"everyone who gets out needs a job" - I totally agree. So why a job in tech, or specifically, a software engineering job, and not a job in a different field?
I guess this is a controversial question.
My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
651–660 of 670 posts
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Same rights" - no sorry, somebody who stole before will be regarded with higher suspicion than other people, and that's OK. How do you know they "learned not to steal"? Can you look inside of their heads? There are jobs with less opportunities to steal, for example. Trust has to be regained, simply "having been in prison" is not really worth much in that respect. You would stay in prison, regardless of your mindset,…
As an Australian, I find that perspective awful. Going to jail is the punishment society has chosen for the crime. Once you've served your time, you rejoin society on an equal footing. Denying jobs to ex-cons makes it much harder for them to integrate back into society, and increases the recidivism rate. (Which you pay for via taxes.) The equation isn't "bad person -> steals". Its "person maladapted to society / with…
The issue is risk. Hiring someone with a criminal record is riskier than hiring someone with a clean record. There is no upside to mitigate that risk either. So it shouldn't be surprising that hiring managers discriminate on anything they can legally get away with.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#653Hey, posting anonymously here since this hits close to home; as I'm also a felon. I learned to program _after_ all my legal troubles started, and my sentence wasn't _nearly_ as long as this (6 months, drug crime). I 100% honestly feel like tech saved my life. My first job immediately gave me hope that I'm not defined by my past. Went from working in a factory making $7/hr (about 10 yrs ago), to now grossing well over…
How? I read so many felon success stories but I'm a non-violent felon and I can't even get an entry-level interview in IT. I'm multiskilled with a huge focus on security but despite the demand, I've had so much trouble. In fact, in one very sad case, I showed up to my first day of work as a sys admin and was walked out after 2 hours because the HR department neglected to go over my application and see the felony chec…
If you have real technical skills in regards to security know that you can generally sell memory corruption exploits completely anonymously, without any presentation of ID much less people asking if you're a felon or your spotty work history.
Most of the real earners in security are making proof of concept code for vulns, and a huge swath of them are felons. Zerodium has generally the best payouts if you don't want to bother networking and building a client list. They do not care about any previous felonies. They only care that your code works. They will pay hundreds of thousands to a million dollars for PoC in some stuff. If you can find two exploits in mid-tier stuff a year, you can earn a six figure living.
There's also the crypto economy.
Another big tip is to move where cost of living in extremely low (Eastern Europe, Cambodia, etc) to make your freelance money last longer while you look for good bugs. I'm a former felon -- my felony conviction was vacated but nobody really seemed to care after I left prison by flipping the false charges on appeal that I wasn't technically a felon anymore. There were no real job opportunities and I had to make my own.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't check the felony checkbox. Seriously.
At best, that can get you fired. Easily. And that makes it even more difficult to find another job in the future.
More so than being a felon in the first place? Most places won't let felons get a foot in the door in the first place. Unless not-checking that box is a criminal offense, lying about your qualifications hasn't stopped some of the highest offices in the US being filled, so while it's easy to say "don't check the box", it's just as easy to say (and just as unrealistic, unless you have a time machine), to say "don't be a felon", to somebody that already has the conviction. Which is to say, it isn't really helpful.
More realistically, the (un)likelyhood of a felony conviction going unnoticed on a background check means that whether or not you check the box, if the employer does a background check it will become known, but some places don't run the check and some don't actually care about the results but they're required to run the check.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#655In Germany I was asked to provide my criminal record while working at a payment processing startup that had to obtain certain certificates. They were probably looking for crimes of a fiscal nature however, which is understandable. Second chances are second chances but security is mostly about trust. Another job at a startup in Germany that worked in less tightly controlled spaces has never asked me to produce my crim…
Hard disagree on that. As a programmer we have access to more than most accountants. How hard would it be for most programmers to put in a backdoor they could later claim was a bug? Criminal convictions are perhaps not the best measure of trustability.
> How hard would it be for most programmers to put in a backdoor they could later claim was a bug?
My guess is that is actually pretty fricking hard, as otherwise it'd be happening all the time. I.e. you can maybe make a backdoor to something without monetary consequences (even in a bank most systems don't handle money), but introducing a backdoor to the core system (i.e. a money-dealing one) in such a way that it is not noticed in code reviews or testing AND you can claim plausible deniability seems hard.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#656Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, some well-intentioned “ban the box” policies backfired in terms of racial justice in hiring. These campaigns managed to outlaw the “are you a felon?” question on job applications in an attempt to make it easier for felons, many of whom belong to racial minorities, to get a fair shot at employment based on their skills. Unfortunately this caused employers to hire even fewer members of those minority gro…
If you forbid direct measurement of something, then people will use proxies, which is generally harmful to everyone involved. If you want to minimize the extent to which people use demographics as a proxy for qualities they want to select for, then make it as cheap and reliable as possible to measure those qualities directly.
That only ends when you make it easier to figure out whether someone is going to actually harm your business in the future, rather than finding out whether they have ever been a felon.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in consulting, it was part of our regular contact language that we had verified backgrounds and that we wouldn't place a felon on site with a client. A surprising number of clients even outside banking, finance, government, etc made a point of enforcing this language, even conducting their own background checks. Freelancing was the approach I saw some people do successfully, but there were lots of projects…
This is just puritanical, judgemental idiocy at its most pointlessly discriminatory. Even for felony offenses it often veers into the same territory but flatly refusing to hire people for fucking misdemeanors with absolutely no relevance to most of the work involved? What a closed, almost hatefully punitive mentality some employers have. I can't put myself into another's shoes or context of needs, but if I ran a firm…
Every Saint has a past.
Every Sinner has a future.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all exercise of freedoms comes at someone else's expense.
Can you give an example to support this statement?
The freedom to disagree with others. The freedom to marry who you want. The freedom to move about freely in nature without having to worry about property lines.
In some places that are less free, these things are frowned upon.
Edit: you can read about the freedom to move about in nature in certain countries here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have reason to believe that the sentencing disparity is like the gender pay gap: easy to prove, if that helps your political goals, and also easy to disprove, if that suits you better. Statistics is hard, and the entire reason there's leeway in sentencing is to account for situations which are resistant to statistical regularity. There is, or was, a pretty obvious source of disparity in US law: freebase cocaine was…
I'm fairly convinced that the fact that marijuana is illegal (federally) and alcohol/tobacco are legal without a prescription has more to do with the populations who typically used them than with any medical or scientific basis on dangerousness. https://www.businessinsider.com/racist-origins-marijuana-pro...
If it’s just about social issues specific to the US, why is it exactly the same in so many other countries? In fact the US did try to make alcohol illegal but it was a shitshow. In my country they’d NEVER touch alcohol yet weed is illegal. Even though it’s the same ethnic group using both.
Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the USA, background checks are often just part of the process. There's an entire industry built around providing the service.
Americans have been completely conditioned into accepting all sorts of trouble while maintaining the idea of freedom in contradiction to that.
There are some that only care about "freedom from sin".