The great displacement is already well underway?

I think your name is unduly handicapping you. Since it is only a single letter people reading your resume think you are being coy and trashing it.

On you resume, change your name to "Shawn Kay." Wait until you're doing HR paperwork to use your legal name.

Yep.

Some context from the blog post: > I turned to service apps this winter: doordash, instacart, uber eats. Their signup systems were incompatible with my full, legal, one-letter last name, and it took about 50 hours on the phone with doordash support in Malaysia and the background check provider in India to eventually get cleared to drive them. I was not able to get through on the other apps.

For sure the impact is not just limited to service apps.

Long ago I knew a person named Gregg. He constantly had to correct peoples' spelling of his name.

Why would parents burden their kid like this?

This is completely insane. Anyone filtering out qualified applicants based on their names is messing up.

I'm a Collin with two l's. Not as uncommon as Gregg but it's never been a burden. I also don't bother correcting people unless it's happening a lot with the same person and someone I expect to interact with a lot.

Ideally the process is blind to avoid bias but that isn't how most people operate. In this case rejection is based upon his perceived behavior, because abbreviating a last name to a single letter to avoid identification is a lot more common than single letter last names.

Why would any parent name their child water with an extra L?

I will probably begin doing this but i will say-- in the past it was not a hurdle at all, and i got many interviews and a few jobs with this name. I have had about 10 interviews in the last year, going to 4th rounds, and nobody suggested it was a problem. my ratio of landing interviews per applications i put in parallels what I am hearing/reading from all other developers on the job market now. I don't strongly suspect my one-letter last name is a huge culprit here, but after a year on the job search and willing to try anything, i may begin applying with a pseudonym

It really shouldnt be a problem, and in the case of simple corrections, it isnt.

I think it does become a problem where formal systems are inflexible and unable to accommodate or be corrected.

More importantly, why don't adults give up names that clearly put them at an economic disadvantage? The same reason people don't sell houses when they are almost always a bad investment; pride, sunk-costs, sentimentalism or other reasons for their subjectivity.

https://www.reddit.com/r/namenerds/comments/10hssp8/why_do_p...

Change name to an Indian one, problem solved!

Yeah well, if you choose unwisely, you may end up having a name typical for a lower caste, and then you'd get bullied by your "compatriots". Jokes aside, apparently it's a real thing — I've heard some nasty stories about devs of South-Asian descent with caste differences on the team.

Before you get appalled by this "news", let me remind you — the caste system in India has existed for over 3000 years and was formally abolished only in the 1950s. Also the long history of cuisine culture in China and Korea includes dog meat consumption. The point I'm trying to make — some aspects of Western culture might sound equally terrible to others, if not worse.

As an orphan that has wanted a last name change-- it's mostly because I am afraid of being locked out of my google account. Haven't I suffered enough?

If some piece of crap HR software won’t accept it, no one is going to chase you down to debug it. You’ll just end up in the no pile

Unfortunately there's probably something in this. "People don't discriminate based on name" probably belongs in the "falsehoods programmers believe about names" list.

There's lots of evidence of recruiters and sometimes AIs discriminating against female names, "foreign" names, low-status names and so on.

Also, haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but the most famous K is Josef K, of the 'The Trial'. Presumably that's why you chose it. But... you're hoisting a flag of dark cynicism. Reading your blog post, you have seemingly initiated a self-fulfilling prophecy. Getting out of your Kafka-esque nightmare could indeed start with changing your surname, at least informally.

This was an article about a dude adding Mr. in front of his name Kim in the CV to land a job.

This is insane but there is a lesson that even a small thing might affect your resume.

I assure you they filter based on that and on your top level domain in your email address.

I dunno, maybe there's some resume processing program that is used by most companies and an update to it started rejecting your name? Doesn't hurt to try.

Google has a surprising plethora of functioning, non-buggy tools for migrating an account's data to a different account. Do some research about what can't be migrated and make the change for everything else.

Nobody has ever misspelled my first name. They never misspelled the last one before "lite" beer appeared.

Not any more. The most famous K is from Men In Black now.

https://meninblack.fandom.com/wiki/Agent_K

Not at all surprising. I used to work with someone whose first name could have been either male or female, so he always included his masculine middle name when signing email, etc.

When you order Starbucks and say your name is “Gregg with three gs”, does the barista write something wild like “grgeg”?

> some aspects of Western culture might sound equally terrible to others, if not worse.

I must say, nothing about European or North American culture sounds remotely as bad as Indians importing their birthright social hierarchy system into our organizations.

"the most famous"

> nothing about European or North American culture sounds remotely as bad

Setting aside the sweeping generalization you moved the point on, making it look like as if all Indians support or perpetuate the caste system (which by itself a preposterous thought), are you sure about what you said? Aren't you forgetting the colonialism, forced religios conversions, military interventions, scientific racism and eugenics theories?

"Our culture" and technology have a long history of systematically imposing bad shit in the region. Rohingya massacres made by western social media through algorithmic amplification of hate speech for the sake of user engagement is just one of the examples, and that happened like yesterday. So like, wtf are you even talking about?