If someone has an incredible résumé with a few typos, I'm not gonna sweat it. If someone has a mediocre résumé with impeccable grammar and spelling, it's a less valuable employee.

That would be pretty funny where I work now, because my boss is one of the worst spellers I've ever met. I had that hilariously embarrassing typo and went on to a semi-management position there with glowing employee evaluations; if a company is willing to turn down an employee with that kind of potential for accidentally saying your instead of you're or something, they're probably not competent enough to evaluate your actual value and not worth working for anyway. After the spelling test, do they do the Job Interview 2.0 riddles? Maybe a history quiz?

People usually don't say "u" and "4gt" and "k" for any good reason. Certainly not creativity. It's the complete opposite of creativity. It's conformity. It's "cool" right now. They don't even realize they're doing it most of the time. I had a colleague that would end EVERY GODDAMN FUCKING MESSAGE with l-o-l (without the hyphens). Shit that wasn't even remotely humorous. Humor had absolutely nothing to do with it. Just serious, everyday, professional communication. Every statement would invariably end with l-o-l. It was effectively a full-stop/dot/period for her. It was distracting and unprofessional. Her lack of care showed up in her code too.

The point is that it takes zero extra effort to use real words. You're already thinking of the word! You just have to type it properly. A programmer should be especially skilled at typing so it should be negligible to do with a full keyboard. Using those kinds of lazy single-letters-that-sound-like-words spellings is very immature in normal communication. It's acceptable where typing is tedious (e.g., using a cell phone's numeric pad), or where your time or bandwidth are severely limited (e.g., during an online game or 1972), or where you're explicitly trying to be clever or obscure (private messaging with a friend). It's not appropriate everywhere, however. There's a time and place for it and A.cc is neither.

As for correcting actual grammar and spelling mistakes, it is helpful to point out when somebody makes a mistake because they probably aren't aware that they're doing it^[1] and it makes them look sloppy. It helps them to learn to communicate more accurately. Programmers should especially appreciate grammar. It's effectively synonymous with syntax. Grammar errors are effectively syntax errors. Spelling errors are effectively logic errors. I appreciate when people point out mistakes that I've made and do my best to fix them. I have learned a few grammar and spelling rules from corrections here that were still ambiguous to me after school (my English teachers were pretty poor, IMHO; though admittedly I also had little interest in social studies).

A number of people whose first language isn't English have also expressed appreciation for the corrections on this site because it helps them to speak and write English more correctly.

That's hardly a mistake if the name was spoken to you and not spelled for you. How could you possibly be expected to know (aside from researching the company yourself)? Now had the name actually been Convergence and you spelled it Convergys, do you still think they would have hired you?

And by that same logic, how are they expected to know that? Per the standards above, someone in HR could look at my letter, see I couldn't even be bothered to spell the company name right, and toss it. Screw qualifications, amirite?

Wait; what? That's a completely baseless assumption. And besides, it's still the same principle:

I didn't take time to verify the company's freaking name. By the standards trumpeted in this thread, that seems pretty huge. I mean, how lazy am I, right?

The only way that you could know the spelling is to actually see it in writing (i.e., a Web page, a brochure, or other document format), which is not necessarily a requirement. You could have easily called the company instead to research them, and unless you explicitly asked, "how do you spell that?", you could easily not realize the subtle difference. Some companies would discriminate based on that though. This particular one didn't. That's completely arbitrary.

Append:

It's also possible that the people that read your cover letter or resume didn't even notice. When you're "in the zone" it's possible to both make mistakes and miss mistakes. It's normal to make mistakes. It's sloppy to consistently make mistakes and not care about correcting them. It's immature to intentionally use incorrect spelling or grammar. That doesn't mean that there are no "teachers" or "bosses" that do. They are people too, and they come in all levels of carefulness and carelessness.

I'd pick whichever was submitted by a girl

none...

Candidate 1 writes the html and CSS, candidate 2 writes documentation and web content and they are both hired!

If someone in their day to day activities is completely abstracted from any tasks requiring proper grammar or spelling, it is much better to hire them and never give them a written task than to disregard them (If they really are talented).

If your company camelCases and TheyDoNot, now we have a problem though.

I don't even know what "k" means.

And please, read some newspaper. They are produced in a very fast tempo. Nevertheless you don't see any deliberately bad grammar, leet speak, lolspeak whatsoever there.

a.cc Off-Topic Ordeals has 416,203 posts, Programming Questions has 239,478 posts. It's a very valuable archive, I use it very often. Only today I read a thread from 2005, which helped me a lot with one problem. When I browse in the old posts, it feels very annoying to stumble on posts written poorly just because the writer wrote with this chat/IRC/SMS gear on. As many others have said, there's no excuse for deliberately bad writing on a.cc.

If you get the latter, you must manage to get girls talking to you.

That's way too hard, I'd pick the former one myself .

One girl once said there was a one in a million chance she'd ever talked to me again. So she's saying there's a chance! Number two, please.

A good idea with bad grammar isn't a nice attribute... So I would prefer nice grammar with no good idea that way would be a nice attribute.