Ask HN: Would you hire a felon for technical work?

A friend of mine had a similar issue. Drug-related. No big company would hire him. Hell, my contract with a large company said I couldn't hire him even if I wanted to.

Oddly enough, the way he got around it was to start his own consulting company and hide behind it. Nobody would hire him as an "employee" but they would hire his company without asking about his personal history. Seems like a big loophole but it worked.

If someone I knew would recommend you, I wouldn't care at all about the record. You need to build a network and you'll be golden.

If on the other hand, if you just applied on a website - I would not hire you. Some people will not say that on here, but you're looking for honest feedback. That's mine.

Personally, I would not care so much but I work for a big company and background check is done by HR. I only ask technical and work related questions.

HR tend to be risk averse but I cannot really say what their policies are. In my company, I have never heard of anyone who was made an offer by hiring manager, had that offer rescinded after background check.

Also if you volunteer your felony during interview and I have another strong candidate, I will probably go with them. That is because I would be afraid that HR will not allow us to go with you and we will waste everyone's time. I rather go with safer option.

I never asked candidates about their past if it wasn't relevant to the job. It's hard enough to find any people at all that can do the job, so I can't afford to turn away people for things they did or did not do a long time ago. If you are qualified for the position, I'll hire you.

The big problem is of course, finding people that are qualified, and most people that replied to my job ads were just utterly unqualified for the job. (I received applications from programmers with "15 years of experience" who have never heard of source control.)

No. My company has state and federal government contracts which require background checks on all employees. Whether I find you personally trustworthy is irrelevant, the contracts in place for government network infrastructure worth many millions of dollars of annual revenue could be voided by hiring you and concealing your felony from the contracting agencies. Hiring you could result in a dozen people losing their jobs, some of whom are the sole providers for their families.

I do not have the political influence or lobbying ability to change these agencies' service/contracting procurement policies. The work will simply go elsewhere if I have a felon with 'enable' on the routers.

After two decades I would bite. Two years, probably not. With a pardon, absolutely. Exception would be if I had any concern about the safety of my colleagues or compliance requirements.

Credentialism for this stuff is out of control. Between school volunteering, work, little league, etc I have like 5 entities monitoring me.

Relevant discussion on the 70MillionJobs launch note [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14911467

Yes I would but I would rather not know and wouldnt ask if it was up to me. I already got enough things to worry about!