"Potential employers will google the names of applicants before an interview"
I would love for this to happen, but this never ever happens. I would love it if, at some point, employers looked at my Github account before the job interview, or if they read some of my comments on Hacker News (I put my Hacker News account on my resume, but they still don't read it), or if they read a few of my better known essays, so I could walk into the job interview and we could skip over the basics and start talking about advanced subjects, but instead, every job interview starts off with "Do you know what Object Oriented Programming is? Define an object. Do you know what the keyword 'private' means?" I would love it if a potential employer read about the disaster that struck my last business, and then we could have a serious talk about risks and burn rates and being honest about bad news, when all the news is bad. Those would be interesting conversations. There are some potential employers who would immediately know that they disagree with my views, if they ever searched for my name, but they never do. At this point, Google associates my name with the blog post "Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end", which was much discussed here on Hacker News and Reddit and other places. Those potential employers who are strongly in favor of the Object Oriented approach could avoid a job interview with me, if they ever searched for my name. But they don't. Not ever. In the 16 years that I have done professional programming, no potential employer has ever used the Internet to try to track down information about me (or if they did, they were very good actors, and pretended to be ignorant).
You imply that because the people who did talk to you did not google you, that no one does. It is more likely that the people who do google you do not give you an interview.
I would love for this to happen, but this never ever happens. I would love it if, at some point, employers looked at my Github account before the job interview, or if they read some of my comments on Hacker News (I put my Hacker News account on my resume, but they still don't read it), or if they read a few of my better known essays, so I could walk into the job interview and we could skip over the basics and start talking about advanced subjects, but instead, every job interview starts off with "Do you know what Object Oriented Programming is? Define an object. Do you know what the keyword 'private' means?" I would love it if a potential employer read about the disaster that struck my last business, and then we could have a serious talk about risks and burn rates and being honest about bad news, when all the news is bad. Those would be interesting conversations. There are some potential employers who would immediately know that they disagree with my views, if they ever searched for my name, but they never do. At this point, Google associates my name with the blog post "Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end", which was much discussed here on Hacker News and Reddit and other places. Those potential employers who are strongly in favor of the Object Oriented approach could avoid a job interview with me, if they ever searched for my name. But they don't. Not ever. In the 16 years that I have done professional programming, no potential employer has ever used the Internet to try to track down information about me (or if they did, they were very good actors, and pretended to be ignorant).