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Comment by buf | Hacker News Reader

I've also been to prison.

My story is homeless at 20, no friends or family, in debt about $20k and just got out of prison as a convicted felon.

Now I've built 2.5 unicorns, one of which I helped start. Right now, I've started two side projects that are nearing the $1M ARR (combined).

Programming is a great leveler in today's world. I cannot express how lucky I am to have found it early in my life.

I have a great desire to give back, and somehow fix recidivism in the USA, but it feels so unreachable. I've heard that 70M Jobs was shutting down, and I reached out to the owner, but he brushed me off in an email. At some point, I'd like to give it a real shot.

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If you want to give back, consider hiring from the organization Rick (subject of the podcast) started - Underdog Devs.

It’s a loosely collected group of mentors and mentees with a small dedicated group of full-time learners on a stipend program

The #1 challenge, by far, faced by the org is hiring and placement into companies for cohort graduates and mentees.

If you’re able, consider posting job listings in the UD slack

https://www.underdogdevs.org/

*I am part of the group as a mentor and its been on the whole an incredibly positive experience

I'm in. Just DMed the UD twitter account to get an invite into the slack group.

That’s awesome - If, for some reason, they don’t get back to you let me know and I will get you into the Slack

Okay, will do. Just in case, you can send the invite to ex [at] siliconvict com

right here... hire convicted felons. go to the nearest prison and work with inmates there that are getting out in a year to teach them programming or whatever position you need filled so when they get out they have a job and the confidence to keep that job.

That is an amazing story! I'm glad you made it out and have found a kind of success many ex convicts don't find.

I never went to prison, but similarly, I'm not sure the person I was before my software career would have faired well if programming wasn't an option. It's such a practical skill that not only can be learned for free but is lucrative and opens all sorts of doors for people to be entrepreneurs.

I hate to be one of those "learn to code" people, but sometimes it is hard for me not to evangelize. I'm of the opinion that a successful career in coding doesn't require the kind of genius intelligence that many, including a lot of HNers, think it does. Mindset is way more important than IQ, and writing "good" code isn't even that high of importance most of the time. More people can get into it than they think, and some of them should before the inevitable day that a hypothetical GPT algorithm can do everything a current day mid-level software engineer can.

I believe there are fewer and fewer "American Dream" jobs, to where you can start from nothing and emerge financially independent with a decent retirement (e.g. doctors, lawyers, programming).

Convicts really only have a few realistic options

1. Programming 2. Starting their own business

For sure. This is why I think there is a definite ethical element to the kind of automation we are inventing. Not to say that automation isn't inevitable, but I don't think I would feel good about myself pushing the process along.

And yeah, non "AI" tech is still automation, but at least the option to be a programmer without having to be a genius with Tensorflow is still there.

Being a good enough developer to build a career in this field doesn't require a high IQ but it does require a special kind of mindset as you said.

I also used to think that everyone could learn to code but I came to realize that this mindset can't be learned. Some people maybe discover that they have this mindset later in life and that's why learn to code is still a useful piece of advice because it'll reach them but once you've tapped into the fixed % of the population that do have this mindset you can't expand it more.

It's not to say others are doomed, there are other mindsets that exists for every professions. Maybe some of them can become great PMs or great small business owners or accountants. But coding is out of reach for a large portion of the population just like developers tend to be very poor salespeople and couldn't "learn to sale" if their income relied on it.

I teach coding. The mindset absolutely can be learned, but indeed, you need to learn some attitude, not just skills. But a teacher can show how it is done; the exploration, the part when you do not give up when you encounter an error, etc.

In my experience, the most significant first barrier is the command line and the environment setup. This is why I always start with explaining the Unix shell and ssh. It gets a lot easier from there.

Maybe you're right. But I've mentored a few college students on the side.

All interested in programing and in pursuing a CS degree and yet some of them wanted only the solution. They were not interested in why their code didn't work or what the error was, they wanted me to jump in and give them the solution.

It's like they liked the idea of being a developer like many like the idea of becoming a writer, but they didn't have that mindset, that stubbornness and willingness to spend hours reading some shitty incomplete readme, going through dozens of GitHub issue threads, googling compiler's errors, reading the doc, trying until it works and feeling that rush of pleasure once it compiles/do whatever you want your program to do.

And some of them couldn't grasp some basic, fundamental concepts like a for loop or accessing a method on an object after two semesters in a CS program.

> I have a great desire to give back, and somehow fix recidivism in the USA, but it feels so unreachable

10% of families account for 66% of criminals [0].

I don't know why people call it recidivism. It's family values.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/10/crime-run...

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