i'm going to tell a funny story that requires 10 times more context than funny story ok here we go
i was employed at amazon for like six years i think. the company's username policy, in a nutshell:
- 3-8 alphabetic letters
- must be based on your name in some way
- usernames are the primary identifier in use across the company
- at the time, every single employee, temporary worker, and worker working for a contractor, had a username (this may still be the case but i heard it's not anymore because union busting)
- usernames are the primary key for users in most databases
- usernames can only be recycled after 18 months; any username held by an L7 or higher (senior manager/principal engineer) can never be recycled
- username changes are permissible for a very small number of reasons, but thanks to internal activism that list includes "you are trans and your username reflects a name you no longer wish to keep"
amazon has been in business for 28 years, so you can probably imagine the number of systems that have risen and fallen in that time that never expected someone would need to change their username.
my original username was my first initial and my last name; when i joined in 2015 i had the feeling that i might be trans despite trying to convince myself i wasn't(? regularly?), and rather smartly had [first initial][last name] assigned to me. fortunate that the feminine name that was stuck in the back of my head since about 2007 started with the same first initial eh
but as i continued, y'know, being trans, ultimately i decided i wanted more control over my last name. the company had good, if latent, systems in place for changing your name whenever you wanted, so i was periodically known as "iliana ??????" and "iliana '--;DROP TABLE users"1 and "iliana destroyer of worlds" in the company directory and every email i sent for years.
and ultimately i decided i have no attachment, and then later negative attachment, to my family's name. and i finally started to dislike having to log in using that name several times a day. i also had gained a lot of knowledge of how to perform cache busting across the company's various people systems, and had a rough idea of exactly what i was doing. soooo in 2021, i finally decided "hey, i know it's fraught to change your username after 5 years of employment, but i'm gonna do it" and my management chain was like "great. lmk if i can help". so i filed the ticket on a monday, an IT engineer and i chatted on a tuesday, we scheduled it to go off thursday evening. i took friday off because i know better. on monday, i planned to go into the office to reimage my laptop so that i could go home and reimage my desktop.
we have now reached the funny story part of this post: per company policy, UNIX UIDs must not be recycled along with usernames. the username i was taking was originally assigned in like 2002, back when UNIX UIDs had to be recycled for technical reasons (not enough bits). but the person who did the name change missed a step in the process specifically for handling username recycling, and so on monday i learned that i had traded in my 7-digit UID and had been reassigned the UNIX user ID 1701.
and then i spent the next week figuring out how to do my job again
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which led to a VP escalation from a well-intentioned security project manager, who did not realize that single quote apostrophes were extremely common in last names and were unlikely to cause problems but here we are, because my manager was out on paternity leave and his manager had just left the company so the next person above me who was actually working was a goddamn company VP