So I have a friend. For the purpose of this post, I'm going to call him Hideyuki Chikafuji. That isn't his name, but it gives the right sort of feel. He works as a well-paid professional in an industry which isn't investment banking, but could be. He has a degree from Northwestern in, well, let's call it Physics. Magna cum laude.

What question do you think he gets asked in every job interview? If your answer was "Do you even speak English?", you win a gold star.

Hideyuki recently got his first name legally changed to Frank. Whammo. No more awkward questions.

I would further note that there is at least one person widely respected on HN who does business under a name which is not their birth name, specifically to avoid pervasive problems with this issue in our industry. (His story is not mine to tell.) The practice is also endemic in journalism, acting, etc etc etc.

It probably isn't the only issue: Redditors are nortoriously anti-capitalist, too, so it's much more convenient to be a community-minded hobbyist developer than to be a corporation (gasp!) with investors (gasp!) and hundreds of thousands of dollars (gasp!).

P.S. If race is totally not an issue, it would be a wee bit instructive that people get so pissed of when someone pretends to be a white guy.