[aavotins]

No offence, but googling your name yields some very questionable search results about events in Woodstock, IL. If it's true, then perhaps the true cause of cultural discrepancy comes from assumptions based on a Google search?

Perhaps I am the odd one out, but whenever a potential new hire is presented to the team, I do a quick Google search and investigation about whom that person might be and whether I'd like working with that person, regardless of his/her skills and knowledge. Every day interactions make up for a very large portion of work agenda.

[yorwba]

Doing the same search, it appears that there are at least three people named Steven Degutis with different middle names: https://www.instantcheckmate.com/people/steven-degutis/

Searching for someone's name can at best give you suspicions, but name collisions are so common that you can't know whether the person you found mentioned online is the same you wanted to find out about.

Personally, I have almost no real-name presence on the internet, so the top result for my name is some other guy's Instagram account. You might spend a lot of time looking at his posts, but that won't help you learn anything about me.

[aavotins]

Some suspicions can be clarified. Especially ones with clear photos available.

As per online presence - we do not hire people that we have never seen. We're a remote and distributed team, thus rarely any hires get to have a walk-in interview, but we do always see the person being interviewed. I wouldn't waste hours looking at posts of a person I can clearly see is not my potential colleague. Having no online presence is fine, most of us don't at my current job. However, if it's there, it is going to be examined. It's way harder to get to know to understand someone as a person if you've never had had a face-to-face interaction, therefore having a video call is a must.

[sdegutis]

Yes, that is the reason 99% of the jobs offered to me have been rescinded. I was originally talking about the other 1%, where I failed the whiteboard or algorithms tests.

You're right. Ultimately, people are uncomfortable with the idea of being around me based on what I did. Even if you take the huge exaggerations out of those articles, what I did was still enough that people just don't want to be around me.

There's no path for redemption for me. It doesn't matter how much I ever change, or how remorseful or sincerely sorry I was, or how hard I work to stay positive and struggle daily against letting the bitterness and pessimism in. But these are things I do for myself.

I really thought that this would show through in my character, and that people would see the good that I strive to always have in me and try to always be, and that this would override in their minds what I've done in the past. But apparently that's not how life works.

[nistur]

I am in the process of interviewing a guy for a technical role that has the same name as the frontman for a very famous rock band. I am 99% certain I was not in contact with him... although googling this guy's name would come up with articles about "his" drug addictions...

Google is a wonderful tool but I would prefer to not search for the person online, as I am more concerned that false positives might unfairly bias my opinions on the applicant.

[commandlinefan]

The top search for my name is a kid in England who is serving life in prison for murdering his girlfriend when he was 16 and she was 14. Obviously not me, but I always wonder how many potential employers have a visceral aversion to hiring me after a quick google search.