The prisoners trying to code their way to a better life
bbc.com
bbc.com
EDIT: I guess a new account can't comment more than once (makes sense) so I'd like to address the background check issue: I've had numerous jobs, where I disclosed honestly. My felony was a very serious one.
Now I'm quite successful (making well over market; a regular poster on HN; throwaway account is obvious). I recently hired a released inmate who I knew could code though he hadn't ever really done it (he showed me some code he wrote down in TI-BASIC). This guy was locked up 15 years, but within a few months, he's learning as fast or faster than any random person.
It really doesn't take a lot of projects to make equivalent and greater money then the type of minimum wage or manual labor jobs many ex-cons would end up working instead (or even petty crime).
- They have 10,000 hours experience
- They have StackOverflow and Kahn Academy and MIT access
- They speak English as a first language (likely in the US)
I'd pay someone like that.
It also makes you more independent when debugging issues no-one else online has seen. You become unafraid of digging into the next level down to find out what's going on.
We don't need no docstrings, the source should be self documenting!
/s
I started learning about C from books long before I ever had access to a C compiler.
Another thing about having a sources-only, no "google-fu" possible/only "local-scope-fu" policy, is that it tends to defeat the cruft. The bloat. The near-infinite gooze that I just know will be the inevitable subject of the response: "software is too complicated for one person to know everything about it, there's just too much of it, etc."
(Of course, its a scope issue. You mathematicians need not flame me in response. I know you don't need to know how to write a compiler to get real work done. There are no absolutes; that is as true of software, unfortunately or fortunately, as everything else..)
[Edit] Here's an article with more comprehensive information, including the program's origins and the organizations behind it: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/how-18-inmates-at...
What is so ground-breaking on that? Any normal country will some sort of education to their prisoners.
As of a couple years ago, there is a program that offers monitored email to some prisoners in U.S. prisons. Email only.
Not only are there no educational programs involving computers, but prisoners are specifically disallowed from using computers for purposes like learning to code.
Now, I'm not saying the U.S. is a "normal country".
I know as an employer of developers, that I would hire someone with a felony because I know their introductory salary will be lower but their skill set should be the same. Which may sound over opportunistic, but it's just economics, fewer offers mean lower initial pay. The downside is if they become excellent developers it'll be hard to keep them at the lower salary, even if they do have a felony.
As a felon, I was rejected from an internship at IBM, but I was able to get hired at startup-type companies.
Over the past twenty years, I've been told by many folks in the US tech industry holding unskilled positions that non-white-collar convicts should never be given jobs again, should do all their time in solitary, shouldn't have books or access to entertainment, or should be beaten with stones or bats (and a few variations on this theme of torture-as-penance, always by women oddly.) Regardless of whether those attitudes are right or wrong, it's important to understand they are there and seem to be commonly held by the folks standing at the gates. And, for people who've committed felonies and done their time to understand they can either get very creative in how they adapt, or reoffend.
To bring this rambling back to the topic at hand: can "felons" get a tech job? Sure, but it's unlikely where those attitudes have had time to become invisibly entrenched, e.g., in human resources' workflow. So, as another poster said, startups are a real possibility. But really, any company where paperwork or blind-policy isn't in play--especially as a first step, e.g., a cookie-cutter job application--is a possibility. Another approach is to create the job, something almost uniquely possible in tech.
In short, it's tough, doable, and I think great because people can use it to walk far from the scenery of recidivism, figuratively and literally.
Edit: Apparently I am wrong, they aren't technically required to disclose it. However, in practice, every job application I have ever seen has had the question.
I think you meant that some people prefers not to hire them, which drives their prospective wages down and, in turn, makes them more attractive candidates to people will hire them, like me.
First, because it reads like a tacit threat - even if you aren't personally a convicted felon, anyone reading this might find themselves less willing to even consider someone who is.
Second, people adjust their expected salary expenditures on any number of qualities and characteristics. It's not "taking advantage" of someone any more than paying a junior developer less than a senior developer. There's increased risk - real and/or perceived - involved in hiring someone who has had difficulty staying within the confines of the law.
"There's increased risk - real and/or perceived - involved in hiring someone who has had difficulty staying within the confines of the law."
This is the same argument banks make when they jack some single mother's interest rate to 39% when she misses a payment on her credit card. It has nothing to do with risk, and everything to do with seizing an opportunity to take advantage of someone.
If you're going to help someone return to society, then you ought to pay them in the same range as everyone else on your team. That - is just good business.
This does a poor job of extending your argument. That's an explicitly defined and agreed-upon contract between the issuer and the recipient of the credit card.
Maybe we have very different interpretations of what "taking advantage" means. To me, that pivots heavily on shared or expressed understanding.
Is that not what you said above?
But, you have no moral issue with such practices?
Being restrained only by the limits of federal law is essentially a sociopathic value system. Bigoted behavior didn't become wrong because of various legislative changes in the 60s. It was already wrong, as is systematically underpaying former criminals who have already served their time.
It's also worth pointing out that this country imprisons millions of non-violent offenders, and those people are disproportionately likely to be black and male.
And this is all the more reason, if you're going to hire someone with a criminal record, to try and treat them with the same respect you'd treat any other employee. For the very fact that many of them get treated so poorly when they get out that it makes just as much sense to go back in.