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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

>Typos might seem like a small matter, but many engineering managers have learned that engineers who aren’t careful with their resumes, also aren’t careful with their code. Be smart about it and check very carefully.

Ugh. What even is this. Name me a compiler that is going to put up with a typo? Verilog, maybe. It'll just be like "Oh yeah this could be a wire". As long as you have no linting. But really, no.

This is the sort of advice you get from people who know so little your field of expertise that the best they can do is spell check it. That may well be the first line of Google's recruitment team, but that tells you more about Google's requirements than anything else- put at the top of your checklist - inovation? No. creativity? No. Spelling! Yes!

I mispelled innovation just there.... did it prevent you understanding me?

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The problem with giving advice on such matters is that human psychology doesn't work by strict rules of logic and reason, and repeatable experiments are often not possible. Even if you can "prove" (if there is such a thing) certain traits of a candidate are more valuable than others, you can't prevent others from judging you on trivial things - especially in a highly competitive scenario. To cover your bases, I think it is good advice to focus on spelling. You can fight the system, or just accept that all humans are flawed :)

If your job is HR in Google the correct response is to say "Hey, hiring managers! Here are the things we see you incorrectly identifying as corollaries to competence" not "Hey, prospective employees, here's how to trick our stupid hiring managers".

What I have learnt is that you can't convince someone they're wrong, if what they're doing is working for them and they're seeing results. Like I said, you can fight the system if you want, or just move on to more important things.

It's not that literal. A developer not passing their resume through a spellchecker to catch typos shows that they are careless. Yes, every decent compiler and all linters are going to catch typos. What happens when that developer has to design a new API and doesn't even double-check their work?

That is quite literally unimaginable at a company like Google.

It tells me that you didn't bother paying attention to the spellcheck in your writing tool, probably didn't take the time to carefully re-read a document for errors, and likely had no one else look at your resume for feedback.

None of those are things I'm looking for in an engineer on my team. I want an engineer who uses their tools to make their work more efficient, who pays attention to details, and believes feedback is a way to improve the quality of their work.

Source: am a FAANG-adjacent hiring manager.

How many 9's do you expect out of my proof reader. Because that's what is happening at Google. It isn't that people aren't proof reading their CVs, it's that mistakes slip through sometimes, and if you're at Google, receiving thousands of CVs per day that 'sometimes' is all the time. But that doesn't mean you should expect 5 9s out of your candidaes.

You're taking the comparison too literally because writing a resume and writing code both involve text. Having a typo on your resume (not a random internet comment) is a strong signal that you can't be bothered do the bare minimum, which isn't a great trait for any job.

Spell checkers are a solved problem for decades now, there's literally no excuse to leave typos in important documents.

The expectation is that you put some care into your resume and pay attention to the details. It's an important document, unlike a HackerNews comment.

If you can't even get the spelling right on a 2-page document, despite the existence of modern spell-checkers, that's a strong signal that you aren't making a serious effort.

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