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?
I keep different identities for different purposes. This identity is pretty public and active on social media, but mostly in the developer and anime sphere. This is partially born out of a desire to find other people to connect with on those topics, which makes it a worthy trade-off in my view. I also don’t mind sharing what I’ve posted since most won’t bother to look closely, and even if they do, there’s not too much to find other than my interests and past projects.
Other identities serve other interests or are much more personal, so those things aren’t as closely in the public eye. My more divisive or controversial takes are really only shared with trusted friends and generally not in writing though, so I might not fit the question you’re posting very well, haha
I think we’re similar. This is the programmer identity, which is one of many (and can hopefully not be easily tied to the others).
I also don’t mind sharing what I’ve posted since most won’t bother to look closely
Share with whom, btw?
The software industry loves hiring people who effectively dox themselves on every platform. I’m starting to compromise on my privacy values because I would rather eat food than rage against the machine at this point. Don’t even get me started on the culture surrounding Linkdin.
YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU has compromised on their privacy values by not including a special character in their username.
Don’t hate, that’s their actual name.
YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU has compromised on their privacy values by not including a special character in their username.
They’re just trying to convey they’re not THAT strong. 😂
Can we please stop with the license crap attached to posts? It’s annoying and also pointless.
You’re annoying and pointless.
I guess the flipside of not being so public is that you get to be an asshole behind a keyboard, eh?
Please do not make personal attacks,
- as they will not help progress your case in adding CC licenses to your post/comments
If you wish to relinquish your hope of licensed comments, you may therefore make personal attacks again. But, please direct them all at me, so as not to hurt others’ feelings.
My bad.
I’m not trying to make a case for the licence. I’m just adding it to my comments yet people keep feeling it necessary to harass me about it. The list of people I’ve blocked for mocking me about it has become quite long. Should I start reporting them?
Why are you adding it? It’s not valid. You don’t own the content you post online anymore. They’re copies of your original content, to which you’ve already granted whatever license the website uses. You can’t re-license those particular copies, it’s out of your hands.
The poster licensing to the platform is not the same as licensing to the public.
This instance
programming.dev
ToS declares:2.2. By submitting, posting, or displaying user content on our services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, distribute, and display such user content.
Distribution and displaying with attribution follows CC BY and SA. NC currently probably does - but may or may not (currently accepts donations).
The ToS only defines the license to distribute and display. It does not define how users and consumers of that distribution may or may not use the content.
So from this instance alone, there could be an argument of “the comment defines how it may be used”.
But I’m not sure that holds given that federated distribution goes to other instances with different terms. For those that don’t define how content may be consumed, it may be a reasonable argument. For those that define it in a conflicting manner, the ToS may override the content CC claim. Given the federated, distributed nature, given that you can reasonably expect such a conflict, there’s a question of whether it holds in the first place if you can expect conflict invalidating it.
Either way, it’s a convoluted mess, and incredibly noisy. Lemmy content has a language attribute. If there’s a need for a license, it should be a metadata attribute in the same manner.
hmm
realistically what would happen for those reports is that warnings would be given,
- after that it would mainly depend on the reported user in question
I have a suggestion for addressing the sources of harassment
I’d like to point out a couple of main concerns:- you might want to [figure out/explain to the public]:
- how and why adding the CC license would protect your comments/posts from LLM data collection
- when being harassed or intimidated, try not to engage/reciprocate with rage or hate [MadMax_That’s_bait.gif],
- if you do it’ll make you less trustworthy to outsiders peering in,
- this I learned painfully from experience
- if you do it’ll make you less trustworthy to outsiders peering in,
- try to ask questions as it can help you learn truths of every situation,
- and typically the path to truth can help you figure out solutions to problems
I mean tbh they’re free to do as they wish as long as they’re abiding by our TOS and guidelines
While adding a CC license on a comment is questionable on the aspect of viability, it doesn’t violate any of our community rules
Please do not gate keep unless there you see justification for the prevention of something
It will be funny when all the LLMs start posting it in their responses at least.
It feels like this needs to be managed on an instance by instance level and not post to post.
I should hope each instance has a provision for posters to grant it an irrevocable, perpetual license to what they post. All instances should. Federation should also have clear terms.
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.
I have a real name account and a couple of one off accounts.
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.
I don’t really get the code point. Like your own code written for personal projects is probably gonna be pretty high quality I’d hope? Sometimes we just write trash to get something finished but soon as I’ve had to change it… hell yeah I’m unfucking that mess, no way do I want to figure out what it does a second time.
Like your own code written for personal projects is probably gonna be pretty high quality I’d hope?
Does every experiment have to be formatted by a code-formatter, linted, 100% code coverage, unit, integration, and e2e tests, have full CICD, an expansive README, documentation, a project board, milestones, be published on package repositories, and a homepage? Does every post you make on the internet have references, perfect grammar, a well thought out point, and can be ready to be published in your field of work?
Um what? I didn’t like hide extra meaning in what I said. High quality code doesn’t imply all that extra shit you added. It’s code that’s easy to read and modify. Typically this just means you name stuff well and document things that aren’t obvious. Usually my docs explain why something exists since thinking it’s unnecessary cause you don’t remember what the original problem was a common occurrence before I started doing so.
Is high quality code ran through a formatter? I’d hope so yeah. There should be a consistent code style across the entire project. Doesn’t matter what it it long as it’s consistent.
100% code coverage is meaningless and as such a pointless metric. Also 100% coverage is explicitly tied to the implimentaion as all code paths have to be reached which is obviously not a good idea (tests have to change when the implimentaion changes as you’re testing the implimentaion not the api).
Really a lot of this is just meaningless buzz words as an attempt at some sort of gotcha. Really don’t understand how you even interpreted a statement so simple in this way.
I write tons of absolutely crap code for personal use, but I generally don’t publish it since it’s usually for stuff no one else would care about anyway.
Generally speaking, my approach is “on the internet no one knows you’re a dog”. I tend to containerize my activity and keep as much PII away from the internet as possible.
I have a few accounts on the fediverse because otherwise the conjunction of regional data, interests and languages would easily identify me. Not that i generally do dumb stuff (but i can easily get flagged if i touch… hot topics, you must pander to certain groups otherwise you’re immediately the villain, very free the fediverse), it’s just that the internet hasn’t quite evolved the way i was expecting it 30 years ago and surveillance capitalism is now a thing, among other factors. I provide as little and as fake information as possible when creating accounts.
As far as the professional sphere goes, all recruiters will ever see is a simple LinkedIn profile. I don’t have much time to do pet projects, unfortunately, and certainly wouldn’t host them on github - forgejo and codeberg ftw.
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.
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 of instruction bolsters this thought.
Those were indeed the reasons I thought people did it. Most other responses here do seem to use multiple identities online, so maybe it’s less prevalent amongst programmers. It’s possible that most of the public accounts are just those public facing identities, with a chunk of them for the reasons you stated above.
Some people put their whole lives on the internet and never once stop to think if it’s a good idea. Then again, online safety and security are never taught or communicated, at least in the west, maybe by design.
online safety and security are never taught or communicated
As a Computer Science teacher I’m gonna tell you that isn’t true at all. We absolutely DO teach about e-safety. Kids probably know more about it than their parents do!
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 programmers… if you have a public profile, and it doesn’t make you look hopelessly incompetent, then your application is going onto my shortlist.
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.
I think that’s the crux of issue. If somebody’s open and said the wrong thing at the wrong time in their life, do you think whoever’s reading it will have the context to understand the circumstances it was written in? Also, won’t it make the selection process even more biased? IINM people like to recruit and promote people they most agree with or see themselves in. Giving a recruiter or company grounds to disagree with you doesn’t seem like a great start.
Let’s say a candidate writes in a blog post that they’re pro squashing commits and all their personal projects use it too, but your shop is strictly against it. How many developers and recruiters do you think it would taint during the recruitment process? Wouldn’t you run the risk of dismissing a candidate who in private is pro-squashing, but open to other ways of working professionally?
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.
It’s not unheard of for people to lose their jobs for stating their political opinion online. #ByeByeJob is a hashtag and https://old.reddit.com/r/byebyejob/ is a subreddit for a reason.
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.
Don’t you feel people’s public profiles only contain purposely perfect code and not what they’re actually going to do on a daily basis? Why doesn’t everyone just take your code and use it as their own, for their CV, without crediting you? I don’t think I’d trust a person’s public profile as it would be way too easy to just fake it.
If people wanna steal my code they can steal it, it’s why I publish it. It’s not that good anyway
I don’t agonize over every line of public code or anything, I just make it reasonably maintainable and generalized enough to be useful to people who aren’t me. If it’s a throwaway bash script with hardcoded paths and such, why would I put it up anywhere?
Implying perfect code exists anywhere.
It’s also trivially easy to tell if you’re presenting someone else’s work as your own. In an interview, you ask about their projects. Those would be very easy (and often fun) for the actual creator to answer, and not for anyone else.
Do you have another account for testing stuff? Experiments, one-off scripts, copy-pasted hudge-kludge, and just in general unprofessional stuff?
Not really, If it’s throwaway then I don’t publish it anywhere.