5 ms·

"p.s. i don’t use spell check - deal with it" Advice from someone who can't be bothered with the most basic details and easiest remedies? I'll pass.

edw519 17y ago
Advice from someone who can't be bothered with the most basic details and easiest remedies? This is actually excellent feedback. It reminds me of the time I took 4 enterprise vice presidents from New Jersey to visit a software vendor in Silicon Valley. They had great (multi-million dollar) software and it was perfect for this customer. Our first meeting was at 9 a.m., and there was no coffee! The Vice President of Sales actually found the coffee and filters and brewed the first pot himself in the vendor's conference room. (Probably the first time he made coffee in 20 years.) Then he said, "Why should I trust them to handle my customer orders when they can't even do the basics right?" A subtle but very important point. When engineering people sell to business people, we have the extra burden of showing that we know how to conduct business at their level. The easiest way to get started is with precise attention to details. And faux pas destroy trust much quicker with web technology. I didn't even notice OP's quote. Thanks for pointing this out, efsavage.
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  Years ago I met the CEO of a company that wanted to hire me at SFO. He had bought himself a coffee and didn't offer me one. I bought my own and he didn't seem to notice. Said everything I needed to know about the guy.
  - patio11 17y ago
    The following question is not rhetorical. I do not have any good way to reason my way to the answer but feel it might be important in my future professional dealings with American coffee drinkers (a social situation I have literally never been in before). What does not buying someone coffee tell you about them? Does it matter that this took place in or outside of his office? Does it matter that he invited you? [Edited to add: Oh, I live in Japan. This might be interesting to some of y'all: here, the boss outranks the job applicant and is almost certainly the host rather than the guest in this context. Thus, it is his social responsibility to arrange for tea or coffee for his guest. The guest should probably decline the offer once before accepting it. Not offering the coffee is a fairly significant breach of etiquette -- it would cause me to wince hearing the story. Buying your own coffee, on the other hand, is about a step short of slapping him in the face. It says "I noticed your lapse of etiquette" and, more importantly, "I just called you on it." Given that a guest has bought himself coffee, the polite thing to do as the host is to take no notice of the fact. We have manuals for this sort of thing.]
    - wensing 17y ago
      In a business relationship, even if it's a totally impromptu coffee break, the man should have offered to buy him one. Anything else is either cheap or inconsiderate or at least unschooled in the way of proper manners.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        We have a rather excellent coffee shop on the first floor of our building, and so coffee shops are the setting for almost all of my meetings with candidates and business associates. I'm thinking back trying to remember a time I invited someone over and didn't buy. Nothing comes to mind, but I couldn't 100% promise you that I managed to buy every time. I'm not doubting JGC learned something about that CEO from the fact that the guy didn't buy him coffee, but in America, sometimes not buying coffee just means forgetting to buy coffee. I've always liked the waiter test for salespeople, though: tip a waiter $50 to handle the candidate poorly, and see whether the candidate remains respectful. I know I've never snapped at a server before.
- Andys 17y ago
  Really good point. I usually find it difficult because I don't even drink coffee and don't know how to make it. Yet culturally, I need to learn this in order to close some deals.
nbroyal 17y ago
This type of comment has always bothered me. I'll admit it, I don't really understand what the guy has against spell check. However, is it really THAT big of a deal that this guy's work may contain some misspellings? Furthermore, neither his lack of a willingness to use spell check nor the mistakes contained within the message (as long as it is still coherent) says anything about the quality of the actual content. It just seems dismissive for the most trivial of reasons. EDIT: With all that said, I'm not vouching for the quality of the post one way or another. I'm just saying, judge the content by the content and nothing else.
- lmkg 17y ago
  What's more off-putting is the up-front refusal to use a spellcheck. It means that he's aware he has a problem and refuses to fix it. If there were more of an explanation, it might endear me to the guy. If he dug into some of the haphazard history of English spelling conventions and refused to adhere to illogical paradigms, I'd give him credit. If he mentioned something from communications theory, I'd give him a pass. But the explicit statement that "my idiosyncrasies are higher priority than your user experience" is not a good statement to make. It's a significantly worse impression than a simple typo, and a stronger one because it's intentional instead of an oversight.
  - bmm6o 17y ago
    Totally with you, though I might not find intentional misspellings as endearing as you. I'll add to your list that I can cut a lot of slack to non-native speakers. But his situation is even worse than you say: He's aware that he has a problem, and he's also aware of the existence of a virtually effortless, automatic solution to this problem. Even if it only makes his writing 1% clearer, isn't it a free 1%? If his site were ugly, and he apologized for not being a better designer, then ok, I can understand that. There's a slight barrier to having an aesthetically appealing site. But it's 2009 - what is he composing in that doesn't have automatic spellcheck? The contents of this very text box are being checked for spelling. (I'll avoid commenting on the phrase "deal with it"; maybe it was funnier in his head.)
- efsavage 17y ago
raheemm 17y ago
Good point but the funny thing is that I did not find a single spelling mistake in the OP's post or his about section. Compare that to a TC post about the wakeband and its riddled with spelling errors. So maybe he is being facetious.

edw519 17y ago

Advice from someone who can't be bothered with the most basic details and easiest remedies? This is actually excellent feedback. It reminds me of the time I took 4 enterprise vice presidents from New Jersey to visit a software vendor in Silicon Valley. They had great (multi-million dollar) software and it was perfect for this customer. Our first meeting was at 9 a.m., and there was no coffee! The Vice President of Sales actually found the coffee and filters and brewed the first pot himself in the vendor's conference room. (Probably the first time he made coffee in 20 years.) Then he said, "Why should I trust them to handle my customer orders when they can't even do the basics right?" A subtle but very important point. When engineering people sell to business people, we have the extra burden of showing that we know how to conduct business at their level. The easiest way to get started is with precise attention to details. And faux pas destroy trust much quicker with web technology. I didn't even notice OP's quote. Thanks for pointing this out, efsavage.

jgrahamc 17y ago
Years ago I met the CEO of a company that wanted to hire me at SFO. He had bought himself a coffee and didn't offer me one. I bought my own and he didn't seem to notice. Said everything I needed to know about the guy.
- patio11 17y ago
  The following question is not rhetorical. I do not have any good way to reason my way to the answer but feel it might be important in my future professional dealings with American coffee drinkers (a social situation I have literally never been in before). What does not buying someone coffee tell you about them? Does it matter that this took place in or outside of his office? Does it matter that he invited you? [Edited to add: Oh, I live in Japan. This might be interesting to some of y'all: here, the boss outranks the job applicant and is almost certainly the host rather than the guest in this context. Thus, it is his social responsibility to arrange for tea or coffee for his guest. The guest should probably decline the offer once before accepting it. Not offering the coffee is a fairly significant breach of etiquette -- it would cause me to wince hearing the story. Buying your own coffee, on the other hand, is about a step short of slapping him in the face. It says "I noticed your lapse of etiquette" and, more importantly, "I just called you on it." Given that a guest has bought himself coffee, the polite thing to do as the host is to take no notice of the fact. We have manuals for this sort of thing.]
  - wensing 17y ago
    In a business relationship, even if it's a totally impromptu coffee break, the man should have offered to buy him one. Anything else is either cheap or inconsiderate or at least unschooled in the way of proper manners.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      We have a rather excellent coffee shop on the first floor of our building, and so coffee shops are the setting for almost all of my meetings with candidates and business associates. I'm thinking back trying to remember a time I invited someone over and didn't buy. Nothing comes to mind, but I couldn't 100% promise you that I managed to buy every time. I'm not doubting JGC learned something about that CEO from the fact that the guy didn't buy him coffee, but in America, sometimes not buying coffee just means forgetting to buy coffee. I've always liked the waiter test for salespeople, though: tip a waiter $50 to handle the candidate poorly, and see whether the candidate remains respectful. I know I've never snapped at a server before.
Andys 17y ago
Really good point. I usually find it difficult because I don't even drink coffee and don't know how to make it. Yet culturally, I need to learn this in order to close some deals.

nbroyal 17y ago

This type of comment has always bothered me. I'll admit it, I don't really understand what the guy has against spell check. However, is it really THAT big of a deal that this guy's work may contain some misspellings? Furthermore, neither his lack of a willingness to use spell check nor the mistakes contained within the message (as long as it is still coherent) says anything about the quality of the actual content. It just seems dismissive for the most trivial of reasons. EDIT: With all that said, I'm not vouching for the quality of the post one way or another. I'm just saying, judge the content by the content and nothing else.

lmkg 17y ago
What's more off-putting is the up-front refusal to use a spellcheck. It means that he's aware he has a problem and refuses to fix it. If there were more of an explanation, it might endear me to the guy. If he dug into some of the haphazard history of English spelling conventions and refused to adhere to illogical paradigms, I'd give him credit. If he mentioned something from communications theory, I'd give him a pass. But the explicit statement that "my idiosyncrasies are higher priority than your user experience" is not a good statement to make. It's a significantly worse impression than a simple typo, and a stronger one because it's intentional instead of an oversight.
- bmm6o 17y ago
  Totally with you, though I might not find intentional misspellings as endearing as you. I'll add to your list that I can cut a lot of slack to non-native speakers. But his situation is even worse than you say: He's aware that he has a problem, and he's also aware of the existence of a virtually effortless, automatic solution to this problem. Even if it only makes his writing 1% clearer, isn't it a free 1%? If his site were ugly, and he apologized for not being a better designer, then ok, I can understand that. There's a slight barrier to having an aesthetically appealing site. But it's 2009 - what is he composing in that doesn't have automatic spellcheck? The contents of this very text box are being checked for spelling. (I'll avoid commenting on the phrase "deal with it"; maybe it was funnier in his head.)
efsavage 17y ago

raheemm 17y ago

Good point but the funny thing is that I did not find a single spelling mistake in the OP's post or his about section. Compare that to a TC post about the wakeband and its riddled with spelling errors. So maybe he is being facetious.