5 ms·
When a previous company was acquired, everyone got a new job offer generally better since the company wanted everyone to stick around. Well except for one guy.
by pkaye 8y ago
When a previous company was acquired, everyone got a new job offer generally better since the company wanted everyone to stick around. Well except for one guy. A junior engineer in one of our teams. He was a really good engineer too so we were shocked. It turned out he had the same first and last name as another person at our company so they thought it was a duplicate entry and omitted it. Eventually a offer was prepare after a week of escalation.
- kbart 8y agoHeh, that's the real problem actually with buggy name-based systems. In my current company we have a person officially called "Name Surname 2" for the same reason.
- vinceguidry 8y agoBecause Name Surname 1 was already taken!
- SparkyMcUnicorn 8y agoBecause Name Surname 0 was already taken!
- vinceguidry 8y agoNo way they were forward-thinking enough to use zero-indexing.
- Bartweiss 8y agoA lot of state DMVs and other government offices apparently use name + birthdate as a "unique" identifier, which works about as well as you'd expect. It doesn't usually cause problems, because both people are accepted as 'real', but it's alarmingly easy to end up with someone else's license suspensions, voter registration, or even credit score. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-theft-racial-justice https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...
- walshemj 8y agoDon't US payroll/hr systems use SS number its one of the few cases where it makes sense to use it
- gota 8y agoWas this is the US? There are benefits to having a national, public, unique ID # for each person and this is one of them; it reduces the number of 'they had the same name' mistakes to nearly zero
- detaro 8y agoDoesn't a US employer have their employees social security number, which would fulfill exactly this role if people cared to look at it?
- newest_user_ 8y agoSocial security numbers are not unique, but combine them with a birthday and name, and it gets pretty close.
- neaden 8y agoSocial Security numbers are unique. They don't work as a great identifier because they can be mistyped, can be hard to verify, and people don't want to give them out too much.
- bb611 8y agoSSNs should be unique, the only exceptions are fraud or errors. According to the Social Security Administration: > At its inception, the SSN's only purpose was to uniquely identify U.S. workers, enabling employers to submit accurate reports of covered earnings for use in administering benefits under the new Social Security program. That is still the primary purpose for the SSN.