable request. Expecting them to score perfectly on a grammar test against a style guide they've never seen, without (presumably) computer assistance, when scored by someone who believes that they're capable of scoring a grammar test without recourse to existing style guides, is foolish, in exactly the same way that expecting a programmer to remember whether String.find take (needle, haystack) or (haystack, needle) as its arguments is a terrible interview technique.

binxbolling2• 14 years ago

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.

hythloday4• 14 years ago

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 caused by typos, rather than ignorance--before they are seen, rather than relying on an up-front test that's never retaken.

Someone else on this thread made an analogy to push-ups. If, as a business owner, you feel that it's essential for your business that any employee can perform 20 push-ups at any time, is it better to test them before they begin employment, or to put them on a brief training course when they join and have regular check-ups on their ability?

quotemstr3• 14 years ago

All the examples you cite are stylistic choices and have nothing to do with "grammar". (I also personally disagree with all your suggested edits, especially the first.) Using Hungarian notation in C may be poor style, but it conforms to the C grammar.

hythloday4• 14 years ago

For clarity, when I talk about "grammar" here I'm talking about what Wikipedia calls "orthography", which is what I think the OP was talking about. You're right that #1 is a style correction and #3 is a typographic correction--on the other hand #2 is unambiguously orthogaphic[0], even if it's not as well known as it's/its, and if the writer feels justified in making up "itses" to mean "it's and its", presumably because people can infer what it means from context, that puts them in a very shaky position as a prescriptivist.

The interesting point that I'm trying to make isn't that that author is wrong or right, because I don't really care much about slips in orthography. It's that once you take a prescriptivist stance you're either making an appeal to popularity or you're entering an arse-kicking contest with a seven-legged monster with no arse.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_compound#Hyphenated_com...

adavies429• 14 years ago

proofreading to match a style guide is completely different from grammar. learn the difference between grammar and style....

philsnow• 14 years ago

first edit: take it or leave it

I have a "zero tolerance approach" should be: I have a "zero tolerance" approach.

your third edit, which I also don't agree with, isn't quite right, it should be: people who mix up "its" and "it's".

fourth edit: I've always hated this jamming of words together with an em-dash: it appears that "job" and "even" have something to do with each other, but they don't.

Hari_Seldon• 14 years ago

why do people write "noone" when they mean "no one"? it is very annoying

sebnukem22• 14 years ago

Finally, a paper and post I can link to when people ask me why using it's in place of its or vice versa makes me angry.

linuxhansl• 14 years ago

Wow, what a load of nonsense. Some of smartest people I know are dyslexic.

I guess they won't be working at any of his companies.

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

  Dear Mr. von Neumann:
  With the greatest sorrow I have learned of your 
  illness.   
  The news came to me as quite unexpected. Morgenstern 
  already last summer told me of a bout of weakness you 
  once had

I am pretty sure that "already last summer" is poor English grammar. Tisk - this Godel character. Probably not worth a face to face.

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/the-gdel-letter/

gjm112• 14 years ago

From the original article:

> [...] Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.) [...]

Kurt Goedel wasn't a native English speaker; he was from Austria. I think that would count as an extenuating circumstance.

leephillips3• 14 years ago

I like how he ended a sentence with "with", and made that "with" a link to a note debunking the popular but silly belief that you should not end a sentence with a preposition. That was both clever and shows that he knows what he's talking about.

kamaal4• 14 years ago

Ah! The Irony.

These days programmers don't want to be bothered about the language syntax they use and heavily depend of autocomplete and intellisense to do even simple tasks. While its this grammar that they should be actually learning and mastering. Yet this isn't even the criteria for hiring programmers these days.

And by the way where does this stop. I can argue physical fitness is important for programmer so can I ask you to sprint a 1000m track as a part of my interview process?

cafard3• 14 years ago

If you can find someone who can sprint 1000 meters, you have a real beast on your hands.

pteromyscus• 14 years ago

Too bad, Yoda could be a killer programmer.

isalmon• 14 years ago

Well, "smart" way to discriminate against immigrants :(

degenerate• 14 years ago

The "canonical" URL for this article is quite hilarious, in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way based on the article:

i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

ricardonunez3• 14 years ago

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.

adavies429• 14 years ago

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....

ricardonunez3• 14 years ago

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

excuse-me10• 14 years ago

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.

ricardonunez3• 14 years ago

Thank you for the correction.

Produce3• 14 years ago

The URL:

i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

I wouldn't hire someone who does anything with poo but dump it too.

l3amm• 14 years ago

The comments have become a firestorm of grammar-as-a-filter for programmers. While this is an interesting debate, I think there are three things about this filter that give it value:

1) Grammar serves as a cultural touchstone in the company, so using a grammar test in hiring is a strong signal to employees and future employees about what we as a company stand for. If you apply to this job and you disregard grammar freely (guilty as charged) you will not fit into this organization. It's a fast filter on both ends: I won't take the test, and if I did you would reject me immediately. Excellent.

2) It is a binary, non-complex test. You write the test once and there is a unambiguous right and wrong answer, if you get the questions right you pass, if you don't you are rejected. This has several benefits:

Applicants: They know this is coming and can prepare/not prepare for it. The test is objective, so they can't really argue with its validity. At one point they probably knew this material, meaning that an hour of time to prepare for the finer points of colons/semi-colons is probably doable if they really want the job.

Employer: Since the answers are unambiguous this filter is easy to use: passed candidates go through. There is no subjectivity around assessing a candidate using a resume or cover letter. In my experience (CEO in hiring efficiency space) this easily-actionable filter means that the task at hand will actually get done. If you watch recruiters try to parse through 200+ resumes against a job req, they will stop after 10-15. They might come back to it on another day, or they might not. Either way the applicant pipeline stops dead on their desk. It's frustrating for the recruiter because the task becomes "analyze this free-text against a free-text requisition and then filter this list of 200 people down to 20."

The reality of this situation is that most resumes don't get read and the person who ends up getting the job is one of the first 20 that were read. Obviously this situation is non-ideal, so I generally advocate an objective, simple filter as the first step to any process (before looking at resume.) Internal recruiters, in their heart of hearts, want to find the best applicant in the bunch, if you don't give them the tools to do their job then they won't.

3) They've thought about their process and institutionalized it. When I see a company that has thought seriously about the filter stage of the process then I know: a) they care about their employees' time b) they care about quality applicant's and the culture they project in the hiring process c) they have probably thought about all stages of the hiring process so things are likely to move quickly and smoothly.

re• 14 years ago

> The test is objective

Less so than you might think. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001863.h...

EternalFury• 14 years ago

Bravo!

Poor grammar is the telltale sign of other impediments that hinder the practice of any activity that requires good attention to details.

SjuulJanssen• 14 years ago

Nice drama title. Of course the drama tanks when the reader finds out that it's for a job where people write for a living. That's like asking a programmer to do some coding in the interview. Which is, IMO, not weird at all and rather something everyone should consider.

AYBABTME• 14 years ago

I wish I had a personal grammar nazi who'd poke me everytime I make a mistake in English. Unfortunately, I don't have such an individual, so I'm left with myself and my doubts.

I have to balance between near-perfecting English as my second language, or learning and concentrating on stuff that is relevant to my domain. Although I am a perfectionist, I also am a realist and consider that there are, in the end, things more important to my life than writing perfect English. Perfect English will not help me building all the great projects I have in mind.

yelloblac• 14 years ago

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.

macey• 14 years ago

anyone else like how the URL is shortened to "i-wont-hire-people-who-use-poo"?

/12yearsold

Zenst• 14 years ago

He 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.

larrys2• 14 years ago

" 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.

melissajenna• 14 years ago

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.

trustfundbaby• 14 years ago

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

derleth5• 14 years ago

The problem is that most people who rail against poor grammar haven't the slightest clue what grammar actually entails, and are instead peeving on stylistic issues that vary both due to the region the applicant hails from and how old the applicant is. In a lot of cases, they may as well be basing a hiring decision on whether the applicant says 'bubbler' instead of 'water fountain' or 'pop' instead of 'soda'.

lukejduncan• 14 years ago

Personally, I've found my grammar degrades after a day of coding. I can write well formed sentences in general, but by the end of the day my mind is working in a much different day and my emails drift towards an embarrassing place.

I don't think there's anything wrong with having your own particular standards for hiring. If it works for you in solving your particular problem: great! One of the things I began to appreciate when I first starting interviewing in the Valley is how much companies did or didn't care about nuance in their interviews. If the interview was too easy, it generally signaled to me that they don't sweat the details and maybe don't hire people that are going to stretch me professionally.

gciii• 14 years ago

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.

scott_meade• 14 years ago

My current grammar peeve is when people end a question with "... or no?" "Are you coming over tonight, or no?" "Do you like this outfit, or no?" "Do I sound like a teenager, or no?" What's up with that?!

Do any of you find yourselves talking like that, or no?

Torgo• 14 years ago

I will not hire people who use contractions.

ericturri• 14 years ago

Not totally related, but I found it ironic that the URL for this article is "I won't hire people who use poo"

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_p...

Tycho• 14 years ago

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.

antidoh• 14 years ago

"And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can't tell the difference between their, there, and they're."

I used to make that judgment. I've since been humbled by many brilliant people who commit that and other common errors. I would be poorer, possibly impoverished, if I had dismissed those people from my circle.

As Peopleware pointed out many years ago, most people have something important to contribute, even if they don't contribute much in one specific area.

mcgwiz• 14 years ago

Teams that lack the element of craftsmanship in their culture will likely not care if a programmer knows grammatical rules of natural language (much less if he is a master of natural language). To simplify, whether you agree with the author correlates with what type of programmer you are (or want to hire). In this simplification, I'll call them "productive programmers" and "craftsmen programmers".

Productive programmers ship lots code, create lots of value, and by business standards are model programmers. They're driven by quantity, volume, getting things out the door, and the solvency of the business.

Craftsmen programmers also "produce" and ship code, but they equally value maintainability, and therefore clarity in code. They're driven by the customer as much as the other consumer of their code, the maintainers.

From my experience, these very different types of programmers have very different priorities and values. Generally, the first set emphasizes clarity in communication only as it impedes progress along the critical path. They JIT there eloquence, whether it's essential business communication or unstable/volatile/certain-to-change code. JITing is hard and not guaranteed to produce the optimal (most clear) output. The second group feels obligated to be clear in communication at all time, because any corners cut now may create pain for a fellow down the road. To excel at this, the second group is self-motivated to learn deeply both the spirit and the mechanics of communication (empathy and grammar). They spend more time analyzing the available solutions for potential misinterpretations, and therefore generally produce a clearer output.

Thus, the applicability of the article depends on the culture and environment of the team.

I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

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