I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar
blogs.hbr.org
blogs.hbr.org
People Who Use Poor Grammar should be: People Who Use Grammar Poorly.
I have a "zero tolerance approach" should be: I have a zero-tolerance approach.
people who mix up their itses should be: people who mix up its and it's.
passed over for a job — even if should be: passed over for a job—even if.
I don't point this out to be pedantic or to level at the author a tu quoque, but to point out that the idea of an "English grammar" that you can apply universally to writing is a myth. At best you can create a style guide, or follow an existing one. Expecting employees to be able to follow a known style guide is a reasonable request. Expecting them to score perfectly on a grammar test against a style guide they've never seen, without (presumably) computer assistance, when scored by someone who believes that they're capable of scoring a grammar test without recourse to existing style guides, is foolish, in exactly the same way that expecting a programmer to remember whether String.find take (needle, haystack) or (haystack, needle) as its arguments is a terrible interview technique.
FWIW, I don't believe the author was talking about style guides at all anyway. Rather, he seems to be discussing general and very basic principles of English.
Someone else on this thread made an analogy to push-ups. If, as a business owner, you feel that it's essential for your business that any employee can perform 20 push-ups at any time, is it better to test them before they begin employment, or to put them on a brief training course when they join and have regular check-ups on their ability?
The interesting point that I'm trying to make isn't that that author is wrong or right, because I don't really care much about slips in orthography. It's that once you take a prescriptivist stance you're either making an appeal to popularity or you're entering an arse-kicking contest with a seven-legged monster with no arse.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_compound#Hyphenated_com...
That's an extreme and unjustified dichotomy. The article is written in an informal linguistic register, not in the voice of a 19th century naturalist writing for the Royal Society. (Is my use of the passive voice in the previous sentence also "incorrect" because style guides frown upon it?)
Still, the article's language is clear, precise, and suggests that the author takes pains to accurately communicate his thoughts. We haven't seen the author's grammar test. I would suspect that it tests the kind of linguistic economy I'm talking about, not whether the test-taker has memorized obscure passages from Strunk and White. As such, the test is probably effective at eliminating candidates who don't give a damn about correctness.
I have a "zero tolerance approach" should be: I have a "zero tolerance" approach.
your third edit, which I also don't agree with, isn't quite right, it should be: people who mix up "its" and "it's".
fourth edit: I've always hated this jamming of words together with an em-dash: it appears that "job" and "even" have something to do with each other, but they don't.
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."
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.
Just a few months ago I helped a government department find an architect. The brief boiled down to someone who can code, but can also liaise with department directors and its vendors, up to CxO level. Clearly grammar and communication ability in general was quite a key requirement.
The recruitment process involved submitting a resume and answering standard questions in an application form. There was a deadline beyond which applications wouldn't be considered.
Of all the resumes I reviewed one stood out. For two reasons.
First, his technical ability, if the resume was to be believed, was impressive. More than a government department could hope for.
The second reason was that his answers in the application form tanked. The very first paragraph answer simply stopped in mid-sentence. There were a number of spelling mistakes in the remaining answers.
I really liked the resume, so I invited him in for an interview anyway. Turns out he is in fact as good as his resume suggested.
The reason for the sloppy application form was that he only spotted the job advertisement at 4pm the day of the application deadline, and had to hustle to get his application in before 5pm. He'd heard about the project and was desperate to be a part of it.
He's been one of the best hires I've made. Being fanatically dogmatic about anything in life closes doors you'd never have imagined were even there. I hope I never become that myopic.
We've hired dyslexic people who have worked out brilliantly. Candidates that don't speak English natively are another exception. We try hard to hire people that can speak multiple languages. (I have found that learning a second language usually makes people better at English grammar.)
We don't expect a perfect score on our grammar test, and that test is one of many deciding factors in our hiring process. Just as we test programming candidates for programming competence, we also test them for writing skills. If you can't FizzBuzz, we're not hiring you. If you can't complete a sentence, we're not hiring you. Beyond that, we use a lot of discretion.
> Everyone says they're detail-oriented in an
> application; I just make my employees prove it.
When I'm hiring I want to see that the candidate has
* ... thought about what I will want and/or need,
* ... makes direct claims that they can provide it/them,
and then
* ... provides evidence to support their claim(s).
All the talk about FizzBuzz, trial runs, grammar Nazis, choice of typography, and every other hiring cargo cult comes down to:
Show me you understand the job you're applying
for, then provide evidence that you can do it.
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
"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."
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.
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?
http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...
sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.
http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.
The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.
Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...
interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the first place.)
The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6...
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6...
Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes.
http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...
Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann:
"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure."
http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...
But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)."
Integrity tests have limited validity standing alone, but appear to have significant incremental validity when added to a general mental ability test or work-sample test.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_integrity_testing
http://apps.opm.gov/ADT/Content.aspx?page=3-06&JScript=1
http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9042/9042.PDF
http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports...
Bottom line: if someone is hiring for a company that produces technical documentation, a company like iFixit.com, and one feature of the product is grammatically correct writing, it's a reasonable subpart of a work-sample test to include testing for revising English prose. If someone is hiring for managing a jewelry store (a local example I know) or for building wood-frame houses, it's quite possible that a work-sample test would completely disregard the issue of correct spelling and grammar. I know a very successful owner of a jewelry store (I know him as a fellow soccer dad who once coached one of my children) who has quite dodgy spelling and grammar and punctuation, but who can communicate in written English for emailing people. I'm aware of multiple local carpenters and other people in construction businesses, including managing construction businesses, who have varying degrees of punctilious correctness in English writing, but all of them making their reputations and their livings by how they construct buildings, not by how they construct sentences. If writing is part of the work (even just for exchanging ideas with colleagues in memos or emails), sure, test it. If writing is not particularly part of the work, don't worry about it.
Just a thought.
I've done consulting for busy people who don't want to spend time reading a long email. They want to know the bottom line, however I also find it good practice to provide backup information in case they or someone they forward the email to want to know how I came to the conclusions.
I start the email with a summary and a list of actions they can take or questions that I have. Typically no longer than a few sentences. Below that is a demarcation point to all the backup, links and further details (should they want to forward or in all honesty to CYA as well for the conclusions).
Edit: [1] Because if people don't read they won't be convinced and they won't learn anything. One of the reasons I typically avoid books by academics: to much difficult verbosity.
"This meta-analysis found that the validity of GMA for predicting job performance was .58 for professional managerial jobs, .56 for high level complex technical jobs, .51 for medium complexity jobs, .40 for semi-skilled jobs, and .23 for completely unskilled jobs."
Apparently having a high IQ is a better predictor of being a good business guy than a good hacker.
Telling the interviewer to go XXXX himself and starting your own company correlates with good tech guys
Meta-analysis suggests that men under the age of 26 have a 60% chance of being sex offenders. This same type of meta-analysis is also the reason that all sex crime offenders (including drunk people pissing in a park and amorous couples getting it on in a dark parkin glot) are lumped together for sex offender registration purposes, because the meta-analysis suggests that the recidivism rate for "sex offenders" (regardless of actual offense) is greater than 90% (without regard to the actual recidivist offense).
TLDR: Meta-analysis can be used to support any claim.
I'd be curious to see if anyone has actually done a study on this, but to me this number actually seems quite low. I would guess that it would easily be 90+%.
By a very tiny margin. I'd have to dig to accurately say whether it's statistically significant, but I assume it's not.
(Assuming you refer to the high/medium level complex technical jobs with .56 and .51 versus the manager's .58)
But as with many silly personnel evaluation techniques that are in common use, general managers will never get punished for doing what everyone else is doing.
[1]: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08959280902970401
I suspect the author is (perhaps unknowingly) using his grammar test as a proxy for general IQ. General IQ correlates _very_ well with performance across a broad spectrum of tasks. (The notion that there are different IQs for different areas of life, though sentimentally appealing, doesn't correspond to reality.) It's no surprise, then, that someone with a high IQ (as measured by this proxy) would do well in a position that requires solving other complex problems, even if these problems have nothing to do with writing per se.
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.
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.
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.
But on a site of mine, I've gotten so many e-mails complaining that I say "the data is" instead of "the data are", or arguing that either "what year were you born in" or "in what year were you born" or "what year were you born" are variously wrong, and only one is right (but they all seem to disagree on which one).
Beyond a certain point necessary for clear communication, one person's proper grammar is another's irritating pedantry.
Applicants who don't think writing is important are
likely to think lots of other (important) things also
aren't important,
Applicants who don't think wearing a tie and polished
brogues to an interview are important are likely to think
lots of other (important) things also aren't important> In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence.
If a person can't present himself well in an interview, what guarantees do we have he would do it well in a client/investor meeting?
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.
> 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.
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/
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 distinguish yourself as part of the upper class. This cynical reason is the very reason that most of Lowth's silly invented rules were adopted by the upper class. There was nothing better about the way Lowth wanted people to speak compared to the way they had spoke before, other than as tool of class distinction.
Another example is the word "ain't". The sentence, "Ain't I a genius?" is actually grammatically correct. Contrast this with how most people now will say, "Aren't I a genius?" which is just plain wrong. Why do people make this mistake? Because prescriptive grammarians beat "ain't" out of them, which caused people to start using something wrong. Sure, now the "correct" thing to say is "Am I not a genius?" But what kind of pretentious idiot would say that?
As to what sense there is to be made of "would of" and "it's" vs "its": This clearly expresses a natural human tendency to desire a more phonetic written language. Spelling in English is just plain dumb. Don't take my word for it--just ask the great author George Bernard Shaw.
I have friends from Italy, and they tell me that there are no such things as spelling bees in Italy. I.e., if you know how to pronounce a word, you know how to spell it. What an enlightened language! Perhaps without having to devote so much of their brains to keeping track of the spellings of tens of thousands of words, they can use it for more productive endeavors. I guess I have no scientific evidence for this, but I do hear that Italians are better lovers. That's gotta count for something!
tldr: A pox on the anti-scientific prescriptivists and obstacle-course-of-arbitrariness-makers of the world.
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'm Dyslexic and if I was applying for a job (obviously not to be a writer) and was told that there was a grammar test but I didn't need to take it, or it didn't count, because I am Dyslexic I would probably walk away. How do I know that they aren't going to hold my Dyslexia against me just as they would someone who has bad grammar? What's the difference between bad grammar and Dyslexia (obviously I know the difference ) the person you tested may have never been diagnosed with Dyslexia.
Dear Mr. von Neumann:
With the greatest sorrow I have learned of your
illness.
The news came to me as quite unexpected. Morgenstern
already last summer told me of a bout of weakness you
once had
> [...] Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.) [...]
Kurt Goedel wasn't a native English speaker; he was from Austria. I think that would count as an extenuating circumstance.
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"?
I have to balance between near-perfecting English as my second language, or learning and concentrating on stuff that is relevant to my domain. Although I am a perfectionist, I also am a realist and consider that there are, in the end, things more important to my life than writing perfect English. Perfect English will not help me building all the great projects I have in mind.
This isn't a test for suitability for the position. It's a matter of signalling.
This is a cheap test (surely can't take more than 5 minutes to complete a grammar test), but with the property that the only candidates who will -fail- it are candidates unsuitable for hiring. Since the author gives no statistics, we can only assume that enough people are weeded out to make it worthwhile.
It's much the same as a FizzBuzz test. I certainly don't feel offended if I'm given such a test at an interview, I just smile and do it.
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']
These days programmers don't want to be bothered about the language syntax they use and heavily depend of autocomplete and intellisense to do even simple tasks. While its this grammar that they should be actually learning and mastering. Yet this isn't even the criteria for hiring programmers these days.
And by the way where does this stop. I can argue physical fitness is important for programmer so can I ask you to sprint a 1000m track as a part of my interview process?
iFixit is a great company with a solid mission, and a reasonable grammar test considering the nature of the company. It was a local radio interview a few years ago featuring Mr. Wiens which reignited my ambition to move out of the manufacturing/shipping sector by learning to code. I am still learning to code, and still have a long way to go before I'm ready to earn a paycheck doing so. However, I applied for a position I was well qualified for in the ifixit shipping department in hopes of further immersing myself in the 'culture'. I traveled six hours by train for the interview. I was left scratching my head when only a few minutes of the lengthy interview centered on my relevant experience, or the requirements of the shipping position. A far larger segment of time was spent on grammar tests and logic puzzles (and no, they were not sku, or 'shipping' themed puzzles).
I think the key to success with novel interview tests is to make sure you are filtering for the correct result. You don't want to inadvertently filter out highly motivated individuals.
Overall, the interview was a good experience, and probably results in the hiring of great gearheads & coders.
Productive programmers ship lots code, create lots of value, and by business standards are model programmers. They're driven by quantity, volume, getting things out the door, and the solvency of the business.
Craftsmen programmers also "produce" and ship code, but they equally value maintainability, and therefore clarity in code. They're driven by the customer as much as the other consumer of their code, the maintainers.
From my experience, these very different types of programmers have very different priorities and values. Generally, the first set emphasizes clarity in communication only as it impedes progress along the critical path. They JIT there eloquence, whether it's essential business communication or unstable/volatile/certain-to-change code. JITing is hard and not guaranteed to produce the optimal (most clear) output. The second group feels obligated to be clear in communication at all time, because any corners cut now may create pain for a fellow down the road. To excel at this, the second group is self-motivated to learn deeply both the spirit and the mechanics of communication (empathy and grammar). They spend more time analyzing the available solutions for potential misinterpretations, and therefore generally produce a clearer output.
Thus, the applicability of the article depends on the culture and environment of the team.
I take issue with this.
Assuming you could, assuming they were available to work because they couldn't find any other job, would you hire a Rhodes Scholar?
If you are hiring for a blue collar type position like "stocking shelves" you want someone who is qualified enough and happy to be in that job and planning to stay at that job. Not thinking it's an interim job until they find something better. A person who is academic enough to have perfect english many times will be an under achiever who might have issues and that is why they are only "stocking shelves".
There is a reason why companies often say "you are over qualified for the job" as a reason someone isn't hired. The job has to fit the person roughly.
As an aside the OP didn't exactly define what is meant by "poor grammar" or place any links to the "mandatory grammar test" so readers can even decide for themselves.
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!).
I guess they won't be working at any of his companies.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having your own particular standards for hiring. If it works for you in solving your particular problem: great! One of the things I began to appreciate when I first starting interviewing in the Valley is how much companies did or didn't care about nuance in their interviews. If the interview was too easy, it generally signaled to me that they don't sweat the details and maybe don't hire people that are going to stretch me professionally.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_p...
I'm a bit OCD about grammar myself and am definitely partial to people who are excellent writers and speakers of English, but I think making an allowance for non-native English speakers could
a. help increase the diversity of people and ideas in your workplace b. make sure you don't miss out otherwise fantastic hires
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 ?
I used to make that judgment. I've since been humbled by many brilliant people who commit that and other common errors. I would be poorer, possibly impoverished, if I had dismissed those people from my circle.
As Peopleware pointed out many years ago, most people have something important to contribute, even if they don't contribute much in one specific area.
What if iFixit/Dozuki decides to expand into Germany or Japan and the OP fails on the basic level of grammar there? Will he be consider himself a sub par resource?
1) Grammar serves as a cultural touchstone in the company, so using a grammar test in hiring is a strong signal to employees and future employees about what we as a company stand for. If you apply to this job and you disregard grammar freely (guilty as charged) you will not fit into this organization. It's a fast filter on both ends: I won't take the test, and if I did you would reject me immediately. Excellent.
2) It is a binary, non-complex test. You write the test once and there is a unambiguous right and wrong answer, if you get the questions right you pass, if you don't you are rejected. This has several benefits:
Applicants: They know this is coming and can prepare/not prepare for it. The test is objective, so they can't really argue with its validity. At one point they probably knew this material, meaning that an hour of time to prepare for the finer points of colons/semi-colons is probably doable if they really want the job.
Employer: Since the answers are unambiguous this filter is easy to use: passed candidates go through. There is no subjectivity around assessing a candidate using a resume or cover letter. In my experience (CEO in hiring efficiency space) this easily-actionable filter means that the task at hand will actually get done. If you watch recruiters try to parse through 200+ resumes against a job req, they will stop after 10-15. They might come back to it on another day, or they might not. Either way the applicant pipeline stops dead on their desk. It's frustrating for the recruiter because the task becomes "analyze this free-text against a free-text requisition and then filter this list of 200 people down to 20."
The reality of this situation is that most resumes don't get read and the person who ends up getting the job is one of the first 20 that were read. Obviously this situation is non-ideal, so I generally advocate an objective, simple filter as the first step to any process (before looking at resume.) Internal recruiters, in their heart of hearts, want to find the best applicant in the bunch, if you don't give them the tools to do their job then they won't.
3) They've thought about their process and institutionalized it. When I see a company that has thought seriously about the filter stage of the process then I know: a) they care about their employees' time b) they care about quality applicant's and the culture they project in the hiring process c) they have probably thought about all stages of the hiring process so things are likely to move quickly and smoothly.
Less so than you might think. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001863.h...
However in the USA it's unusual to take the provenance of parental lingerie into account in the hiring process.
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'.
Poor grammar is the telltale sign of other impediments that hinder the practice of any activity that requires good attention to details.
Like "this guys skillset is great so were going to ignore that he was fired from his last job for laziness and that all his department left because of his sociopathic behaviour". Seriously?
Do any of you find yourselves talking like that, or no?
i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html
I wouldn't hire someone who does anything with poo but dump it too.
i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html
blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html
/12yearsold
Best URL truncation from a serious topic, EVER.
sad it is;
or . , ;; :
one of those
Stupid, incredibly shortsighted and very draconian, but fair.
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.
Here is an idea for hiring people and to end this strange fascination that comes with it: building on a core team of excellent people and a good, existing culture you then bring in people mainly through references. I saw this work especially well when bringing in students but it applies to former colleagues as well; they know who the good and the go-to people amongst their colleagues are/were and the good people know it more than anyone else. And they also know the person from working with them so chances are the applicant will be a great fit for the existing team. As an alternative you could let your people teach some classes or give trainings and they will very quickly know who the good students are. Then just hire the applicant and give them a realistic chance to prove themselves in a project. Chances are very good that within a few months or even weeks it will become very clear whether they are a good fit or not. Bad people WILL dis-qualify and alienate themselves, in any healthy organization you can trust on that and if you don't have any good people at all well then your whole hiring-voodoo is pointless anyway because the best new hire will drown in your swamp.
I have seen this work like a charm at my last employer - I was brought in by my Linux teacher who was working there and I went for a beer with the guys, I liked the atmosphere and the people and they could get to know me too and then I showed up to the interview with the CEO in a very relaxed environment and it was pretty clear they want me so we just discussed details and that was it. Efforts on their part were zero and on my part a mild hang-over after a great evening and no stupid self-presentation and applying shenanigans. I have seen people come and go at that place for a few years and without a fail the ones that left were a bad match or just bad employees. The good ones stuck around and I am best friends with all of them, even to this day more than three years after the place went belly-up and I moved to a different country. At that time each one of them found a new job very quickly and a lot of former customers continued to bring them business just because the people were so good and reliable. Each time we get together twice a year now that "old spirit" flares up again and we feel just like in the "good old days". This is also the best network you could ask for, it "grew naturally", if you will.
Hire through references and give people a realistic chance and be smart about managing your expenses, side-effects and repercussions from doing so. I can not see how this is not way more efficient and more reliable than the whole bloated fortune-telling HR mumbo-jumbo.