8 ms·

A Japanese company once made the decision that they needed "virtual" employees in a particular system, for example to support e.g. adding a job to the org chart

by patio11 13y ago

A Japanese company once made the decision that they needed "virtual" employees in a particular system, for example to support e.g. adding a job to the org chart before that position had been filled (and another dozen use cases), so they had the clever idea "Hey, if we need to do this, we'll just input their 'name in Japanese' as one of a dozen status flags, like XX_JOB_REQUEST or XX_INCOMING_TRANSFER." One developer at this company, who was annoyed with having to tweak a particular system every time they added a new possible status flag, wrote code which was, essentially: if (InternalStringUtils.isAllLatinCharacters(employee.getJapaneseName()) { /* no need to pay this 'employee' so remove them from batch before we retrieve bank details for salary transfers */ ... } Do I have to explain why I'm aware of this curious implementation choice?

swanson 13y ago
Took me a minute... InternalStringUtils.isAllLatinCharacters("Patrick McKenzie") == true
tracker1 13y ago
I worked in a security software development department where the primary security request application had to allow a request from anyone, for anyone (Approval was more stringent). I personally found several bugs in the system in my first few months, because I, personally, conflicted with the various "uniqueness" constraints in the system... like lastname + ssn-last-four, or dob + firstname, etc. The org had 380K active entries, so it was definitely interesting being a dev on such a project, with a relatively common name, and conflicting dob and last 4-5 of my ssn.
- jasonkolb 13y ago
  Your DOB and last 4-5 of your SSN matched someone else? The reason I ask is because rules like this are often used to de-duplicate records. It's not perfect but it is useful, especially when trying to integrate data from more than one system. It's also used quite a bit in fraud detection etc. to find connections in the data.
  - tracker1 13y ago
    There were about 380K users in the various systems... so conflict chances were pretty high... I can't imagine what it would be like to have a name like "John Smith" or "Adam Jones" ... even more common...
  - Dove 13y ago
    Well, there are 366 dates of birth, and 9999 last 4 digits in SSNs, so approximately 3.7M combinations. If you drop 380k users into 3.7M buckets, that's only ten times as many buckets as users. A lot of the buckets will be shared.
kabell 13y ago
I'm actually curious now, was your (or whoever became the victim of this code) "Japanese name" not in the system in katakana or something?
- patio11 13y ago
  That was imprecision because I was trying to avoid the quick discussion of Japanese orthography. Like most systems in Japan dealing with names, there are separate fields for 漢字名　and カナ名. (Some systems also have ローマ字名.) Japanese systems have wide, wide variability in what they do for 漢字名 for people who, ahem, don't have one. Some repeat the カナ名. Some do so but use half-width kana (半角 vs. 全角). Some managers who believe that there is such a thing as an "official name" think that one's official name should go in 漢字名, regardless of whether it is 漢字 or not. A related problem: what happens when you have two systems which have different behaviors on this? For example, let's say you're a Japanese bank, and your branch employees were instructed in 2012 to update any 漢字名 of foreigners to be the name written on their foreigner registration card, in double-width characters. Let's further suppose that your web tier does Javascript validations when you try to sign up for online banking, and because any engineer can see that ＤＯＵＢＬＥＷＩＤＴＨ latin characters are not 漢字, this means that it is literally impossible for the web tier to match the DB for affected customers. Hilarity ensues.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    It's not quite the same, and it does't break things so much as make them rubbish, but try getting a radiology information system to talk to a scanner of some description (CT, MRI etc). GE scanners accept Surname^Name. If someone has a middle name it doesn't display or come across to the scanner, so as to save space (I assume). This is fine until you get someone who has a first name with 2 separate words. I discovered it with someone called something like Al Amen as a first name. No hyphen. So now he is called Al. To make the medical images correct we have to incorrectly spell his name and make the RIS incorrect. Since then I look out for this and I have seen lots of patient names broken in this manner. Mid name capitalization also breaks and all becomes lower case. McDonald to Mcdonald etc. Names are horrid to deal with and people (myself included) like them to be correct.
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
Many systems in China depend on your Chinese name and identification number. Suffice it to say, foreigners who work in China don't have either of these: a made up Chinese name is not meaningful or legal (China also lacks any kind of kana), a passport number is not a "valid" ID number and changes every 10 years anyways. I don't get to use many online services accordingly, and every year there is some problem with how they handle my last name (MC DIRMID, there is a freaking space after the MC in my passport, causes all sorts of problems).
- kevin_p 13y ago
  It's meaningful in some contexts. I had a different Chinese name on my work permit and marriage certificate (in both cases transliterated without my input), and it caused me no end of hassle when I was applying for a mortgage - we got refused the first time and had to get the work permit changed to make them the same.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Yes, we (my wife and I) were careful about that when we got married last year. But to be honest, I think that's the only case (and the name on my work permit is not even my own chosen Chinese name!)
- SiVal 13y ago
  Yes, and imagine the impact this has on "foreigners who work in China" such as Tibetans in Lhasa.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Tibetans (with Hukou anyways) have Chinese names though. Usually they are phonetically chosen. Its something that must be done when you are born in China I guess, even if your native language isn't Chinese. This applies to all minorities who use different writing systems (Uigher, Manchu, Mongolian, etc...). Japanese of Korean descent can also choose Kanji names I think, to use as legal aliases.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

by patio11 13y ago

swanson 13y ago

Took me a minute... InternalStringUtils.isAllLatinCharacters("Patrick McKenzie") == true

tracker1 13y ago

I worked in a security software development department where the primary security request application had to allow a request from anyone, for anyone (Approval was more stringent). I personally found several bugs in the system in my first few months, because I, personally, conflicted with the various "uniqueness" constraints in the system... like lastname + ssn-last-four, or dob + firstname, etc. The org had 380K active entries, so it was definitely interesting being a dev on such a project, with a relatively common name, and conflicting dob and last 4-5 of my ssn.

jasonkolb 13y ago
Your DOB and last 4-5 of your SSN matched someone else? The reason I ask is because rules like this are often used to de-duplicate records. It's not perfect but it is useful, especially when trying to integrate data from more than one system. It's also used quite a bit in fraud detection etc. to find connections in the data.
- tracker1 13y ago
  There were about 380K users in the various systems... so conflict chances were pretty high... I can't imagine what it would be like to have a name like "John Smith" or "Adam Jones" ... even more common...
- Dove 13y ago
  Well, there are 366 dates of birth, and 9999 last 4 digits in SSNs, so approximately 3.7M combinations. If you drop 380k users into 3.7M buckets, that's only ten times as many buckets as users. A lot of the buckets will be shared.

kabell 13y ago

I'm actually curious now, was your (or whoever became the victim of this code) "Japanese name" not in the system in katakana or something?

patio11 13y ago
That was imprecision because I was trying to avoid the quick discussion of Japanese orthography. Like most systems in Japan dealing with names, there are separate fields for 漢字名　and カナ名. (Some systems also have ローマ字名.) Japanese systems have wide, wide variability in what they do for 漢字名 for people who, ahem, don't have one. Some repeat the カナ名. Some do so but use half-width kana (半角 vs. 全角). Some managers who believe that there is such a thing as an "official name" think that one's official name should go in 漢字名, regardless of whether it is 漢字 or not. A related problem: what happens when you have two systems which have different behaviors on this? For example, let's say you're a Japanese bank, and your branch employees were instructed in 2012 to update any 漢字名 of foreigners to be the name written on their foreigner registration card, in double-width characters. Let's further suppose that your web tier does Javascript validations when you try to sign up for online banking, and because any engineer can see that ＤＯＵＢＬＥＷＩＤＴＨ latin characters are not 漢字, this means that it is literally impossible for the web tier to match the DB for affected customers. Hilarity ensues.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  It's not quite the same, and it does't break things so much as make them rubbish, but try getting a radiology information system to talk to a scanner of some description (CT, MRI etc). GE scanners accept Surname^Name. If someone has a middle name it doesn't display or come across to the scanner, so as to save space (I assume). This is fine until you get someone who has a first name with 2 separate words. I discovered it with someone called something like Al Amen as a first name. No hyphen. So now he is called Al. To make the medical images correct we have to incorrectly spell his name and make the RIS incorrect. Since then I look out for this and I have seen lots of patient names broken in this manner. Mid name capitalization also breaks and all becomes lower case. McDonald to Mcdonald etc. Names are horrid to deal with and people (myself included) like them to be correct.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

Many systems in China depend on your Chinese name and identification number. Suffice it to say, foreigners who work in China don't have either of these: a made up Chinese name is not meaningful or legal (China also lacks any kind of kana), a passport number is not a "valid" ID number and changes every 10 years anyways. I don't get to use many online services accordingly, and every year there is some problem with how they handle my last name (MC DIRMID, there is a freaking space after the MC in my passport, causes all sorts of problems).

kevin_p 13y ago
It's meaningful in some contexts. I had a different Chinese name on my work permit and marriage certificate (in both cases transliterated without my input), and it caused me no end of hassle when I was applying for a mortgage - we got refused the first time and had to get the work permit changed to make them the same.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Yes, we (my wife and I) were careful about that when we got married last year. But to be honest, I think that's the only case (and the name on my work permit is not even my own chosen Chinese name!)
SiVal 13y ago
Yes, and imagine the impact this has on "foreigners who work in China" such as Tibetans in Lhasa.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Tibetans (with Hukou anyways) have Chinese names though. Usually they are phonetically chosen. Its something that must be done when you are born in China I guess, even if your native language isn't Chinese. This applies to all minorities who use different writing systems (Uigher, Manchu, Mongolian, etc...). Japanese of Korean descent can also choose Kanji names I think, to use as legal aliases.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]