Way back around 2009, Google did something stupid internally where people with names like "Nishit" were flagged as being "fake" or similar. I probably found out about this because I had worked on the accounts system at one point.
On the surface, it seemed simple enough: someone coded up a check to pick up an "four letter word" (in English...) and it matched it. Even though it's totally a name used by a lot of people, their systems told those people that they were invalid and unwelcome. Never mind they have employees that are directly affected by this.
Ten years later, nearly the same thing happened at Lyft. It happened late in 2019 as it rolled into 2020. The timing always made me think that someone particularly clueless was trying to make one final push to meet their so-called "quarterly goals" before the year ended.
These events, and others like it, have touched off a series of posts like "falsehoods that programmers assume about names", and then its own series of posts about whole other realms which are full of trouble.
I, too, have written about this. I mentioned how the Intel museum only allowed the ASCII characters A-Z as letters in your name, and anyone else was out of luck.
All along, I have been treating this as a case of "those fucking stupid programmers", and it's an easy groove to fall into, because believe me, there are quite a few really incompetent people out there doing this kind of work.
However, I've been starting to realize that this is overly simplistic and is missing a large possibility. Can you see it yet? I sure didn't for a very long time, and that time is immortalized in my older posts.
The thing that finally got me thinking about another side to this problem was when I went to get my hair done recently. The scheduling form on my salon's web site had a list of stylists with their names given. One stylist had a name that had a rather unusual consonant pair that you don't normally see in English. I wasn't really sure how to pronounce it.
Let's say her name was shown as "RJAY", even though that's not even remotely close to the real thing for both her sake and mine. I thought that was her name, and went with that, until finally I saw how she wrote it out: "R'Jay". That's when I finally understood.
The booking system had decided that an apostrophe was a bridge too far and had just dropped it, thus reducing a fairly easy-to-pronounce name to a blob of characters that isn't her damn name! That it also forced everything into capitals didn't help things.
As she worked on my hair, we got to talking about things and that in particular, and I admitted that I had worked at places that had also screwed people's names up badly. I told her about asking the person at Lyft to "if nothing else, promise you won't do it again" and only getting a blank look in response. Then, perhaps because of recent goings-on in the world, I finally saw another possibility for why it might be happening. It's not necessarily clueless programmers, much as I'd like to bag on them for being that way.
We owe it to ourselves and to those around us to admit the possibility that some of these people are doing it on purpose. They're being unmitigated assholes because they realize they can use their position to make someone else's life a little crappier.
Get it? "Assuming best intent" is probably a mistake. When there are enough people being hateful around you, that is no longer an option.
Hanlon's Razor falls down in this kind of environment. It's lazy.
I have definitely made this mistake. You need not go particularly far back in my posts to find that I wrote my "honest troubleshooting code of conduct" which incorporates exactly that. Actual life experience now says that leaning on that is the lazy way out, and that you actually have to do some damn work to figure out exactly what's going on.
It's stuff like this that makes me realize just how much I still do not know, even though some people *have* to know this, and have no choice in the matter. I'm finding it out much later, and while it bothers me that it's taken this long to even get started, it's not going to stop me from admitting my ignorance while pushing to understand more.
While I may never truly understand some of the things that are not daily lived truths for me (and are for others), I can always work towards realizing that it exists, it's valid, and it needs to be appreciated.
Oh, and finally, it's not the responsibility of folks like my stylist to explain it to me. They have enough work to do as it is.
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