Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

Here's something easy you can do at your company, that will help everyone, but especially women: let everyone choose any username they want, and make it easy to change if needed.

Personal example: I'm recently married, and you wouldn't believe the time my wife has had getting her username changed to reflect her new last name (an issue because her employer bases usernames/emails on their first + last names). This means she gets to explain every single time she gives out her email (internally) why its not the expected pattern, but rather a seemingly arbitrary string.

Its not the end of the world of course, or even that big of a deal when you consider it individually. But its one more thing that's not accessibly designed, and its hard to get a male dominated culture to care.

FWIW, I changed my last name too, but I own my company, and we use first names for our emails anyway, so I was lucky.

If you own your company, make sure you're getting this right. If you let people choose their usernames, and change them easily, you can cover this case and many others. [1]

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

It's helpful to have predictable names. Imagine you have to @ someone or add them on a code review by name or send them a chat by name. @fruitloops123 is a lot harder to remember than @mark[Teamname] or @marklastname.

When you are large enough first names no longer work.

I don't know why this is so hard nowadays. I administered a large VMS system in the 80s, and we regularly changed usernames (and email names, which were the same thing in those days) for women who requested it. Contrary to another replier, I never received a request to change someone's username to something inappropriate.

Allowing anything is a non-starter, since people will most certainly choose inappropriate names. And, once you make it a subset of anything, that means there's someone who arbitrates, and that will cause friction (why did so and so get their choice but I didn't get mine?).

> since people will most certainly choose inappropriate names

Really? I can't imagine that being the case in a workplace. Particularly considering that name is the one that'd be set on their email account.

I was tired of seeing job title inflation at my last job, so as a joke I changed my position title on my email sig from 'System Administrator' to 'Grand Duke of Information Infrastructure'. I didn't have customer contact - most of my emails were internal, with a couple of vendor contacts. Nevertheless, people liked it, to the point that they changed my job title on the website.

I reverted it a few months later when I felt the joke was tired, but people can do pretty whimsical things with their company channels if you let them.

HP, with some 300k employees, has a company-wide policy of allowing people to choose their email addresses. It's possible there's a human in the loop filtering out inappropriate ones, but even if so, the problem is clearly tractable.

I just don't believe there is no filter anywhere.

Example:

I want the email address john@... clearly that should not be allowed, because potentially sensitive emails might be directed at the wrong John.

This happened all the time at my company, and people got irritated at me for disallowing first name login names. I even had the example, at one point, of 3 David's working for us.

So, all this push back on my original statement has me really thinking the replies are completely disingenuous. It's just too easy to come up with a reasonable case where a name should not be allowed.

Oddly, even at technical communities without formal HR that let you choose your own username (GitHub, Debian, SourceForge, etc.) or email address (LKML, just about any other open-source mailing list), this doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. If you're choosing an address when you have zero political capital and are about to talk a lot with HR and your new management, I have trouble believing this will be more of a problem.

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