I don't want employees that spend all that time fretting over what they wear. I want employees that would look at me funny if I asked them to dress nice. I'd want to see a funny, bewildered, slightly pained look on their face that said "I'm one of the best people at what I do, I'm doing important work, I could work anywhere, each second I waste on this is something that doesn't go into designing the future, and you want me to worry about wearing what?"

Umm, yeah. And if a candidate had spelling mistakes on his resume, would you think "well, I'm hiring him to code, not to write documentation"? Or would you in fact not even bother to interview him at all?

Well a resume conveys useful information, which is important. Dress does not. It's a signal to noise ratio thing.

Incidentally, bad spelling in an otherwise smart person is a good sign of creativity, because it's correlated with personality types that correlate with creative thinking (when intelligence is evidenced at all).

Do you have a source for the typo thing? That would be very useful information.

I emailed you info, we're getting too far off topic here.

I don't think I got an email. Subject line?

I am not interested in someone who writes "creative" code that someone else has to debug.

That's not what I mean. You are deliberately taking the worst possible interpretation of what I wrote. No one wants typos in code. But, a programmer who's written english is bad, but who is highly intelligent will probably not evidence the same typos in programming as in typing written english.

It's the same sort of thing as dyslexia being different at a neurological level in chinese then in english. English dyslexics who learn chinese aren't dyslexic in chinese. Likewise, people who are messy in their english might be extremely good at code. People sure like to hang onto conventional wisdom even when there is plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that they are wrong.

OK, every word processor these days can check your spelling for you. You don't even need to do anything; it will underline words it doesn't know by magic. Given that big a shove in the right direction PLUS the manual proof-reading that ought to be done, it is incomprehensible that typos get through. It can only be carelessness. This isn't an IRC conversation; it's a professional document.

Clumsy use of English from someone for whom it isn't their native language is a completely different matter, I don't care about that.

I agree with the first paragraph and disagree with the last sentence.

For me, it's less about the typing or language skills and more about proving that you can produce a complete work-product. A typo-laden resume indicates to me that you failed to have at least one native speaker of the language review it.

If you have a known weak area (English is not your most fluent language and is also required for the job), I would expect a thorough individual to seek help.

Just like I would expect a rock-star hacker to call tech support or post on open-source forums for help if they have a particularly difficult bug that they aren't making headway with.