I feel like there are many devs out there who expose a lot of personal details and opinions all over the web. Maybe it’s just me, but when starting out with the internet I tried my best to separate my personal details (name, age, sex, country, ethnicity, family ties, relationship status,…) from usernames in public.
Seeing devs do it willingly and voice opinions on divisive or sensitive topics kind of messes with me. Aren’t y’all afraid of missing out on job opportunities if someone reads your opinions, code, or other stuff tied to your personal accounts? Or letting anybody (maybe family, friends, acquaintances, …) in on your personal life, mindset, opinions and other personal information?
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Can we please stop with the license crap attached to posts? It’s annoying and also pointless.
I heard that there is a person making a bot to pull all linked comments/posts to the Anti AI license stuff as a joke. To train a LLM and create more comments.
This is a strange world.
It will be funny when all the LLMs start posting it in their responses at least.
I mean tbh they’re free to do as they wish as long as they’re abiding by our TOS and guidelines
While adding a CC license on a comment is questionable on the aspect of viability, it doesn’t violate any of our community rules
Please do not gatekeep unless you see justification for the prevention of something
Is it gatekeeping if they voice their disapproval? Is any form of disapproval gatekeeping? Where is the line?
They didn’t ask them to stop posting or participating. Wouldn’t that be the line where it crosses to gatekeeping?
They asked them not to attach the CC notice. It didn’t address their content.
It feels like this needs to be managed on an instance by instance level and not post to post.
You’re annoying and pointless.
Please do not make personal attacks,
- as they will not help progress your case in adding CC licenses to your post/comments
If you wish to relinquish your hope of licensed comments, you may therefore make personal attacks again. But, please direct them all at me, so as not to hurt others’ feelings.
Totally agree on the sensitive or decisive topics point, but I include a caveat that what some people call “sharing decisive viewpoints in public”, others call “not hiding their gender/sexual orientation”, and similar things, so it’s not always perfectly clear cut.
I try to avoid being inflammatory in general, anonymous or not, and I’m not perturbed if people know my city, industry, trade, and vague interests. Basically what you could figure out from a polite conversation while waiting in line.
I’ve got a lot of code up on GitHub, and some of it is absolute garbage. If an employer judges me poorly for sharing my pile of one-off scripts, or “basic human decency and lack of respect for neo Nazis in a casual setting”, then I frankly probably don’t care to work for them.
Admittedly, other than a script that automates figuring out which web hosts are hosting hate groups, there’s not much political content in my software.I do alright, so my system seems to work.
If any of that is part of the hiring process - I don’t want the job.
If HR is incompetent enough to consider things like relationship status or political opinions then what other bullshit policies does the company have? It’s probably the tip of the iceberg.
By far most important thing is to have good colleagues, because without good colleagues your job will be miserable or the company will not last (or both). Made the mistake of working for a shitty job at high pay once and it was one of the worst decisions of my life.
Don’t waste your life working for incompetent companies.
Also, as someone who has hired devs… if you have a public profile, and it doesn’t make you look hopelessly incompetent, then your application is going onto my shortlist. Too many applications cross my desk to look at all of them properly, so a lot of good candidates won’t even get considered. But if there’s a GitHub or similar profile, I’m going to open it, and if I see green squares… you’ve got my attention.
You’ll get my attention wether the username matches your real name or not, but bonus points if it’s your real name. Openness leads to trust. And trust is criitcal.
You’ll get my attention wether the username matches your real name or not, but bonus points if it’s your real name. Openness leads to trust. And trust is criitcal.
I think that’s the crux of issue. If somebody’s open and said the wrong thing at the wrong time in their life, do you think whoever’s reading it will have the context to understand the circumstances it was written in? Also, won’t it make the selection process even more biased? IINM people like to recruit and promote people they most agree with or see themselves in. Giving a recruiter or company grounds to disagree with you doesn’t seem like a great start.
Let’s say a candidate writes in a blog post that they’re pro squashing commits and all their personal projects use it too, but your shop is strictly against it. How many developers and recruiters do you think it would taint during the recruitment process? Wouldn’t you run the risk of dismissing a candidate who in private is pro-squashing, but open to other ways of working professionally?
If HR is incompetent enough to consider things like relationship status or political opinions then what other bullshit policies does the company have? It’s probably the tip of the iceberg.
It’s not unheard of for people to lose their jobs for stating their political opinion online. #ByeByeJob is a hashtag and https://old.reddit.com/r/byebyejob/ is a subreddit for a reason.
The software industry loves hiring people who effectively dox themselves on every platform. I’m starting to compromise on my privacy values because I would rather eat food than rage against the machine at this point. Don’t even get me started on the culture surrounding Linkdin.
YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU has compromised on their privacy values by not including a special character in their username.
Don’t hate, that’s their actual name.
YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU has compromised on their privacy values by not including a special character in their username.
They’re just trying to convey they’re not THAT strong. 😂
I keep different identities for different purposes. This identity is pretty public and active on social media, but mostly in the developer and anime sphere. This is partially born out of a desire to find other people to connect with on those topics, which makes it a worthy trade-off in my view. I also don’t mind sharing what I’ve posted since most won’t bother to look closely, and even if they do, there’s not too much to find other than my interests and past projects.
Other identities serve other interests or are much more personal, so those things aren’t as closely in the public eye. My more divisive or controversial takes are really only shared with trusted friends and generally not in writing though, so I might not fit the question you’re posting very well, haha
I think we’re similar. This is the programmer identity, which is one of many (and can hopefully not be easily tied to the others).
I also don’t mind sharing what I’ve posted since most won’t bother to look closely
Share with whom, btw?
Some people put their whole lives on the internet and never once stop to think if it’s a good idea. Then again, online safety and security are never taught or communicated, at least in the west, maybe by design.
online safety and security are never taught or communicated
As a Computer Science teacher I’m gonna tell you that isn’t true at all. We absolutely DO teach about e-safety. Kids probably know more about it than their parents do!
My open source work is published under my real name because I feel like if someone is running my code, they should know who I am? Also it helps with my CV and such. I don’t go into politics or anything controversial though, keep it pretty professional.
Do you have another account for testing stuff? Experiments, one-off scripts, copy-pasted hudge-kludge, and just in general unprofessional stuff?
Not really, If it’s throwaway then I don’t publish it anywhere.
Don’t you feel people’s public profiles only contain purposely perfect code and not what they’re actually going to do on a daily basis? Why doesn’t everyone just take your code and use it as their own, for their CV, without crediting you? I don’t think I’d trust a person’s public profile as it would be way too easy to just fake it.
Implying perfect code exists anywhere.
It’s also trivially easy to tell if you’re presenting someone else’s work as your own. In an interview, you ask about their projects. Those would be very easy (and often fun) for the actual creator to answer, and not for anyone else.
I have a real name account and a couple of one off accounts.
I think this can be more generalized as: why do some people eschew anonymity online? And a few plausible reasons come to mind:
- a convention carried over from the pre-Internet days to be honest and frank as one would be in-person
- having no prior experience with anonymity or a basis to expect anonymity to last
- they’re already a real-life edgelord and so the in-person/online distinction is artificial, or have an IDGAF attitude to such distinctions
IMO, older people tend to have the first reason, having grown up with the Internet as a communication tool. Younger, post-2000 people might have the second reason, because from the events during their lifetime, privacy has eroded to the point it’s almost mythical. Or that it’s like the landed gentry, that you have to be highly privileged to afford to maintain anonymity.
I have no thoughts as to the prevalence of the third reason, but I’m reminded of a post I saw on Mastodon months ago, which went something like this: every village used to have the village idiot, but was mostly benign because everyone in town knew he was an idiot. One moron in every 5 or 10 thousand people is fine. But with the Internet, all the village idiots can network with each other, expanding their personal communities and hyping themselves up to do things they otherwise wouldn’t have found support for.
Coming back to the question, in the context above, maybe online anonymity is a learned practice, meaning it has to be taught and isn’t plainly natural. Nothing quite like the Internet has ever existed in human history, so what’s “natural” may just not have caught up yet. That internet literacy and safety is a topic requiring instruction bolsters this thought.
Generally speaking, my approach is “on the internet no one knows you’re a dog”. I tend to containerize my activity and keep as much PII away from the internet as possible.
I have a few accounts on the fediverse because otherwise the conjunction of regional data, interests and languages would easily identify me. Not that i generally do dumb stuff (but i can easily get flagged if i touch… hot topics, you must pander to certain groups otherwise you’re immediately the villain, very free the fediverse), it’s just that the internet hasn’t quite evolved the way i was expecting it 30 years ago and surveillance capitalism is now a thing, among other factors. I provide as little and as fake information as possible when creating accounts.
As far as the professional sphere goes, all recruiters will ever see is a simple LinkedIn profile. I don’t have much time to do pet projects, unfortunately, and certainly wouldn’t host them on github - forgejo and codeberg ftw.
I don’t really get the code point. Like your own code written for personal projects is probably gonna be pretty high quality I’d hope? Sometimes we just write trash to get something finished but soon as I’ve had to change it… hell yeah I’m unfucking that mess, no way do I want to figure out what it does a second time.
Like your own code written for personal projects is probably gonna be pretty high quality I’d hope?
Does every experiment have to be formatted by a code-formatter, linted, 100% code coverage, unit, integration, and e2e tests, have full CICD, an expansive README, documentation, a project board, milestones, be published on package repositories, and a homepage? Does every post you make on the internet have references, perfect grammar, a well thought out point, and can be ready to be published in your field of work?
Um what? I didn’t like hide extra meaning in what I said. High quality code doesn’t imply all that extra shit you added. It’s code that’s easy to read and modify. Typically this just means you name stuff well and document things that aren’t obvious. Usually my docs explain why something exists since thinking it’s unnecessary cause you don’t remember what the original problem was a common occurrence before I started doing so.
Is high quality code ran through a formatter? I’d hope so yeah. There should be a consistent code style across the entire project. Doesn’t matter what it it long as it’s consistent.
100% code coverage is meaningless and as such a pointless metric. Also 100% coverage is explicitly tied to the implimentaion as all code paths have to be reached which is obviously not a good idea (tests have to change when the implimentaion changes as you’re testing the implimentaion not the api).
Really a lot of this is just meaningless buzz words as an attempt at some sort of gotcha. Really don’t understand how you even interpreted a statement so simple in this way.
I write tons of absolutely crap code for personal use, but I generally don’t publish it since it’s usually for stuff no one else would care about anyway.
Ah sure, like scripts and stuff. I have some absolutely atrocious python hanging out to help me do shit. I don’t have like any actual projects that are just a trash fire though
