A new experiment in remote work, from the inside

Transcript link:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5601059

A great listen and thought provoking all the way through, but the part most specifically relevant to HN:

> GONZALEZ: Preston Thorpe is the one making six figures, which, by the way, is double what the corrections officers who guard him make. And it's been a game changer for Preston. He said it's hard enough to get a job when you have a criminal record, let alone while you're still inside.

THORPE: And now, I feel like my life has a purpose. Like, there's no situation right now that would cause me to do something where I would risk losing, like, my job, my computer.

GONZALEZ: Preston is 33 years old. And he told Susan Sharon that he's always been a computer guy, a computer nerd, he said, since he was 13 years old. It's kind of what got him in trouble later in life.

SHARON: He talked to me about buying drugs on the dark web and selling them. And I think the second time, he was convicted because he had a powerful synthetic opioid, much more deadly than fentanyl, capable of killing lots of people.

GONZALEZ: Preston is about nine years into his 20-ish-year sentence. He used to be in a different prison, in a different state, and he says he got in a lot of trouble there, so much so that they transferred him to Maine. Like, we need this person out of our custody. And when he got to Maine, Preston started seeing possibilities-- school, picking up coding again. And he did super well, so well, no issues. And eventually, he got a remote job as a lead principal engineer for this nonprofit that pushes for education in prisons. And because Preston had a laptop, you know, in his cell all day and all night that he could use for certain approved things, Preston started contributing to this big open-source coding project.

Basically, this company was going to attempt to rewrite this database called SQLite in Preston's favorite programming language.