On Friday, 13 May 2016 at 22:18:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 5/13/2016 1:54 PM, Xinok wrote:
I've known a couple people who had to apply for over 200-300
positions before
they finally got a job in their field. Life isn't so
convenient that we can pick
and choose which job we want. Sometimes, you've gotta take
what you can get.
Ironically, hiding contributions under a pseudonym may make one
a less desirable candidate because nobody will know that you're
any good.
Not really, you can always put your github profile on your
resume, ie selectively unveil your pseudonym for certain
potential employers.
But suppose one of these people was a member of the D
community and they get turned
down for every job they apply for because the employer
discovered something dumb
they posted in this thread:
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/[email protected]
The internet never forgets so a little anonymity is a good
thing.
Note that this is a professional forum, not a chat room. I have
suggested many times that people maintain a professional
decorum here, i.e. don't post things that are unacceptable to
say at work.
1. Using a pseudonym here is not license to be a jerk
2. It's not that hard to adhere to a professional standard of
conduct
3. If you want to vent about politics and religion, reddit is
just a click away
For a "professional forum," perhaps this is all true, though the
term "professional" really is a euphemism for "don't offend
anyone you're working with," which becomes ridiculous with the
levels the professional offense-grievers and PC police have taken
it to now. It just means, "Stick to the technical topics,"
particularly in this forum, which is mostly feasible, but people
have other interests too and discussions wander to the connected
world.
4. Consider your name as your professional brand. By posting
and githubbing under your name, there's a significant
opportunity to enhance your brand, which translates into being
able to get better jobs at higher pay. Anonymity is a fine way
to have to send out hundreds of resumes to get a job. Being a
well-known contributor to a prestigious project is a shortcut
to better things.
Not everyone wants to have their name as their professional
brand, or wants any kind of "brand." I know this is the
conventional wisdom, but it's not like "well-known contributor to
a prestigious project" gets you on billboards anyway, :) so there
is very little upside to such "branding" and a lot of downside.
Using your real name online is an artifact of the real world that
doesn't work too well: I read a good analogy once that compared
it to shouting out your real name every time you enter a real
room, which nobody does. We're moving to a more anonymous
virtual world where most everyone will be using nicknames, we're
just not there yet, largely because the culture at large is just
not used to it yet.
On Friday, 13 May 2016 at 17:19:01 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
On Friday, 13 May 2016 at 17:02:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
In today's surveillance state, the government already knows
your name and what you look like, so being anonymous on github
is a bit pointless, as if anyone cares that you are interested
in D. I can understand if you're a celebrity or want nobody to
know you're a dog, but that doesn't apply to most of us.
Actually, given the blatant misogyny frequently on display on
this forum, about 51% of the world's population - literally
most of us - have a perfectly understandable reason to maintain
some level of anonymity in this community.
You must be reading some other forum than I am or have some
strange standards for such an epithet. If you're referring to
the recent thread started by the language researcher, all I saw
was a bunch of people sharing their anecdotal experiences,
speculating on reasons for the documented gender gap, and
mentioning statistical evidence for what the underlying reasons
might be, none of which is "blatant" or any other kind of
"misogyny." If you're referring to some other threads, hard to
believe it's so "frequent" that I've never seen it, though I
certainly don't skim every thread, as you say you do.
