[OT] Re: Github names & avatars

[poliklosio via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 14 May 2016 at 19:19:08 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/13/2016 10:08 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Your name is your brand.
>
> Probably the most obvious example of this is Trump. Long before 
> he got into politics, he understood his name was his brand, and 
> never lost an opportunity promote his brand (and profit off of 
> it).
>
> In fact, I stopped using pseudonyms online for my professional 
> work because I watched "The Apprentice" and realized that he 
> had the right idea.
>
> Also, think of the top programmers in the business. They all do 
> things online under their own names.

If I would guess, I would say that using your own name instead of 
a fake one is OK. However, I would be cautious.

Please, mind the survivor bias! Would someone post here if he 
lost his engineering career because of a comment on the internet? 
Of course not!

How many of those unlucky guys are there per one successful one? 
10, 1, 0.01, 0.000001? You can't know until you actually do hard 
work collecting actual statistical data.

For everything anyone writes there are pretty much as many 
interpretations as the readers.
And vague claims about touchy subjects are million times worse. 
If someone has a bad day, this really can turn out badly. Culture 
differences make it even worse. What is a technical disagreement 
in one country can be racism in another. Given sufficiently many 
words, those things can happen. A joke can be easily 
misunderstood as something completely different than intended. 
Also, social media sometimes spreads the news about people's 
textual mistakes. Just google "careers destroyed by social media".
Also, you assume that you are going to be judged by technical 
merit alone, which is fair enough if you are white male with good 
reputation, living in a country known for its love for freedom of 
speech. It may be very different if you are a poor immigrant girl 
in a third world country trying to convince a prospective 
employer to give you the first chance at trying to do some 
programming.

Another bias: Everyone always wants to think they are always 
victims and never the perpetrators, but still somehow 
perpetrators exist. After all, I would never say anything hurtful 
to anyone ever, right? And those people who accidentally hit 
pedestrians with cars are always pure evil, and I could never be 
one of them, right? Noone could ever be one of those until he is. 
:)

There's a reason why stuff like correspondence is traditionally 
private.