My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
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Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#2Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788650
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#3This is a pretty good argument in favor of technical challenge styled interviews i.e. what can you do instead of what have you done.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#4That's awesome, and depressing, when you think of how rare that is.
But kudos to Jessica for giving a shit and the person in question for keeping at it.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#5The way that ex-felons are treated in society is despicable, no wonder there's a 55% recidivism rate if you get blocked at every attempt to becoming a productive member of society.
The Last Mile seems like a great program to share our tech skills and knowledge with people who really need a leg up. I will be signing up as a volunteer today.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#6That's awesome, and depressing, when you think of how rare that is. But kudos to Jessica for giving a shit and the person in question for keeping at it.
You definitely made me think with this comment. I came here ready to say “this is amazing” but read your comment and it dawned on me how incredibly depressing it is when you think how rare this sort of thing is.
Great comment and thanks for sharing that perspective.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#7tldr: "I reached out to a friend who is Head of Engineering at a ~500 person fintech company."
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#8We need more of this. A criminal record in the US is a curse for life, leaving former criminals with little chance at success and little to live for. People without much to live for are dangerous. We should help our former criminals rather than condemn them for life--it benefits us all.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#9Unfortunately, the worst offender of this is the federal government. Essentially any federal position, regardless of actual job position, requires a background check.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#10This is a pretty good argument in favor of technical challenge styled interviews i.e. what can you do instead of what have you done.
Clearly a controversial point, but I actually sort of agree. I hate technical challenge interviews because I think they measure the wrong thing, but then we have a problem of only wanting to hire senior people with big portfolios, because someone else has essentially done the vetting - this makes it harder and harder for those without experience, for whatever reason, to get a job.
Clearly we need some way to evaluate entry level employees who wouldn't have had time to build a portfolio, it just remains an open question as to what an effective method would be.