What did/do you do for a living, tech related? How did it affect your career to have a felony drug charge?
When I caught this charge, I had just turned 18. It really ruined my life.
Currently, I work in tech. For a very long time I was barely making ends meet, working in a fast food restaurant for minimum wage while trying to interview to get a developer job.
I went through 8 interview processes, and received offers from all but one. Each one of them was rescinded when HR learned that I had a felony, as a matter of company policy.
It was really heartbreaking and a lot of times, it made me want to give up on life and just stop trying. I kept interviewing and going to events/networking, and eventually found a very low-paying job at a local place and sort of slowly worked my way back up from there.
If anyone here has some degree of power at a company and wants to make a difference in the world, convince your company to hire felons with non-violent/non-finance related offenses.
Thank you for looking though. I think it's important to offer felons the chance to get a decent job in a proper career field too.
There's one organization doing this called "Underdog Devs":
> "if that is allowed discrimination outside certain roles how can those people ever be expected back to society? Ofc, they are going to do more crime if it is their only realistic option for reasonable income."
"Welcome to the Hotel California. You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!"
On the other hand you have egregious cases where such a measure would completely make sense but is ignored because of larger interests. One of them is how EU public institutions screen all their employees and filter out felons. And then a public institution like the European Central Bank names Christine Lagarde president, just 3 years after she received a criminal conviction of negligence in allowing the misuse of public funds.
A freshly minted criminal can be named president of an institution in more or less the same general area as where she committed her crime. But a someone with a minor drug charge can't take a dev job... Both are a stain on modern society.
I find it ironic, though, to want to seek shelter in BRK to avoid a too tech heavy SPY, when BRK itself has maintained relevancy only by investing disproportionately in AAPL. It would seem prudent to cut out the BRK middleman and just directly invest in AAPL if one wants to emulate BRK’s success.
If the argument is that serving your time in jail rehabilitates you, then you shouldn't be limited in what roles you can take after you've served your time.
I assume the "certain roles" you are talking about is something like banking with someone with a history of felony fraud. I guess the argument is that maybe prison isn't 100% rehabilitative. But if that's the case, why should I, as a non-banker, hire a felon who, say assaulted a stranger with a baseball bat. Isn't there a similar chance that prison wasn't 100% rehabilitative?