Comments on: What Matters Most (Job Hunt Advice)

By: Maarten

Maarten — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 07:07:35 +0000

Jory, good to hear that from a dyslectic person. I’m not dyslectic myself, so you probably know better.
I tend to agree with the effort bit, so I guess that invalidated my point :-)

By: What Matters Most (Job Hunt Advice) | BrandonSavage.net « Resumes Cover Letters

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:40:32 +0000

[...] Read the original: What Matters Most (Job Hunt Advice) | Brando&#… [...]

By: Jory Geerts

Jory Geerts — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:05:26 +0000

Maarten, I’m a dyslectic person myself. Does that mean I get to be lazy and just send things in without even trying to make sure I’ve spelled everything correctly? Especially with spelling check software build into just about application you can type in, spelling errors aren’t something you can afford in important writings.
To compare that to PHP programming: You don’t just write some code and then deploy it into production without even making sure it parses, do you? No, you first try if the code is valid PHP and does what you want it to do on a testing server or your workstation. (Well, you should.:) )

I do agree that “there”/”their”/”they’re” can be confusing, though I found it to be much like the $array['KEY'] vs $array[KEY] thing Shahar Evron mentioned: it’s something you do wrong mostly because you don’t know any better. Once you know which to use where it becomes something you to automatically after a while. (At least that’s how it was for me.)

I also agree very much with Sean Coates. When I read something that is filled with spelling and grammar errors, it becomes very difficult to take what was written serious for me.

/me lets Word spell and grammar check this to prevent him from looking like an idiot.
(Dumb Word, it doesn’t even know what “/me” means.)

By: Brock

Brock — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:54:40 +0000

Sean – two VERY good points.

I also wanted to mention commenting. I don’t have any evidence to back this up, but I feel comfortable in my assumption that someone who writes a cover letter like that isn’t going to bother writing meaningful or helpful comments in their code.

By: Maarten

Maarten — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:46:52 +0000

My experience is that dyslectic people are often quite technical, which to me makes them good programmers.
The only valid point I see above is the one about spelling mistakes in names, we have such a problem in one database field, and it often bites me.

By: Sean Coates

Sean Coates — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 14:52:45 +0000

Two additional points:
- Spelling and grammar are a sign of intelligence. I have a hard time respecting the intellect of otherwise intelligent people if they can’t spel or right.
- Spelling is very important when you work in a team. Here’s an example that I saw last week: http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/source/browse/trunk/php/library/HTML5/TreeConstructer.php Not only does a team member need to remember the file/class name, but s/he also needs to remember that it’s spelled incorrectly.

This probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, but from experience, I know it /is/ a problem—especially when you have a recurring charges mechanism that, in various parts of the code and schema, is spelled in all of these ways: recuring, recurring, reccuring, reccurring, reocuring, reocurring, reoccuring, and reoccurring. (I’m not making this up.)

By: Shahar Evron

Shahar Evron — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 12:44:29 +0000

Interesting post – especially as I was just going over someone’s CV :)

I somewhat disagree with your point that “Syntax is as important in English as it is in PHP”. The big difference is that humans are pretty flexible with what they can understand. We can all easily understand the sentence you put as an example, but making similar mistakes in a programming language would either not compile, or worse – will compile but not work. Programming languages are way more restrictive than human languages, for the simple reason that the human ability to interpret language is far more flexible than computer language interpreters. This is of course for a good reason.

English is a second language for me (maybe even third, after BASIC (; ) and I can tell you that personally, I have to think 3 times when using “its” vs. “it’s” or “your” vs. “you’re”. I’ve probably used the word “asses” several times in official documents to presented to customers when I meant to use “assess”.

The syntax rules of PHP are much simpler – and PHP is very permissive in that sense – e.g. there are some developers who don’t know the difference between (1 == true) and (1 === true) or between $array[KEY] and $array['KEY']. But once you learn the differences, they come to you naturally, unlike the rules of a written language (esp. if it’s your 2nd or 3rd language).

That said, I do think that someone who doesn’t proof-read (and ask someone else to proof-read) his *cover letter* is just not trying hard enough.

By: gasper_k

gasper_k — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 09:31:24 +0000

Interesting point and to some extent fairly valid. The difference I see is that a natural language syntax is far more complex than any programming language syntax. Not only that, but NL syntax isn’t even always logical, and has many exceptions, while PL syntax follows a (small) set of strictly enforced rules. So, not knowing NLS doesn’t necessarily say much about your knowledge of PLS.

I would agree, though, that people should learn to write better. I get a nervous tic every time I see a statement like “They brought there kids …”

regards