Comment by pkaye
8 years ago
When a previous company was acquired, everyone got a new job offer generally better since the company wanted everyone to stick around. Well except for one guy. A junior engineer in one of our teams. He was a really good engineer too so we were shocked. It turned out he had the same first and last name as another person at our company so they thought it was a duplicate entry and omitted it. Eventually a offer was prepare after a week of escalation.
Heh, that's the real problem actually with buggy name-based systems. In my current company we have a person officially called "Name Surname 2" for the same reason.
A lot of state DMVs and other government offices apparently use name + birthdate as a "unique" identifier, which works about as well as you'd expect. It doesn't usually cause problems, because both people are accepted as 'real', but it's alarmingly easy to end up with someone else's license suspensions, voter registration, or even credit score.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...
Because Name Surname 1 was already taken!
Because Name Surname 0 was already taken!
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Don't US payroll/hr systems use SS number its one of the few cases where it makes sense to use it
Was this is the US? There are benefits to having a national, public, unique ID # for each person and this is one of them; it reduces the number of 'they had the same name' mistakes to nearly zero
Doesn't a US employer have their employees social security number, which would fulfill exactly this role if people cared to look at it?
I'm not that knowledgeable but I thought SSN aren't public information and that they are not used throughout information systems to identify people because they are 'sensitive information'
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Social security numbers are not unique, but combine them with a birthday and name, and it gets pretty close.
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