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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Because Name Surname 1 was already taken!

Because Name Surname 0 was already taken!

No way they were forward-thinking enough to use zero-indexing.

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...

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?

Social security numbers are not unique, but combine them with a birthday and name, and it gets pretty close.

Social Security numbers are unique. They don't work as a great identifier because they can be mistyped, can be hard to verify, and people don't want to give them out too much.

SSNs should be unique, the only exceptions are fraud or errors.

According to the Social Security Administration:

> At its inception, the SSN's only purpose was to uniquely identify U.S. workers, enabling employers to submit accurate reports of covered earnings for use in administering benefits under the new Social Security program. That is still the primary purpose for the SSN.

They are not. SSNs can and have been reused

There have been cases where the same SSN was issued multiple times on accident, but they haven't been reused on purpose.

Isn't an SSN only 9 digits? Seems inevitable that you'll hit reuse (not now, but probably before the end or even middle of the century)

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'

They aren't public, but so many places use it as an identifier. It's kind of dumb for something so sensitive.

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