He Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar.

HBR blog recently has this one from a Kyle Wiens, “CEO of iFixit, the largest online repair community, as well as founder of Dozuki, a software company dedicated to helping manufacturers publish amazing documentation.”

If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.

Even in this hyper-competitive market, I will pass on a great programmer who cannot write. Programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose. Great programmers are more than just code monkeys; according to Stanford programming legend Donald Knuth they are “essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms.”

Grammar is my litmus test. All applicants say they’re detail-oriented; I just make my employees prove it.

Mr. Wien, the boss, wants only those people with certain traits and skills. For that, he uses grammatical proficiency as the screen. This approach is based on several critical assumptions: grammatical proficiency is strongly correlated to those traits; the strengths of both are linearly proportional, that if one is very strong grammatically, he or she is similarly strong in those traits; he can have an effective test to screen people’s grammatical proficiency; lastly, the reverse is true, that if someone is not good at grammar, the person also must lack those traits he desires.

Except for the tests, these are not rational. And the test is true only for English. If we chart one of those traits: detail attentiveness, diligence at work, software programming skills, etc., against grammatical proficiency. What correlation coefficient would we expect?

Many of the best software engineers, that I know of, are grammatically terrible. Mr. Wiens will never get to know any of them. Come to think of it, Mr. Wiens won’t hire myself either. Oh, well.

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