As an IT/Development manager, I only had one role that I hired for where the skills for getting the job matched the skills for doing the job: Business Analyst. Not job entailed presenting information clearly, both written and verbally. So I expected the resume and cover letter to be organized and clear.
Programmers, on the other hand, I wouldn’t expect the same level of polish. But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count – a lot.
A lot of the people that applied, and that I hired, did not have English as a first language. So I gave a lot of latitude with regard to word selection and grammar. But not spelling. Use a goofy word or two, but spell them right.
I figured that most people were highly motivated when writing a resume – about an motivated on you can get. And if not level of motivation cannot get you to take care, then you’ll just be a bug creation machine if I let you touch my codebase.
And the same thinking applies to interviews, but that’s very difficult. My leadership sometimes gets surprised about how much I help interviewees, and I have to clarify to them that I don’t care about how good they are at interviewing. I care how good they are at the job.
Unfortunately, this makes my interviews super long, but we have arguably the best engineering team in the company.
Our new CTO was very skeptical of our long interviews and ordered us to shorten them. Fortunately, we had one scheduled already. He sat in on it and is no longer worried about our long interviews. He understood the value once he was able to see where the candidate stumbled and excelled in our … simulations? of the work. We try to simulate certain tasks in the interview, especially collaborative ones, to see how they would actually do the work. It’s really hard for us as interviewers to prepare and run, but it’s proven highly effective so far
But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count – a lot.
Let’s not exaggerate. We have many kinds of spell checkers, all kinds of autocomplete, code reviews, automated testing, linters, and compilers that won’t compile if something is spelled wrong. Spelling is the least of a programme’s concerns, as it should be.
As an IT/Development manager, I only had one role that I hired for where the skills for getting the job matched the skills for doing the job: Business Analyst. Not job entailed presenting information clearly, both written and verbally. So I expected the resume and cover letter to be organized and clear.
Programmers, on the other hand, I wouldn’t expect the same level of polish. But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count – a lot.
A lot of the people that applied, and that I hired, did not have English as a first language. So I gave a lot of latitude with regard to word selection and grammar. But not spelling. Use a goofy word or two, but spell them right.
I figured that most people were highly motivated when writing a resume – about an motivated on you can get. And if not level of motivation cannot get you to take care, then you’ll just be a bug creation machine if I let you touch my codebase.
100% this
And the same thinking applies to interviews, but that’s very difficult. My leadership sometimes gets surprised about how much I help interviewees, and I have to clarify to them that I don’t care about how good they are at interviewing. I care how good they are at the job.
Unfortunately, this makes my interviews super long, but we have arguably the best engineering team in the company.
Our new CTO was very skeptical of our long interviews and ordered us to shorten them. Fortunately, we had one scheduled already. He sat in on it and is no longer worried about our long interviews. He understood the value once he was able to see where the candidate stumbled and excelled in our … simulations? of the work. We try to simulate certain tasks in the interview, especially collaborative ones, to see how they would actually do the work. It’s really hard for us as interviewers to prepare and run, but it’s proven highly effective so far
Let’s not exaggerate. We have many kinds of spell checkers, all kinds of autocomplete, code reviews, automated testing, linters, and compilers that won’t compile if something is spelled wrong. Spelling is the least of a programme’s concerns, as it should be.
Except I’m not actually talking about spelling, per se, but about attention to detail. Spelling errors in a resume is just sloppy rubbish.
Ah, right, the proxy evaluation that’s so famously effective. Lol