3 ms·

Allowing anything is a non-starter, since people will most certainly choose inappropriate names. And, once you make it a subset of anything, that means there's

by e40 12y ago

Allowing anything is a non-starter, since people will most certainly choose inappropriate names. And, once you make it a subset of anything, that means there's someone who arbitrates, and that will cause friction (why did so and so get their choice but I didn't get mine?).

jackweirdy 12y ago
> since people will most certainly choose inappropriate names Really? I can't imagine that being the case in a workplace. Particularly considering that name is the one that'd be set on their email account.
- vacri 12y ago
  I was tired of seeing job title inflation at my last job, so as a joke I changed my position title on my email sig from 'System Administrator' to 'Grand Duke of Information Infrastructure'. I didn't have customer contact - most of my emails were internal, with a couple of vendor contacts. Nevertheless, people liked it, to the point that they changed my job title on the website. I reverted it a few months later when I felt the joke was tired, but people can do pretty whimsical things with their company channels if you let them.
ScottBurson 12y ago
HP, with some 300k employees, has a company-wide policy of allowing people to choose their email addresses. It's possible there's a human in the loop filtering out inappropriate ones, but even if so, the problem is clearly tractable.
- e40 12y ago
  I just don't believe there is no filter anywhere. Example: I want the email address john@... clearly that should not be allowed, because potentially sensitive emails might be directed at the wrong John. This happened all the time at my company, and people got irritated at me for disallowing first name login names. I even had the example, at one point, of 3 David's working for us. So, all this push back on my original statement has me really thinking the replies are completely disingenuous. It's just too easy to come up with a reasonable case where a name should not be allowed.
geofft 12y ago
Oddly, even at technical communities without formal HR that let you choose your own username (GitHub, Debian, SourceForge, etc.) or email address (LKML, just about any other open-source mailing list), this doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. If you're choosing an address when you have zero political capital and are about to talk a lot with HR and your new management, I have trouble believing this will be more of a problem.

by e40 12y ago

jackweirdy 12y ago

> since people will most certainly choose inappropriate names Really? I can't imagine that being the case in a workplace. Particularly considering that name is the one that'd be set on their email account.

vacri 12y ago
I was tired of seeing job title inflation at my last job, so as a joke I changed my position title on my email sig from 'System Administrator' to 'Grand Duke of Information Infrastructure'. I didn't have customer contact - most of my emails were internal, with a couple of vendor contacts. Nevertheless, people liked it, to the point that they changed my job title on the website. I reverted it a few months later when I felt the joke was tired, but people can do pretty whimsical things with their company channels if you let them.

ScottBurson 12y ago

HP, with some 300k employees, has a company-wide policy of allowing people to choose their email addresses. It's possible there's a human in the loop filtering out inappropriate ones, but even if so, the problem is clearly tractable.

e40 12y ago
I just don't believe there is no filter anywhere. Example: I want the email address john@... clearly that should not be allowed, because potentially sensitive emails might be directed at the wrong John. This happened all the time at my company, and people got irritated at me for disallowing first name login names. I even had the example, at one point, of 3 David's working for us. So, all this push back on my original statement has me really thinking the replies are completely disingenuous. It's just too easy to come up with a reasonable case where a name should not be allowed.

geofft 12y ago

Oddly, even at technical communities without formal HR that let you choose your own username (GitHub, Debian, SourceForge, etc.) or email address (LKML, just about any other open-source mailing list), this doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. If you're choosing an address when you have zero political capital and are about to talk a lot with HR and your new management, I have trouble believing this will be more of a problem.