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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

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 we couldn't put them on.

We even saw clients that refused anyone who had even a misdemeanor, at which point I discovered how many of our consultants had misdemeanor DUIs or arrests for various non-violent reasons.

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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 that subcontracted employees to other companies, who then refused to accept them for some half-assed DUI from years back, I hope I'd have the decency to fire that client instead.

Generealizing: if a person is dishonest, do you think his inclination to act dishonestly depends on the work they do or on their personality?

That's a loaded and extremely variable question. Furthermore, it has little relevance to the main thing I criticized above: that misdemeanors are usually irrelevant to most work and rejecting people because of them is grossly, punitively biased. I say irrelevant because in the context of your question, the value of some random public disorderliness citation or DUI is next to useless for judging how inherently or professionally honest a person is, and even more absurd for measuring how likely they are to commit outright criminal offenses against an employer.

It's very easy to get slapped with a misdemeanor in the U.S and even many other countries, often for absurd, bullshit reasons that had more to do with the mood of the authorities in a given context than a person being at all an abnormal danger to society.

I don't really disagree with you - but try arguing that with every lawyer in every Fortune 1000 company.

Every Saint has a past. Every Sinner has a future.

Everyone has a past and a future, but what kind?

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