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HBR blog recently has this one<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n Grammar is my litmus test. All applicants say they’re detail-oriented; I just make my employees prove it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading \n