> by Naomi Liu
Take a day off.
This man has won the People's Honour Award for climbing the highest mountains on 5 continents and being the first man to reach the north pole solo.
So Naomi is not necessarily a dead giveaway, you guys really split hairs and raise hackles over just about nothing worthwhile. Mistaking someone's sex is not a massive deal.
I used to have on my team a guy named Joan (pronounced joe-an) who spoke really softly, so his potential new employers would call me for a reference asking about "she" and "Joan", I'd gently correct them so as not to embarass him on any phone interview in the future. Nobody needed to throw a fit over an honest mistake.
Coincidentally, that guy was the best programmer I ever employed.
Anyway, just one of many counterexamples to a non-issue.
And this is on top of calling someone else out for presuming something... and here you all are presuming that Naomi is a feminine name.
We're making a mountain out of a molehill here. This is a persistent and pernicious problem in society at large now. What is the actual point of calling out any POSSIBLE perceived remote slight that you really have to perform mental gymnastics in bad faith to even arrive at?
There was no malicious intent on the part of the original poster, and yet they are excoriated for nothing?
What a massive amount of spare time we all have to waste.
Especially when it is a unisex name.
We could be doing something to better our world, and we spend time _on this_. We do it every day on a massive scale. It's so tiring, so wasteful, and so lamentably useless when there are so many useful and actually kind things we could be doing, instead of just virtue-signalling fake empathy on the internet that amounts to nothing.
Mis-stating gender might be careless when as you imply “their” is the always the safe bet, but it’s probably not enough to justify OP’s unduly critical response. He / she or they could have just replied with “I checked their LinkedIn and Naomi’s a girl, btw”.
As an aside, there's a lot of rightful complaining about the interview process. I've been on both sides and it sucks either way.
As a hiring manager for a small company, we never had the 'process' that bigger companies have, so it was always a seat of the pants decision. Not my favourite thing to do.
As an interviewee, I've struggled with people's favourite questions, you know the ones that you ask so much that it starts sounding like an easy question in your head?... I'm productive, I ship software but interviewing is so incredibly stressful and always makes me feel like I don't know much.
Anyhow, if I was interviewing the OP for a typical web app CRUD position or monolith to micro services refactor or some other common role, I'd think twice. Clearly he's very smart. Is he able to "deliver value" vs optimizing code? I know the post was tongue in cheek, but in the real interview setting you gotta demonstrate how you're a smart team player and allude to your capabilities. It's kinda like dating I guess. You can't show how much of a real person you're on the first date.