this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Honestly, IT should just really ask "What do you want your email address to be?" and not auto-assign. Just give IT a general alias so that your chat name, email address, source control account, or any other account, can all be the same. The issue is that some people are going to want the same exact alias and then that creates a back and forth but at bigger places, IT should be able to cut out some time to make a system to check if a username is taken and just send that to new hires. For smaller places, collisions like that are less likely to happen.
Literally every company I worked in assigned name.surname@company.com, I don't know why people would complicate their life by doing literally anything else.
You've not worked in large companies then because people end up having the same first and last names as each other. Collision with names is literally unavoidable in large companies. Also for people who don't have a single last name, it can get confusing. Do you do First.Last.Last@company or just tell them to pick a favorite last name? (Which is potentially difficult for some people for personal reasons.) Honestly, just give people a chance to tell you what they want to be called, and this all smooths over.
I mean yeah, but it happens even more with the naming scheme in the original post. Most companies just add a number when that happens. Predictable naming schemes, at least as the default, make it a lot easier to find people in large companies.
Do they? I feel like most people use Gmail or Exchange and they don't search by email address but instead by name. Which is a special field that shows the display name of the email address. So you'll typically see "First Last " This is how I typically search the contact list since most of the time the C-level team are all like "tom@somecompany.com" instead of a last name included. Even when I was at T-Mobile and Comcast they had C-level people get to choose if they wanted just their first name.
So overall my suggestion would equalize the company and allow for people to feel better about what they get to be called. At least, that's the intent.
You could alternatively try to enforce the email address format with everyone throughout the company but realistically that never happens. Someone always gets an exception because they are the CEO or pretty much retired but not wanting to learn the new way or whatever. Just letting people be called what they want seems to be the most human-solvable solution.
Sorry, I meant professional company emails. Obviously people can make up whatever private gmail account they want. And people can state their preferred name, but the fact that if I call my coworker "Josh" and their last name is "Jacobson", the fact that I can type in Josh.Jacobson and find them is extremely helpful, and I don't get why companies would complicate that by making it "jojacko" .
Company I most recently joined gave me name.surname1@company.com. Unfortunately there was someone else with the exact same name combination. Feels bad man.
Because 30 years ago we didn't have enough letters or something and people stick with tradition because change is apparently really hard to do.