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This bakery will hire anyone

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Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#141

Post by arrrg »

ars wrote: post #101
arrrg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, some people do not see jobs as purely transactional …

For me employers clearly have a responsibility to take care of their employees. They are not robots, they are people and they have to be treated as such. It‘s an ethical question.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#142

Post by ptaipale »

cubano wrote: post #46
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

Wow, can the meta-irony of this particular point be any deeper? Good thing there will always be a job waiting for him at the bakery. "Following the release of his book, Chasing the Scream, in 2015, Hari gave a number of interviews where he expressed regret for his actions. In order to quell doubts about his reporting, he also released full audio copies of sources he interviewed for his book. In an interview with the…

I'm fine with hiring people who have erred before, if the regret looks real. People make mistakes. They should be able to take a new direction.

But Hari did dishonest reporting for a long time and, as David Allen Green writes, was "smearing other journalists in an on-going systemic manner for years". I will remain suspicious of whatever he does as a reporter.

In a way: his crime was an abuse of words, and I'll be careful whenever he again works with words. If his crime had been abuse of children, I wouldn't mind him working in construction, or even keeping books, but I'd be careful hiring him as schoolteacher.

If he got a job at a bakery, well, I suppose he wouldn't poison anyone, although his work as a reporter was poison.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#143

Post by vertex-four »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #72
grasstomouth wrote: post #33

I'm increasingly of the opinion that this open-hire practice could give businesses a competitive advantage. With the US having 5% of the world's population but incarcerating 25% of the world's prisoners, we've got a surplus of those deemed unemployable due to past convictions. A person with past convictions will generally be more loyal to the company that hired him vs. someone who isn't systemically punished by the j…

> A person with past convictions will generally be more loyal to the company that hired him // The risk factor is that they won't, that they're not really reformed, that if they robbed in the past then ripping off your office will seem a good option (or letting a friend know how to do it without getting caught, etc.). Any evidence to back up your claim? It would be lovely to think that this is true. FWIW I'm for appl…

As an offset to that risk, giving your employees more individualised attention than many companies want to give entry-level/minimum-wage employees would likely be a necessity.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#146

Post by mseebach »

cubano wrote: post #46
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

Wow, can the meta-irony of this particular point be any deeper? Good thing there will always be a job waiting for him at the bakery. "Following the release of his book, Chasing the Scream, in 2015, Hari gave a number of interviews where he expressed regret for his actions. In order to quell doubts about his reporting, he also released full audio copies of sources he interviewed for his book. In an interview with the…

Things are significantly more complicated with Hari than "mistake, apology, done". This article recaps the problems and even documents severe problems in his post-apology work.

http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/9/7/kdgwxcbsned1rknh0h3...

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#147

Post by mseebach »

Stratoscope wrote: post #36
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

Yikes, I didn't know that, thanks for pointing it out. Still, I think it would be a mistake to skip the article because of who wrote it. As I said, it was a real eye-opener for me, and I'm glad I read it. I'm even glad I bought Hari's book Chasing the Scream . (I didn't even do my usual Kindle free sample, just a one-click purchase on the spot after reading the article, quite unusual for me!) You did have me worried…

Maybe he deserves a second chance, but he doesn't seem to have changed his ways much.

http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/9/7/kdgwxcbsned1rknh0h3...

The last section, "Update", is of particular interest to you, as it relates directly to the audio transcripts from Chasing the Scream.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#148

Post by mseebach »

Stratoscope wrote: post #119
cubano wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, can the meta-irony of this particular point be any deeper? Good thing there will always be a job waiting for him at the bakery. "Following the release of his book, Chasing the Scream, in 2015, Hari gave a number of interviews where he expressed regret for his actions. In order to quell doubts about his reporting, he also released full audio copies of sources he interviewed for his book. In an interview with the…

While we're talking about people who did bad things in the past and got a second chance... How about John Carmack? > As reported in David Kushner's Masters of Doom, when Carmack was 14, he broke into a school to help a group of kids steal Apple II computers. To gain entry to the building, Carmack concocted a sticky substance of Thermite mixed with Vaseline that melted through the windows. However, an overweight accom…

Journalism and computer programming are fundamentally different pursuits. Computer programming is a perfectly objective activity, the output is totally independent of the work that went into it. Thus, Carmack's work is brilliant, and would remains brilliant despite Carmack being a repentant theif. ReiserFS is still a good filesystem and is still included in the Linux kernel, despite it's author being a convicted murderer.

But journalism is different: the activity is subjective and we are required to trust that the journalist (and their editor and publisher etc) isn't out to mislead us (or, more realistically, that we understand their biases and can compensate for them). Thus, the output is much closer linked to the work that went into it. The journalist was in the room, we weren't. We have to trust that the journalist not only accurately quotes what's being said, but accurately represents the context of it. That means that the personal integrity of the journalist is much more important.

Plenty of lapses of journalists can be trivially forgiven - youthful theft easily among them. But Hari didn't steal a computer as a kid, he messed with one of the most sacred institutions of journalism: the quote. Even worse, he claimed ignorance: forgiving a journalist who so fundamentally misunderstands his own role as a high-integrity purveyor of truth that he thinks it's cool to mess with quotes is a lot more difficult than forgiving theft (not that it's up to any of us to forgive Carmack, we weren't party to his crime).

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#149

Post by marincounty »

Congrats to this bakery, and the felons who are happy with their job. As to someone who worked as a Baker; I can honestly state the job was one of the worst jobs I have ever had--and I have had more than a bakers dozen x 2. The Bakery I worked at couldn't keep employees. The hours were horrid. I remember having to be there at 4:30 a.am. The wage was not a livable wage, unless you were living with family members. And two guys out of the 10 of us working there committed suicide. I'll name the Bakery because the original owner was such a Jerk; it was Marin Bagel Factory. This was in the ninties--maybe working in a bakery has changed, but any bakery owner should be glad they have any employees that show up. Sorry, but I think back at that Rat hole and cringe.

Re: This bakery will hire anyone

#150

Post by VLM »

MichaelGG wrote: post #93
rdl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if a Silicon Valley tech company would care about drug related convictions. I don't think possession/distribution/etc. alone would really be an issue (except if it were extremely recent and potentially ongoing), but clearly "I was high and raped/killed my neighbor" would, and either could arguably be "drug related". "Was an addict and broken into cars to get money for drugs" would be a more interesting corne…

Taking "drug convictions" into account is a form of discrimination. If the FDA revoked the licensing of Prozac or the DEA scheduled it tomorrow, suddenly tons of people would be guilty of drug-crimes. It'd criminalize being depressed. The same is true for the current state of drug laws. We're criminalizing people with anxiety, with existential pain, stress, curiosity, etc. What's different about stealing cars for mon…

One way to think about interviewers ignoring current immoral and unethical laws would be to step back and consider past immoral and unethical laws.

Going back a couple decades, being gay or holding the wrong political beliefs was something of a hiring problem.

Given that "we" forget that technology and fads might change, but people never do, you can safely assume that if being "outed" a couple decades ago eliminated about 95% of employment opportunities, then the equivalent today will eliminate a similar percentage.

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