This bakery will hire anyone • Hacker News Board

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#101

Post by ars » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 1:31 AM UTC

arrrg wrote: post #54

nostromo wrote: post #24

I think more employers would do this if firing was easier. It's perhaps counterintuitive that making firing cheap, easy, and without large liabilities could reduce our unemployment rate substantially. We should reduce the risk of employers taking a chance on people.

Eh … German labor law, for example, while quite strict when it comes to firing long-term employees, has several mechanisms in place that would make this easily possible with new hires. Lawmakers of course have long recognized that to spur companies to hire new people they have to give them a way out when they notice it doesn't work out during the first couple months. First, it's possible to time limit an employment c…

This might help, but it's still completely bizarre that you can't fire someone for any reason.

An employee does not have a "right" to a job. You do work you get paid, it's transactional. It's not "your" job - it belongs to your employer.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#102

Post by ars » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 1:36 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #11

jMyles wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do felons and addicts belong on the same list?

Why do felons belong on a list?

Because that same lack of empathy for other people, together with a lack of self control also affects other parts of their life. If that's the kind of person they are then people have a right to now that and judge them for it, because they are likely to do it again.

It doesn't mean never hire them, but it does mean don't put them in a position where they have a larger ability to hurt others.

Obviously some crimes are of the "stupid teen" variety, and other motivations - those should be categorized differently.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#103

Post by seivan » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 1:44 AM UTC

gadders wrote: post #29

Stratoscope wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you both for the courage to post this, and for the link to Johann Hari's article. It is a real eye-opener. (If anyone is tempted to skip it because of the HuffPo link, take my word for it, this is well worth reading.)

Don't skip it because it's HuffPo, skip it because it's Johann Hari. He's a plagiarist and a cyber stalker. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari

The irony of you letting a man hang to dry in a post about atonement.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/02/johann-hari-int...

C'mon dude.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#104

Post by Dylan16807 » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 2:11 AM UTC

emiliobumachar wrote: post #94

Dylan16807 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What cyber stalking are you talking about? This page only talks about plagiarism and wikipedia vandalism. Making negative edits about people you don't like on wikipedia involves exactly zero stalking. Is information missing here? And it sounds like the 'plagiarism' was him using quotes he did not personally acquire, which is pretty minor and wouldn't turn me away from reading anything.

Hypothetically, imagine gadders would now edit some public information about you with lies, because you criticized him. Would that not feel a little bit stalky?

So let's say we got in a big argument and then he went to my github profile and called me a poopy head and a bad coder. I would find that obnoxious, I would find it harassment if he kept doing it, I don't think I would find that stalky.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#105

Post by eru » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 2:18 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #60

sgift wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't 'right' or 'wrong', it's just reality. Government-supported reality. You can say that this is okay, but please do not make it look like this is just the way it is: The government could disallow access to all felony records (probably with an exemption for police) and even (if it wanted) provide people with a fake background story for the time they were in prison. Discrimination can only be based on things…

> The government could disallow access to all felony records (probably with an exemption for police) So instead of searching government records to find out if you have been convicted of a felony when you apply to work for me, I use Google to find a newspaper report of your conviction. Not as reliable, but will still probably turn up most applicants with serious felony convictions. If we are in one of the 40 state tha…

If you are a big enough company, hiding those illegal discrimination practices becomes harder.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#106

Post by bequanna » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 2:35 AM UTC

jim_greco wrote: post #100

bequanna wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government could disallow access to all felony records (probably with an exemption for police) and even (if it wanted) provide people with a fake background story for the time they were in prison. Discrimination can only be based on things someone else knows, if the government didn't provide the information, how could the employers be "picky"? No. We have this system because that is what people want. Maybe not…

> We have this system because that is what people want. Maybe not you, but clearly the majority. Laws and regulations are usually designed to protect the minority. Our country would have made very little social progress if we only enacted reforms that the majority wanted.

I don't disagree with you, but, it is going to take a lot work to convince the US public that convicted felons are a minority group worth protecting.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#107

Post by Natsu » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 2:42 AM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #44

gadders wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't skip it because it's HuffPo, skip it because it's Johann Hari. He's a plagiarist and a cyber stalker. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari

Weird to see a positive article about the benefits of letting people who have served their time get back into work juxtaposed with your post saying, essentially, Burn him he's a plagiarist.

If you read that, it wasn't just plagiarism, he actually made up stories, whole cloth.

That said, I've worked for a factory. Many of the hires on the floor were for people with records of various kinds. It did help the higher-functioning people turn their lives around, which was quite encouraging. But we also had people who did stupid things and got arrested for things like domestic violence charges, which were related to their drug use.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#108

Post by steveklabnik » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 2:45 AM UTC

snowpolar wrote: post #90

What about sociopaths?

They work in lower Manhattan, not Yonkers.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#109

Post by shasheene » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 2:48 AM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #67

icebraining wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting article, thanks. As a Portuguese, and having been close to someone who was addicted to heroin, I know that besides clinics, we also had houses in the countryside where there were small communities where people trying to recover could stay for a few months, with very regular visits by specialist psychologists helping them. I don't know how effective they were or if they still exist, but it seems to jive wi…

Change of scenery is an important thing when trying to break out of a bad pattern. Novelty is actually processed by a different part of the brain than whatever rut we may be in is. The book Iconoclast explains that even moving furniture around can put us into a more creative state, because our creativity is activated by novelty.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#110

Post by karmacondon » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 3:15 AM UTC

powertower wrote: post #68

cubano wrote: post #15

As someone with several drug related felonies on my record, I can do nothing but applaud the efforts of this CEO, although on a different level I wonder if any adult working a minimum wage job isn't living a very bleak existence anyway, and in fact isn't being exploited for having a brain disorder we currently call "addiction" The problem with people who let drugs seriously affect their life is that...they let drugs…

It's a bakery, requiring little to no skills, and nothing more than being able to repeat physical activity, and only 35% make it through the program (a 10 month on-the-job job). I don't think this is the "success" story it's being made to be.

It's certainly not all bad. Giving people who would otherwise have no job prospects the experience of coming to work every day, getting used to the routine and socialization of a work environment and evaluating their ability to be a part of that system is valuable. Even if it only lasts a few months, it's much better than nothing. Especially given that the only alternative for most of them is a blanket rejection based on something they did years ago, often without an interview.

It would be better for all of society if programs like this were more common.