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).
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
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.
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.
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.
oh the US Constitution is wonderful to throw at grammar nazis.
Article 1, section 10, clause 2:
"No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress."
I still cringe at all the "would of"s and incorrect "your"s and "their" on the Net. As an English speaker from outside the US, these aren't mistakes I commonly see in my country, and they grate. I'm like you - I find it arduous and irritating to read a passage littered with them, because each one pops up and distracts me.
That said, if I were hiring programmers, I wouldn't go by grammar. Business concerns and core capabilities come first. If the person makes mistakes but does the job best, no biggie. It all comes down to the situation in the labour market - does demand for programmers exceed supply, or vice versa? If I were flooded with good potential applicants then I'd weight grammar more heavily as a differentiating factor - but since good programmers are hard to come by currently, it's just pointless to do so.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think that's because the term "Oxford comma" is somewhat of a misnomer. The comma before "and" actually seems to be more preferred in the United States that in Britain.
"Opinions vary among writers and editors on the usage or avoidance of the serial comma. In American English, the serial comma is standard usage in non-journalistic writing that follows the Chicago Manual of Style. . . . It is used less often in British English,[5][6] where it is standard usage to leave it out, with some notable exceptions such as Fowler's Modern English Usage."
I prefer to use oxford comma where I'm writing a long list of items, and those items contain sets within themselves.
For instance, while listing computer brands that include Dell, HP, Acer, Toshiba, Alienware, Compaq and ASUS, I wouldn't use the oxford comma. But if I'm listing out speaker brands like Bose, Klipsch, JBL, Bang and Olufsen, and Altec Lansing, I think oxford comma helps to clarify the meaning intended.
relatedly, there's a little-used rule that lets you use a semi-colon as your list separator if the individual elements contain commas: "My favorite law firms are Dewey, Cheatem & Howe; Robinall, Widowes, & Laffin; and Sue, Grabbitt, & Runne."
In one case I discourage it as well, because with it you can't write the funniest sentence ever composed: "I would like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God."
Otherwise, no strong opinion, although I usually use it myself.
True! And it's also very funny. (But a shade less so than the parents sentence.) Maybe our descriptivist/purist friends should start a campaign to bring back the dative.
Dude, I so want to go there, apply, and write at the bottom of the page:
"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States." -- And that's the law of the land. Please try to parse that until your head explodes.
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?"
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).
By Contemporary Standard American English standards comma placements are strewn throughout the sentence with very little regard for clarity (removing a few would make it clearer), and the logical relation between clauses leaves something to be desired.
Standards for comma usage weren't established until almost the end of the 19th century. Some people used breathing or personal stylistics to decide on comma use, but there certainly was no general expectation that it would follow grammatical construction or logic.
Compared to some other 18th century documents I've read, the US Constitution is downright spare with commas.
However, by the standards of English then in effect, it makes perfect sense. Part of the problem is that written English prior to the 1900s included a large element of (conscious or subconscious) verbalization of what was written.
Try reading the Constitution out loud, taking appropriate breaks at the punctuation. It becomes a lot easier to understand and read; most (but not all) of the ambiguity will disappear.
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.
The grammar rule is that you can remove a clause within the commas - so this becomes:
No Person except a natural born Citizen at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.
So unless you were born sometime before 1776 you aren't going to be hitting the campaign trail
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.
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.
The canons of statutory interpretation forbid absurd, unreasonable or unjust interpretations. I believe that ultimately this is what lets the courts discard the odd parse trees.
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?
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.
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 ;-)
> 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.
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.
"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.
Huh. Really? I use whom all the time, and most of my friends do as well. Granted, a) we're all snobs, and b) we don't use it in every case we should, but we still use it.
So ask yourself the question, why not "thee", "thou" and "thy" (and relevant possessive forms)? I'm not saying "whom" is wrong only that it is archaic. Reviving just that word seems rather capricious and arbitrary no?
"Whom" makes you sound a bit dated. Etymologists will get the joke. ;-)
(I suppose I should explain it. "Whom" comes from a dative case, and would is not descended from a word that would be used for direct objects, but only for a subset of indirect objects and prepositional objects. However if elative uses relate to elated things, then surely dative uses in English relate to dated things, right?)
I would say "whom" today is reserved for formulaic usage.
In 1912, Edward Sapir ("Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech") noted the death of "whom." The example he gave was "Whom did you see yesterday" vs "Who did you see yesterday?"
Granted there are some cool things you can do with who/whom, like:
'Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome tae yer gory bed,
Or tae victorie.'
Of course that's 18th century Scottish and things have changed a bit....
I don't know. English is a second language here in India, and the grammar covered in schools is pretty basic, and still I would wager most of people would recognize it's passive voice.
The reason why that error is so common among American English speakers though is that we are mistakenly taught that voices apply to sentences and so passive voice in a subordinate clause gets ignored. So you have the issue that
"Are you responsible" is active voice but "if papers were left on your desk" is passive.
But this also gets to the problem of avoiding the passive voice which too many grammarians push, which is that there are times when the use of passive voice clarifies things.
The question, "Are you responsible if papers are left on your desk?" illustrates this very well. The questioner assumes it doesn't matter who left the papers on the desk, and there is no way to better word the sentence.
So in this discussion I have intentionally split infinitives (to emphasize that the goal is to do better at wording sentences), and illustrated why the passive voice is great, and in so doing have probably permanently disqualified myself from a job where grammar nazis rule.
"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."
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...
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.
He was a "big deal" in the 90s, at least within hacker circles: wrote a lot of early free software / hacker culture reated stuff & was heavily involved in the rebranding of "free software" into a form that corporate suits could feel comfortable with ("open source") & selling that idea to a wider audience. See 'The Cathedral & the Bazaar' and other works.
He wasn't all talk: way back in the day, he worked on emacs & authored fetchmail (fair warning: reading the fetchmail source will make your ears bleed.)
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
What? If you're writing software being able to produce clear documentation, write-ups, and other supplemental materials is quite important. In some cases, far more important than writing the actual code.
In some hires I've used a descriptive writing assignment, where I ask the candidate to describe in words what they are looking at. You can learn much from these things, including: analysis skills, close looking, how they think, and, well, how well they would document their software.
> What? If you're writing software being able to produce clear documentation, write-ups, and other supplemental materials is quite important. In some cases, far more important than writing the actual code.
You are taking it to the extreme where there are only 2 states: grammar purists and monkeys banging at keyboard. Someone who mixes up "its" and "it's" is capable of all the important stuff you listed. I mix "its" and "it's" a lot while typing. I know the difference, my fingers don't.
> analysis skills, close looking, how they think, and, well, how well they would document their software.
And none of it is a result of good grammar. Are you implying that somehow good grammar leads to good analytic skills? Or are you saying talking with them gives you a window to their mind? If the latter, the window is wide open irrespective of how often I mix "it's" and "its". And how I prefer my period outside of quotes or parens(Why? Because I like it that way. That's why).
So teach yourself not to make the mistakes because the next person in behind you working on your code might not know what you mean. If you know the difference it's just laziness to not communicate correctly.
As for periods outside of parentheses or not, that's syntax, not grammar. Your position here is weak. Good grammar is an indication that the person wielding the language at least takes care over what they're doing. A valuable trait for anyone, no matter what.
> Good grammar is an indication that the person wielding the language at least takes care over what they're doing.
Good grammar is an indication of good grammar, and that's that. If you believe it's otherwise, well, your believes aren't fact. Please provide citations.
"...If you're writing software being able to produce clear documentation, write-ups, and other supplemental materials is quite important. In some cases, far more important than writing the actual code."
Does the company in the original post not recognise the function of an editor?
Absolutely you do not have to subject yourself to his whims. You would be free to walk out the door if you found the grammar test offensive, or the push-ups test, or the rope-skipping test.
You do not deserve respect. Ever. You must always earn it.
Oh god. I hate this attitude. Respect is a right, not a privilege. Why should anyone have to earn something so basic? Do we also have to earn our privilege to breathe air? We're all equals and equally deserve respect. Yes, even you after you muttered that banality.
I would say that we're definitely not identical, but we can all be equal.
A better question, though I will answer yours shortly, is what does equality mean? It's simply the relative value we assign something. The thing is, we can think in terms of valuable and not valuable or we can skip the duality altogether and see everything on an equal level. A spade is thoroughly unvaluable if you have no hole to dig yet indispensable when you do. So what is it's absolute value? Is it equal to a saw? Is one person equal to another? It all depends on your perspective.
The problem with seeing inequality between people in terms of respect is that you will treat some of your fellow man badly, since you don't respect them. If their value is merely a matter of perspective, which is ever changing, would it not make more sense to see past our biases and show everyone respect, whether they are equal to what we currently identify as respect worthy or not?
To me, respect means to consider someone in high regard. In my experience, how I look at people ends up affecting how they act. People always tend towards living up to the expectations placed on them. By showing someone that I don't respect them, I am pushing them down rather than helping them up.
Putting it another way, when someone is on the defensive, because someone else looks down on them and does not show them respect, they close up and are not receptive to new information. By showing them respect even if they are bad at something, they are likely to listen to what you have to say and change how they act as a result of your words. Disrespecting someone with - "you type like an idiot" or ignoring them, will make them respond appropriately. Validating their actions - "cool, a more condensed form of English!" then suggesting something else - "I've had lots of success finding a job by writing like this", they might actually change.
If we want society (and spelling) to improve, we have to embrace those we call idiots and teach them, not push them away.
If someone is an awesome programmer but can't write English to save his life, why not educate him? You'll certainly have a more loyal employee if he feels that he's gained important skills from you.
tl;dr - Disrespect is damaging, respect is nurturing. Respect everyone and the sun will shine brighter.
> You do not deserve respect. Ever. You must always earn it.
Hm. If you don't have my respect, I may well feel justified in stealing from you. Is that really the kind of 'lack of respect' you think should be the default state?
> Absolutely you do not have to subject yourself to his whims. You would be free to walk out the door if you found the grammar test offensive, or the push-ups test, or the rope-skipping test.
> You do not deserve respect. Ever. You must always earn it.
There are multiple types of respect. "One human being to another" is the basic type. Everyone deserves that. Another is earned. And the last one is context dependent.
If I am coming in for a programming job, there are expectations and norms. I come in and you ask me to unclog the toilet since you read in some blog about some CEO doing it or it represents loyalty or commitment or whatever the fuck, I am free to walk out and I will walk out. But that doesn't excuse the fact that you didn't warrant me the respect I deserved.
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?
The idea of using grammar as a litmus test for all new hires is akin to saying that nothing is more important than natural language grammar. That could not be further from the truth. I've read plenty of extremely thoughtful, info-dense specs in the open-source community that had typos and grammar errors. I've seen countless emails from colleagues that were clearly quickly written and thus contained errors. The essential ideas were none-the-less transmitted. My mind is able to auto-correct when needed. Perhaps if the rules of english grammar were based on logic and reason rather than the memorization of arbitrary, capricious rules I'd be willing to attach more wait to the grammar skills of non-professional writers.
> I've read plenty of extremely thoughtful, info-dense specs in the open-source community that had typos and grammar errors. I've seen countless emails from colleagues that were clearly quickly written and thus contained errors. The essential ideas were none-the-less transmitted.
And because people tolerate it and allow for this to happen, we live in such ugly world, where people don't give a damn about quality.
Similarly, nobody has fine tapestries on the walls of their server rooms. Nobody cares about the insulation properties, apparently, but worst of all, nobody cares about the attention to detail and quality a fine tapestry represents. Thus we live in a terrible world with no appreciation of the finer things, because if you don't mind the lack of tapestries, how can you possibly care about a lack of code quality?
Getting basic grammar poorly is not like having no tapestries on walls of server rooms. It's like having a big mess in server room, where machines lie around in unorderly fashion and cabling is a mess. Yes, it works. But it looks terrible. Also add unfinished pizzas laying on the floor for accurate representation of people who don't care about spelling.
> If you're writing more code than natural language (documentation, discussion of specs, interaction with the team, etc) something is extremely wrong.
As long as we are just throwing claims around, I posit unless the code you write isn't 99% of what you write, something is extremely fucked up, and the orcs will take over the world.
I don't see how your claim is more valid or invalid than mine. None of the claims are backed by data, and personal perceptions are, well, personal. No one other than person experiencing it gives a damn.
Perhaps, except that hypothetical code-hungry orcs are imaginary and have nothing to do with anything while the value of any of my very real examples is well understood by pretty much anyone. (Though - if you'll forgive me drawing further from our mystical beastiary - trolls might be an exception?)
Edit to explain why I'm so dismissive:
I think that it's a fairly accepted axiom that specified and documented projects are easier to maintain than the alternative. Likewise with code size versus feature set. I think it's self-evident that teams that communicate in natural language (even if only via a ticket system) are more functional (or at least more tolerable to be a member of) than teams that do not.
Deriving my claim from these seems reasonable enough, to me, given the context of the discussion (a comment thread of a relevant topic on some website a minority of people care about).
Not everything is science and while it might be nice to have 5-sigma data to reinforce my opinon, it fortunately doesn't need to be so reinforced in order to be valid, or even valid to be worth sharing.
> Perhaps, except that hypothetical code-hungry orcs are imaginary and have nothing to do with anything while the value of any of my very real examples is well understood by pretty much anyone.
What does this even mean? I don't see any real examples, and all you are doing is throwing more claims around. I missed the memo where you, and whoever this "everyone" else is were appointed authority on the value of anything for everyone else.
> Edit to explain why I'm so dismissive:
I think that it's a fairly accepted axiom that specified and documented projects are easier to maintain than the alternative.
So a project with beautiful documentation and totally retarded code is easier to maintain? Documentation, more often than not, is for the end user. As far as code maintenance goes, the most important factor is proper abstractions and encapsulations. If you wrote a 5000 line, well commented method, it doesn't help me at all.
And a very specific set of projects lead itself to and require beforehand specs. Majority of the real world runs on "code is spec". Where is the spec for linux? Here is a little unknown someone's views on specs http://kerneltrap.org/node/5725 Where are the specs for rails, sinatra, django, flask? And how would it help if suddenly a rails specs came into being? You are confusing your little well with the world. Most projects design interfaces, not specs(activerecord, rails 4 queuing api etc)
Even your axiom holds(it doesn't, at all), how does that imply if you're writing more code than natural language (documentation, discussion of specs, interaction with the team, etc) something is extremely wrong.?
> Deriving my claim from these seems reasonable enough, to me, given the context of the discussion
> Not everything is science and while it might be nice to have 5-sigma data to reinforce my opinon, it fortunately doesn't need to be so reinforced in order to be valid, or even valid to be worth sharing.
I didn't ask for 5-sigma data. I asked for data which isn't personal anecdotes and viewpoints presented as truth.
Watching how someone makes their bed shows their behaviour towards paying attention to detail. Even if they don't know how to do it, if someone chooses not to do or chooses to give up, it's clear sign that the person will probably not do something out of their domain.
If you're in a startup, you wear many hats. You do what it takes to succeed. If you have no clue how to do sales, find a way.
>Watching how someone makes their bed shows their behaviour towards paying attention to detail. Even if they don't know how to do it, if someone chooses not to do or chooses to give up, it's clear sign that the person will probably not do something out of their domain.
I'm really not trying to be argumentative here, but this seems really silly. Replace "make a bed" with something like "kick a 40 yard field goal" or "craft a wooden chair" or more simply "tie a Windsor knot". All your testing is whether they care about that particular task that is in no way related to skills you actually need.
Sure it might sound silly but sometimes it's not whether you can actually do the task or not. It's more of how will you approach something that you are not expected to do. Different people have different approaches.
I agree that if you're hiring a programmer strictly to program and do nothing else, that's fine. But if you're looking for someone who thinks outside of the box, is capable of coming with ideas and solutions when the solutions are yet to be known, having tests like these is probably a way to figure out how a person thinks. Whether it's a good way or not, I'm not so sure as I've never had to administer one of these tests.
Right. You should know the rules so you know when to break them. Stephen King hits on this point well in "On Writing." That book is a great read and takes a very non-parochial approach to writing.
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.)
> (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.
Also, it makes it easier to determine when a sentence ends that contains an abbreviation. (This refers to when most people would use periods at the end of abbreviations.) I still use double spacing even though standard HTML does not display the double spacing on web pages.
The following sentences are an example of what I was saying:
"I sent the N.D.A. to N.Y. It arrived three days later."
The single space after the "A" in "N.D.A." indicates that the sentence has not ended even though there is a period.
The harder case is an [A-Z]. [A-Z] which is not a sentence ending. Consider the following:
"When we compare the use of mistakes in speech in the Saga of St. Olaf with some of the other Old Norse literature, we can see that there is, in fact, a pattern of use of errors in speech being a sort of death omen."
The single space there identifies that there is no end of sentence between St. and Olaf. Of course when you are working in LaTeX you have to tell LaTeX that this is a word break and not a sentence break or else it will kern it as an end-of-sentence.
Typographers do! Double-space is OK for monospace fonts, but otherwise single-space is almost universally preferred for avoiding so-called "rivers" of whitespace.
Indeed. I'd point out that LaTeX does kerning independent of number of spaces after a period. I usually put two spaces when I type because I do a lot with monochrome fonts including all my LaTeX sources, but really, it is no substitute for proper kerning.
> I'd point out that LaTeX does kerning independent of number of spaces after a period.
This is misleading. Yes, LaTeX ignores how many spaces you put after the period in the source; but it does lay out extra space after sentence-ending characters. To avoid the extra space (e.g. if you have a mid-sentence abbreviation) you have to backslash it!
>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.
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.
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.
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.
The OP generated a lot of strong negative reactions. But it also generated some strong positive reactions from programmers who share the author's frustrations and would enjoy working at a place where everyone punctuates impeccably. Like the author, my experience has been that programmers who care about language tend to write beautiful code.
I'm not looking for a job. But if I was, this article would make me more, not less, likely to apply.
I'm an owner at a software dev shop now, and I loved this article. I can't imagine actually using grammar as a litmus test, personally, but it definitely goes into my on-the-spot judgement criteria. I feel significantly less-comfortable working with someone who lacks the critical thinking skills or personal professionalism to be intensely concerned with how they interact with others - and grammar is significantly about that.
If you can't be bothered to learn grammatical syntax, and it's something you've done your whole life, why should I expect that you'll be bothered to pursue perfection in other areas? If you are bothered to pursue it, why should I believe you have a chance at approaching it if you haven't nailed something you've done since you were five years old?
Anyway, I've not taken the time till now to really develop my understanding of this flash judgement I make of people, but it has always really bugged me. I have a friend who some people view as 'redneck' because he's got a bit of southern good-ol-boy in his heritage, but he's been reading books since he was young and it shows. We took a chance on him, brought him in-house, and trained him. One of the reasons I knew he'd become a great developer was because of the attention to detail he gave to everything that he did. It played out extremely well, for us and for him, and that one signal was a huge part of it.
Obviously anecdotal; typical caveats apply. Still, I'd rather live in the world iFixIt's pursuing than the world we presently live in, re: grammar.
EDIT: hilariously, for grammar. I missed a question mark.
Writing skills are clearly a BFOQ for an organization where your entire work product is written; there is absolutely nothing illegal about a writing test for a programming job.
My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt your ability to know what form of "const" to use in C++. At the very least, lack of proofreading suggests to me you might be rash with your code as well.
Many disagree with me on this point of view, but routinely I've found that those that express themselves 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.
> 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.
While I could exhaustively ask about every aspect of every language you might have to work in, it's far simpler to use a proxy. The proxy in this case is your native language and seems to work rather well. And since your job certainly isn't going to be writing code for 8 hours straight, the ability to communicate well is a good skill to have.
For what it's worth, I use other aspects to proxy fit and ability as well. If you can't bother to clean up before an interview, I have a pretty reasonable idea of how you conduct yourself.
Re: the non-native speaker part. I've had to help a lot of people out over the years on various support channels because someone wrote "then" instead of "than" or "loose" instead of "lose." Since many people seem to be able to read & write in foreign languages but not necessarily speak them, homophones are easily confused. Personally I know enough French & German to follow along with most technical materials, but easily get derailed by misspellings. Is it an idiom I'm unaware of? Is it a word I don't know? Is it some sort of slang?
> The proxy in this case is your native language and seems to work rather well.
No, it does not. The very notion that someone who always uses "its" and "it's" understands const-correctness is ridiculous.
Command over native language doesn't signify programming prowess. You are imagining things or extrapolating your personal anecdotes to absolutes. Please provide citations if it's a proven fact.
> For what it's worth, I use other aspects to proxy fit and ability as well. If you can't bother to clean up before an interview, I have a pretty reasonable idea of how you conduct yourself.
What on earth does cleaning up mean? I shower in the morning. I am not going to take a special shower for you. Whether or not I shave depends on my mood. I don't see how on earth an interview with you should affect my facial hairs. I am not coming in looking like a hobo, and anything beyond that isn't your call at all.
Why the hell people count on metric which doesn't indicate a person's qualities relevant to the job? Whatever the fuck happened to phone screening, checking up open source projects, on-site problem solving, having a conversation, checking up references. Where and why the fuck wearing a suit or taking a grammar test came into picture?
I think someone else pointed it out, it's a cultural affinity test. The shit about grammar indicating code quality is just rationalization for wanting someone who is culturally similar to you - has the same values as you. That is, someone who holds arbitrary things like grammar, facial hair, etc. in the same value as you do.
Some of my coworkers are from India and China. I could make up similar things about how chewing with your mouth open and not wearing deodorant indicates a lack of awareness of manners and means they are unaware of memory leaks and race conditions in their code.
It's on me to come to terms with people chewing with their mouth open, not fire them because of subconscious cultural supremacy issues.
No, it's as I stated initially. If you're unable to keep track of the rules of your native language, something that should be second nature, I have severe doubts about your ability to keep track of the rules in Scala, Ruby, or whatever else. If it's simply that you don't proofread or don't care to, I have no reason to believe you'll do so when dealing with code. That problem is exacerbated in dynamic languages where typos won't be caught until runtime. Both writing natural language and code are forms of expressing ideas, problems, & solutions cogently -- you just have different grammar forms for the various languages, each with their own rules. The two are even merging with things like Cucumber.
No, I don't have exhaustive studies on this. That neither proves nor disproves anything. I never stated any of this beyond my own opinion, which has been formed and reinforced by 15 years of working in open source, running & working at startups, and working at big companies.
That aside, code is typically only part of your job. Documentation, blog posts, interacting with customers, partners, team members, etc. are all part of engineering. You don't have to like it or think it's just, but people do and will form opinions about you on this stuff. Many times it won't be other engineers, which you may be fine with, but engineering alone often doesn't make a successful business. You can disagree with it or be flippant about it, but it really doesn't change reality.
> If it's simply that you don't proofread or don't care to, I have no reason to believe you'll do so when dealing with code.
Really. So all past experience on a person's resume doesn't count toward that? Every other aspect of your interview with that person cannot possibly lend anything to increase your belief that they proofread their code? That is quite irrational.
It's also irrational to assume that because someone doesn't keep track of grammar rules, that they are unable to do so. That's a pretty big mistake of an assumption.
It should be hanged, actually, when referring to capital punishment, except when drawing and quartering are involved. It's a quirk of the language; hung is correct in most circumstances.
You seem to be using the word funny in a sense with which I am not at all familiar. Again, consider the non-native user of English, and the likelihood of encountering him or her on a site like this. "Ironic" grammar policing without an irony indicator isn't at all funny.
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.
On the other hand, I would like to know since Finnish as a language fascinates me:
How common are noun-case errors among people who have a high school education? I mean something like using the elative case when the ablative might be more appropriate?
How common are noun-case errors among people who have a high school education? I mean something like using the elative case when the ablative might be more appropriate?
Nonexistent. I don't think even preschool children ever mix those. I don't have kids, so I can't say how it is with the kids who are just learning to speak.
Also in English, you don't see people mixing "into" and "onto" even remotely as often as the mistakes the linked article talked about.
Absolutely agree. I would never be able to take anybody seriously (in terms of hiring them) who can't spell or get basic grammar right in my native tongue, but this tends to be quite common in written English.
How much can one infer from the fact that a native speaker mixes up "they're" and "their"?
My gut tells me (there's a scientific statement, if ever there was one!) that it correlates mainly to people who haven't read much in print. Print publications tend to be edited better than online ones. Unfortunately, bad spelling is reinforced by spending a lot of time online and being exposed to misspellings that are not corrected.
As a child I didn't have access to TV, so I read everything in sight and I read constantly. The end result is I have a particularly sensitive eye for spelling and grammar mistakes. I find the misuse of, e.g., "loose" instead of "lose," to be tremendously irritating. The people I know who read a lot simply don't make trivial mistakes like that unless they're in a hurry and mistype.
Is it sloppy? I would say it's sloppy if writing is a large part of your job. Otherwise, it's mainly an indicator of someone who doesn't read print very much.
It is also getting worse at an increasing rate. I remember when mispelled words and bad grammar in reputable magazines and journals was rare, now it's almost expected that anything I read will have a few.
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).
If you don't care equally about grammar and programming, then you aren't wanted. You can no doubt latch onto a dev shop that doesn't care about that.
I don't see the problem and I admire the attitude. Use of the written word is important and, aside from the exceptions mentioned in the article, I think significantly less of people who don't write or speak well. It's important to me to work with good communicators and you can't be a good communicator if you can't speak and write well.
I am a software developer for a medical device manufacturer. Poor spelling and grammar can change the meaning of a requirement, leading to a software error. Down the road someone can certainly die.
More likely, however, is that grammar and spelling errors in Requirements, Design, Procedure or other documents, or in code commit comments, or code comments themselves implies to an auditor for a Regulatory Body that our code itself is sloppy. That leads the auditor to dig deeper. Dig deep enough and you will find enough to hang someone.
For just this reason, we must pay attention to proper documentation, down to appropriate word choice. No, we don't test for usage of written English during interviewing, but it's strongly enforced during day-to-day work.
>"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.".
I would say mixing up its and it's is a sign of a good programmer!
Apostrophe-s means a possessive most of the time, so logically belonging to it should be it's. programmers like logic, if the English language happens to have case this wrong that's their problem!
I like to amuse myself thinking of people trying to use "her's," "his'," "their's," "our's," or "your's." The possessive form is pretty consistent with pronouns.
The reasons for those are interesting - all to do with losing cases when middle English simplified and having to fit a few borrowed Norse words into Old English's German grammar.
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!
I didn't downvote you, but my guess is you were downvoted for making a rather tenuous and almost insulting relationship. There's a big difference between someone with an actual disability and those that just don't care about what they write. And I don't think anyone is even advocating for a zero tolerance policy. People make mistakes all the time. But calling it a "typo" or a triviality or otherwise getting defensive really doesn't help anything. It does however suggest how you might react when a "triviality" comes up in a codebase.
I've never been diagnosed with a disability, and now I am supposed to jump through hoops to try to prove to people that I should be given some sort of special exemption? As if I need more humiliation in my life than to notice after the fact that what I've written is riddled with unintended little mistakes?
As to people caring about what they write: The litmus test should be whether they can effectively communicate, not whether they have the same arbitrary bees in their bonnets that someone else has. I might not want to hire anyone who can't give me their opinion on whether or not Frege would have discovered Godel's Incompleteness Theorem decades before Godel, if Frege hadn't been so discouraged by Russel's Paradox as to give up his entire endeavor to derive math from logic. After all, someone who hasn't put in the effort to study even the basics of modern philosophy can't be trusted to really think deeply on any issue, can they?
This, no doubt, is true, but it would also be a morally indefensible hiring practice.
As for making tenuous and almost insulting relationships: I find your claim that there is any correlation between having issues with "its" vs "it's" and the like, and the care with which one puts into their code, to be a tenuous and insulting claim. You're insulting my code-writing ability, and you've provided no evidence for your claim. That's pretty tenuous. You've also confounded caring with performance. Although it may or may not be the case that caring is a general personality trait that spans across all one's skills, performance can be quite different between skills.
As to whether such grammatical distinctions are trivial, I assure you that they are. Having some linguistics background, I feel qualified to assert this. (MIT degree in cognitive science.) If we were to all agree today to just use "its" all the time, rather than using both "it's and "its", the world would be no worse off.
Whenever you confuse the two, you cause me to have to reparse the sentence. "it's" becomes "it is" and then I have to determine that that doesn't make any sense and go back to substitute it. Vice versa. I also have a linguistics background. So I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
> Whenever you confuse the two, you cause me to have to reparse the sentence. "it's" becomes "it is" and then I have to determine that that doesn't make any sense and go back to substitute it.
I'm sorry. When they come up with a cure for dyslexia, I'll be sure to get it. In the meantime, I suspect that most people are just dyslexic enough (dyslexia is a spectrum) that these little things cause them a great deal of trouble. It's not that they don't care; it's that if they did care, it would drive them crazy. Me, I do care about details. That's no doubt, in part, why I became a programmer.
As to throwing you off, since this mistake is so common, it would seem to be easy enough to train yourself to treat the two words as hominyms of each other. After all, you have no problem, I take it, with all the other homonyms in the language. (Yeah, I know, wheelchair ramps are annoying!) The fact that the words are pronounced identically proves conclusively that we don't need the words to be distinguished, other than by context.
As to having linguistics backgrounds, in my classes they beat prescriptivism out of me. How did yours survive?
I guess I kept mine in tact by studying other languages and having to deal with people internationally. And my fondness for "The Elements of Style" and "On Writing" fostered it natively.
I should think that dealing with people internationally would provide more tolerance for questionable grammar, not less, since non-native speakers of English typically make quite a few grammatical errors. Especially for irregular and idiomatic aspects of grammar.
Take those ignorant Brits, for example. They are always saying "different to" rather than "different from". That's much more annoying than using "it's" for "its", as it's not even pronounced the same way. And don't get my started on them misspelling "color" and "rumor".
I've mentioned this elsewhere in the comments, but you're extremely unlikely to ever see a non-native speaker write "greater then" rather than "greater than." It's a pseudo-homophone (they really are pronounced differently) that just doesn't exist to anyone picking up English as another language. More than that, it's confusing as hell for them to read because it's a form that makes no sense. "would of" and "would've" is another that comes to mind. Mixing "lose" and "loose" up seems fairly common nowadays, too.
You're right in that those not fluent in English make mistakes that seem odd, but I don't think I've ever come across a case where the error wasn't with a different tense or form of the verb. I.e., the sentence is structured a bit oddly, but it largely makes sense. The same cannot be said of "would of."
> I don't think I've ever come across a case where the error wasn't with a different tense or form of the verb. I.e., the sentence is structured a bit oddly, but it largely makes sense.
Oh come now. English, and I presume all natural languages, are replete with idiom for which it is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to ever master. (E.g., "different from" is the correct idiom, while "different than" is not. But non-native speakers often mess up idioms that I didn't even realize were idiomatic until I hear a foreign speaker get them wrong. Things like "Put that at the table" rather than "on the table", etc.) If you learn a language after puberty, you will almost certainly never learn a language with the fluency of a native speaker. Something in our brains restructures itself after that point.
And this is why your claim is so insidious. If someone grows up in a poor community which speaks a different dialect of English from "Standard Written English", and they don't become fluent in Standard Written English before the age of puberty, they are likely screwed for life. They are biologically determined to NEVER master it to the degree that you require. But since you have a background in Linguistics, you must already know this.
This whole topic makes me rather depressed. It seems to me that anyone who promotes the idea that anything like perfect grammar is required to be a programmer--or anything other than an editor of some sort--is lacking in both compassion and ability to think scientifically. If you are willing to discriminate in hiring based on hypotheses for which there is ZERO scientific evidence, then you fail on both counts.
In fact, if I were to hire programmers, I think that instead I might test them on their abilities to be empathic and to think scientifically and logically, since these are skills that actually do matter for software engineers. Prescriptive grammarians would fail on all three counts.
By the way, do you have any idea how hard it was to get into and graduate from MIT being dyslexic? And yet now the world wants to add all these crazy hiring criteria hoops that I'm supposed to jump through??? Coding on whiteboards? Having perfect grammar? Doing handsprings and cartwheels? Haven't I proven myself enough already by getting into and graduating from one of the best and most difficult universities in the world, and then continuing on in a career with many commendable accomplishments? E.g., writing the software that configures an X-ray space telescope, and implementing the specificity scoring algorithm for RNA Interference hairpins; knowing how to program in a dozen-plus programming languages; etc. The increasing tendency towards myopic monoculture and inflexible hiring practices infuriates me. I consider it a personal attack on my mental and financial well-being. And it is!
Regarding your claim that "would of" makes no sense, I'm not sure how to jibe this with your claim of having a linguistics background. The first thing that one learns in Linguistics, which is the scientific study of how people actually do speak, as opposed to the unscientific field of prescriptive grammar, which aims to tell people how they ought to speak, is that if a community of people speak or write a certain way, then it always makes sense, and there is always a good cognitive reason for it.
That's not to say that the good cognitive reason always maximizes functionality, but the same criticism can certainly be made about prescriptive grammar too. A lot of the rules in prescriptive grammar are completely arbitrary, and don't reflect the real language, as actually spoken.
A clear example of this is the deprecation of double negatives. This prohibition is a modern invention, invented by Bishop Robert Lowth in 1762. Before that everyone in English said, "I don't have none", just as they do in Romance languages. There was nothing wrong with the sentence, "I don't have none" before 1762, and there is nothing wrong with it today, except to the extent with which you wish to distinguis...
Perhaps standard grammar is not, as you argue, the best measure of semantic correctness. Then please, let us violate standard grammar wherever it improves accuracy.
Writing something different from what you mean because the two sound alike does not qualify.
I'm fond of Bertrand Russell myself. Does your argument stand on its own?
If we were to replaced both "it's" and "its" with just "its", absolutely no expressiveness in the language would be lost. This is shown by the fact that in spoken English, there is no audible distinction between these words. You can tell which word is being used 100% of the time that they are used in a sentence by the context alone. No sane person ever argues that we should introduce an audible distinction between "it's" and "its" in order to make a more expressive spoken language.
I don't know what Bertrand Russell would say, but I know what the great writer George Bernard Shaw would say. He lobbied very hard for a transition to a completely phonetic alphabet. I think he sometimes even wrote using it.
That's completely hypothetical. I could say "cat" and "dog" should in the future both be called "dog." That doesn't really excuse calling cats dogs.
Perhaps a new standard of spelling could be created and, as you suggest, "it's" and "its" could be replaced by "its." But that's not what you're doing when you write "it's" instead of "its;" instead, you are writing a word that is different from the one you mean.
"Its" has a meaning now, today, that whoever parses you language will use. Perhaps you will convince everyone to overload that meaning with a new one, but in the meantime write what you mean.
In the meantime, I'm dyslexic, and you don't seem to be very considerate of that.
Additionally, what I said is not hypothetical. It's a linguistic fact. Your comparison of phonetic spelling to replacing "cat" and "dog" with one word is a linguistic falsehood.
Perhaps someday falsehoods will be as accepted as facts, but in the meantime, speak the truth.
Writing "pier" instead of "peer" is, just like writing "cat" instead of "dog," wiring something different from what you mean. Your reason for confusing "pier" and "peer" doesn't make them the same. Perhaps it's hard to get the right answer, but that doesn't make a wrong answer right.
As for your dyslexia, I don't think it's relevant. Your case for phonetic spelling wasn't specific to dyslexics.
If "pier" and "peer" were merged into one word, then there would be sentences that are ambiguous. No such ambiguities arise with "its" vs "it's". They aren't even the same parts of speech.
You also have an incorrect notion of right and wrong. Read up on some linguistics and get back to me. E.g., there is nothing more "right" about "Standard Written English" than there is about the dialects spoken in inner cities. Both are equally good, full rich languages. Though certainly mistakes can be made within a dialect, you must understand, in order to be a civilized human, that for many native English speakers, their native language is not Standard Written English, but rather a regional dialect. Consequently, when they are in a situation where they are expected to communicate in Standard Written English, they are being expected to communicate in a language that is not their native language, and yet many people will not afford them the allowances that we make for people whom no dialect of English is their native language.
As for my dyslexia, it certainly is relevant, as this entire thread, from when I started posting on it, which is a direct ancestor of this post, and yours, is about whether it is moral to deny people jobs just because they make such an unimportant mistake. It's a mistake that never actually matters, except to the pedantic, and it's a mistake that dyslexics are particularly prone to. Not because they don't understand the difference, but rather because they often can't see when such mistakes are made.
> 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?
Effective communication is important for every job position I've ever encountered. Whether it was when I was a porter at Dunkin' Donuts, a research assistant, a cog in the wheel at Cisco, or running my own company. At the very least, you need to be able to communicate effectively with the rest of your team and usually across departments.
> 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?"
"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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
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....
There are indeed two GCSEs but crucially we had only one type of English lesson. We studied literature, poetry, wrote stories and poems of our own; did presentations, read plays, memorised Shakespearean monologues and such. But, barring that one poem in primary school I was never taught what an adverb is for example.
In French we'd look at past-participles and different tenses but never was it discussed what the pluperfect or future perfect was in English. In Russian we looked at locative and genitive, accusative and nominative cases (and others I'm sure) but in English there was never once a mention that anything such as a grammatical case existed. In school there was never a lesson on the apostrophe - reading Truss's tome [Eats, Shoots & Leaves] recently made me wonder why on Earth I couldn't have been passed something like that as a kid (I was a quite avid reader for many years but alas of course it wasn't written until 2006).
We did look at literary terms like onomatopoeia, alliteration, spoonerism and related concepts - metaphor, rhyming and timbre - that allow for analysis of poetry and prose.
Our English language classes, and exam incidentally, were about English usage and not really the language itself - the construction of language using English as the subject.
Grammar was just not in vogue at the time I feel. I've always felt however that being taught English grammar would have helped foreign language learning immeasurably.
FWIW I got high marks in both English exams (though I felt I was robbed by my teacher confusing me with the boy I sat next to!).
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.
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 ?
So there's no rationale beyond convention? Other linguistic conventions get changed so why is this one sticking around and why do its supporters promote it - is the more logical [to me] method somehow confusing?
it's old printers' stuff to do with physical properties of lead type, i think. as to why it won't go away, i have no idea. i happily ignore it in almost all my writing....
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?
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.
> 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'.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Grammar is probably more important for sales than it is for developers. I get a few sales pitches and tend to dump the ones with poor grammar. I feel like: if they can't bother to send a clean pitch, how well are they going to manage my account?
> 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.
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.
> There have been many choices in grammar that have been decided almost arbitrarily by higher authorities
Just because somebody makes a decree about grammar doesn't mean it'll be widely accepted, any more than an organism obtaining a genetic mutation means it'll become spread throughout the population in subsequent generations.
My point is just that there wasn't any overarching plan. People design their own use of it, but whether or not that becomes popular enough to be considered "the rule" is analogous to natural selection - messy, convoluted, frequently arbitrary, but good enough.
> 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.
> Don't give this test to people who speak AAVE: You'll be considered racist.
Perhaps, but probably not. In my understanding most AAVE speakers (and other "low-class" dialects, for that matter) are bidialectical with Standard American English and can code-switch to it in more formal situations. And, those who aren't able to do so likely haven't been exposed to the education and training necessary to even be qualified for a job like this in the first place - they surely would've picked it up along the way.
>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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
333 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadWhen 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:
Evidence that you've even thought about these issues will get you through the door.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.
"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"
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).
"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
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.
If you were to actually pronounce the word that is spelt "maintainance", that is how it would be pronounced, with the stress on the "ain".
Which accents did you have in mind?
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?
"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.
Article 1, section 10, clause 2:
"No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress."
That said, if I were hiring programmers, I wouldn't go by grammar. Business concerns and core capabilities come first. If the person makes mistakes but does the job best, no biggie. It all comes down to the situation in the labour market - does demand for programmers exceed supply, or vice versa? If I were flooded with good potential applicants then I'd weight grammar more heavily as a differentiating factor - but since good programmers are hard to come by currently, it's just pointless to do so.
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma
"Portugal, Spain, and France" (Oxford comma) "Portugal, Spain and France" (Not Oxford comma)
"Opinions vary among writers and editors on the usage or avoidance of the serial comma. In American English, the serial comma is standard usage in non-journalistic writing that follows the Chicago Manual of Style. . . . It is used less often in British English,[5][6] where it is standard usage to leave it out, with some notable exceptions such as Fowler's Modern English Usage."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma
For instance, while listing computer brands that include Dell, HP, Acer, Toshiba, Alienware, Compaq and ASUS, I wouldn't use the oxford comma. But if I'm listing out speaker brands like Bose, Klipsch, JBL, Bang and Olufsen, and Altec Lansing, I think oxford comma helps to clarify the meaning intended.
Otherwise, no strong opinion, although I usually use it myself.
"There are two hard problems in computing: naming things, cache expiration, and off by one errors."
The comma indicates a pause when spoken, and you need that pause in this particular joke.
"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." -- And that's the law of the land. Please try to parse that until your head explodes.
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?"
Compared to some other 18th century documents I've read, the US Constitution is downright spare with commas.
Try reading the Constitution out loud, taking appropriate breaks at the punctuation. It becomes a lot easier to understand and read; most (but not all) of the ambiguity will disappear.
The grammar rule is that you can remove a clause within the commas - so this becomes:
No Person except a natural born Citizen at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.
So unless you were born sometime before 1776 you aren't going to be hitting the campaign trail
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.
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.
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.
sad it is;
or . , ;; :
one of those
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 ;-)
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.
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.
"To whom did you give it?" vs. "Who did you give it to?" the latter is more modern and natural in modern English.
Maybe we're part of this little post 2000 resurgence: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=whom&year_s...
(I suppose I should explain it. "Whom" comes from a dative case, and would is not descended from a word that would be used for direct objects, but only for a subset of indirect objects and prepositional objects. However if elative uses relate to elated things, then surely dative uses in English relate to dated things, right?)
In 1912, Edward Sapir ("Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech") noted the death of "whom." The example he gave was "Whom did you see yesterday" vs "Who did you see yesterday?"
Granted there are some cool things you can do with who/whom, like:
'Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome tae yer gory bed,
Or tae victorie.'
Of course that's 18th century Scottish and things have changed a bit....
http://books.google.com/books?id=ofgrAAAAYAAJ&printsec=f...
Chapter 7 I believe is the relevant chapter.
I learned who was going out with whom
And who had the keys to the powder room
Passive voice.
But this also gets to the problem of avoiding the passive voice which too many grammarians push, which is that there are times when the use of passive voice clarifies things.
The question, "Are you responsible if papers are left on your desk?" illustrates this very well. The questioner assumes it doesn't matter who left the papers on the desk, and there is no way to better word the sentence.
So in this discussion I have intentionally split infinitives (to emphasize that the goal is to do better at wording sentences), and illustrated why the passive voice is great, and in so doing have probably permanently disqualified myself from a job where grammar nazis rule.
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.
Best URL truncation from a serious topic, EVER.
"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
He wasn't all talk: way back in the day, he worked on emacs & authored fetchmail (fair warning: reading the fetchmail source will make your ears bleed.)
More on his wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
Reading sendmail configs out-loud are believed to summon the evil one and bring about his reign of terror.
So fetchmail is the equivalent of an evil prayer wheel
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157324 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3826846
The link in [2] is dead, it previously linked to http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4270
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.
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']
blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html
> 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.
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.
In some hires I've used a descriptive writing assignment, where I ask the candidate to describe in words what they are looking at. You can learn much from these things, including: analysis skills, close looking, how they think, and, well, how well they would document their software.
You are taking it to the extreme where there are only 2 states: grammar purists and monkeys banging at keyboard. Someone who mixes up "its" and "it's" is capable of all the important stuff you listed. I mix "its" and "it's" a lot while typing. I know the difference, my fingers don't.
> analysis skills, close looking, how they think, and, well, how well they would document their software.
And none of it is a result of good grammar. Are you implying that somehow good grammar leads to good analytic skills? Or are you saying talking with them gives you a window to their mind? If the latter, the window is wide open irrespective of how often I mix "it's" and "its". And how I prefer my period outside of quotes or parens(Why? Because I like it that way. That's why).
As for periods outside of parentheses or not, that's syntax, not grammar. Your position here is weak. Good grammar is an indication that the person wielding the language at least takes care over what they're doing. A valuable trait for anyone, no matter what.
For the nth time, I am not talking about "monkeys banging on keyboard" grammar.
> As for periods outside of parentheses or not, that's syntax, not grammar
Syntax is not grammar?
It isn't that hard to fact-check before confidently correcting someone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax
> Good grammar is an indication that the person wielding the language at least takes care over what they're doing.
Good grammar is an indication of good grammar, and that's that. If you believe it's otherwise, well, your believes aren't fact. Please provide citations.
Does the company in the original post not recognise the function of an editor?
You do not deserve respect. Ever. You must always earn it.
What does respect mean to you, out of curiosity?
A better question, though I will answer yours shortly, is what does equality mean? It's simply the relative value we assign something. The thing is, we can think in terms of valuable and not valuable or we can skip the duality altogether and see everything on an equal level. A spade is thoroughly unvaluable if you have no hole to dig yet indispensable when you do. So what is it's absolute value? Is it equal to a saw? Is one person equal to another? It all depends on your perspective.
The problem with seeing inequality between people in terms of respect is that you will treat some of your fellow man badly, since you don't respect them. If their value is merely a matter of perspective, which is ever changing, would it not make more sense to see past our biases and show everyone respect, whether they are equal to what we currently identify as respect worthy or not?
To me, respect means to consider someone in high regard. In my experience, how I look at people ends up affecting how they act. People always tend towards living up to the expectations placed on them. By showing someone that I don't respect them, I am pushing them down rather than helping them up.
Putting it another way, when someone is on the defensive, because someone else looks down on them and does not show them respect, they close up and are not receptive to new information. By showing them respect even if they are bad at something, they are likely to listen to what you have to say and change how they act as a result of your words. Disrespecting someone with - "you type like an idiot" or ignoring them, will make them respond appropriately. Validating their actions - "cool, a more condensed form of English!" then suggesting something else - "I've had lots of success finding a job by writing like this", they might actually change.
If we want society (and spelling) to improve, we have to embrace those we call idiots and teach them, not push them away.
If someone is an awesome programmer but can't write English to save his life, why not educate him? You'll certainly have a more loyal employee if he feels that he's gained important skills from you.
tl;dr - Disrespect is damaging, respect is nurturing. Respect everyone and the sun will shine brighter.
Hm. If you don't have my respect, I may well feel justified in stealing from you. Is that really the kind of 'lack of respect' you think should be the default state?
> You do not deserve respect. Ever. You must always earn it.
There are multiple types of respect. "One human being to another" is the basic type. Everyone deserves that. Another is earned. And the last one is context dependent.
If I am coming in for a programming job, there are expectations and norms. I come in and you ask me to unclog the toilet since you read in some blog about some CEO doing it or it represents loyalty or commitment or whatever the fuck, I am free to walk out and I will walk out. But that doesn't excuse the fact that you didn't warrant me the respect I deserved.
If you're writing more code than natural language (documentation, discussion of specs, interaction with the team, etc) something is extremely wrong.
And because people tolerate it and allow for this to happen, we live in such ugly world, where people don't give a damn about quality.
Similarly, nobody has fine tapestries on the walls of their server rooms. Nobody cares about the insulation properties, apparently, but worst of all, nobody cares about the attention to detail and quality a fine tapestry represents. Thus we live in a terrible world with no appreciation of the finer things, because if you don't mind the lack of tapestries, how can you possibly care about a lack of code quality?
As long as we are just throwing claims around, I posit unless the code you write isn't 99% of what you write, something is extremely fucked up, and the orcs will take over the world.
I don't see how your claim is more valid or invalid than mine. None of the claims are backed by data, and personal perceptions are, well, personal. No one other than person experiencing it gives a damn.
Edit to explain why I'm so dismissive:
I think that it's a fairly accepted axiom that specified and documented projects are easier to maintain than the alternative. Likewise with code size versus feature set. I think it's self-evident that teams that communicate in natural language (even if only via a ticket system) are more functional (or at least more tolerable to be a member of) than teams that do not.
Deriving my claim from these seems reasonable enough, to me, given the context of the discussion (a comment thread of a relevant topic on some website a minority of people care about).
Not everything is science and while it might be nice to have 5-sigma data to reinforce my opinon, it fortunately doesn't need to be so reinforced in order to be valid, or even valid to be worth sharing.
What does this even mean? I don't see any real examples, and all you are doing is throwing more claims around. I missed the memo where you, and whoever this "everyone" else is were appointed authority on the value of anything for everyone else.
> Edit to explain why I'm so dismissive: I think that it's a fairly accepted axiom that specified and documented projects are easier to maintain than the alternative.
So a project with beautiful documentation and totally retarded code is easier to maintain? Documentation, more often than not, is for the end user. As far as code maintenance goes, the most important factor is proper abstractions and encapsulations. If you wrote a 5000 line, well commented method, it doesn't help me at all.
And a very specific set of projects lead itself to and require beforehand specs. Majority of the real world runs on "code is spec". Where is the spec for linux? Here is a little unknown someone's views on specs http://kerneltrap.org/node/5725 Where are the specs for rails, sinatra, django, flask? And how would it help if suddenly a rails specs came into being? You are confusing your little well with the world. Most projects design interfaces, not specs(activerecord, rails 4 queuing api etc)
Even your axiom holds(it doesn't, at all), how does that imply if you're writing more code than natural language (documentation, discussion of specs, interaction with the team, etc) something is extremely wrong.?
> Deriving my claim from these seems reasonable enough, to me, given the context of the discussion
> Not everything is science and while it might be nice to have 5-sigma data to reinforce my opinon, it fortunately doesn't need to be so reinforced in order to be valid, or even valid to be worth sharing.
I didn't ask for 5-sigma data. I asked for data which isn't personal anecdotes and viewpoints presented as truth.
If you're in a startup, you wear many hats. You do what it takes to succeed. If you have no clue how to do sales, find a way.
I'm really not trying to be argumentative here, but this seems really silly. Replace "make a bed" with something like "kick a 40 yard field goal" or "craft a wooden chair" or more simply "tie a Windsor knot". All your testing is whether they care about that particular task that is in no way related to skills you actually need.
I agree that if you're hiring a programmer strictly to program and do nothing else, that's fine. But if you're looking for someone who thinks outside of the box, is capable of coming with ideas and solutions when the solutions are yet to be known, having tests like these is probably a way to figure out how a person thinks. Whether it's a good way or not, I'm not so sure as I've never had to administer one of these tests.
In fact I'd say good writing usually eschews many "rules" of proper grammar.
Similarly if you are Knuth you can talk about literate programming replacing C but nobody is going to hire you to do embedded development
(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.
The following sentences are an example of what I was saying:
"I sent the N.D.A. to N.Y. It arrived three days later."
The single space after the "A" in "N.D.A." indicates that the sentence has not ended even though there is a period.
The harder case is an [A-Z]. [A-Z] which is not a sentence ending. Consider the following:
"When we compare the use of mistakes in speech in the Saga of St. Olaf with some of the other Old Norse literature, we can see that there is, in fact, a pattern of use of errors in speech being a sort of death omen."
The single space there identifies that there is no end of sentence between St. and Olaf. Of course when you are working in LaTeX you have to tell LaTeX that this is a word break and not a sentence break or else it will kern it as an end-of-sentence.
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...
This is misleading. Yes, LaTeX ignores how many spaces you put after the period in the source; but it does lay out extra space after sentence-ending characters. To avoid the extra space (e.g. if you have a mid-sentence abbreviation) you have to backslash it!
Love the typo in your last line. Love it even more if it was unintentionl.
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.
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.
I'm not looking for a job. But if I was, this article would make me more, not less, likely to apply.
If you can't be bothered to learn grammatical syntax, and it's something you've done your whole life, why should I expect that you'll be bothered to pursue perfection in other areas? If you are bothered to pursue it, why should I believe you have a chance at approaching it if you haven't nailed something you've done since you were five years old?
Anyway, I've not taken the time till now to really develop my understanding of this flash judgement I make of people, but it has always really bugged me. I have a friend who some people view as 'redneck' because he's got a bit of southern good-ol-boy in his heritage, but he's been reading books since he was young and it shows. We took a chance on him, brought him in-house, and trained him. One of the reasons I knew he'd become a great developer was because of the attention to detail he gave to everything that he did. It played out extremely well, for us and for him, and that one signal was a huge part of it.
Obviously anecdotal; typical caveats apply. Still, I'd rather live in the world iFixIt's pursuing than the world we presently live in, re: grammar.
EDIT: hilariously, for grammar. I missed a question mark.
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.
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.
For what it's worth, I use other aspects to proxy fit and ability as well. If you can't bother to clean up before an interview, I have a pretty reasonable idea of how you conduct yourself.
Re: the non-native speaker part. I've had to help a lot of people out over the years on various support channels because someone wrote "then" instead of "than" or "loose" instead of "lose." Since many people seem to be able to read & write in foreign languages but not necessarily speak them, homophones are easily confused. Personally I know enough French & German to follow along with most technical materials, but easily get derailed by misspellings. Is it an idiom I'm unaware of? Is it a word I don't know? Is it some sort of slang?
No, it does not. The very notion that someone who always uses "its" and "it's" understands const-correctness is ridiculous.
Command over native language doesn't signify programming prowess. You are imagining things or extrapolating your personal anecdotes to absolutes. Please provide citations if it's a proven fact.
> For what it's worth, I use other aspects to proxy fit and ability as well. If you can't bother to clean up before an interview, I have a pretty reasonable idea of how you conduct yourself.
What on earth does cleaning up mean? I shower in the morning. I am not going to take a special shower for you. Whether or not I shave depends on my mood. I don't see how on earth an interview with you should affect my facial hairs. I am not coming in looking like a hobo, and anything beyond that isn't your call at all.
Why the hell people count on metric which doesn't indicate a person's qualities relevant to the job? Whatever the fuck happened to phone screening, checking up open source projects, on-site problem solving, having a conversation, checking up references. Where and why the fuck wearing a suit or taking a grammar test came into picture?
Some of my coworkers are from India and China. I could make up similar things about how chewing with your mouth open and not wearing deodorant indicates a lack of awareness of manners and means they are unaware of memory leaks and race conditions in their code.
It's on me to come to terms with people chewing with their mouth open, not fire them because of subconscious cultural supremacy issues.
No, I don't have exhaustive studies on this. That neither proves nor disproves anything. I never stated any of this beyond my own opinion, which has been formed and reinforced by 15 years of working in open source, running & working at startups, and working at big companies.
That aside, code is typically only part of your job. Documentation, blog posts, interacting with customers, partners, team members, etc. are all part of engineering. You don't have to like it or think it's just, but people do and will form opinions about you on this stuff. Many times it won't be other engineers, which you may be fine with, but engineering alone often doesn't make a successful business. You can disagree with it or be flippant about it, but it really doesn't change reality.
Really. So all past experience on a person's resume doesn't count toward that? Every other aspect of your interview with that person cannot possibly lend anything to increase your belief that they proofread their code? That is quite irrational.
It's also irrational to assume that because someone doesn't keep track of grammar rules, that they are unable to do so. That's a pretty big mistake of an assumption.
People are hanged, portraits are hung.
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.
And clever use of "its" there :-)
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.
On the other hand, I would like to know since Finnish as a language fascinates me:
How common are noun-case errors among people who have a high school education? I mean something like using the elative case when the ablative might be more appropriate?
Nonexistent. I don't think even preschool children ever mix those. I don't have kids, so I can't say how it is with the kids who are just learning to speak.
Also in English, you don't see people mixing "into" and "onto" even remotely as often as the mistakes the linked article talked about.
How much can one infer from the fact that a native speaker mixes up "they're" and "their"?
As a child I didn't have access to TV, so I read everything in sight and I read constantly. The end result is I have a particularly sensitive eye for spelling and grammar mistakes. I find the misuse of, e.g., "loose" instead of "lose," to be tremendously irritating. The people I know who read a lot simply don't make trivial mistakes like that unless they're in a hurry and mistype.
Is it sloppy? I would say it's sloppy if writing is a large part of your job. Otherwise, it's mainly an indicator of someone who doesn't read print very much.
It is also getting worse at an increasing rate. I remember when mispelled words and bad grammar in reputable magazines and journals was rare, now it's almost expected that anything I read will have a few.
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".
I don't see the problem and I admire the attitude. Use of the written word is important and, aside from the exceptions mentioned in the article, I think significantly less of people who don't write or speak well. It's important to me to work with good communicators and you can't be a good communicator if you can't speak and write well.
Since you brought it up...
I am a software developer for a medical device manufacturer. Poor spelling and grammar can change the meaning of a requirement, leading to a software error. Down the road someone can certainly die.
More likely, however, is that grammar and spelling errors in Requirements, Design, Procedure or other documents, or in code commit comments, or code comments themselves implies to an auditor for a Regulatory Body that our code itself is sloppy. That leads the auditor to dig deeper. Dig deep enough and you will find enough to hang someone.
For just this reason, we must pay attention to proper documentation, down to appropriate word choice. No, we don't test for usage of written English during interviewing, but it's strongly enforced during day-to-day work.
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.".
Apostrophe-s means a possessive most of the time, so logically belonging to it should be it's. programmers like logic, if the English language happens to have case this wrong that's their problem!
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!
As to people caring about what they write: The litmus test should be whether they can effectively communicate, not whether they have the same arbitrary bees in their bonnets that someone else has. I might not want to hire anyone who can't give me their opinion on whether or not Frege would have discovered Godel's Incompleteness Theorem decades before Godel, if Frege hadn't been so discouraged by Russel's Paradox as to give up his entire endeavor to derive math from logic. After all, someone who hasn't put in the effort to study even the basics of modern philosophy can't be trusted to really think deeply on any issue, can they?
This, no doubt, is true, but it would also be a morally indefensible hiring practice.
As for making tenuous and almost insulting relationships: I find your claim that there is any correlation between having issues with "its" vs "it's" and the like, and the care with which one puts into their code, to be a tenuous and insulting claim. You're insulting my code-writing ability, and you've provided no evidence for your claim. That's pretty tenuous. You've also confounded caring with performance. Although it may or may not be the case that caring is a general personality trait that spans across all one's skills, performance can be quite different between skills.
As to whether such grammatical distinctions are trivial, I assure you that they are. Having some linguistics background, I feel qualified to assert this. (MIT degree in cognitive science.) If we were to all agree today to just use "its" all the time, rather than using both "it's and "its", the world would be no worse off.
P.S. I do know how to use const in C++.
I'm sorry. When they come up with a cure for dyslexia, I'll be sure to get it. In the meantime, I suspect that most people are just dyslexic enough (dyslexia is a spectrum) that these little things cause them a great deal of trouble. It's not that they don't care; it's that if they did care, it would drive them crazy. Me, I do care about details. That's no doubt, in part, why I became a programmer.
As to throwing you off, since this mistake is so common, it would seem to be easy enough to train yourself to treat the two words as hominyms of each other. After all, you have no problem, I take it, with all the other homonyms in the language. (Yeah, I know, wheelchair ramps are annoying!) The fact that the words are pronounced identically proves conclusively that we don't need the words to be distinguished, other than by context.
As to having linguistics backgrounds, in my classes they beat prescriptivism out of me. How did yours survive?
Take those ignorant Brits, for example. They are always saying "different to" rather than "different from". That's much more annoying than using "it's" for "its", as it's not even pronounced the same way. And don't get my started on them misspelling "color" and "rumor".
You're right in that those not fluent in English make mistakes that seem odd, but I don't think I've ever come across a case where the error wasn't with a different tense or form of the verb. I.e., the sentence is structured a bit oddly, but it largely makes sense. The same cannot be said of "would of."
Oh come now. English, and I presume all natural languages, are replete with idiom for which it is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to ever master. (E.g., "different from" is the correct idiom, while "different than" is not. But non-native speakers often mess up idioms that I didn't even realize were idiomatic until I hear a foreign speaker get them wrong. Things like "Put that at the table" rather than "on the table", etc.) If you learn a language after puberty, you will almost certainly never learn a language with the fluency of a native speaker. Something in our brains restructures itself after that point.
And this is why your claim is so insidious. If someone grows up in a poor community which speaks a different dialect of English from "Standard Written English", and they don't become fluent in Standard Written English before the age of puberty, they are likely screwed for life. They are biologically determined to NEVER master it to the degree that you require. But since you have a background in Linguistics, you must already know this.
This whole topic makes me rather depressed. It seems to me that anyone who promotes the idea that anything like perfect grammar is required to be a programmer--or anything other than an editor of some sort--is lacking in both compassion and ability to think scientifically. If you are willing to discriminate in hiring based on hypotheses for which there is ZERO scientific evidence, then you fail on both counts.
In fact, if I were to hire programmers, I think that instead I might test them on their abilities to be empathic and to think scientifically and logically, since these are skills that actually do matter for software engineers. Prescriptive grammarians would fail on all three counts.
By the way, do you have any idea how hard it was to get into and graduate from MIT being dyslexic? And yet now the world wants to add all these crazy hiring criteria hoops that I'm supposed to jump through??? Coding on whiteboards? Having perfect grammar? Doing handsprings and cartwheels? Haven't I proven myself enough already by getting into and graduating from one of the best and most difficult universities in the world, and then continuing on in a career with many commendable accomplishments? E.g., writing the software that configures an X-ray space telescope, and implementing the specificity scoring algorithm for RNA Interference hairpins; knowing how to program in a dozen-plus programming languages; etc. The increasing tendency towards myopic monoculture and inflexible hiring practices infuriates me. I consider it a personal attack on my mental and financial well-being. And it is!
Regarding your claim that "would of" makes no sense, I'm not sure how to jibe this with your claim of having a linguistics background. The first thing that one learns in Linguistics, which is the scientific study of how people actually do speak, as opposed to the unscientific field of prescriptive grammar, which aims to tell people how they ought to speak, is that if a community of people speak or write a certain way, then it always makes sense, and there is always a good cognitive reason for it.
That's not to say that the good cognitive reason always maximizes functionality, but the same criticism can certainly be made about prescriptive grammar too. A lot of the rules in prescriptive grammar are completely arbitrary, and don't reflect the real language, as actually spoken.
A clear example of this is the deprecation of double negatives. This prohibition is a modern invention, invented by Bishop Robert Lowth in 1762. Before that everyone in English said, "I don't have none", just as they do in Romance languages. There was nothing wrong with the sentence, "I don't have none" before 1762, and there is nothing wrong with it today, except to the extent with which you wish to distinguis...
Perhaps standard grammar is not, as you argue, the best measure of semantic correctness. Then please, let us violate standard grammar wherever it improves accuracy.
Writing something different from what you mean because the two sound alike does not qualify.
I'm fond of Bertrand Russell myself. Does your argument stand on its own?
I don't know what Bertrand Russell would say, but I know what the great writer George Bernard Shaw would say. He lobbied very hard for a transition to a completely phonetic alphabet. I think he sometimes even wrote using it.
Perhaps a new standard of spelling could be created and, as you suggest, "it's" and "its" could be replaced by "its." But that's not what you're doing when you write "it's" instead of "its;" instead, you are writing a word that is different from the one you mean.
"Its" has a meaning now, today, that whoever parses you language will use. Perhaps you will convince everyone to overload that meaning with a new one, but in the meantime write what you mean.
Additionally, what I said is not hypothetical. It's a linguistic fact. Your comparison of phonetic spelling to replacing "cat" and "dog" with one word is a linguistic falsehood.
Perhaps someday falsehoods will be as accepted as facts, but in the meantime, speak the truth.
As for your dyslexia, I don't think it's relevant. Your case for phonetic spelling wasn't specific to dyslexics.
You also have an incorrect notion of right and wrong. Read up on some linguistics and get back to me. E.g., there is nothing more "right" about "Standard Written English" than there is about the dialects spoken in inner cities. Both are equally good, full rich languages. Though certainly mistakes can be made within a dialect, you must understand, in order to be a civilized human, that for many native English speakers, their native language is not Standard Written English, but rather a regional dialect. Consequently, when they are in a situation where they are expected to communicate in Standard Written English, they are being expected to communicate in a language that is not their native language, and yet many people will not afford them the allowances that we make for people whom no dialect of English is their native language.
As for my dyslexia, it certainly is relevant, as this entire thread, from when I started posting on it, which is a direct ancestor of this post, and yours, is about whether it is moral to deny people jobs just because they make such an unimportant mistake. It's a mistake that never actually matters, except to the pedantic, and it's a mistake that dyslexics are particularly prone to. Not because they don't understand the difference, but rather because they often can't see when such mistakes are made.
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?
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?"
> 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.
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.
I don't give a shit about someone's grammar if they're good at what they do.
In French we'd look at past-participles and different tenses but never was it discussed what the pluperfect or future perfect was in English. In Russian we looked at locative and genitive, accusative and nominative cases (and others I'm sure) but in English there was never once a mention that anything such as a grammatical case existed. In school there was never a lesson on the apostrophe - reading Truss's tome [Eats, Shoots & Leaves] recently made me wonder why on Earth I couldn't have been passed something like that as a kid (I was a quite avid reader for many years but alas of course it wasn't written until 2006).
We did look at literary terms like onomatopoeia, alliteration, spoonerism and related concepts - metaphor, rhyming and timbre - that allow for analysis of poetry and prose.
Our English language classes, and exam incidentally, were about English usage and not really the language itself - the construction of language using English as the subject.
Grammar was just not in vogue at the time I feel. I've always felt however that being taught English grammar would have helped foreign language learning immeasurably.
FWIW I got high marks in both English exams (though I felt I was robbed by my teacher confusing me with the boy I sat next to!).
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.
Can someone explain a rationale for this proclivity ?
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.
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'.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
Just because somebody makes a decree about grammar doesn't mean it'll be widely accepted, any more than an organism obtaining a genetic mutation means it'll become spread throughout the population in subsequent generations.
My point is just that there wasn't any overarching plan. People design their own use of it, but whether or not that becomes popular enough to be considered "the rule" is analogous to natural selection - messy, convoluted, frequently arbitrary, but good enough.
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.
Perhaps, but probably not. In my understanding most AAVE speakers (and other "low-class" dialects, for that matter) are bidialectical with Standard American English and can code-switch to it in more formal situations. And, those who aren't able to do so likely haven't been exposed to the education and training necessary to even be qualified for a job like this in the first place - they surely would've picked it up along the way.
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.
Sounds like every programming language syntax ever.
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.