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While I agree that immaculate attention to detail is important in documents you're creating for formal consumption (e.g. CVs/resumes), I don't see how the same extends to emails, websites and READMEs.

I'm a native English speaker and despite being well aware of homonym misuse, my brain doesn't always play the game and occasionally I find myself using the wrong word in my writing with no rational explanation.

Similarly, I often find myself leaving out words in my writing that I don't notice are missing even after re-reading a paragraph many times. (I fall for "PARIS IN THE THE SPRING" almost every time it comes up.)

Alternatively I'll change the wording in a sentence and not notice stray words are left over in the wrong order, again even after re-reading. Usually I have to do something else and look back at what I've written to read it with "fresh eyes". I imagine dyslexic people have similar problems.

Despite these issues I've been complimented many times on the quality of my technical writing and my code, so I don't consider my natural language issues as much of a disability when it comes to programming or technical work. That is, until I encounter somebody who holds your beliefs.

It seems obvious to me that there's a vast difference between somebody writing a CV using obviously incorrect spelling or random formatting, or inconsistent capitalisation, punctuation, tenses, etc., and somebody who makes one or two typos in a blog post on their personal home page.

It is almost impossible to proof read a document you wrote yourself for typos, specifically repeated/replaced words, immediately (while you can still remember writing it.) I don't know if this is true in all languages, but it's definitely true in English.

This is because your brain subvocalises (reads back) what you meant to say, not what you actually wrote, when you re-read and can still remember the sentence in your head.

I know of at least one example of a Deputy Headmaster, who was also my maths teacher, accidentally typing in a swearword to a school report. My Dad (the IT manager, whose job it was to check all the reports before they were posted) got him to read it back aloud (a day or so after he wrote it) and he read out the sanitised/corrected version, aloud, from a piece of paper with the swearword staring him in the face. He was very embarrassed when my dad pointed it out.

In cases like that, you wish you could define a specialised dictionary without the swearwords, so that dangerous typos jump out at you!

to GP: tooling can only get you so far, and you're battling against your own brain the rest of the way. A 2AM README typo is forgivable; a CV/cover letter issue (where you were supposed to be concentrating, and/or getting someone to proof read for you) less so.

Typos are one thing, misuse of homonyms or lack of subject/verb agreement is another entirely. I wouldn't begrudge someone a "teh" in a readme THAT much (though, again: where the fuck is your spellcheck?), but a misuse of "your" for "you're" immediately makes me start to question if they have a clue what they're doing.

> somebody who makes one or two typos in a blog post on their personal home page.

You'll note that the best bloggers/essayists (e.g. pg) have other people proof things before they post them for public consumption.

I didn't say it doesn't have false negatives. I just said that it's a good proxy for attention to detail and diligence. Life isn't a warm-up round or a first draft.

MVPs aside, when you release something for public consumption, it should be as high-quality as you can possibly make it.

That's amusing, considering that you made two rather bad errors in the above comment ("If you can't be assed" and "language and written communication is unimportant"). Granted, a Hacker News comment is hardly the same thing as a CV, but I still detect a touch of hypocrisy here. What makes you so sure that your own GitHub READMEs are free of errors? People have a tendency to gloss over their own mistakes.

"can't be assed" is slang: http://www.urbandictionary.com/thesaurus.php?term=can't+be+a...

As for "language and written communication is unimportant", the full statement was: "It's not like language and written communication is unimportant...". That seems correct to me.

Technically, it should be "It's not as if language and written communication are unimportant."

If we were to nitpick style, we'd say that the double negative is unnecessary, and that "It's..." construction is flabby. So we'd reduce the sentence further to "Language and written communication are important." Debatably, even this statement is reducible to "Written communication is important." From there, we could even cut down to "Communication is important," assuming that "written" is redundant in context.

Not trying to be cute; just illustrating a point. You could argue that I'm reducing too far and slicing away some nuance. Nevertheless, a primary goal in writing is to make a point as succinctly as possible. This is doubly true in short-form writing, such as in resumes and cover letters.

I don't see the errors there. "If you can't be assed to do X" seems standard English to me, if informal. What would you say is wrong with that?

"Language and written communication is unimportant" seems arguably OK to me. Both are mass nouns / uncountable, so the "is" there seems quite defensible to me (v.s. "are", which I assume is your contention?).

(language and written communication) is

Singular as they are logically combined into a single field/endeavor, that is, communication (including language and writing).

Did you actually read the blog post? It's rife with blatant grammatical errors.

Awful use of conjuctions and a bizarre obsession with commas plus errors that a spellchecker will miss (eg. "roughly out 9 out of 10 applicants" under the method section.)

Apparently you wouldn't hire the author, and she wouldn't hire herself.

It's true. I would not hire myself as an engineer for TrialPay.

One of my old managers used throw them in the bin if they had spelling mistakes I asked him about it once and his response was "If they're too lazy to press F7 I don't want them working for me".

One of the best programmers I've ever meet misspelled a core technology on his resume, 3 times, in different ways. There's always exceptions and this kind of resume triage misses them.

*met

See! And I'm fantastc!

Yer FIRED, dude!

If you can't be assed [sic] to write accurately and consistently in your native language ...

"can't be assed" is an idiom with which it seems you're unfamiliar.

More like slang within a certain age / social group, rather than an "idiom."

Don't forget about too and to! You wouldn't want that one to slip on through.