[laila90]

oh yeah, we've heard about that recently from a Greek friend! Thankfully it seems like the Greek language is the only one in which our name has a weird meaning (at least so far), and hopefully it’s not offensive? Manara means “lighthouse” in Arabic. We did lots of user testing with various name options and this one was most positively perceived in Europe, North America, and MENA. Now we just need to get really great SEO to show up at the top of search results :)

[StavrosK]

The Greek is probably not a problem, nobody really uses that word any more (it's as dated as "groovy" is in English). Hell, the artist is the first thing that came to my mind, aloukissas is just an old-fashioned elderly gentleman.

[frostburg]

At least in Italy everyone would just think of the illustrator.

[ilianam]

Oh man that's too bad! We have one partner in Italy so far (Bending Spoons) and they didn't mention this to us though... maybe that's a good sign, or maybe they were too embarrassed!

[toyg]

It has to be said Milo Manara is a boomer and his popularity somewhat declined in the 2000s. Nowadays even people who are familiar with his mainstream output (from ads to cartoons made with Adriano Celentano) don't necessarily know his name or the fact that he became famous with erotic comics in late-70s/mid-80s. I would not expect anybody under 30 to be familiar with his name.

[ilianam]

This is reassuring, thank you! Also probably clarifies why we hadn't heard of him. :)

[riffraff]

I am italian, and I wouldn't worry too much.

It is true that the artist is very famous and has even done some tech-related work in the past (I think he designed boxes for GPUs or modems, I forgot), but it's not like you risk being confused.

[ilianam]

This is reassuring, thank you!

[frostburg]

They've a reputation for being a good place to work for (if a bit too SV-wannabe), especially in the context of Italy.

They probably didn't want to embarass you (and this isn't really a problem here, but it might be a serious issue SEO-wise).

[ilianam]

They (the co-founder Francesco Patarnello to be precise) were really wonderful to speak with & work with. They seem to have done a lot to grow the entrepreneurship & developer ecosystem in Italy, and are growing fast enough to need to hire from abroad now. They also have a really high bar for who they hire. Their process starts off with a logic test (nothing related to coding) which takes more than a day to complete.

(Curious about that by the way, since we have only seen one other company - Klarna - start with a logic test. Do you know if this is common? Is it an effective screening approach? In the USA people are sometimes wary of how standardized tests of this type may impact untraditional candidates in particular)

But back to your point - that name issue is really disappointing. We'll have to put some more thought into it but my first reaction is to do a little more polling to see how widespread this association is in our primary markets (MENA and countries that do a lot of hiring of software engineers, so mainly USA, Germany, Poland, Sweden, UK, Canada, Australia, etc)

[frostburg]

Regarding the logic test: here it's not common at all (especially outside of programming roles, it could be argued that most programming questions are logic tests), but apparently there are recruiting firms that employ them along with other even more dubious tools like psychometric questions to gauge the ability work in teams.

Italy isn't a major source of software engineering positions and has systemic issues with companies being too small and unwilling to invest / partner with others / grow. My (non-quantitative) opinion is that that sort of approach doesn't work that well - hiring is far from a solved problem - but is likely less discriminatory than whatever hunch-based interview processes would otherwise be in place. I'd describe it as progressive-in-context.

[ilianam]

Interesting. I didn't think of it this way previously, but after hearing your description, I'll interpret it a positive sign of their culture / forward-thinkingness.

[ilianam]

And yes, we'll need to think more about the SEO strategy! What terms do you think people would use to search for us? When we explored this before choosing the name (and we were unaware of the association so we didn't even notice the first result) we figured that someone would enter "Manara developers" or "Manara engineers" if they didn't find us immediately when searching "Manara"