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Is Your Email Address Holding You Back? (wsj.com)
Whether you're freelancing or on the job hunt, don't let a poorly conceived online handle limit your career prospects A quick glance at any group email confirms what recruiters and hiring managers know too well: Not everyone sheds their adolescent email addresses when they enter adulthood, instead maintaining allegiance to digital monikers based on the music, videogames and contraband they once held dear. From a report: Though rebranding yourself online can be a pain (as those who've been through the ordeal of changing their contact info know), the practice is often better for your career trajectory, said Chris Swanson, a career and college counselor at Bremerton High School in Washington state. "It's just like the idea that a handshake and eye contact makes a good impression. That's the first thing that comes across someone's desk." Even so, many Americans still use curious handles for professional exchanges, either by virtue of inertia or nostalgia or because they've never had an employer-issued handle and don't know any better -- they only know Dave Matthews rules.
[...] It might be ironic to send missives from @aol.com, but it doesn't suggest an exceedingly tech-savvy candidate. Actually, "It weirds me out," said Ms. Moore. "Why are you still using AOL? Gmail is definitely the winner." Don't even get her started on Hotmail. When updating a resume it's a good time to evaluate if an email address seems dated, especially if applying for a tech gig.
[...] It might be ironic to send missives from @aol.com, but it doesn't suggest an exceedingly tech-savvy candidate. Actually, "It weirds me out," said Ms. Moore. "Why are you still using AOL? Gmail is definitely the winner." Don't even get her started on Hotmail. When updating a resume it's a good time to evaluate if an email address seems dated, especially if applying for a tech gig.
If you're (say) enrolled in grad school part-time, use your university address. This provides automagic proof that you're in fact enrolled -- one less thing on their resume for them to need to check.
I quit using gmail for anything important about a year ago. They had gotten strident and shrill about wanting a phone number for 'recovery' if they ever choose to lock the account for whatever reason. For a few dollars a month I got a paid account. I chose Fastmail, there are other companies as well.
Gmail is more 'professional.' It indicates to the HR people that you will probably be a good compliant employee.
lol I used my grad school email for 4 years after graduation and only let it lapse out of disuse. I guess it implies you were probably once enrolled, but because of how i was employed it showed the wrong department.
If someone is still using an AOL email address, so what? I know of several successful business which use AOL addresses.
People like Ms. Moore who are "weirded out" by what email domain people use are the problem, not the people applying for positions. Thinking the latest and greatest is the only thing which matters has brought us the abomination which is Windows 10 or the nearly walled and welded garden of Apple.
If these people are more worried about what email address someone uses rather than their qualifications, that explains the sorry state of affairs in the tech industry today. Flash over substance.
Recruiters, being whom and what they are, are less likely to think about time lapses, more likely to see a .edu addy.
Run your own mailserver. DNS registration is cheap these days, and you can have as many different email addresses as you want.
what do i do now?
nothing to see here - move along
Recruiters are more outdated and narrow-minded than the candidates. I say itâ(TM)s time to upgrade them.
It'a 'bout time you stop posting like a homie...
My main email address is ou81269me@hotmail.com
and my password is Hunter2
I'm not bothering with the /s
My oldest current email addres is @netscape.net, although it's been redirected to AOL for many years.
I also have a Yahoo one.
The greatest virtue of a non-Gmail address is that I can use it on my Android phone without the phone being taken over.
I don't have any Google accounts, and I don't plan on it. I use F-Droid and Yalp Store for apps.
It's odd the way TFS paints not using Gmail as "immature", given the ignorance and naivete it takes to use Gmail at all.
Recruiters, being whom and what they are, are less likely to think
I deleted the extra words you put at the end for you.
I've seen fairly innocuous ones that are nonetheless unique, and a quick Google search shows these people are {furries, swingers, potheads, anarchists, involved in political groups who actively oppose our line of work, survivalists, conspiracy theorists}. In general, we try to evaluate talent. If you're applying for a niche or high-end position, we'll likely look at your ... hobby ... as a novelty.
However, if you're applying for something more entry level, at the very least we will question your judgement. At worst, we might think you're a little too weird.
Ever not hired someone because of their email? Nope. Several on the above list I remember because I was all 'I can't believe I hired Bradalicious!'. It is hard, though, when forming a culture fit assessment to exclude such impressions, for good or bad.
Also, it's fun to state sometimes the background company contacts via email, is 'analrapelover1972@yahoo.com' still a good email?
People who use Gmail tell me a few things:
1. They don't care about their own privacy. It's worth less than $2/month to them.
2. They don't see any problem with one or two giant companies holding a hegemony over a large part of the Net.
3. They're lazy.
4. They're not technologically saavy.
It depends on the context, of course, but those are all the things that I think when I see "@gmail.com" (or any other "Free" email address).
I don't respond to AC's.
A gmail address only tells me that you don't mind Google parsing your emails and collating data on you. I'm not sure why an employer would want that but they don't seem to mind too much themselves.
bing has an email prefix? I remember the days of hotmail, msn, live and outlook but now bing?
Make SELinux enforcing again!
"Gmail is definitely the winner"... I don't know, versus what? For a tech candidate, nothing says "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing" quite like writing from a webmail address
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
On the other hand, recruiter may want to set an interview with a candidate applying from root@cia.gov
trust me, every post here and every email, regardless of the service, is seen by automated NSA systems...it's mostly uninteresting...
nothing to see here - move along
I applied to "Big Tech Company A" using a free webmail thing from "Big Tech Company B"
and they gave me a LOT of shit about it.
I work and have worked with some well known and / or high net worth individuals, and more often then not they have an AOL address, as they started using it in the 90s and just just kept using it as they were comfortable with it, and no one ever gave them a good enough reason to switch. (these are obviously not tech industry people)
For myself I did go by a childhood nickname for many many years and it actually stuck in the workplace because I have a very common first name and we had to deconflict.
Now that I work for myself I have dropped it, and I use my personal domain with POP/IMAP on a hosting server with my website, keeping only two weeks of email on the server. Like some people here I'm not interested in having all my email exposed to the Google apparatus.
It'd be interesting to see in what light personal domains are seen in now, not that it matters or affects me at this point. (firstnamelastname.com type format) Before it was a must have piece of real estate, now many people just use a free email service such as Gmail and few people have personal websites anymore.
They'll probably think you're younger as well, which probably helps your prospects quite a bit.
Firstname.Lastname.Turnipface@Gmail.com
No resume should ever be without one of these beauties.
You're welcome.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I've got about six email addresses I use currently, all for different purposes, I can't see why anyone would limit themselves to only one.
I'm not sure why an employer would want that
Perhaps because obsessive paranoid people don't get much work done.
My wife still uses an AOL email address... and why the hell not?
It still works just fine; nobody has a problem reaching her - she hasn't had to make anyone change an address book in 20+ years.
She connects to it via IMAP with a real mail client, and has been doing so for at least the last 15 years, and POP3 before that.
Having an @aol.com address has zero reflection on function, form, appearance or anything else of her email... it's, after all, "just" an IMAP server. No reason to change whatsoever. What's the benefit? Believe it or not, the AOL IMAP servers are pretty stable - no more or less so than any other service. So, no technical or feature upside to doing so.... Why go through the hassle of changing?
"Also, try to have a white-sounding name," Ms. Moore added before stuffing her face with an assortment of Hostess Snack Cakes, inexpensive chocolate smearing her face as the air filled with crumbs dutifully removed by her three french toy poodles.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
a hotmail address shows that you've actually got some experience
Nope. It just shows that you are old. If a younger person has the same knowledge and skills as you, then it is reasonable to conclude that you are a slow learner.
If a younger person has *all* the same knowledge and skills as you then maybe you're a slow learner. Otherwise, not so much.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
job hunting purposes and never use it elsewhere. If you do, you'll find that your professional email will land on a zillion of spam lists and you'll be bothered by recruiters even years after securing a job. By keeping it separate, recruiters also won't be able to find your profiles on the Internet and possibly jeopardise your application efforts.
The reality is that is pure ignorance on the interviewers part, having ancient email addresses connected to those domains often means a long history of involvement with internet, I literally only just ditched an ISP account I had used for nearly 30 years. I do many interviews and not once have I ever given a shit about their email address. However nowadays the ignorance of some interviewers probably does need to be catered for, doesn't mean you have to change anything though, just register a new domain/email address just for those situations. If you are reliant on your domain name and email address to obtain an interview you have other serious problems anyway.
If you have half a clue, get a raspberry-pi, get a domain name, set it up as an email and Wordpress server.
Now you can project yourself as professional or personable as you want.
You can be a household or expand to a company, show family or products,
broadcast opinions, connect with others
you own it, you control it, you secure it
Go well
And I couldn't give less of a toss what the email address is.
My job is to match skillsets and personality to a role. Before sending a CV on to a company I strip contact details anyway. So the hiring company doesn't have that as a baseline. And if there is an email that I think will cost the person I advise them to create another one.
But the recommendation to change it never comes on the 2nd half of the email address. It's always the first. @aol, @hotmail, @rediffmail, who cares? Bigknockersgg@gmail.com got advised to use a different one because she was going for an HR role and the company would have to send the offer letter there.
Seriously who knows what setup people have behind the scenes anyway. An @aol might be in use simply because it is the email address that they have been giving people for the last 20 years. It could potentially all being forwards to a Gmail account anyway.
even better, make a positive tech profile with the identity you give out for a tech job search. they can get suspicious if they see no profile at all.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Use a bang path. And dial-up UUCP. And stay off my lawn.
Have gnu, will travel.
I have my own domain name (since 1995), which is mylastname.org. I send job-seeking info from job@mylastname.org.
I send more serious job-seeking communications (ones that seems like they might actually result in employment) from myfirstname@mylastname.org.
If that's not good enough for "them" then fuck 'em, I don't want to work for them anyway.
...people were hired by their qualifications, not just the perceived propriety of their email address to the trendy.
-Styopa
So you're saying the reason I don't get any interviews is my "Locke2005@hotmale.com" email address?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I interviewed at SCO (The Santa Cruz Operation) once. Showed up in a 3 piece suit. They looked me up and down, and said, "You're not going to fit in here!" My gf at one time worked there; said her Marketing Department manager used to keep his pot in the company freezer (back when it was still very illegal). Of course, they went down the tubes a couple years later anyway.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You should use the email supplied by your ISP. Granted you usually get to choose the part before the @. Gmail is just as much a loser email as AOL, hotmail, yahoo, or bing. All of the email accounts listed are only useful as throw-away accounts. True techies do not use webmail!!
No you shouldn't that locks you into an ISP. Just buy a domain already and use one of the handful of providers that let you point your MX DNS record to thier servers.
I do not exist on social media. You'll not find me on any "professional" sites (i.e. LinkedIn) too. In fact, you'll not see my name or personal information anywhere on the Internet at all (at least not because I put it there lol). Why would I share such critical information with anyone publicly? Because everyone else does so? Because hardly anyone cares about their privacy? Following the herd is simply dumb. Develop some common sense, people.
I've never had a problem with "not having a profile" when looking for a job.
Try going back that far.
Plumbers are not IT guys
That is probably the right thing for most people: Your own domain with a hosted DNS and Email server for it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hey, if you don't mind letting google spy on you in exchange for slightly better free email, you probably won't mind your boss spying on you either, right?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
On the topic of e-mail: an I the only one that finds a buiseness using a a gmail.com address as their main conract e-mail a bit of putting? I mean how hard and/or exspensive is it to get a domain and basic email hosting in 2018?
Personally, using someone's email address as some sort of metric of what kind of person owns it.. pretty stupid really. It shouldn't matter.
And if it does, or did, or will, it's not like getting a new email address is some difficult thing. They're pretty easy to come by these days. Which makes it even more worthless as a metric of what sort of person lies beyond the address.
I think this is about as useful as associating someone's street name with what sort of person they might be. It doesn't matter. At least, it shouldn't.
If I get a resume with user@well.com, or even better, well.com!iris!user, It might bubble closer to the top. Otherwise, as long as it well formed, I don't really care.
You mean that service for illicit sub sandwich personal experiences?
This space unintentionally left blank.
It's definitely a factor when deciding whom to vote for in various local elections. I'm more likely to vote for bob@bob4dogcatcher2018.com or bob@gmail.com than I am for bob@aol.com or doghumper420@hotmail.com.
That way, you can still be "whateverurweirdonameyouchoose"@"whateverservicewasavailable" and still be a very professional givenname.lastname@ieeeorg
Just remeber to make a google (or some other address) to match, since the ieee email is a redirector.
this will not impress anyone for or against you, but at least transmits a modicum of "seriousnes".
If you want to transtmit your funny side, that's what the personal interests part of the CV is for, mine lists scuba diving, cycling and reading.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
A thing to remember about High Tech is that there is enormous value added.
As a result, company management can be off-the-wall-fruitcakes, following or instituting management fads and perpetrating many horrible management pathologies, yet still have enough profit left that the company can go on for years before dying, or even thrive.
Then, even if they take it down (or better yet, bail out just before their house of cards collapses), or a competitor with less pathology eats their lunch, failure in High Tech is so often not the fault of the failing that it's not a black mark. Unless how they screwed up is SO visible that it becomes a scandal (or sometimes even if it is) they can then use their experience as a qualification credit when going for their next job, beat out less pathological but more junior applicants, apply the same or even bigger and better pathologies to another, larger, company, and take it down, too. Iterate for a while and you have a successful career, are rich from cashed-in stock options, and leave a trail of devastation as a legacy.
What's true for upper management goes double for middle management and functionaries. They get to inherit both the pathologies of those above them and create more or follow fads of their own. As lower-ranking they're expected to be less competent and their foul-ups are not the subject of major business-press scandal.
Minsky divided the first three decades of computer science education into three periods of about a decade each:
1) Computer science was too new. Colleges had no idea what to teach, so they taught the wrong stuff. (Like everybody was taught how to WRITE a compiler.) A four-year degree was actually a handicap for getting a job in industry: It meant you had more that you had to UN-learn before you could learn the stuff you actually needed to know to be useful. The trick was to go ALMOST to a degree (to get access to the tools to learn and the useful skills), then get a job and drop out.
2) Colleges figured out enough about what was really needed that going all the way to a four-year degree actually made you more useful than not.
3) Colleges got into teaching a bunch of computer-science methodology fads and the degree became a slight handicap again.
There have been a few more decades since then, and a lot more fads, both in computer science and in management. About a decade back, for instance, a degree was a mandatory check-box, and no matter how experienced you were, how many patents you had, who you knew, or how hard the people running the actual department were crying for you to be hired, you couldn't get HR to process your paper without having the sheepskin, checking the box, and filling in the adjacent slot with the name of one of a handful of big-name schools.
On one hand some big-name companies are again hiring by some measure of skill and not requiring degrees, a practice that might spread. (Especially if H1Bs get restricted.) On the other, we've got the "email provider is A SIGN" fad in H.R. circles. So here we go again.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
After years of using name@comcast.net among others, I'm thinking of buying a domain although the one ending in my last name is taken
Poll: What sounds better name@1lastname.com or name@lastname1.com ?
Is it even worth it I wonder since it's $ for the account renewals....
Get up!
It depends what is the job.
Once bubbly head recruited asked me why you do not have Facebook account or at least professional web page? ....
My answer? My employers are paying me for protecting their data. Why I should show poor care about my data? It created that big question mark over recruiter head
and smile on my future boss face
I am quiet back end guy making sure that private things will stay private. ...
Even convinced my boss that it is worth to invest in professional physical security
Remember S&W beats 2 factor authentication.
My oldest current email addres is @netscape.net, although it's been redirected to AOL for many years. I also have a Yahoo one.
Yeah. Some people do not need to re-brand them self. Some people may even have some older and newer code or old message boards stuff posted from that unfashionable email ...
The inter-tubes thingy did not started when millennials started using "The most fashionable services for Year VXYZ"
Why is this necessarily bad? Changing an email address is a big deal, unless you're maintaining multiple addresses. If some recruiters think that gmail is better than aol or yahoo, then they're basing this on fashion and not logic. If one free email service sounds iffy, then all of them should be considered iffy.
I have one address that I have paid for, not too much a year, which forwards all the email to my ISP account. I can't change it easilly because it's been my address for 25 years. At one point, it got a reputation for spamming and I was blocked from some sites but that got resolved. Too bad it's difficult to just keep the same one forever easily without paying for it and that other email readers would respect Reply-to: instead of using the ISP's address.
(I wanted to get a domain name but it was a bit expensive at the time and was not clear how to attach that to an email provider in the mid 90s when I didn't even have internet at home, whereas my email was "free for life" until they decided it made more business sense to charge for it)
But definitely screwed up with my handle. Why do I keep it? Because I always hope to stumble across old online friends.
This isn't hypothetical. At a prior gig I was discussed resume screening with a coworker. He indicated that he'd round-filed my resume because of my @aol.com email address. I only got an interview because of a persistent person in HR.
I'd had that email address since AOL came on CDs in magazines, but that conversation caused me to switch to gmail.
(Thanks for being honest Dave. That conversation has helped me advance my career. I am in your debt.)
Who uses only one e-mail address these days? Stupid article.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
The data is safe. With spelling like that no AI parser can make any sense of it.
A gmail.com address can also that you wanted a stable, long-term email address with high availability and good spam filtering, and fewer political implications than most addresses.
I don't think so. Been using "retired-hit-man@IKnowWhereYouLive.com" for years and never had anyone say anything bad about it.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
... into n00b territory when people are discussing the professional branding value of Hotmail vs. Gmail. :-) ... etc. ... huge gap ... bladiblah@gmail/Hotmail/whatever.
It goes like this:
MyFristname@mylastname.tld, contact@mylastname.tld, etc. or contact@mydomain.tld,
Why is this even on Slashdot?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Recruiter = Person who still applies to work in a job that was replaced by computers 25 years ago and they didn't actually notice
I have a simple response to recruiters when they say :
Them : I have a great customer...
Me : No, you don't. They left it up to a relative stranger to track down leads instead of searching LinkedIn or Monster or whatever else. You have a customer who doesn't actually care enough to use Google.
Them : I have a great opportunity for you...
Me : No you don't. Companies don't use recruiters when they want serious candidates, they use recruiters when they are looking for meat. They get their serious candidates through personal networking and personal recommendations. You would never hire a candidate for a "Great opportunity" through something as anonymous as a recruiter.
Them : We're hiring 17 great people for a project...
Me : Good luck! You're attempting to build a team without any real knowledge of how they will work together as a team. You're actually throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some will stick. If you're hiring 17 more or less random people for a project, most of those people are basically just desperate and if I were there, I'd have to do all their jobs for them. You'd be better off hiring two or three known assets and have them bring their own people in. In reality, if you're hiring 17 people at once, you should actually be outsourcing the project.
There are many things to say to recruiters... my dad was a recruiter back before the Internet. Back then, to look at jobs outside of your local area, it was the only way to go. Once the web came around, recruiters were basically people who couldn't find a real job for themselves and now are trying to do it for someone else.
Again, recruiters showing the exact attitudes that causes people to just blow them off.
Why don't you have a good hard look at yourselves and realize that judging people on surface criteria is a personality failure? You complain about people not being courteous, but that doesn't give you an excuse to judge people.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Sadly, fashion, not logic is important. It gets you past the non tech interviewers and past HR. In fact, I've found that to even get interviewed by the technical people, fashion is a must, and in interviews, usually the tech people's recommendations are tossed out for who the manager likes or dislikes. I've seen people hired just because they drove BMWs, and the boss considered people who drove relatively expensive foreign cars more likely to care about status and their job. Some companies, it isn't this way... if people interviewing know what they are doing, they will toss someone, and the management will respect it. Other companies, is about form over function.
People assume so much about your E-mail address. If I have an aol.com address, that has a negative connotation. For "free" E-mail [1], gmail is probably the most neutral. me.com/icloud can be looked at as good/bad depending on the company. Yahoo seems to be a provider mainly used as a place to dump ads when you have to give an email address for some local store's app. Anything with the "mail" as part of the domain might look cheesy.
I have found that having one's own domain and paying a few bucks a month for E-mail is worth it. People tend to remember your domain, for better or worse.
Caveat: If you are doing a job hunt, use aliases. For example, have a different email address on your resume than the one you use normally. The phone number, similar. Use Google Voice or similar. If you don't, you will continue to have recruiters calling you 24/7 saying they have a job for $8 an hour in Lower Elbonia that requires a MCSE, CCIE, CISSP, and RHCA, and are you available for work. You will get a recruiter calling, then emailing you constantly about completely irrelevant stuff, in hopes his scattergun technique lands him someone.
[1]: TANSTAAFL. You pay for "free" email. $DEITY knows who has full, unfettered access to your mailbox. For example, Yahoo now has part of their ToS, that Verizon has access to your stuff.
What is this "your email address" ?
Singular?
Seriously?
I've got about 20 more-or-less (many just forward to the same inbox) email addresses on half as many domains. Not counting work e-mail.
Even if you don't run your own server and own a couple domains like I do, it is absolutely trivial to set up two, three, five or fifty e-mails with one or several e-mail providers. In fact, if I didn't run my own mailserver, I'd definitely do so in order to not be fucked if my e-mail provider suddenly disappears or decides to not do this business anymore, or move to a pay model and holds my e-mail history hostage.
Why in the world would anyone have only one e-mail address?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You do realise email is plain text sent over the interwebs? Anyone can read it without much effort no matter who you're with or where you host...
Them : I have a great customer...
Me : No, you don't. They left it up to a relative stranger to track down leads instead of searching LinkedIn or Monster or whatever else. You have a customer who doesn't actually care enough to use Google.
When I wanted to relocate (family reasons), I didn't have any contacts in the area I wanted to relocate to -- I worked with a great recruiter and had an interview scheduled for my current job before the job was even posted on the job boards.
Them : I have a great opportunity for you...
Me : No you don't. Companies don't use recruiters when they want serious candidates, they use recruiters when they are looking for meat. They get their serious candidates through personal networking and personal recommendations. You would never hire a candidate for a "Great opportunity" through something as anonymous as a recruiter.
When my company needed to grow, we quickly ran out of personal recommendations and though we posted to the usual places, sifting through the hundreds of unqualified resumes got to be a chore. The company had worked with a recruiter off and on for over 10 years, and she sourced us some great candidates (including me).
Recruiters are kind of like travel agents -- you don't always need one, but when you do, a good one is worth their weight in gold.
* Expert Sexchange
If you have some IT knowledge, so everybody here, use your own domain. If you use email professionally, use your own domain.
Costs about 10USD per year. I do not get it if a local bakery uses a hotmail adresss on their store window,or if a consultant jands me a bussiness card with a gmail adress.
You still can set it up so that Google can read your emails if you want.
And that first oart? If you have any IT knowledge and the address is holding you back, blame yourself.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
GMail is the "winner"? It's one of the mail "services" which forwards all your messages to the NSA, and which mines them for the commercial benefit of themselves and their partners. ....
Making this statement during the interview and they will move on to the next candidate.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
The gold comparison for good recruiters is apt. To find one, you have to shovel a lot of crap.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pretty much this. I once landed a job exactly because I did not have FB. Companies who take security serious tend to look for people who take their personal security serious, since, well, why should I assume you care about mine if you obviously don't even care about your own?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you actually use encryption, yes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Since I only use both for unimportant (i.e. work related) stuff...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
tai.nee.wang@aol.com was taken, I get it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The privacy of Google and the reliability of AOL?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So an @protonmail.com address would be undesirable? @protonmail.ch even less so?
"having ancient email addresses connected to those domains often means a long history of involvement with internet"
To you and me that shows experience, lessons learnt and a knowledge of what's good to be repeated and what's bad to be avoided.
To many recruiters and HR drones it raises flags of "this person's old", "they may know more than me", "they're probably prepared to be assertive and not just accepting", "they'll want an decent income"...
An "ancient" email address is great for nostalgia - I still keep a couple myself - but I can appreciate how it can negatively affect job hunting [it shouldn't but it does].
On the other hand, you could probably discern what I think about other businesses by the e-mail address that I give them: if I give you my gmail address, it means that I'm not that concerned about/don't highly value your business; my 'professional' address (a facade redirecting to proton mail) is used for most business purposes; my personal domain address is reserved for a very few special cases. If I give you a hotmail or yahoo address (yes I still keep them going) I really regard it as a throwaway and am not really likely to follow up. :)
Personal e-mail is a different story
You seem to be implying that ISPs and webmail providers are not parsing your emails and collating data on you. That would be nice.
Unencrypted email is not, and has never been, a secure channel. If you want to impress your prospective employer in this field, provide your public encryption key (not on a USB pen). That works with any mailbox.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
"use your university address."
Dammit, you mean I didn't get the job because I used my old Big_Dick6521@hotmail.com address?
Seriously. I pay less than $2.50/month for a personal domain and a hosting package with 5GB storage, unlimited traffic, Roundcube webmail, full support for Wordpress and bunch of other software I can install, at a reputable and very well-regarded hosting provider.
My email is mine.
Eat the rich.
And if I run my own mail server?
What category do I fall in?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Them : I have a great customer... Me : No, you don't. They left it up to a relative stranger to track down leads instead of searching LinkedIn or Monster or whatever else. You have a customer who doesn't actually care enough to use Google.
Alternatively, I have a team of 4 developers (including me) and our hr person is basically just a part time employee that processes payroll. I have neither the time or the aptitude to spend days trawling through LinkedIn or whatever you think I should be doing with my time instead of building my product. However I have a reasonable amount of cash and I'm willing to pay someone else to do the web trawling.
Them : I have a great opportunity for you... Me : No you don't. Companies don't use recruiters when they want serious candidates, they use recruiters when they are looking for meat. They get their serious candidates through personal networking and personal recommendations. You would never hire a candidate for a "Great opportunity" through something as anonymous as a recruiter.
In an ideal world, absolutely. Certainly, most of the best candidates I've interviewed were people I've interviewed from hackernews. However, the worst CVs were also from there. In my experience, you want to give yourself the best openings to get the right candidate and that means recommendations, meet ups, hackernews and recruiters.
Them : We're hiring 17 great people for a project... Me : Good luck! You're attempting to build a team without any real knowledge of how they will work together as a team. You're actually throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some will stick. If you're hiring 17 more or less random people for a project, most of those people are basically just desperate and if I were there, I'd have to do all their jobs for them. You'd be better off hiring two or three known assets and have them bring their own people in. In reality, if you're hiring 17 people at once, you should actually be outsourcing the project.
Any project that starts with hiring 17 people will probably never get delivered. A lot of these kind of postings, at least where I live (London), are for contract bodies at banks, which is generally well-paid but incredibly boring maintenance work, so take that or leave it
One of the problems with your theory that you should be able to build a large team from recommendations is this though. I have a team of 3 other people. They are the best people I have worked with over the last 3 or 4 years - that is why I brought them in. Who are they going to have worked with in that period that is outside of the same group? You need a way of bringing in new blood
Why would protonmail.ch be less desire able? They are under strict privacy and banking laws.
To access your mails there, someone need a search warrant by a Swiss judge and be present in person and search the files in person physically on a computer inside of the mail provider.
They never will hand out a copy of the mails to anyone outside of Switzerland.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Facebook has nothing to do with your own security.
No idea were that myth comes from.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Seems recruiting is fucked up in your country.
A recruiter doing this in Germany would be out of business pretty soon, and probably personally sued into oblivion.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This just reminds me of the names people would use on AIM. In particular I was always confused by the vast number of: xX_aZn_SenSAtion_goku_Xx variants. I asked a friend why she had her xx azn whatever name and her response was something along the lines of: "It's for my Asian pride, why wouldn't I or anyone else want to display that???" I remember just being really confused as to why it was that important.... and still why it needed the xX's in it... Plus the pride being in being "Asian" rather than Japanese.
Wages in London seem incredibly low. I see "senior" positions advertised at £50k. Maybe some people are willing to put up with several of hours of hell commuting a day, but not me.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I have my old internet "handle" based accounts, and I've had several variations on them over the years. I still use one of those for communicating with people who I know well -- and who I no longer have to worry about impressing... because they already know me well enough to not really care about my online handle, anymore.
I also have one "non-handle" account, and I use that anytime that a first impression actually matters, such as (obviously) interviewers and/or recruiters. That account is based upon my real name, which means it matches up nicely with what they'll see on my resume. I think it works pretty decently for that purpose.
The only note-able disadvantage is, my "real name" account has a rather peculiar set of problems, which I've somehow never experienced with any of my other accounts: Some other idiot with a vaguely similar name thinks that it's their account, and keeps using it when they fill in their contact information with various companies. And I don't necessarily think that they're just attempting to "black hole" junk advertisers... I've received confirmation messages for house purchases and rentals, vacation reservations, flight confirmations... you name it. Disturbingly, many of the companies which send me information for this other "non-me" person, never even bother to perform basic verification of the address before sending personal information to it.
And before you ask: yes, I've tried to get non-me to stop; they don't seem to care, or they're just too oblivious to understand the nature of the problem. They've even opened a Roku account using that e-mail, which I've attempted to cancel on several occasions -- but apparently, any device which has been activated on a Roku account can reactivate that account at any time, even without access to the e-mail account and without the Roku account password... from which I learned that if someone else somehow gains access to your Roku account (with or without your permission) they'll basically have access to it for life, on your dime. If I were malicious, I could add any of Roku's additional-fee services to non-me's account and connect any of my own devices to it for free, and they could do absolutely nothing about it -- except of course cancel the credit card that they used to sign up, which would no doubt result in creditors harassing them for non-payment, at some point. (I'll never be signing up for Roku myself, that's for sure!)
But yeah... I guess I just have to chalk that up as another one of those things that boggles my mind, but simply can't be helped. It's still worth it to maintain that e-mail account, for those brief periods every five or ten years when I'm interviewing for my next job.
"If a younger person has *all* the same knowledge and skills as you then maybe you're a slow learner. Otherwise, not so much."
God, that's funny.
Maybe, if you are the equal of the 'younger person', you've not just kept up, you've been running a race they just now entered. I dunno, but adding experience and current skills together gets me, what, a better employee? Assuming that the recruiter is looking for skills and not cheaper, and that's the value proposition dealt with constantly, even for the janitor/facilities management positions.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
In London? The total package here is 150k for a senior dev and I recently had a developer poached away from me (after a verbal agreement after the interview) for £200k. The going rate for a node/python developer is at least £600 a day (£120k pa assuming 200 days) and a java/c# guy in a bank can be £750 plus (£150k pa assuming 200 days). I've been turned down by a grad for offering £60k a year.
Having said that, I won't hire people that live more than an hour away as I want them to keep a reasonable work life balance and that is not possible spending 3-4 hours on a train every day.
Since the big ones are already virtualized, and anything you post to a service is also, upgrades are mostly done on the applicant side. Make your resume machine-readable, solve one bottleneck in your favor.
Meatspace recruiters are just feeding software.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's really no different from saying, "Oh, I see you've lived in the same house for more than five years. We want applicants who are willing to uproot their lives at the drop of a hat."
Keeping your email address is no different from keeping your phone number for as long as possible - it saves on forcing people to update their contact lists and means you can still be reached if people see something relatively old you've posted somewhere.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I crack myself up.
Seriously though - I do see email addresses from people trying to cross the private to professional line that are rather unprofessional. Sure, "ILoveKitties" is cute and on the edge, but I've seen some that are distressing.
Please let the "Personal Branding" people disappear.
...where do you think gold comes from?
Supernovae.
Next question.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've been online since some of you were barely in kindergarden, and I have two email addresses: a personal one, and a "professional" one, and never the twain shall meet.
I have one address that I have paid for, not too much a year, which forwards all the email to my ISP account. I can't change it easilly because it's been my address for 25 years.
Same here. I just checked, and it would appear I've had my Pobox for 22 years. Until I changed it to point to my personal domain email, I didn't even know what my "real" email address was most of the time. If I changed ISPs, I'd go to Pobox, change the forwarder, then change my email client, and I was good to go. For me, the best benefit of this service is that I never have to tell anyone if the underlying email address changes.
FWIW, I've been very happy with the stock filters that Pobox uses, and their service in general.
This is an ex-parrot!
I just hack my way into the company's server and advertise myself as postmaster@companyname.com. That way they know I'm capable and I've even saved them the bother of setting up an account for me.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
someone told me that once, i felt discriminated like digitally challenged and excluded as if i were a guy with a facepiercing ... think i should have sued her ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
> And if I run my own mail server?
>
> What category do I fall in?
Former Secretary of State and failed presidential candidate who thinks conservatives are deplorables.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
> Facebook has nothing to do with your own security.
HA. Hehh. Haha. Ok. Seriously though, do you believe this? If you use facebook, your digital breadcrumb trail is much more marked. That, alone, is security-impactful. Let alone "using facebook" normally means allowing FB javascript and 3rd party resource requests and running a FB app.
You have a 5-digit ID, you've been here over a decade. The phrase "attack surface" should mean something to you by now. Using FB requires using it, that surface grows. The phrase "crowbar security" should mean something. Using FB means leaking when/where you are, and if you don't see how that's security-impactful, go play tourist in Ukraine.
And I'm sure they prefer hiring candidates who, by their selection of email provider, have already shown they're okay with it.
Also, I'm sorry for your bad experiences with overbearing employers - I recommend avoiding working for a corporation, or any business with more than a few dozen employees. Human decency doesn't seem to survive well at those scales.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's AzeHosting, a Danish hosting provider. You get a full cPanel hosting package with a big line of available packages you can install, plus email accounts with full IMAP and calendar etc.
I have nothing but praise for them.
Eat the rich.