cubano

I was recently released from Las Vegas County Jail (CCDC) where all sentenced inmates, myself included, are forced, by state law, to "work" in some manner in the jail.

In this case, work consisted of 11-hour shifts, 6 days a week, of ultra back-breaking kitchen work. We were not even allowed to have water cups anywhere outside the break room.

They actually yelled faster! faster! as we ran "the line"...I never could get over that one. All that was missing were the whips and the guards with shotguns spitting tobacco.

We processed approx. 10 thousand trays per day, and were constantly harassed and threatened big time by the corporate kitchen staff in charge. It wasn't enough that we were clocking 60-70 hours a week for the grand total of 1 extra tray per meal (not every meal grant you, just the ones we were working during), but you could actually get thrown in the box and lose gain time (more days in jail) for eating a cookie or some trivial such thing.

If you refused to work, you were put in the box and 5 days were added to your sentence.

I did the math...2 shifts of 28 workers 365 days a year...with overtime and all that, approx $50k per week($2.6mil/year) of free basically coerced slave labor for the Aero-mark Corporation that ran the kitchen.

[edits]

That usually works out well, right?

Or you have something on your SE history that makes you totally unsuitable for hire, according to the muckity-mucks in charge.

Hard work and practice pretty much always makes one better.

Achievement-esteem of course has to do with the trophy stuff and doing things your peers can't do as well. I excelled at this sort of thing and have all sort of Al Bundy-type anecdotes I'm sure no one wants to hear.

The much more important type of self-esteem is the one that forms much earlier in life and is instilled by your parents love and devotion, and is the one that is much more important to your future-self's emotional well being.

My personal experience tells me this one drives addiction and probably many criminal behaviors as we get older.

As a proponent of the Einstein's block universe theory, I often wonder if everything is already baked in and we are just what we are destined to be anyway, so what does it matter how we feel really?

I say this because while I seem to observe this prison-is-terrible-the-convicts-need-compassion, not one person here has offered to help me in any meaningful way, even though I have documented my trials and tribulations over and over [0][1][2].

I have a 30 year history of software development, with 14 or so with the LAMP-stack. No one reading this is willing to even talk about some side project or prove-yourself 2 week gig? Ok right I get it...this isn't a help wanted or job board fine that's cool.

But still, I'm not getting it anymore...is everyone just into some sort of bullshit social signalling exercise or, perhaps worse, are willing to try to help ex-cons as long as they are funneled into low paying exploitative back-breaking jobs with no future that almost surely will lead 95% back into crime?

If so, can we start being honest about that's what all this discussion is about..."boy someone should sure do something about how screwed these people are but hell no it won't be me."

Yeah, so I'm frustrated and scared and broke and all that, so try to forgive my rant...I'm sure I'll come to regret it as I do so much else in my life.

[0] https://postmoderncoder.svbtle.com/fear-and-jaywalking-in-la... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14394324 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14302656

I have been released twice from the Florida DOC, both times from a panhandle camp (Gulf C.I) that was approximately 9 hours from my home.

They definitely DO NOT give you the clothes "you were arrested in" as long ago those clothes were thrown away (at the "reception center" along with your cell phone, which was almost certainly stolen by the COs and/or convicts, and all other property you may have had)

My first time through, in 2004, my ex-wife actually sent me a beautiful set of clothes to be released in. They were of course "lost". She was so upset when she came to pick me up the assholes in release were actually threatening to lock her and/or me up because she was making such a stink about me having no clothes for release.

I ended up getting very ill fitting cheap-ass pants and a white t-shirt, and back then, a $100 dollar bill. That's it. Thankfully, I had her to pick me up and drive me home.

The second time through I wasn't so lucky. In 2014 I was given the same shit clothes, only $50 this time as they changed the release policy, and a bus ticket. That is it. No cell phone, no wallet...nothing.

It sounds like you are talking about jail, not prison.

What techie wouldn't love one (or four as a nice matrix) of these?

I like to call it "ego-driven/fashion development" and I pretty much see some form of it nowadays every time I work with a team of devs with members under the age of 30.

But the average person in many of these small organisations (even the tech team) is probably confused by a simple WordPress install or even the process of uploading files to a web hosting account.

If a "tech team" can't even upload a file to a server, that is really a piss poor tech team and in general shouldn't even be labeled as such, IMO.

  # bash vst-install.sh
  vst-install.sh: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
  vst-install.sh: line 1: `<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">'

I find it very ironic that Moody is pointing a finger at China's "debt-fueled binge" when plenty of federal debt issues are staring us right in the face here in the US.

The 8 years of Obama doubled a national debt that had taken about 230 years to accumulate. No regime in the history of America has even come close to that debt figure, and current US obligations looking forward cha-ching in ar around $200T more, far more then we can ever hope to afford.

China, being a one-party communist rule, probably has a much better chance of fixing its issues then we do due to the lack of any political infighting. It's leaders can do whatever they need to fix budget shortfalls, irregardless of having to worry about reelections.

Or am I missing something key here? Yes of course it's been extended by very smart people has new features etc etc...but a weekend project that was robust enough to handle the Linux kernel codebase for him? That's is no small feat.

Oh yes perhaps its the new meme among developers that there are no real genius architects and coders and that anyone could have done it really so why distribute props to any one creator?

Yeah given my experience I have a hard time buying into that mindset.

They could no longer use their revision control system BitKeeper and no other Source Control Management (SCMs) met their needs for a distributed system. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, took the challenge into his own hands and disappeared over the weekend to emerge the following week with Git.

[0] https://www.linux.com/blog/10-years-git-interview-git-creato...

Thank you brother for having the courage to be honest and for inspiration.

And a exceptional work history that include IBM Advanced Technology, AT&T, and TransUnion along with more current cutting edge gigs using systems like Fastlane, Jenkins, and React as a very successful remote IC?

Yes what I've learned is that most HNers just like to virtue-signal their support and aren't really interested in actually involving themselves...but a serious and heartfelt THANK YOU for the ones that do.

Blackthorn, it's fantastic you are involved in a active and successful program that is helping people coming out of prison find a job and stay out...that's God's work for sure.

But in my experience many are almost surely being exploited by employers whom are using their desperation against starving and living in the streets, violating parole and going back to prison, and going back to a life of crime against them to offer them a employment at below market-rate jobs.

Many if not most of these jobs are actually designed for the ex-con to fail at and to be easily replaceable with the next crop of paroles and new releases as the revolving door spins in-and-out. Halfway houses seems to be the worse offenders here as they often take a large portion of the ex-cons take home pay in the name of "protecting" them against themselves but its often just a raw money grab.

Very few of these jobs pay anything close to a decent living wage that will allow the newly released convict a good chance at rejoining society in a meaningful way anyway.

It's so easy for even a very empathetic person who wants to help to take a hard look at these problems and eventually decide "well damn...there is no solution here so let's just go back to the old attitude that is their fault for breaking <insert random bullshit non-violent offense here> so they deserve to be social outcasts, shit on forever living on the margins of society with very little hope of redemption."

You guys just don't know how much I hate knowing all this shit...I truly don't believe I am the person that my background suggests I am to most employers but as always, the very few ruin it for the most.

As an IC basically my entire life, I have joined large legacy projects many times, and my typical attack strategy always revolves around a large cup of coffee and my trusty debugger. Using 2 monitors, starting at main() or index.php (or whatever of course), I will execute as much of the entire codebase as possible line-by-line.

At first I will blast through the code looking at general structures and entry/exit branches and the like, and note things and often breakpoint sections that seem hairy or where I can note inefficiencies or great design.

Then I slow down the stepping and really examine the heavy-lifting sections to try to become familiar with the style and abstractions being used.

This method has served me well, as more often then not, by the first day's afternoon I can be having intelligent conversations with the existing team, almost always much to their confused surprised.

I suppose it matters much if you are going into the senior position as really strong head-down coder or as really more of a project management liaison.

Not being much into the management side of things, I don't have much advice on that role, and your suggestions sound really smart.

But, as I am currently finding out in my life, the odds are very slim to none that life post-prison is going to change for these convicts as they try to rejoin society, as the job markets will be almost totally closed off to them as they seem to be for me.

Even with all this "enlightened" rhetoric here on HN about second-chances and "understanding the struggle", not one person here has contacted me about remote work even though I have make it very clear how desperate my situation is [0]. Please don't misunderstand...I don't really expect anyone to have much sympathy for my situation, but I know plenty of people here are currently looking for IT workers and my posting clearly show I am capable of doing high-quality LAMP work, so I think it's at least notable to discuss my experience.

It's all well and good to provide education and such to people in seek it, and its a great feel-good-story with wonderful social signaling for all you comfortable techies, but the reality is that food and shelter costs real money, and all the education in the world isn't going to help these ex-cons find work, build self-esteem and rejoin society if the common prejudices continue to work against them at every turn.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14017760

In fact, most are scared by the idea of it and actively try to limit the meme. This explains why the US has basically become a prison state and has roughly 4% of the world's population and 33% of the incarcerated inmates, with no serious efforts at reform seeing the light of day.

I suppose given our evolutionary biology, these attitudes aren't surprising, and really represents just another form of tribalism where the ingroup works safe "corporate-drone" jobs and the outgroup don't.

Something about the 49-qubit threshold or some such proclamation, so maybe that's something that will finally move the needle.

My take is that you really haven't found this love in your life yet. You are trying to pigeonhole other peoples passions (like youtube vids and OS projects) into yours. That will never work long term.

For me, it was music; I loved it so much that you couldn't stop me from playing, and pretty much all available time outside work was spend practicing and playing in my band at the time.

It was the ideal social lubricant as well, as being a gifted "nerd" 35 years ago was a totally different thing then it is now. Literally, at work and school I interacted with the math kids that were often picked on and made fun of.

Playing and practicing live music not only soothed my soul, but gave me self-esteem and a ton of social status. And it hardly ever seemed like "real" work

I think that is the key for a sustainable hobby commitment.

[edits]

One of the first software projects I ever developed was a real microcode/bus simulation of the 6502 for a required CP class I took what seems life lifetimes ago. I remember the prof telling the class that if anyone was interested in a project where they didn't have to come to class and still get an A, talk to him after class.

Sure I'll go for that I thought...who wants to sit in a boring class when you can create.

So I built the opcode simulator, which took the individual bits on the various internal busses and propagated them through the "chip", on a pretty kickass Atari ST that I owned, which at the time (1985 or so) represented cutting edge PC technology. What I remember most about it was finding a bug in the damn Turbo-C (or whatever I can't remember exactly) compiler I was using that, in some cases, always gave the output of "50" during an bin-to-hex conversion or something.

I did everything I could to try to fix this bug, but no matter what it kept popping up, fouling up the results of my otherwise slick simulation. I was terrified to show the prof, but he was relatively impressed with my use of a PC instead of the school's timeshared VAX and totally disregarded the bug after reviewing my code.

And yes...I got my A. I sure wish I still had that program.