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Comment by thoraway1010 | Hacker News Reader

I do hiring.

1) Run your own background check and see what comes back. Most will let you run your own check.

2) Don't mention this if you want the job, the the FAANGs did go through a period where they wanted activists / not just the standard coders but I think that might be somewhat over.

3) I would never hire someone with your record if I knew about it.

A note - use straight language if you are committing crimes for moral reasons. For example "defends unborn children from child murders" is committing a murder of an abortion doctor under our current laws, "rescuing animals" may be theft or burglary. "saving the world from GMO" may be destroying a local farm. "saving the world from gentrification" may be multiple arsons (in emeryville for example). 9/11, the US wars in many other countries are often tied to these ideals justify violence and killing language models.

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Can you provide a link or some resource to a recommended background check service?

See my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23035383. I've worked at two FAANG companies plus Uber, if that helps.

re. 3), are you kidding me?

I'm not saying I would or wouldn't, but consider this. I'm the hiring manager. I know someone has committed a felony. I argue that we should hire anyway.

Guess who is putting their career at a company on the line for a stranger?

I think you are over dramatizing this. Bad hires happen. I do not see how the manager has their entire career on the line, if they need to fire someone later.

Should it not be possible to create trust between two people, just because one of them has a criminal record? I do not follow that logic.

Edit: My issue is with his absolute "never".

Bad hires of course happen. I don't think that's relevant.

Say I work at a place where (1) no criminal backgrounds is a rule, and (2) I have a candidate we would hire except for rule (1). If I personally push for an exception to rule (1) and the person turns out to be a bad hire -- and particularly if the badness of the hire is related to crimes -- I strongly suspect that will become a me problem.

"Investigating factory farms and rescuing animals" puts a nice spin on breaking and entering and theft of property, doesn't it?

You could use that same line of reasoning in almost any situation that there are circumstances that lessen the repercussions of an action.

i.e. "Self defense" puts a nice spin on killing someone, doesn't it?

It's worth pointing out that self-defense is a legal defense that absolves oneself of guilt. There's a similar defense called "necessity," where you can be absolved of guilt in committing a lesser crime to avoid a greater harm in narrow circumstances. But political activism (of the sort the OP admits to committing) is conclusively not in that set of circumstances.

re: #3, They said they were saving abused animals from farms, not doing violence to people. That is also a felony and breaks some laws. Both things can be true. The machinations of the powerful are often totally morally bankrupt and also the law of the land. Your analogies are too extreme for this instance.

> They said they were saving abused animals from farms, not doing violence to people.

I don't think the crime should matter at all. We, as a society, decided long ago the justice system is the means by which we mete out punishment. So long as they served whatever punishment, if any, was arrived at by verdict of a fair trial/court of competent jurisdiction, refusing to hire someone who has committed certain crimes is a de facto additional punishment for which that person was never given any opportunity to defend themselves from (and that's morally wrong).

Moreover, how are these people supposed to become productive members of society again if nobody offers them a job? Should they only work "those" jobs, not "my" job? Or be forced to find out if they are competent entrepreneurs? The parent's viewpoint is too extreme for any instance.

(This topic has been written about, and I feel like has even topped HN a few times, though I am struggling to find a good citation at the moment.)

An opposing view is we don't have fair trials due to the expense of representation and plea bargaining.

Possibly op was innocent but too poor and risk adverse to try and fight the harder charge, so op plead for a lesser charge. Possibly op gunned down the farmer and plead to a lesser charge. We don't have fair trials so we'll never know for certain what happened.

If we had fair trials, the general public would feel less need to be judge jury and executioner. But we don't, so its just added responsibility for a hiring manager.

"We, as a society, decided long ago" Who's this 'we', not me, that's for sure. Its not my failed system.

Not everyone in society agrees with how things are run. Hence, protests and individual moral compasses.

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