Rejected from an interview because first name is too short for internal IT | Hacker News Reader

Rejected from an interview because first name is too short for internal IT

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10 pointsamrrs8 comments

Finally a topic on HN I can actually speak about with professional experience!!! <3

I've done this job for years - putting new hires into Active Directory - (haven't quite got myself a professional programming gig yet, hopefully soon) and I don't know of any common system that would reject a three letter first name. Before I clicked I thought it would be two or one letters.

99% of orgs are on AD, and most of the other systems pull info from that. I would guess that one of these systems pulls info and doesn't allow manual entry, but also assumes names > 3 characters (or they're lying).

I've known plenty of people stuck with a pre-marriage name because it was too hard to change everywhere, or people who chose a different preferred name as their real name is often mispronounced, and other stuff like that.

Worst case scenario you add a few letters to get him in the system, apologize, inform his coworkers, and put in a request to update/fix it/whatever. If your manager is aware you're using a preferred name and your legal name still needs to go on important forms and stuff, it should be business as usual. That stuff happens all the time.

There's definitely bias in these systems, doing things like assuming a first name is a given name and your last name is your family name (and that everyone has those). Works okay for anglos, but people from e.g. some Asian countries aren't accomodated properly.

But 3 letters? What about Bob? Jon? Amy? What about Amy?

This is just bizzare. Admitting it even more so. There's got to be something else going on here. I'm not a lawyer but surely you could at least argue discrimination?

Spoke about it with the better half with H.R. experience, and she thinks it'd be more likely that some other reason would be behind it, but they weren't willing to commit it to paper.

I have to wonder about all the Hsu's, Ngo's, and everyone else out there if it's really the case.

But saying this as a reason seems like they’re opening the door even further.

At most, saying “your services are no longer needed” is about all they need to do in an at-will environment.

For funsies I filtered the wiki of prominent figures in SE/CS and amassed a list of those this company would simply not hire:

Per Brinch Hansen

Kit Cosper

Tom DeMarco

Zvi Galil

Ian Goodfellow

Ian Goldberg

He Jifeng

Les Hatton

Tin Kam Ho

Ken Kennedy

Adi Shamir

Guy Steele

Éva Tardos

Jie Wu

They look pretty darned dumb from here. Maybe is they didn't spend 6 weeks for the hiring process then they might have enough time to fix really broken things.

My name, yes really! I have replaced it with the number of characters for obvious reasons. First Name : 12345678901 Last Name(three parts) : 1234567 1234567 1234567. Obviously I am not of Anglo heritage. Its a drama with everything I need to do from dealing government departments to drivers license to medicare to online forms. Yes IT systems are biased towards a particular heritage.

I think this has to be some attempt to "test" the guy to see how he would respond to a company policy that is not only wrong but could have serious legal consequences.

2020 at last has an issue just affecting one person, that we know of! This is insane, but so 2020

Seems fake.

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