@technomancy salesforce. next question?

when I started at my current job I had never used slack before, and I started creating my account with the username @technomancy of course

the HR person who was helping me get set up was like "uhhhh yeah, how about you use your legal first name instead?" and I'm like ... "ok I guess?"

and then multiple times over the next six months in the middle of conversations I would have people randomly be like "wait, you're technomancy? I had no idea!" and I was like ... well, that worked great

meanwhile I occasionally get pinged with messages that are meant to go to other people who share my given name

@technomancy Did you know two people can have the same @ nick on Slack? At least, I don't think they've fixed that yet

I'm still @ drbrain

At one point there was a search bug where if I put “technomancy" in my status field and somebody searched for "technomancy" I might pop up first?

Slack is a fractal of bad design choices

@drbrain I was flabbergasted when I discovered this; usernames, you had one job

@technomancy real name policies really ruin the fun. I can say I also had that moment at some point, where I went "oh... wait I work with technomancy??"

@technomancy fwiw, you can work around this with the “display name” setting, somewhat. My work account has both my legal name and “genehack” on it.

@genehack yeah, I think that works now but at this point it would just be more confusing than anything, plus the display names seem to have a lot of bugs in them when you try to use them for mentions

@arch slack kinda feels like it was designed to take online chat and make it as straight-laced, no-fun-zone as possible

@airshipper I mean, the rot had already set in long before the acquisition

Salesforce did make things worse, but they were only accelerating a process that had been ongoing for many years

@airshipper for example, this abomination predates the acquisition by four years https://api.slack.com/changelog/2017-09-the-one-about-usernames