If he writes good code I dont care what his personal life before working for me entails, long as he isnt doing illegal stuff on company resources.
If he writes good code I dont care what his personal life before working for me entails, long as he isnt doing illegal stuff on company resources.
I feel like that's true for most 'stuff', but there are a few exceptions where I will refuse to hire an individual based on things they've done with their personal lives.
The problem is, when he does illegal stuff using your corporate resources, like running an illegal crypto scam it's a whole heckuva lot harder to say "Oh, we didn't know he would do that!" in court.
> it's a whole heckuva lot harder to say "Oh, we didn't know he would do that!" in court.
No it's not. If he did his time, he must be given the benefit of the doubt since he should be "reformed" by now.
That's your risk to take if you like. However, I don't think it will stand up in court.
>long as he isnt doing illegal stuff on company resources.
Previous criminality is one of the most reliable indicators of future criminality.
Of course this depends on the crime, but it is absurd to believe that someones past crimes do not reflect on their likelihood to commit crimes again.
That applies to crimes dealing with theft or assault. I.e when you are willing to break basic rules of society, that indicates
On the flip side if you run something like a drug trafficking business, you can probably run a generic shipping business if you make the same risk adjusted money without reverting to do doing anything illegal.
In the same way, if you run a piracy website, you most likely can just get paid big bucks at a tech company to do very easy work because you are likely smarter than most people there, and cruise control without worrying about doing anything illegal.
> if you run something like a drug trafficking business
Violence and other crimes are inherent in the illegal drug trade once you get to any high level. Your local friendly weed dealer may not hurt anyone physically but the people above him are another matter.
> you can probably run a generic shipping business if you make the same risk adjusted money
The propensity to take a course of action based on "risk adjusted profit" rather than "right or wrong" is a pretty good predictor of future criminality.
>Violence and other crimes are inherent in the illegal drug trade
In the movies yes.
In real life, you have hired security, in the same way that a large company will have hired security.
Right and Wrong is not the same thing as legal vs illegal. Many morally wrong things are legal, and many morally neutral or right things are illegal.
I would be shocked if a history of purely committing mala prohibita crimes had much correlation with committing mala in se crimes.
Why? This seems a totally normal thing for drug related offences, which turn from minor self harm, using the drugs, to major crimes, like drug dealing or killing people while driving drunk.
It also goes the other way, though.
For instance, lots of Americans refused to sign up for the draft, which was illegal but prevented them from killing innocent people in Vietnam.
Or they helped slaves escape the South, illegal but stopped violence being used against them.
As for drug dealing, I'm not sure simple drug dealing is even considered a mala in se crime, absent some sort of fraud or dealing to incapacitated people. It used to be illegal to sell hemp, now you can legally buy it on the internet both federally and in the vast majority of states -- yesterday they were a "drug dealer" and today they're just a "farmer."
Drug dealing is one of the most horrendous crimes imaginable. The amount of society wide suffering it causes, the amount of families it tears apart, the amount of destruction it does to health make it far, far worse than most other crimes. It is obviously something where a death penalty is more than justified, especially since no other methods works in stopping drug dealers.
>hemp
What a ridiculous argument. We both know that this is not the drug we are talking about.
Does this include the Sackler family?
I wonder if there's more nuance there if we break down types of crime and then factor in economic and social conditions. If the only way I can see to get ahead is selling drugs and I end up in prison for it, when I come out now branded as felon do I have more options?
> Previous criminality is one of the most reliable indicators of future criminality.
That blanket statement could use some nuance.
Supposedly, a brain is developing until around the mid-20s. That seems to line up with federal recidivism data [1].
1. https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
Indeed, hiring a young criminal is even more risky than hiring someone older.
Especially if the older person has proven himself by not reoffending that would be grounds to trust them more.
I think its still incredibly unlikely for an educated employed person to re-offend. You aren't really saving yourself from anything by not hiring on that sole fact, and are likely making the person's life and society overall worse by making that decision, which, arguably, is more ethically challenging than hiring persons with a criminal history.
The data is old, but this just does not seem true at all: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ecp.pdf
66% of people with some college of more in prison were reoffenders.
It is true that higher educated people reoffend less, but it is by no means unlikely or even "incredibly unlikely".
Table 15 is a survey of state prison inmates, it isn't a sample of the general population. It is just saying that 66% of the surveyed state prison population are reoffenders with "some college". That is not really a representative sample to draw inferences from for this discussion with regard to educated people who have been released from parole.
Also, you have to consider what is the definition of an offense is to be considered as reoffending. Normally, that data includes parole violations as arrests. You can violate your parole engaging in what most people would consider benign behaviors. It is a confounding factor that many people don't even think about when looking at that sort of data.
Additionally, the "some college" stat is cherry picking. Many state prisons offer "some college" to inmates in the form of courses. It is likely inmates in a state prison system for any significant period of time have have taken "some college". That survey states that a good number of inmates took "some college" while in prison (page 7).
Look at college graduates. That document itself states that it is incredibly unlikely for someone with a bachelors degree to even go to prison. 2% of white state prison inmates aged 20-39 have any college degree (almost 3 decades ago in 1997, and crime rates have fallen since then).
Finally, the reimprisonment rate is much lower in the US in general, some 37% over three years, even as low as 19% in Oregon [1]. And that is for all persons, not bucketed by educational attainment.
Some programs claim around 2% - 4% general recidivism rate for inmates they fostered to obtain college degrees [2]. Again, "recidivism" is a large bucket that includes supervised release violations, rearrests for anything (including violations), re-convictions, and re-imprisonments.
I would wager that, if you could find data on it, that the chance of re-conviction for a new offense for someone who has completed parole, a bachelor's degree, and found gainful employment in said career is near-zero.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6743246/
[2] https://www.vera.org/news/back-to-school-a-common-sense-stra...
[3] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/effects-aging...
[4] https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/uscc_business_cas...
There's always someone just as qualified that doesn't have a record, so you'd in fact be hiring the lesser of the two candidates, and that's not a smart business decision.
define "doing illegal stuff". Piracy is such a weird grey area, especially for companies
> Piracy is such a weird grey area, especially for companies
I think most people will agree, torrenting/pirating on company resources is a dumb idea. You probably deserve to be fired for it, grey area or not. Unless you have Facebook's lawyers though, then it seems to be okay.
I'd start drawing a line on fascist ideologies. We don't need fascists no matter how brilliant and skilled. We can do without just fine.
Sure, in theory. But then he is working on some important feature, and the code is on his laptop, which gets confiscated during a raid and now your access to the person and their in-process work is gone. Yeah, I know, code check-ins, documentation, blah blah blah. Totally the strong suit of the typical uber-hacker type /s.
The work/life boundaries are heavily blurred these days in even the best cases. Something like this, their personal life as a real potential to impact your business/product/brand.