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Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

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Re: Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

#331

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

throwup238 wrote: post #297
smsm42 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drugs? Contraband? Tax evasion? Insider trading? Industrial espionage? Any process crime like "lying to a fed"? If you think about it, we have tons of laws that don't fit into the mold of "hurting specific people" - which would definitely be "black morality" to me - but are more of either "preserving the system as it is" or even "we said it's illegal and so it is". I'm not saying none of those should exist, but I def…

I agree, I just wouldn’t trust a felon to make an unbiased determination about the morality of their actions. The only item on your list that I would say is mostly gray area is insider trading - the rest are very much case dependent. A weed dealer might be gray area but someone who peddles crack cocaine is not. Most people like to think they are good, even when presented with hard evidence that they’re not.

> I just wouldn’t trust a felon to make an unbiased determination about the morality of their actions.

I wouldn't trust a single human to be objective about the morality of their actions

Re: Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

#332

Post by gnfargbl »

pyuser583 wrote: post #276
gnfargbl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge here is your choice of specialism. Security is fundamentally a trust-based business and the industry is pretty wary of anyone with a perceived black mark against them. The reasons for this are mainly liability ("if this guy does something wrong and he already has a record, how will we look?") and reputation ("what will our government customers think about us if we hire this person?"). Could/would you co…

The point of security is to remove trust as a requirement. Poster could say, “you don’t need to trust me, that’s the point of {insert product or service}”.

OP is doing "SecOps" which is incident response and security automation. The service includes him as a moving part.

Re: Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

#334

Post by phpisthebest »

throwup238 wrote: post #297
smsm42 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drugs? Contraband? Tax evasion? Insider trading? Industrial espionage? Any process crime like "lying to a fed"? If you think about it, we have tons of laws that don't fit into the mold of "hurting specific people" - which would definitely be "black morality" to me - but are more of either "preserving the system as it is" or even "we said it's illegal and so it is". I'm not saying none of those should exist, but I def…

I agree, I just wouldn’t trust a felon to make an unbiased determination about the morality of their actions. The only item on your list that I would say is mostly gray area is insider trading - the rest are very much case dependent. A weed dealer might be gray area but someone who peddles crack cocaine is not. Most people like to think they are good, even when presented with hard evidence that they’re not.

Why is a weed dealer a gray area but cocaine not a gray area both are things people are consuming voluntarily into their own body why is one prohibited from consuming cocaine of their own volition but not marijuana

I'm of the position it all drugs even medical drugs should be free to consume by anybody I should be able to walk in to CVS and get heart medication if I want or cocaine if I want if CVS is willing to sell it to me it's not for the government to decide nor government licensed agents AKA doctors to decide what I consume into my own body

My body my choice

Re: Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

#335

Post by gnfargbl »

jstarfish wrote: post #142
gnfargbl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge here is your choice of specialism. Security is fundamentally a trust-based business and the industry is pretty wary of anyone with a perceived black mark against them. The reasons for this are mainly liability ("if this guy does something wrong and he already has a record, how will we look?") and reputation ("what will our government customers think about us if we hire this person?"). Could/would you co…

My experience is different. I'm not a felon but I come across them in the workplace fairly often as an internal investigator. We have infosec personnel working for us with nonviolent sex offender convictions who also maintain security clearances (defense contractor). Life does not end with a conviction; don't wear a sandwich board broadcasting it but honesty goes a long way. It's the lies that I'll eventually hang yo…

There's some decent but counterintuitive advice in here, OP: have you tried applying to a job with a clearance requirement? That way your past gets (should get) evaluated within a defined decision making framework, instead of by a spooked recruiter using their lizard brain.

Re: Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

#336

Post by Pikamander2 »

dang wrote: post #64

There used to be a YC startup dedicated to this, which unfortunately no longer exists. I don't know the backstory on that, but I do remember that there was quite a large Launch HN thread: Launch HN: 70MillionJobs (YC S17) – Job board for people with criminal records - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14911467 - Aug 2017 (506 comments) I link it here in case there might still be useful information or tips in those…

> I don't know the backstory on that

After skimming through the threads, it looks like:

1. Bronson's business started out strong right before the pandemic and showed a lot of promise.

2. The pandemic nearly bankrupted it.

3. His business partially recovered after the pandemic, but he was unable to secure high enough wages during a period of high inflation and wage growth and so his employees kept leaving to find higher paid work elsewhere, which he sourly blamed on "The Great Resignation" and shut the whole thing down.

It was a bit of a sad story and arguably a loss of a great resource, but the positive flip side is that it suggests the economy was good enough for his workers to find better work independently rather than relying on a for-profit middleman who I would assume takes some kind of commission/fee out of the deal.

Re: Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

#337

Post by phpisthebest »

autoexec wrote: post #151
justsomeoldguy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was charged and convicted with assault with a deadly weapon. I shot someone. he accepted my apology, I was high af and didn't even know what was going on. and I have no history of violence, nor after. but. welp. it was considered domestic violence cuz that someone was my husband. and california wouldn't let him drop the charges. they don't give you that, they just run with it. its a messed up story. he was devastat…

> his hands were tied. there were three, assault with a firearm, great bodily injury, and domestic violence. because a gun had been involved. minimum mandatory sentencing. no concurrent, must be consecutive. Situations like yours are what people who get off on "tough on crime" policies and push for harsher punishments for "bad guys" never stop to think about. We need judges to be able to consider an individual's uniq…

100% agree but you have to remember that the mandatory minimums are a reaction to other types of judges that go very soft on violent offenders that end up reoffending and causing more violence and more victims and there are clear evidence that this person was going to reoffend again oftentimes having already offended multiple times and committed multiple crimes against multiple victims and are given fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth 10th chances.... so the reaction to by the politicians is to create laws to hamstring the judges

In reality just like with policing we need better judges we need better officers we need better judges in the system the problem is how to get that nobody has solved that problem and it's easier to just write rules to make things worse for everybody instead of trying to fix the system with better people

Re: Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

#338

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #260
vidoc wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know this is a controversial view, but I think employers should not be allowed to run background checks unless important for the role (government work, access to children, etc) and where it is important for the role it should only return the criminal convictions that might be relevant to the role. This shouldn't be controversial at all and I think your take is 100% correct wrt exceptions (gov work, access to chil…

It's not controversial, because we've twisted freedom of association, in places people aren't allowed to even have a "Ladies Night" at the bar, chose who the rent to, etc etc etc. Barry Goldwater absolutely and unequivocally warned us of this. Now because that freedom of association, freedom to chose who you do business with does not exist, we think this is reasonable. However, it is not. I own a business. I should n…

I get that, but in this specific case it kinda sucks for you. We shouldn’t be making a system that penalizes offenders for life without explicit sentencing for such. Whether that information is useful to your business is relatively irrelevant to me because denying people proper employment does a lot more harm to them than the harm done to the people in businesses like yours by not penalizing them.

Re: Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

#339

Post by [deleted] »

woodruffw wrote: post #114
thaumasiotes wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a "throwaway" account for obvious reasons. You should know that if you also have a non-throwaway account, HN will unify your accounts in their backend records.

No, they don't do this. It's not even clear how they would; the closest thing would be merging based on IP or fingerprinting, but both are extremely noisy.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

#340

Post by cangeroo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #101
felon_in_texas wrote: post #42

This is a "throwaway" account for obvious reasons. I did some terrible things when I was 19 that I won't go into details, but after working as a developer for a few years, served a six-year sentence from 2003-2009. Upon release, I leveraged some old contacts to get a bit of contracting work. In time I found more contracting work, mostly working for smaller companies on a 1099 basis. (direct, not through a firm) In ti…

> This is a "throwaway" account for obvious reasons. You should know that if you also have a non-throwaway account, HN will unify your accounts in their backend records.

GDPR would prohibit this, and since they never ask about consent, I would assume that they have no legal basis to collect personally identifiable information on anyone.

If you have evidence of the contrary, I would love to know.

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