For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
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For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
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Re: For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
#2I was afraid that this would be a tacky post hinging around hiring a guy solely because of his disability (i.e., charity) and instead it's a really thoughtful, insightful post about what it's like as a father of a young man with a disability and how hard it can be for people with disabilities to get hired.
One thing I wonder (and I don't know if the author comes here): is there no Office of Vocational Rehabilitation or something similar? The author mentions Penn State and I know Pennsylvania has an OVR, even though it can be very hard to communicate with them sometimes.
I had this problem when I was younger and had just gotten a cochlear implant. I always fretted about whether or not I would be able to get a job somewhere since I couldn't hear in moderately noisy environments (think fast food, movie theaters), couldn't use the telephone, and sometimes had difficulty understanding people I'd never met before. It was really scary thinking that I would have to live with my mother for the rest of my life, unable to get a job.
Being rejected from all of the entry-level jobs I applied to at the time only made my fears worse.
I found some good jobs and have a great one now, but I feel for this young man.
Re: For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
#3I worked with mentally handicapped kids a lot as an educator when I was younger (albeit in a different country). This wonderful article captures perfectly how, in the right environment, children with Down Syndrome can blossom, but how hard it can be for them as adults once society & red tape & bureaucracy all come into play. (I also worked with children who had Down Syndrome and had not grown up in the right environment- think abusive/dead/incarcerated/etc. parents. That got very depressing very fast, and I'm not sure I could do it again).
I think this also highlights how the increasingly geographically fragmented familial unit is problematic: in a culture where several generations of the same family lives under the same roof, the situation wouldn't be as dire. However, in our culture it is typical to have only small portions of a family living together, and for children to move away and live on their own, potentially hundreds of miles away. No situation is perfect, of course - but it's still something to ponder (and it affects other social groups as well, for instance the elderly).
There was a wonderful American Life a while back on a similar topic, about a mother dealing with her adult son who had a mental disability (can't remember if it was autism or Down), and fearing for what would happen once she passed away. Can't find it right now; will edit this post if I do.
Re: For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
#4I remember when I worked in an auto-industry factory (as part of my training) in Japan, we wore caps with colored bands that denoted rank/category. New employees were dark blue. Equipment/facility maintenance people wore yellow bands. "Management" inside the factory, as well as the white-collar employees had light blue. Outside guests wore red.
Amidst this, workers with disabilities wore caps with green bands. Many were hearing impaired, but there were some with leg issues and others with some form of mental illnesses.
This kind of categorization perhaps wouldn't fly in the States, but it seemed to aid the company's goal of having 5% of their factory workforce composed of people with various forms of disability (iirc).
As knowledge workers, it's easy for us to dismiss bluecollar positions like these, but working at a enormous Toyota group company, receiving a great deal of training and a respectable wage (you can make quite a bit with overtime), and being part of something that produces countless goods into the world is a pretty good deal for people in a country where it's not illegal for potential employers to ask about your existing medical conditions during the interview process.
Re: For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
#5I worked with mentally handicapped kids a lot as an educator when I was younger (albeit in a different country). This wonderful article captures perfectly how, in the right environment, children with Down Syndrome can blossom, but how hard it can be for them as adults once society & red tape & bureaucracy all come into play. (I also worked with children who had Down Syndrome and had not grown up in the right environm…
I believe you are referring to Season 2 Episode 1 of This American Life the tv show titled "Escape". Two sentence summary from the site:
"Mike and his mom get caught up in a fight that lots of kids have with their parents. Except in their case, due to some very specialized circumstances, they go through the fight in slow motion, over the course of years."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002V87A4S/ref=atv_feed_cat...
Re: For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
#6I remember when I worked in an auto-industry factory (as part of my training) in Japan, we wore caps with colored bands that denoted rank/category. New employees were dark blue. Equipment/facility maintenance people wore yellow bands. "Management" inside the factory, as well as the white-collar employees had light blue. Outside guests wore red. Amidst this, workers with disabilities wore caps with green bands. Many w…
> This kind of categorization perhaps wouldn't fly in the States
I see this as a bit of a paradox in the States. There is always some discussion about how everyone should be treated as equal, yet your "race" (whatever that means in the age of genetics!) is recorded by the government, and minorities are tracked by employers even though this is absolutely not related with their skills. If i think too much about it, I'd call it madness.
Re: For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
#7I remember when I worked in an auto-industry factory (as part of my training) in Japan, we wore caps with colored bands that denoted rank/category. New employees were dark blue. Equipment/facility maintenance people wore yellow bands. "Management" inside the factory, as well as the white-collar employees had light blue. Outside guests wore red. Amidst this, workers with disabilities wore caps with green bands. Many w…
It certainly seems like it could be handy to have those flags, especially in a labor-based job. From a safety perspective, I'd think it is a win if people are immediately aware that person X has a disability. Then they find out what it is, and act accordingly...
Re: For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
#8I barely made it through this article. After the 10th minute of pushing through my tears to read, I had to resolve that nothing would stop me.
On HN we dream big. And we all agree that we can dream big and maybe hit it big. Imagine what it feels like to realize at a young age that you DONT get to go after your dreams because you are missing the tools. Imagine what it feels like to believe something is wrong with you because you talk to yourself sometimes. Now get back to starting your company.
And yet, you can be happy to commute, to have co workers, to have some freedom from our parents.
Re: For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
#9I have a strong sense that online work - on CrowdFlower, Mechanical Turk, or Elance - could be the path forward for someone like Jaime. Please do note: I work for CrowdFlower.
The beauty of online work is its promise of operating as a meritocracy. Access to the labor market is not about who you know, or how you appear, but about your ability to perform. Everything about Jaime, from his diligence to his incredible cataloguing memory, struck me as a perfect fit for the type of work that's readily available online: data collection, cleaning and labeling.
Even better, this type of work is going to become a larger and larger part of labor market as the machine learning field grows and the need for clean training data grows along with it.
Re: For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
#10I remember when I worked in an auto-industry factory (as part of my training) in Japan, we wore caps with colored bands that denoted rank/category. New employees were dark blue. Equipment/facility maintenance people wore yellow bands. "Management" inside the factory, as well as the white-collar employees had light blue. Outside guests wore red. Amidst this, workers with disabilities wore caps with green bands. Many w…
> This kind of categorization perhaps wouldn't fly in the States I see this as a bit of a paradox in the States. There is always some discussion about how everyone should be treated as equal, yet your "race" (whatever that means in the age of genetics!) is recorded by the government, and minorities are tracked by employers even though this is absolutely not related with their skills. If i think too much about it, I'd…
And also levy high taxes on people to support the elderly through social security; the government reduces the ability for individual families to support its own elderly, because everyone's parents are equal.