I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html <comment><USER2> Just to illustrate what a morass "poor grammar" is, I have, wearing my ex- professional proofreader hat, gone through the article to highlight the areas where I could find fault with the article for incorrect usage.

 _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.

<comment><USER3> All the examples you cite are stylistic choices and have nothing to do with "grammar". (I also personally disagree with all your suggested edits, especially the first.) Using Hungarian notation in C may be poor style, but it conforms to the C grammar.

<comment><USER2> For clarity, when I talk about "grammar" here I'm talking about what Wikipedia calls "orthography", which is what I think the OP was talking about. You're right that #1 is a style correction and #3 is a typographic correction--on the other hand #2 is unambiguously orthogaphic[0], even if it's not as well known as it's/its, and if the writer feels justified in making up "itses" to mean "it's and its", presumably because people can infer what it means from context, that puts them in a very shaky position as a prescriptivist.

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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_compound#Hyphenated_compound_modifiers)

<comment><USER3> > 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.

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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it's a fair, but just to simplify the argument:

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.

<comment><USER5> Dude, I so want to go there, apply, and write at the bottom of the page:

"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?"

<comment><USER6> This is crystal-clear to me. What's the problem?

<comment><USER5> By Contemporary Standard American English standards comma placements are strewn throughout the sentence with very little regard for clarity (removing a few would make it clearer), and the logical relation between clauses leaves something to be desired.

<comment><USER7> Are you proposing that the constitution be re-written for grammar every couple of decades?

<comment><USER5> No, but it isn't even clear that the Constitution obeyed perfectly the standards of spelling and grammar of "it's" day.

<comment><USER8> Standards for comma usage weren't established until almost the end of the 19th century. Some people used breathing or personal stylistics to decide on comma use, but there certainly was no general expectation that it would follow grammatical construction or logic.

Compared to some other 18th century documents I've read, the US Constitution is downright spare with commas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it just me, or is, blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html a bad choice for url on this subject?

<comment><USER10> As a spare-time grammar nazi, I find it quite fitting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even if this ensures a cultural fit I'd not be so binary about grammar.

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.

<comment><USER12> I've hired last minute applicants, too, so I understand where you're coming from. We are very happy to make exceptions to the policy in situations like that.

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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the take-away point for me:

      > Everyone says they're detail-oriented in an
      > application; I just make my employees prove it.

CVs are great, certifications and qualifications are great, but if you claim you can do something, I want to see the evidence.

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.

Evidence that you've even _thought_ about these issues will get you through the door.

<comment><USER14> "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:

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

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

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>--

This tells me pretty much nothing.

<comment><USER15> Many job descriptions are actually a listing of the problems that happened with the last employee.

"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

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I agree. I think Eric S. Raymond nails it:

"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."

<http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html>

<comment><USER17> The 90s are unfortunately long gone but the one good thing about this is that we could finally just NOT give ESR and his populism any more attention...

<comment><USER18> Could you expand a bit on this? I've read his Cathedral and Bazaar book, and quite enjoyed it. I didn't realize there was a whole context that I should be aware of.

<comment><USER19> I would also like this explained. I know very little about who ESR is.

<comment><USER20> He was a "big deal" in the 90s, at least within hacker circles: wrote a lot of early free software / hacker culture reated stuff & was heavily involved in the rebranding of "free software" into a form that corporate suits could feel comfortable with ("open source") & selling that idea to a wider audience. See 'The Cathedral & the Bazaar' and other works.

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>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think that's perfectly reasonable. Although I'm not a native speaker I quickly get annoyed at people's inability to form proper sentences. But only in formal situations, such as the job application scenario in the original article.

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.

<comment><USER22> I don't know, sometimes I misspell maintenance on purpose out of spite for the English language.

<comment><USER23> Really? That's a rather phonetically spelt word, aside from the "s" sound at the end.

<comment><USER22> But why change the spelling? Maintainance looks much more logically correct.

<comment><USER19> Because that's pronounced "maintain-ance". Stress on the "ain".

<comment><USER24> That sounds like a regional dialect. I've never heard it pronounced that way in the northeast US at the very least.

<comment><USER19> I don't think anyone pronounces it that way, because what everyone is saying is the word that is spelt "maintenance".

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".

<comment><USER24> Bah. My bad. I confused the parties in the thread. I'm sorry for the noise.

<comment><USER19> 'Twas not a problem!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Once again here on Hacker News we are talking about hiring procedures for technical companies. Many people find this topic interesting, because most of us have applied for a job at least once, and many of us have been in a position to recommend someone else for a job, or to hire someone for a job. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274

[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

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...](http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx)

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...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24)

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- GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrlOV&sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false)

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv- GZkw6...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv- GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrnMW&sig=LKLi- deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false)

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://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf)

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWlMYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&f=false)

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...](http://geb.uni- giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf)

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://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...](http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports/abstract-14602.html)

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.

<comment><USER26> Great post. Thought this was interesting from the Schmidt & Hunter article:

"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.

<comment><USER27> Take any "meta-analysis" with a large grain of salt (or better yet, and industrial size vat of salt).

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.

<comment><USER28> Would you care to elaborate on what, specifically, is flawed about meta analysis? I'd definitely be interested in a source on that 60% number and how that source arrived at a number that seems, on it's face, so incorrect.

<comment><USER26> "I'd definitely be interested in a source on that 60% number and how that source arrived at a number that seems, on it's face, so incorrect."

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+%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now I want to know the following:

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 ;-)

<comment><USER29> > 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.

<comment><USER30> "Whom" is also almost impossibly archaic and no longer considered part of modern English (having almost completely fallen out of usage around the start of the 20th century). It survives almost entirely in discussions of when to use it and almost never appears in modern writing except as a demonstration of what linguists call a "prestige form".

"To whom did you give it?" vs. "Who did you give it to?" the latter is more modern and natural in modern English.

<comment><USER5> I would say "whom" today is reserved for formulaic usage.

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....

<comment><USER30> Sapir was exactly who I was thinking of.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=ofgrAAAAYAAJ&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=ofgrAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Language:+An+Introduction+to+the+Study+of+Speech&source=bl&ots=PooIswwyky&sig=Fm0p-qz7hfYrQd103LgFGWaRnsw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fHQJUJusGJK00QH14JXjAw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Language%3A%20An%20Introduction%20to%20the%20Study%20of%20Speech&f=false)

Chapter 7 I believe is the relevant chapter.

<comment><USER5> That's a wonderful book isn't it? Really expands your ideas of what grammar is and could be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I do the same: unstructured e-mails, poor grammar and, in general, bad writing style make me reject applicants instantaneously.

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?

<comment><USER5> In my view the ability to structure communications is important. I don't think that's the same as being a grammar nazi. For example if you have a zero tolerance policy for it's vs its, or for commas making things confusing, the framers of the US Constitution would fail the test. Not only is 'it's' is used as a possessive but try to parse 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.

<comment><USER16> I don't know, I don't think your example sentence is particularly hard to parse, and I'm not a native speaker. But I have to say, even as a non-native speaker, I just can't understand whats hard about "its" and "it's" and "their", "there" and "they're" and it makes me cringe every time to read such mistakes (as does confusing "loose" with "lose"). That said, I don't expect perfection but if I read a text that is littered with such mistakes and makes them consistently I won't read it because, for me, it's arduous to correct all those mistakes in my mind while reading.

<comment><USER32> I still cringe at all the "would of"s and incorrect "your"s and "their" on the Net. As an English speaker from outside the US, these aren't mistakes I commonly see in my country, and they grate. I'm like you - I find it arduous and irritating to read a passage littered with them, because each one pops up and distracts me.

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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Poor grammar (i wuld leik to apply 4 jorb) is an acceptable thing to use when rejecting a candidate.

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.

</comment><comment><USER34> As long as it's a reasonable test, you can argue its merits.

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.

<comment><USER12> The test covers a variety of topics, and you don't need to get anywhere close to a perfect score. And it really covers the basics: misspellings, usage of to vs two, etc. This is about basic communication, not pedantry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35>
      Applicants who don't think writing is important are
      likely to think lots of other (important) things also
      aren't important,

"Citation needed." Or to put it another way, what is the difference between this statement and:

      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

<comment><USER36> The difference between those two cases is well explained by the internal logic of the article (which I find spot on):

> _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._

<comment><USER37> You could say the same thing about how a person presents himself.

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?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This practically excludes everyone who doesn't speak English as their native language. Depending on what business he's into this can be a serious handicap for recruitment.

<comment> excuse-me No he says specifically that this doesn't apply to ESL or dyslexics.

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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> My train of thoughts:

> 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.

<comment><USER24> My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt your ability to know what form of "const" to use in C++. At the very least, lack of proofreading suggests to me you might be rash with your code as well.

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.

<comment><USER39> As a non-native speaker of English, I have been wondering how much signal it would be appropriate for me to infer from the kind of sloppy grammar that is typical only for native speakers of English? [1]

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.

<comment><USER40> My gut tells me (there's a scientific statement, if ever there was one!) that it correlates mainly to people who haven't read much in print. Print publications tend to be edited better than online ones. Unfortunately, bad spelling is reinforced by spending a lot of time online and being exposed to misspellings that are not corrected.

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.

<comment><USER41> Don't forget dyslexic guy: it makes your indicator wrong. According a fast google research, it's 5% of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, ....

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.

<comment><USER43> We will probably never know if anyone is really holding something against us. Sure, someone could tell you but others might choose not to disclose that information. We just go with trust and gut :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44>
      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

I am pretty sure that "already last summer" is poor English grammar. Tisk - this Godel character. Probably not worth a face to face.

<http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/the-gdel-letter/>

<comment><USER45> From the original article:

> [...] _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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Along these lines, let me ask advice from HN.

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?

<comment><USER47> Funny, I prefer misspelled to incorrectly corrected. Nothing worse than having a document littered with poor word substitutions -- at least with a spelling error I could know a bit more what the writer intended.

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.

<comment><USER48> The one time I hired a home inspector, I got the report by the end of the 3-hour appointment, printed up by his laptop and portable printer. It wasn't until I read your comment that I now know how what a good thing that was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like how he ended a sentence with "with", and made that "with" a link to a note debunking the popular but silly belief that you should not end a sentence with a preposition. That was both clever and shows that he knows what he's talking about.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wish I had a personal grammar nazi who'd poke me everytime I make a mistake in English. Unfortunately, I don't have such an individual, so I'm left with myself and my doubts.

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.

</comment><comment><USER50> I freaked out at first. I couldn't believe that they were criticizing developers for poor grammar. As I read on, I realized that they make a living on the written word and it all made sense.

</comment><comment><USER51> Everyone who is getting angry, listen:

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.

</comment><comment><USER52> "And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil's in the details."

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']

</comment><comment><USER37> Ah! The Irony.

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?

<comment><USER52> If you can find someone who can sprint 1000 meters, you have a real beast on your hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I interviewed at iFixit, and I took the grammar test.

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.

</comment><comment><USER54> Teams that lack the element of craftsmanship in their culture will likely not care if a programmer knows grammatical rules of natural language (much less if he is a master of natural language). To simplify, whether you agree with the author correlates with what type of programmer you are (or want to hire). In this simplification, I'll call them "productive programmers" and "craftsmen programmers".

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.

</comment><comment><USER55> " 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."

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.

</comment><comment><USER56> I will.

I don't give a shit about someone's grammar if they're good at what they do.

<comment><USER57> If they're good at what they do and not an imbecile then couldn't you give them a lesson or two in grammar. I was never taught English grammar at school - French and Russian grammar but no English grammar beyond learning a poem about it at primary school. I was educated in England, English is my first language.

<comment> UK-AL How can you never be taught grammar? There are two English gcses, English language and English Lit. One is about the technicalities of the language, the other about literature. Everyone has to do English Language....

<comment><USER57> There are indeed two GCSEs but crucially we had only one type of English lesson. We studied literature, poetry, wrote stories and poems of our own; did presentations, read plays, memorised Shakespearean monologues and such. But, barring that one poem in primary school I was never taught what an adverb is for example.

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!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Wow, what a load of nonsense. Some of smartest people I know are dyslexic.

I guess they won't be working at any of his companies.

</comment><comment><USER59> Personally, I've found my grammar degrades after a day of coding. I can write well formed sentences in general, but by the end of the day my mind is working in a much different day and my emails drift towards an embarrassing place.

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.

</comment><comment><USER60> Not totally related, but I found it ironic that the URL for this article is "I won't hire people who use poo"

[http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_p...](http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html)

</comment><comment><USER61> I see where the OP is coming from but this is the kind of mindset that could ensure you miss out on brilliant technical hires. I have a co-worker who only started learning English 15 years ago ... he speaks very good English, but every now and then he'll make written grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Brilliant developer.

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

</comment><comment><USER62> It's funny , I am a native french speaker married to an australian so my english start to be quit all right. What is funny is that "there, their, they're" or "its, it's" mistakes are painful to me, but at the same time I am unable to write 3 sentences in french whith no mistake. I probably made a few mistake in this post but remember english is EASY (at least from a european background). I am ashamed of my own french writting , I tried (not to hard) to fix it with very limited success , when I what kind of easy stupid common English mistake I'm really torn between empathy and disgusts.

</comment><comment><USER63> _Now, Truss and I disagree on what it means to have "zero tolerance." She thinks that people who mix up their itses "deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave," while I just think they deserve to be passed over for a job — even if they are otherwise qualified for the position._

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.

<comment><USER57> I've never understood this putting punctuation that isn't part of a quote inside the quotation marks. It seems both wrong in terms of verity and in terms of logically constructing prose.

Can someone explain a rationale for this proclivity ?

<comment><USER64> Because that's How It's Done. Programmers are almost the only people who routinely break it - because we're used to quoted strings being atomic units.

<comment><USER57> So there's no rationale beyond convention? Other linguistic conventions get changed so why is this one sticking around and why do its supporters promote it - is the more logical [to me] method somehow confusing?

<comment><USER65> it's old printers' stuff to do with physical properties of lead type, i think. as to why it won't go away, i have no idea. i happily ignore it in almost all my writing....

<comment><USER64> Inertia, I assume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> "And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can't tell the difference between their, there, and they're."

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.

</comment><comment><USER67> On the flip side, I'm suspicious of people who immediately comment on typos and grammatical mistakes when they read something. Usually I don't even register such mistakes, my brain must just automatically make sense of the text. People who notice small mistakes that don't hamper the actual meaning/communication at hand - I wonder if they are really thinking about the meaning much at all, or just focussing on superficial details.

</comment><comment><USER68> If he's talking about general grammar skills in any language then it makes sense. Poor grammar always stands out as a negative trait, but should not be the sole criteria to hire. Some of the best developers are immigrants and not always have the best command over the native language.

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?

</comment><comment><USER69> The comments have become a firestorm of grammar-as-a-filter for programmers. While this is an interesting debate, I think there are three things about this filter that give it value:

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.

<comment><USER70> > The test is objective

Less so than you might think. [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001863.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001863.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> My mother thong is Spanish, I also know English, Portuguese and some Italian. I'm not a good in either language. In the last few years I put a lot of time in getting better at English. By reading that post and some comments you will assume I don't read, I'm lazy, slow learner, sloppy and unmotivated. Proper grammar is important, but I'll not make it a priority while looking for talent.

<comment><USER65> no, just illiterate. the original author and the commenters here all made allowances for non-native speakers of english, which apparently you couldn't be bothered to read....

<comment><USER71> My bad, I apologize. I still think I'll not use grammar as a very important issue (at least for some positions) while hiring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> This kind of outlook and having a grammar test doesn't make me think that you'd be a great boss to work with, nor does it make me want to work for you. I may not be the cultural fit you're looking for, but undoubtedly you're shrinking your potential talent pool and removing exceptional candidates by just sounding like a stiff and non-flexible place to work, as a programmer.

</comment><comment><USER73> What it they are foreigners?

<comment><USER74> As a foreigner, I can try to answer that. I've noticed that in general foreigners have a much better grammar than English native speakers because we (at least in my case) went through boring English classes. Learning English was a conscious effort and every grammar rule had to be learned and understood.

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.

<comment><USER75> > I've noticed that in general foreigners have a much better grammar than > English native speakers

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'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Bravo!

Poor grammar is the telltale sign of other impediments that hinder the practice of any activity that requires good attention to details.

</comment><comment><USER74> Finally, a paper and post I can link to when people ask me why using it's in place of its or vice versa makes me angry.

</comment><comment><USER77> As an interviewee, the grammar test reinforced my confidence that iFixit was the right fit for me. I don't want to work with leadership that doesn't "put their money where their mouth is." I love that Kyle is uncompromising in this regard, as it sets the bar high, and we all continue to strive for excellence.

</comment><comment><USER78> When I screen, interview and hire people, I look for reasons to hire someone as opposed to trying to find reasons to disqualify people. This kind of negative approach (especially when dealing with people) is just not a good way to go about things in my opinion and experience.

<comment><USER57> I'm sure you do both. Why would you ignore negatives?

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?

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Nice drama title. Of course the drama tanks when the reader finds out that it's for a job where people write for a living. That's like asking a programmer to do some coding in the interview. Which is, IMO, not weird at all and rather something everyone should consider.

</comment><comment><USER80> Yes, technical writers are required to use proper grammar. Why is that controversial? I do find it ironic that his prose has commas in places where most people would not put a comma, and his placement is probably correct, but still somewhat less readable.

</comment><comment><USER81> You could write a similar article about why you only hire people who eat with their elbows off the table, and it would probably be just as meaningful. I agree that the basics are important, but I disagree that it matters to the extent you're suggesting.

</comment><comment><USER82> My current grammar peeve is when people end a question with "... or no?" "Are you coming over tonight, or no?" "Do you like this outfit, or no?" "Do I sound like a teenager, or no?" What's up with that?!

Do any of you find yourselves talking like that, or no?

</comment><comment> UK-AlasGou Grammar can often be so complex, that you can get experts who disagree with each other.

<comment><USER83> Grammar is a set of agreed rules, therefore it is not set in stone. Someone might disagree with the rules, and that leads to a slightly different grammar. And so on and so forth. Effectively, everyone has their 'own' grammar that they use. IMHO (especially not being a native English speaker) this article is rubbish (it's in URL BTW). One needs to know his grammar to write articles, but for a developer position? Don't think so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> The URL:

i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

I wouldn't hire someone who does anything with poo but dump it too.

</comment><comment><USER85> Well, "smart" way to discriminate against immigrants :(

</comment><comment><USER86> The "canonical" URL for this article is quite hilarious, in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way based on the article:

i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

</comment><comment><USER87> I will not hire people who use contractions.

</comment><comment><USER88> Caring about grammar is just a way to signal that you are of higher class than people that use poor grammar.

</comment><comment><USER89> If they did that here, we'd need to find a new CEO... but the programmers would be in good shape.

</comment><comment><USER90> i wont read an article about people who use poo

blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

</comment><comment><USER91> anyone else like how the URL is shortened to "i-wont-hire-people-who-use-poo"?

/12yearsold

</comment><comment><USER92> LOL... "I won't hire people who use POO"

Best URL truncation from a serious topic, EVER.

</comment><comment><USER93> Too bad, Yoda could be a killer programmer.

</comment><comment><USER94> I'm guessing he isn't a big Steve Jobs fan.

</comment><comment><USER95> So... Yoda and all the internet kitties are out of luck...

sad it is;

or . , ;; :

one of those

</comment><comment><USER96> He may only hire people who can do grammer, but can they recite PI to 27 places, I think now. He is a word racist as I call them. His loss.

</comment><comment><USER97> To everyone saying it isn't fair...it's fair. I mean, they are his companies.

Stupid, incredibly shortsighted and very draconian, but fair.

</comment><comment><USER98> I think that ain't no fiar!

</comment><comment><USER99> why do people write "noone" when they mean "no one"? it is very annoying

</comment><comment><USER100> I wouldn't hire people who's eyes point to different directions.

</comment><comment><USER101> Oh please. I can understand not hiring someone who communicates poorly. That makes sense. But grammar is just a set of arbitrary rules that some person or group of people decided were correct. It's like a secret handshake that lets people know you're part of some smart boys club (by and large it seems like men are the only ones who enjoy bitching about grammar). To me, it says, "I went to a good school system and was taught correctly!"

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.

<comment><USER102> > But grammar is just a set of arbitrary rules that some person or group of > people decided were correct.

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.

<comment><USER103> Natural selection was not a conscious choice. There have been many choices in grammar that have been decided almost arbitrarily by higher authorities. Sure, many of these choices may have been based on their own experiences, but they were not necessarily the best choices. They were decided by a small group of individuals, but again, the choice was not strictly a natural selection of grammar rules. Language more often follows this pattern than grammar because people are more likely to argue over grammar than language itself, excluding etymology, of course.

<comment><USER102> > There have been many choices in grammar that have been decided almost > arbitrarily by higher authorities

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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> The problem is that most people who rail against poor grammar haven't the slightest clue what grammar actually entails, and are instead peeving on stylistic issues that vary both due to the region the applicant hails from and how old the applicant is. In a lot of cases, they may as well be basing a hiring decision on whether the applicant says 'bubbler' instead of 'water fountain' or 'pop' instead of 'soda'.

</comment><comment><USER17> For me this comes down to the HR dilemma and why I feel sympathy for the dreaded HR drones and in this case for him having to make HR decisions: They are people responsible for making decisions about applicants they practically know nothing about based on nothing but a bit of self-presentation and ultimately they are in trouble when that applicant turns out to have been the wrong choice, so no wonder they turn to obscure "voodoo" and "dark magic" as sure-fire ways of weeding out allegedly "bad" applicants... in this case instead of a crystal ball he uses a grammar test to make decisions about, amongst others, staffing technical and engineering positions. I am sure a lot of excellent programmers and engineers aren't necessarily the best with words and you have no idea how well they might do by requiring them to pass a grammar test as the bare minimum. You might just as well ask them to paint you a few pictures and then derive conclusions about their mental abilities to picture things and software framework... while there could be correlations, it just has nothing to do with their job and the rest of their skills.

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.

</comment><comment><USER105> Some advice - just because you happen to like perfect grammar, don't enforce your preference on others. Some of the best devs I've ever worked with have poor grammar, but it has never stopped them from making huge contributions to the team.</comment>


A short video depicting the beauty of Moebius Transformations in mathematics. - <AUTHOR> http://www.videosift.com/video/Moebius-Transformations-Revealed

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_transformation></comment>


Airbnb Suffers Big Defeat in Jersey City - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/nyregion/airbnb-jersey-city-vote.html <comment><USER2> 70 percent of voters supported the new regulations.

 _The new restrictions allow homeowners to rent out portions of their homes as long as they're present during a guest's stay. But they prohibit renters from listing their apartment and bar owners from renting a property on a short-term basis most of the year if they don't live on-site, effectively banning large- scale Airbnb operators who had converted hundreds of condos and townhouses into makeshift hotels. It would, however, hurt residents who were making extra cash by renting out a second home for days at a time through Airbnb._

It sounds reasonable to me. I used to love staying in Airbnb's but can't stand the cheapness of it all as of late due to them turning into pure investments and no longer real homes.

<comment><USER3> > I used to love staying in Airbnb's but can't stand the cheapness of it all > as of late due to them turning into pure investments and no longer real > homes.

That's nice that you prefer one type of rental over the other. Why not allow both, so that others who prefer not having a homeowner intruding on their privacy don't need to deal with that?

<comment><USER4> Because local housing naturally has a limited supply making it a natural monopoly in addition to the fact that, since it's very difficult to live without housing, it is a one-sided market without alternatives.

So, as much as you'd like to pretend it's just a matter of personal freedoms, bypassing housing codes via the guise of a tech company just enables negative externalities that restrict the personal freedoms of others. And the 'others' are the people who actually live there, making them more important than you.

<comment><USER5> Local housing has an artificially limited supply, actually. There's an absolute limit on housing per unit of area, but we get nowhere close to approaching that limit anywhere in the US. The real issue is zoning laws prohibiting building of new housing or favoring single family homes over apartment buildings creating markets where supply doesn't increase. If you address this and allow for building of higher density housing, prices will decrease and services like AirBNB stop being as big of an issue.

It doesn't help that local government politicians are frequently homeowners (and their constituents as well) that have a vested interest in keeping housing prices high. AirBNBs, apartment buildings, and high rises are going to negatively impact the value of their properties.

<comment><USER4> Not if there's induced demand. Areas without zoning laws have been tried, we usually tear them down.

<comment><USER5> Induced demand for housing, a thing that costs actual money to purchase, would just be an indicator that supply hasn't reached equilibrium with demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Airbnb will loathe the day it decided not to fight back against people buying 10 to 15 apartments and renting them via large scale operations on their platform. They had to know it was happening, and, while it may have helped them achieve their initial growth rates, it's dramatically turned public opinion against them. I don't know a single renter or home owner in NYC who actually wants Airbnb guests in their building.

<comment><USER7> Owner-occupied, full-time rental and part-time rental can co-exist, but not if all sides "dig in."

Consider the urban reaction if (a) buildings got to tax AirBnB stays and use the proceeds for improvements and/or reduce owner HOA costs, (b) the profile/reputation/support system were shared between AirBnB and building staff/management, so guests weren't unaccountable strangers and building staff and AirBnB could coordinate during emergencies.

As travelers, owners have also benefitted from AirBnB, which has been life- changing for providing kitchens, affordability and traveling with friends and family. AirBnB also solved the problem of large events taking away housing stock needed for everyday travel.

<comment><USER8> Jesus Christ, AirBnB didn't invent vacation rentals. There was even a movie about them 35 years ago. The non-Martha Plimpton girl from The Goonies was in it.

<comment><USER9> they haven't, but they made it super accessible to my mother and the nice old lady upstairs both as a host and a visitor

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While more than 96,100 Jersey FTA: City residents use Airbnb when traveling, the defeat underscored the difficulty that sharing economy companies increasingly face in mobilizing users as a constituency.

Seems a bit NIMBYish doesn't it? As in residents happy to use AirBnB in someone else's neighborhood but damned if they'll extend the same to people visiting their own.

<comment><USER11> Of course, AirBnB doesn't reveal the period of time that 96,100 residents used it and what percentage are still active. AirBnB has been around for more than 10 years, so the 96,100 users are over that long span of time!

<comment><USER10> Indeed, though the population of Jersey City is about 270,000 so it's about a third of that population - that's a significant number even if some have used it only once and then never again 9 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can still rent out a room of your apartment if you are living in it yourself. The issue is about units that the owners are not residing in themselves.

<comment><USER3> Why would I want to stay in a room of somebody's apartment?

<comment><USER13> This was the entire premise of Airbnb; you get a cheap lodging (sometimes literally on an air bed), and the owner (optionally) might even make you breakfast. It then kind of evolved into a gray area, with some businesses essentially running large numbers of apartments. Many argue that at that scale, it is disruptive to others living nearby, and should be regulated as a normal hotel operation, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been consistently surprised how insulated Airbnb has been to the level of criticism that Uber and Lyft have more publicly faced for many years now...maybe a part of it is that the impact Airbnb has on a city is much more subtle so most don't necessarily pay attention unless it's directly impacting their life.

<comment><USER15> Have they been? I don't know if they were anti-AirBnB protests on the streets, but their meatspace ads have been defaced in the past. At least on HN, AirBnB has been getting comparable levels of criticism to Uber, for roughly the same reason - they're burning down society for profit, piece by piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> [http://archive.is/cP124](http://archive.is/cP124)

</comment><comment><USER17> Airbnb destroyed my neighborhood (crime, noise and rent saw dramatic increases) and was a factor in me moving to Germany with my entire family. I am hoping more ppl get the message and ban them outright.

<comment><USER18> > Airbnb destroyed my neighborhood (crime, noise and rent saw dramatic > increases)

Where was this?

<comment><USER17> Colorado, sorry for not being more specific.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's a shame. Airbnb really changed the game for my friends and I. We've been travelling all over the world with airbnb.

<comment><USER20> Then you've no loss. You can still stay in houses with people living in the home. Just not the fake ones where someone pretends to live on site and all the stuff is an Ikea show room.

<comment><USER21> I used AirBnB when it first launched and was absolutely floored that people would actually want to spend the night(s) in a random strangers house with them present. This was after me experiencing it first hand. It was quite terrible.

Fast forward to AirBnB becoming what it is today where the majority of users select "entire house" and it makes more sense.

The problem now is that they are essentially the same price as a cheap hotel, which for my money is the far superior option (the hotel), so we're back to AirBnB making no sense to me again.

Perhaps I'm an outlier and the whole couch surfing market is that big, but it seems like AirBnB is balancing being a hotel (entire house) without really being a hotel. That's a tricky spot to be in when regulators come knocking.

<comment><USER22> For some people, the fact that it's like a hotel (entire place to yourself) but a) in a residential neighborhood, and b) with a kitchen and other amenities of home that are usually missing or very expensive in a hotel (laundry, parking, etc.)

If an actual hotel is the superior option to you, then, sure.

<comment> em-bee exactly this. i'll take an airbnb serviced apartment over a hotel any time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside the Race to Build the World's Fastest Bitcoin Miner - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/bitcoin-mining-rigs/

<comment><USER2> 15 bitcoins in 20 hours. Whoa.

You could make a fortune at the factory just doing the burn-in test for 24 hours.

In fact I am curious why they would even ship them from China, you'd lose money the weeks on the boat, just plug them in at the factory...

<comment><USER3> In a recent interview (the one that photo is drawn from), that CEO guy acknowledges that from a purely selfish standpoint, shipping the ASICs at all has a high opportunity cost, but [http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/engineering-the-bitcoin- gol...](http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/engineering-the-bitcoin-gold-rush-an- interview-with-yifu-guo-creator-of-the-first-asic-based-miner) it was more honest to ship:

> This is an obvious question, but why aren't you mining your own chips?

> Like I said, the current reality is vastly different from what we originally > had planned. We always figured we would be late to the party. Butterfly Labs > and bASIC (another ASIC developer that ultimately failed to launch) were > supposed to launch in succession. But due to various complications and > delays, it didn't work out that way. > . If they had delivered on their > promises, they would have shipped months before our first batch. We wanted > to start selling chips so people could make their own units, providing a > hedge from a single entity becoming too powerful, and then move onto a new > project. That was our main goal. We wanted to prevent this potential > monopoly. As it turned out, we became the monopoly we tried to prevent.

> You aren't doing any mining at all?

> Nope. Fun fact: none of the Avalon team have their own mining units (outside > of test units)... We've had plenty of opportunities, such as keeping the > technology to ourselves and simply mining, but that was never our intention. > So how much is that trust worth? We think it's worth $5000 by itself. Beyond > that, the calculation is based on the current difficulty rate so that break- > even point occurs in a month. Which, by the way, as an investment vehicle is > a fairly unique proposition. It should be mentioned also that the cost of > the batch two was also 75 bitcoins. That the exchange rate has moved is out > of our control. And in the end, this was never what we wanted. If we wanted > to maximize our profit, we could charge much more. For us, this has always > been an ideal-oriented problem, not a business-oriented one. This is one of > the primary reasons we aren't clearly in the black. We're lucky that we held > onto the second batch of bitcoins because if it weren't for the > appreciation, we would be very, very deep in the red, which ultimately still > isn't that big of a deal.

(And presumably, they're airmailing the components. Why risk a boat?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At the current exchange-rate, it seems counterproductive for Avalon to sell their units instead of running them in-house to recoup the cost of production (in a couple of days), and then continue to generate profits.

Also, since they are the only game in town (plus BFL & private players probably), they could take advantage of their position in the short term, before the difficulty increases by another order of magnitude.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if they're actually selling new ones, or just shipping preorders from 6 months ago. And the reason they took preorders was to get the capital to fund the production in the first place.

It does seem like it would be awfully tempting to delay those preorder deliveries a little bit and use the machines first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am surprised the article does not mention that Avalon, in addition to ready- to-use devices, just started selling bare mining chips to OEM manufacturers last week. And they already sold $5M worth of them (500 thousand chips) _in the past 8 days alone_! This equates to 140 Thash/s (twice more power than the current network). Lead time is 9-10 weeks. Manufactured on-demand at TSMC.

<https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=181982.0>

[http://store.avalon-asics.com/?product=avalon-asic- chips-100...](http://store.avalon-asics.com/?product=avalon-asic-chips-10000)

<comment><USER7> Unless I've interpreted BTC wrong - this means that as soon as they go live, the current miners are going to see their returns drop by 2/3? And if many are already at the edge of profitability in terms of electricity/BTC, they'll drop off the network?

The BTC network may be utterly dominated by ASIC players within a few weeks.

Are they any more energy efficient than racks of GPUs?

<comment><USER6> A decent GPU would still be plenty profitable even after a 3x difficulty increase. For example the HD 7970 (about $400) currently mines $130/month, with electrical costs around $15/month assuming a worldwide average rate of $0.10/kWh, making a $115/month profit. After a 3x diff increase, this would turn to $45/mo revenues and $30/mo profits.

However this 140 Thash/s of Avalon chips is just a fraction of what is about to hit the network. All ASIC vendors combined, plus future Avalon deliveries will push the difficulty far more than 3x higher in the next 4-6 months.

Current ASICs do 150-200 Mhash/Joule (at 12V). Much better than GPUs topping out at 3-4 Mhash/Joule (at 12V).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really perverse. Some of the best talent got sucked into making people click on ads and now this.

<comment><USER9> 'this' is in many ways a harbinger of the future. Maybe (probably, though it has lasted longer than many predictions, including mine) it will be bitcoin probably it won't be but the future is definitely going to include something like bitcoin.

Imagine the same about newspapers: This is really perverse, some of our best writing talent got pulled into writing news articles in order to get people to read the ads.

Advertising is a means, not an end and as such it is a pity that so much talent gets devoted to getting people to click on it but that will burn itself out somehow and then we're left with the byproducts.

<comment><USER10> > Imagine the same about newspapers: This is really perverse, some of our best > writing talent got pulled into writing news articles in order to get people > to read the ads.

This isn't an apt analogy. Ads may bring in the revenue but people are doing something useful. Same could be said for Google---ads bring in the revenue but the product (i.e., search) is still highly useful.

The computational power used to mine bitcoins are doing absolutely nothing of useful value to society. I believe there was an HN discussion earlier about tying this in with Folding@Home or SETI@Home and make the mining process a bit more productive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yifu Guo also was the first supporter to donate toward development of Bitcoin Payments plugin for wordpress: [http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bitcoin- payments-for-woo...](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for- woocommerce/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Because they are literally selling you a machine that just sits around and 'makes' money.

If the amount of profit from using these machines was greater than the profit from selling the machines.. then the company selling the machines wouldn't sell them to you..

<comment><USER13> >If the amount of profit from using these machines was greater than the profit from selling the machines.. then the company selling the machines wouldn't sell them to you

Unless they couldn't make the machine without you paying for it first. Or they don't want to break the system by reaching >51% of the network (after which the value of btc plummets down immediately, thus making the machines worthless).

<comment><USER14> Why would the value of BTC plummet if you reach 51% of the network?

<comment><USER15> If a single group controls more than 51% of the mining power they can cheat the system (double spending, things like that). If such a monopoly was created people might lose their trust on Bitcoin and try to leave the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Keep in mind that your return is based on the current net hash rate of all mining computers, everywhere. Combined with the 6+ month wait time, you can buy a $20,000 rig that would mine you $500/day today but by the time you get it the hash rate will have risen so high that you'll be lucky to out-mine the cost of your power consumption.

I wouldn't be surprised if these companies were using each rig for a couple months in their prime before shipping them out.

<comment><USER17> _...using each rig for a couple months before shipping them out._

Looking at the global hash rate it's clear that this is not happening. (Before anyone asks, you cannot hide mining.) <http://bitcoin.sipa.be/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> are there checks based on electricity consumption to detect cannabis growers in the usa (or elsewhere)? if so, how long before a miner is raided?

<comment><USER19> Except that miners aren't actually breaking any laws. But more importantly will be to see what how quickly the market floods with new coins and the impact that has on collectors.

<comment><USER20> I think the point was that they are (potentially) using lots of electricity.

<comment><USER21> I imagine they use a decent amount, but not nearly as much as would be required to run a cluster of computers to mine a comparable quantity. I think with an ASIC, electricity costs are negligible compared to the output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So how many did they setup for themselves in the 6 month delay period?

<comment><USER9> Either very little (easy enough to check for) or none at all if you believe them.

<comment><USER20> How would you rule it out?

I would think they are sophisticated enough that they could have a parameter for their client specifying a target hash rate and slowly ramp it up (over weeks/months), looking more or less just like other sorts of hardware coming online. It would take some work to hide in a pool or whatever, but I don't think it would be a big problem.

<comment><USER9> You can't hide it to the point where you'll be able to mine at a rate high enough to make back the investment on the hardware development unless you do it openly. It's an economic argument, not a technical one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>