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Comment by fvdessen | Hacker News Reader

I am bewildered by the low literacy ability of a significant amount of the people I hired. People with advanced degrees; can't take notes, can't really read either. Not idiots, but illiterate. How did they end-up there ? Do we now need to test for literacy in interviews ?

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Do you mean they are incapable of taking notes or that they just won't bother to?

It is hard for me to imagine how someone would be incapable of taking notes. It is something you constantly had to do in school.

Probably not what the GP meant, but an interesting data point:

CGP Grey is a Youtuber who became well known for deeply-researched videos on subjects of nerdy interest.

Many years after going full-time doing this, he encountered Zettelkasten and realized that "taking notes" is supposed to including paraphrasing, write things in your own words, and making connections to other facts you've found. (Cortex podcast #105)

He thought notes were just the transcription version of using a highlighter in a book: exclusively verbatim quotes, just to save you from rereading the whole book. Synthesizing knowledge was a separate process. He'd carried this belief his whole life — educational Youtuber, high school physics teacher, two college degrees.

He attributes this in part to being raised on standardized testing, where memorizing the teacher's sound bites was how you succeeded.

Taking notes feels so basic that we just assume everyone knows how, and that we ourselves are doing it effectively. I mean, it's just taking notes, how hard is it? But really it's a growable skill where technique matters, and you can plateau very low if no one tells you you're doing it badly.

Zettelkasten changed everything for me, I didn't hear about it until my early 40's myself. I also had no idea you weren't just supposed to be summarizing verbatim.

It did take a huge amount of effort to go through the conversion process of my notes, but now it makes things much easier and works how my mind works to link concepts and ideas.

One sample here, but I hate taking notes and I am not good at it. I have very poor handwriting. I do scribble stuff but it's mostly useful for local, short time sketching of problems and when the issue is so complex I can't keep it all in my head.

Anyway, I am also quite literate(I think) so I am confused by the bundling of note-taking with literacy.

When I asked local tech CEOs in my town what skills they wanted entry-level programmers to have, they said they wanted them to be able to read and write.

Hired for what roles?

Business / Analysts / POs. Programmers as well, although it matters less.

If you can write code then you are literate for sure.

No, you can have very low skills in English and still be able to code, like many coders in Asia. Hence, it definitely can be the same for native English speakers.

I assume those coders are literate in their native language, why do you say that is evidence you can code without being literate if you learned to code in English?

I assumed you thought you had to be literate to write code because it’s in English.

I think I disagree twice then. You do not need to be literate (as per the definition of the post), neither in English nor in another language to be able to code, I have seen with my own eyes people who struggle to write a simple email being able to produce code. (Please keep in mind the definition of literacy as per the post)

"Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English."

Source: https://github.com/eunuchs/unix-archive/blob/master/PDP-11/T...

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