Ask HN: Recent computer hacking convictions and employability?

A former coworker of mine was a convicted "hacker" who did time in federal prison for it. Part of his story was told in Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. The coworker told me that he had stuck at the current company for many years because he felt that his reputation, including a Wikipedia page, would prevent him from getting another good job. I told him I thought it might help him more than hurt him, and he just shook his head sadly. But then a year later he did start a job hunt, and found an excellent high level position at a large successful outfit almost immediately. He's still there. They knew who he was and what he did. I think that rep helped him more than a little.

It depends what you did of course. In his case the only plausible "victim" was AT&T, and he disputes that too.

> Stop telling yourself that. You wouldn't be #11 out of 25,000 if you weren't talented.

I like this advice.

I used to think I wasn't as good a programmer than a friend of mine because he had a larger breadth of skills than myself. Then I actually saw the code he was producing professionally ... and it was crap. It was functional sure, but not maintainable at all (if the business rules changed, then rewrites were awful).

Where I work now, the developer team that I joined were a bunch of amateurs pretending to write business applications. Their code (which I'm still refactoring 10 years later) is awful. I seemed like a super star to my managers because they never knew the difference from a good and bad coder.

That last paragraph wasn't meant to be employment advice. My point is, you never know how good you really are until you see how bad other people are. Couple that with the general self doubt we all sometimes experience, and you end up feeling like the worst in your field.

I'm self taught too. I started coding at age 7. We're the best because we love our particular skill so much that we made a fun hobby out of it. We stayed up way late into the night honing our craft. Etc, etc ... other inspiring reasons why we're awesome at what we do.

Edit:

> Edit: I would also add that I'm also completely self-taught. The only computer class I've taken was typing... and I got kicked out for cheating because it was boring.

Ha, I wrote my comment about being self-taught before you made your edit.

On the topic of cheating: In 6th grade spelling class, we had to write out our weekly spelling words 5 times each. We were allowed to handwrite, or type it out on a computer and hand in the printout. I wrote a computer program where I would input the spelling words as an array (only typing them once), and it would output a text file for me to print out and hand in.

I wonder if the "not very talented" self depreciation might mean talent with soft / people / social skills (the depreciation does strongly point to this) and therefore suggest that getting some education and training / experience in these soft skills might be the key to finding employment.

certainly there's a inevitable associated presumption that criminal behaviour is caused by poor social awareness and so addressing the general area would also indirectly attack the unfortunately undeniable connected human behavioural profile that needs to be overcome.

the quandary of either hiring employees whose hacking efforts on my company's infrastructure I can defeat / defy and hiring someone who I can't protect myself from is going to come down to some very individual assessments that I don't believe a DBS check can help me with.