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Comment by tarpherder | Hacker News Reader

Its interesting to see the difference in type of names between Football Coach (Dan, Bill, Mike, Jim, Rich, Steve) and Electrical Engineer (Bernard, Eugene, Edwin, Charles, Alfred, Harvey). Short (one vowel each), common, English versus longer (two vowels each) French/"Posh" English names. Correlation between the names and background/educative level seems likely?

Songwriter is interesting too: 4 out of 5 end with a variation of "y".

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It's also possible that football coaches have a tendency to commonize their names - whether to fit in and make their players more relaxed, or maybe they were just raised in solid blue-collar American families.

Their birth certificates could very well read Daniel, William, Michael, James, Richard, Steven.

Similarly, the EE's probably have a tendency to be more formal on their resumes or business cards.

Their family and buddies probably calls them Bernie, Gene, Eddie, Chuck, Freddy, Harv.

The data sources are the FEC and SSA (and Wikipedia, for some reason). Which means that this data is coming off the stuff they submitted to the government for whatever reason.

I work with a software engineer named Charles and a project manager named Eugene. They go by Chuck and Gene, respectively.

As another commentator points out, (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8881131 )the actual results appear to be a heavily human-edited "6 of the top 37" list. In which case most of the interesting patterns would reflect the biases of the people that compiled the chart.

Chances are that there are largely unsurprising gender/age/class/race biases in the full dataset too, but these have been selected for effect (I bet most of the rest of the disproportionately common football coach names are pretty regular names for men born between 30 and 55 years ago with some of them possibly even having additional syllables, and similarly and wouldn't be surprised to find that Jim and Bill, for example, also featured high in the list of people disproportionately likely to be electrical engineers, possibly even above Eugene)

That is interesting and I am sure there is a good point there but meteorologist is also a profession requiring a high education level. Yet the meteorologist list (Bill, Joe, Jim, Jeff, Mike, Scott) is way more similar to the football coach list to the point where 3 of the names are the same.

Perhaps it's because individuals in public-facing professions/roles tend to favor shortened versions of their names? I think this is largely why the media makes fun of Benedict [Timothy Carlton] Cumberbatch.

For example: http://benedictcumberbatchgenerator.tumblr.com/

Stage names. No newsreader on a newscast is going to say "Thanks for that great lasagna recipe, now lets talk to Ebenezer Ulysses about tomorrow's rain", they're going to get a stage name of "Bennie" in that case.

I wonder however if Eugene were a Football Coach if he Edwin would then be called Ed for short. Perhaps Dan into Daniel and Mike into Michael for Electrical Engineer.

Heh, seeing Bernard as common name for Electrical Engineer made me think of Maniac Mansion...

The 'football coach' names you list there are all contractions of a name that would be at least 2 syllables long, though.

edit: (or yeah, what MichaelTieso said :) )

I do agree people with French/"Posh" English names are probably more educated and contribute more to society based upon this poor correlation

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