| HN Mirror

Cloning a reply I made earlier talking about that exact situation:

It's not my company or me, it's my clients. Here's a sort of long winded story explaining what I mean that the corporate world can't use anything with the name "cockroach". If you disagree after reading, I'm open for a friendly debate.

Average project, some 60 year old VP signing off on 100k of custom software with 8 pages of lawyer speak contracts is NOT going to allow "his" project to run off of "cockroach database". VP's/CEO's like to take personal ownership of projects they feel will go well, and ones done with us usually do. None of these people want ANY chance of their project getting criticized internally, so nobody will use CockroachDb. It's just not going to happen. Having successful projects is an easy way for these people to gather promotions and respect. Having any part of it do with "cockroach" could result in the whole project being an embarrassment.

Imagine the database goes down one day. One of their low level staff calls us(we have ongoing support contract). Problem gets rapidly escalated to development. One of our lead developers replies to the email thread, that by now has a third of the clients' company on it. "Yeah see the problem was the cockroach database that wasn't supposed to go down needed to be restarted" . Most of the staff think we're joking. Guarantee this becomes a big pun around their office, every time anything breaks in the app they say "maybe the cockroaches on the back end died again".

It's made worse by the fact that issues in software systems are commonly called "bugs". Well, our system doesn't have general bugs anymore, it has "cockroaches". Do you think this is an unlikely scenario? Because it's not. Besides the word "cockroach" this is exactly how urgent issues tend to be reported and fixed. Replace "cockroach" with "Microsoft" and I've probably violated my NDA. After that incident, whoever championed the project, probably our strongest ally in the company, resents us for making such a stupid mistake that resulted in his project becoming a joke. Maybe we aren't as great of a dev shop as he once thought? Maybe it's better to do open bidding next time so whoever wins he can't be blamed directly for what happens.

You could say their company culture sucks, maybe it does? But that doesn't change that I can't use it on any client projects because of the chance we'll lose hundreds of thousands over a stupid name.

There's plenty of other names that convey meaning but don't make lawyers nervous. Your attitude of "oh, well if you can't use it your company culture sucks" is EXACTLY why nobody will rename it and why corporate american won't touch it. Nobody cares about how cool it is to be edgy when millions of dollars are on the line. If you plan on forcing clients to use it you might as well hold a going away party for any of your clients with more than 5M revenue.