Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective (2008)

A couple years ago I was hired at PwC. Everything was fine, but the company doing my background check hadn't checked in yet, but management decided to go ahead with the hire anyway. A week later, after spending $2400 on travel expenses I was assured were to be re-imbursed, the background check company called in to say there was something fishy about my background. They could not find academic records matching my name. I had disclosed to PwC that I had academic and work history under an additional name and they said they were fine with it.

It turns out that the background check company had a field that said "additional last names used" -- clearly this is for people (mostly women) who take their (mostly husband's) last name after marriage. But I had not taken my spouse's last name. I had legally changed my first name and gender marker. I noted this in the "other" space in the paper background check form.

I eventually got a call from them apologizing. There was no way they could do a job or academic search on my old name. They could only type in the data as I entered it on the form and hit the submit button.

This went up to our division's managing partner at PwC who apologized and said "My hands are tied. I can't hire you without a background check." I understand that, but maybe they could contract a firm that was capable of performing a proper search. I also didn't get my travel expenses re-imbursed.

I learned two things:

1. PwC is a company staffed by morally repugnant individuals who, though they bill themselves as guiding companies through "digital transformation" are flummoxed when one of their business processes requires a minor change in a third party's business app.

2. Y2Trans is also a thing.

I read this a while ago- but long after I had sort of learned to do data modelling in SQL on my own (badly). It's actually a pretty nice introduction to the series of concepts modellers need to understand for good schema design. I really like the ordering of a progressive set of improvements.

It also serves another purpose: normalizing gay/lesbian marriange and multiple genders, in a technical context. Really quite clever IMHO.

Found this linked in one of those “awesome” github repos and thought this was a well done approach to exploring challenges in DB design. I think this incremental approach is a good teaching method.