Recently in the Wall Street Journal, they highlighted the phenomenom of one-name email and the bragging rights associated with them. How can it be that the brightest technical minds of a generation gets stymied by something so simple and so trivial?
Email has been around office life for a few decades by now, and for millenials, they’ve always been part of life. So small companies and startups have opted to use the casual first-name as a convention for email, blissfully unaware that this would be an issue down the line?
Perhaps they weren’t planning on the company’s success. Perhaps they’ve never been in a room with more than one person named Dave. It sounds implausible.
Then again, I can’t imagine hiring anyone with the same name as someone else at the company when the name in question is more than a little uncommon. I know a small company of about 9 employees and two of them are share the first name of Austin. Why would you do that to yourselves?
More specifically, wrap your head around this one…. Katie Janesen, Marketing Officer at AppLovin hired her own intern, who just happened to be Katy Jensen. How did someone with such a similar name even make it past the interview screen?
These don’t seems like terribly difficult problems to sort out, but maybe using all one’s brain power to create new ways of making shopping easier leaves little overhead left to sort out common sense issues such as these.
You can read the WSJ piece here…
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cher-elvis-bono-one-name-is-silicon-valleys-status-symbol-1528475180