Public personal dev accounts: opinions?

I feel like there are many devs out there who expose a lot of personal details and opinions all over the web. Maybe it’s just me, but when starting out with the internet I tried my best to separate my personal details (name, age, sex, country, ethnicity, family ties, relationship status,…) from usernames in public.

Seeing devs do it willingly and voice opinions on divisive or sensitive topics kind of messes with me. Aren’t y’all afraid of missing out on job opportunities if someone reads your opinions, code, or other stuff tied to your personal accounts? Or letting anybody (maybe family, friends, acquaintances, …) in on your personal life, mindset, opinions and other personal information?

Anti Commercial-AI license

mesamunefire,

I have a real name account and a couple of one off accounts.

traches,

My open source work is published under my real name because I feel like if someone is running my code, they should know who I am? Also it helps with my CV and such. I don’t go into politics or anything controversial though, keep it pretty professional.

lemmyvore,

Can we please stop with the license crap attached to posts? It’s annoying and also pointless.

the_artic_one,

It will be funny when all the LLMs start posting it in their responses at least.

mesamunefire,

I heard that there is a person making a bot to pull all linked comments/posts to the Anti AI license stuff as a joke. To train a LLM and create more comments.

This is a strange world.

abhibeckert,

If any of that is part of the hiring process - I don’t want the job.

If HR is incompetent enough to consider things like relationship status or political opinions then what other bullshit policies does the company have? It’s probably the tip of the iceberg.

By far most important thing is to have good colleagues, because without good colleagues your job will be miserable or the company will not last (or both). Made the mistake of working for a shitty job at high pay once and it was one of the worst decisions of my life.

Don’t waste your life working for incompetent companies.

Also, as someone who has hired devs… if you have a public profile, and it doesn’t make you look hopelessly incompetent, then your application is going onto my shortlist. Too many applications cross my desk to look at all of them properly, so a lot of good candidates won’t even get considered. But if there’s a GitHub or similar profile, I’m going to open it, and if I see green squares… you’ve got my attention.

You’ll get my attention wether the username matches your real name or not, but bonus points if it’s your real name. Openness leads to trust. And trust is criitcal.

litchralee,

I think this can be more generalized as: why do some people eschew anonymity online? And a few plausible reasons come to mind:

  • a convention carried over from the pre-Internet days to be honest and frank as one would be in-person
  • having no prior experience with anonymity or a basis to expect anonymity to last
  • they’re already a real-life edgelord and so the in-person/online distinction is artificial, or have an IDGAF attitude to such distinctions

IMO, older people tend to have the first reason, having grown up with the Internet as a communication tool. Younger, post-2000 people might have the second reason, because from the events during their lifetime, privacy has eroded to the point it’s almost mythical. Or that it’s like the landed gentry, that you have to be highly privileged to afford to maintain anonymity.

I have no thoughts as to the prevalence of the third reason, but I’m reminded of a post I saw on Mastodon months ago, which went something like this: every village used to have the village idiot, but was mostly benign because everyone in town knew he was an idiot. One moron in every 5 or 10 thousand people is fine. But with the Internet, all the village idiots can network with each other, expanding their personal communities and hyping themselves up to do things they otherwise wouldn’t have found support for.

Coming back to the question, in the context above, maybe online anonymity is a learned practice, meaning it has to be taught and isn’t plainly natural. Nothing quite like the Internet has ever existed in human history, so what’s “natural” may just not have caught up yet. That internet literacy and safety is a topic requiring instruction bolsters this thought.

ricecake,

Totally agree on the sensitive or decisive topics point, but I include a caveat that what some people call “sharing decisive viewpoints in public”, others call “not hiding their gender/sexual orientation”, and similar things, so it’s not always perfectly clear cut.

I try to avoid being inflammatory in general, anonymous or not, and I’m not perturbed if people know my city, industry, trade, and vague interests. Basically what you could figure out from a polite conversation while waiting in line.

I’ve got a lot of code up on GitHub, and some of it is absolute garbage. If an employer judges me poorly for sharing my pile of one-off scripts, or “basic human decency and lack of respect for neo Nazis in a casual setting”, then I frankly probably don’t care to work for them.
Admittedly, other than a script that automates figuring out which web hosts are hosting hate groups, there’s not much political content in my software.

I do alright, so my system seems to work.

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