As someone with several drug related felonies on my record, I can do nothing but applaud the efforts of this CEO, although on a different level I wonder if any adult working a minimum wage job isn't living a very bleak existence anyway, and in fact isn't being exploited for having a brain disorder we currently call "addiction"
The problem with people who let drugs seriously affect their life is that...they let drugs seriously affect their lives, and at least from an employment point of view, where what matters is robot-like conformity and compliance, this is just not-to-be tolerated or even risked.
The sad, sad irony of this is that according to very recent studies[1], the very thing that made us addicts is the very prescription that society has deemed our punishment to be. Talk about cruel and unusual.
I wish I could say I don't struggle with relapse, but one of the few things worse then being an addict is being a lying addict.
Being unemployable by most metrics and having to constantly struggle to survive sure doesn't help with that battle.
Interesting article, thanks. As a Portuguese, and having been close to someone who was addicted to heroin, I know that besides clinics, we also had houses in the countryside where there were small communities where people trying to recover could stay for a few months, with very regular visits by specialist psychologists helping them. I don't know how effective they were or if they still exist, but it seems to jive with this idea of establishing human connections.
Change of scenery is an important thing when trying to break out of a bad pattern. Novelty is actually processed by a different part of the brain than whatever rut we may be in is.
The book Iconoclast explains that even moving furniture around can put us into a more creative state, because our creativity is activated by novelty.
Addicts are very lonely people whom are simply trying to connect with people but have some sort of synaptic wiring issue that prevents them from successfully doing so without the use of powerful pharmaceuticals (or anything that releases dopamine, really) that both create false bonds of dependency and mood-altered states.
That is why research shows over and over that creating new environments and new "friendships" (the cornerstone of AA and NA) is of crucial importance.
It's so hard for "normal" people to see and understand this because (from my personal experiences)...
1. the addict often seems like the life of the party (at least in the beginning of the story) and no one thinks that person is lonely.
2. normal people, for the most part, discover and nurture these connections so automatically that they can't understand how it could feel for it not to work, thus addiction is totally baffling to them.
To me, the crown jewel of Neuroscience would be to come up with a successful treatment to addiction that worked directly on the brain and didn't require the complete overhaul of your life that inpatient and outpatient treatment demand.
This article is garbage. As others have pointed out, the author is a repeat plagiarist [1], and the point that he makes in the article is heavily based around the Rat Park study - one that has struggled to be replicated [2]. The clickbait title doesn't help things either.
Garbage is probably somewhat strong, but I agree about the title.
I suppose, like so much these days, it all depends on your POV and ingrained confirmation biases whether you believe research about the incorrigibility of addicts or the hope of rescue.
My thoughts on this whole "Shoot the messenger, he's a plagiarist" line of thinking is that we live in a remix society, and certainly in music, producers and artists are given wide leeway to come up with new ways to use old sounds with no repercussions.
I wonder if the ability to take old written content and present it in a fresh, persuasive way shouldn't be given the same respect.
Thank you both for the courage to post this, and for the link to Johann Hari's article. It is a real eye-opener. (If anyone is tempted to skip it because of the HuffPo link, take my word for it, this is well worth reading.)
Wow, can the meta-irony of this particular point be any deeper?
Good thing there will always be a job waiting for him at the bakery.
"Following the release of his book, Chasing the Scream, in 2015, Hari gave a number of interviews where he expressed regret for his actions. In order to quell doubts about his reporting, he also released full audio copies of sources he interviewed for his book. In an interview with the Little Atoms podcast, Hari also stated that he would apologise to Nick Cohen and Francis Wheen."[1]
I think the article is exceptionally well-written, personal, and informative, and gave me, as someone intimately involved with all things addiction for 30 years, fresh perspective.
The fact that he seems to be currently deeply in love with an active addict may be motivation behind the piece, but it takes little away from the insights.
Things are significantly more complicated with Hari than "mistake, apology, done". This article recaps the problems and even documents severe problems in his post-apology work.
I'm fine with hiring people who have erred before, if the regret looks real. People make mistakes. They should be able to take a new direction.
But Hari did dishonest reporting for a long time and, as David Allen Green writes, was "smearing other journalists in an on-going systemic manner for years". I will remain suspicious of whatever he does as a reporter.
In a way: his crime was an abuse of words, and I'll be careful whenever he again works with words. If his crime had been abuse of children, I wouldn't mind him working in construction, or even keeping books, but I'd be careful hiring him as schoolteacher.
If he got a job at a bakery, well, I suppose he wouldn't poison anyone, although his work as a reporter was poison.
While we're talking about people who did bad things in the past and got a second chance... How about John Carmack?
> As reported in David Kushner's Masters of Doom, when Carmack was 14, he broke into a school to help a group of kids steal Apple II computers. To gain entry to the building, Carmack concocted a sticky substance of Thermite mixed with Vaseline that melted through the windows. However, an overweight accomplice struggled to get through the hole, and opened the window, setting off a silent alarm and alerting police. John was arrested, and sent for psychiatric evaluation (the report mentions 'no empathy for other human beings' and describes Carmack as 'a brain on legs'). Carmack was then sentenced to a year in a juvenile home.
Carmack's comments (from 1999):
> I knew I wanted to work with computers from a very early age, but there were also a lot of other stereotypical geek aspects to my life growing up - phreaking, hacking (nobody called it "cracking" back then), rockets, bombs, and thermite (sometimes in not-so-smart combinations), sci-fi, comic books, D&D, arcades, etc.
> I was sort of an amoral little jerk when I was young. I was arrogant about being smarter than other people, but unhappy that I wasn't able to spend all my time doing what I wanted. I spent a year in a juvenile home for a first offence after an evaluation by a psychologist went very badly.
> I went to a couple semesters of classes at the University of Missouri (UMKC), taking nothing but CS classes, but it just didn't seem all that worthwhile. In hindsight, I could have gotten more out of it than I did, but I hadn't acquired a really good attitude towards learning from all possible sources yet.
> I dropped-out of college to start programming full time, but trying to do contract programming for the Apple II/IIGS post 1990 was not a good way to make money, and I only wound up with between $1k and $2k a month. Not having enough money is stressful, and I did some things I didn't want to. I wrote a numerology program for a couple hundred bucks one time...
> Softdisk publishing finally convinced me to come down to Shreveport for an interview. I had been doing contract work for Jay Wilbur and Tom Hall, so I knew there were some pretty cool people there, but meeting John Romero and Lane Roath was what convinced me to take the job. Finally meeting a couple sharp programmers that did impressive things and had more experience than I did was great.
> After I took the job at Softdisk, I was happy. I was programming, or reading about programming, or talking about programming, almost every waking hour. It turned out that a $27k salary was enough that I could buy all the books and pizza that I wanted, and I had nice enough computers at work that I didn't feel the need to own more myself (4mb 386-20!).
> I learned a huge amount in a short period of time, and that was probably a turning point for my personality. I could still clearly remember my state of mind when I viewed other people as being ignorant about various things, but after basically doubling my programming skills in the space of six months, I realized how relative it all was. That has been reinforced several additional times over the seven years since then.
Journalism and computer programming are fundamentally different pursuits. Computer programming is a perfectly objective activity, the output is totally independent of the work that went into it. Thus, Carmack's work is brilliant, and would remains brilliant despite Carmack being a repentant theif. ReiserFS is still a good filesystem and is still included in the Linux kernel, despite it's author being a convicted murderer.
But journalism is different: the activity is subjective and we are required to trust that the journalist (and their editor and publisher etc) isn't out to mislead us (or, more realistically, that we understand their biases and can compensate for them). Thus, the output is much closer linked to the work that went into it. The journalist was in the room, we weren't. We have to trust that the journalist not only accurately quotes what's being said, but accurately represents the context of it. That means that the personal integrity of the journalist is much more important.
Plenty of lapses of journalists can be trivially forgiven - youthful theft easily among them. But Hari didn't steal a computer as a kid, he messed with one of the most sacred institutions of journalism: the quote. Even worse, he claimed ignorance: forgiving a journalist who so fundamentally misunderstands his own role as a high-integrity purveyor of truth that he thinks it's cool to mess with quotes is a lot more difficult than forgiving theft (not that it's up to any of us to forgive Carmack, we weren't party to his crime).
Yikes, I didn't know that, thanks for pointing it out.
Still, I think it would be a mistake to skip the article because of who wrote it. As I said, it was a real eye-opener for me, and I'm glad I read it.
I'm even glad I bought Hari's book Chasing the Scream. (I didn't even do my usual Kindle free sample, just a one-click purchase on the spot after reading the article, quite unusual for me!)
You did have me worried for a moment, though: do I want to support someone like that?
But he seems to recognize how he screwed up and is trying to make things right, apologizing to the people he mistreated, releasing the audio interviews used in the book, etc.
Weird to see a positive article about the benefits of letting people who have served their time get back into work juxtaposed with your post saying, essentially, Burn him he's a plagiarist.
They are two different things. One is directly related to the job. The other is being a felon for an unrelated reason.
I wouldn't mind someone being a teacher if they got caught with pot 20 years ago. I would mind if they raped a few kids.
The point is that if their crime was related to the job, it's fine not to trust someone to do that same job again. That's not the same as never employing them for anything.
If you read that, it wasn't just plagiarism, he actually made up stories, whole cloth.
That said, I've worked for a factory. Many of the hires on the floor were for people with records of various kinds. It did help the higher-functioning people turn their lives around, which was quite encouraging. But we also had people who did stupid things and got arrested for things like domestic violence charges, which were related to their drug use.
What cyber stalking are you talking about? This page only talks about plagiarism and wikipedia vandalism. Making negative edits about people you don't like on wikipedia involves exactly zero stalking. Is information missing here?
And it sounds like the 'plagiarism' was him using quotes he did not personally acquire, which is pretty minor and wouldn't turn me away from reading anything.
Hypothetically, imagine gadders would now edit some public information about you with lies, because you criticized him. Would that not feel a little bit stalky?
So let's say we got in a big argument and then he went to my github profile and called me a poopy head and a bad coder. I would find that obnoxious, I would find it harassment if he kept doing it, I don't think I would find that stalky.
Because if the subject matter is in a domain that is outside someone's expertise they don't really have a way to judge by the content. It's possible to make really good arguments for things that are simply untrue.
So instead we judge by the author - i.e. is the writer at least trustworthy.
I will certainly agree: there should be more skepticism for such at article by a known untrustworthy author. Does that mean we should immediately dismiss something written by him?
Your advice is good to take in general: don't trust what you read without judging both the credentials of the writer and the content the writer is putting forth. But to dismiss it based only on the author is shortsighted. I see nothing in your reply specifically about the content of the article, does anything else truly matter? Sure, take the author's history and intentions into consideration, but at the end of the day the content is what matters.
yeah, let's not read the article on barriers to employment because of past offenses written by someone who is presumably trying to make it as a writer with a record of criminal offenses.
> I wonder if any adult working a minimum wage job isn't living a very bleak existence anyway, and in fact isn't being exploited for having a brain disorder we currently call "addiction"
Assuming you consider 28 years old to be "adult", I can confirm that there are such adults.
I wonder if a Silicon Valley tech company would care about drug related convictions. I don't think possession/distribution/etc. alone would really be an issue (except if it were extremely recent and potentially ongoing), but clearly "I was high and raped/killed my neighbor" would, and either could arguably be "drug related". "Was an addict and broken into cars to get money for drugs" would be a more interesting corner case; nonviolent property crime. I think "in the past" for sufficiently large values of past might be fine.
Taking "drug convictions" into account is a form of discrimination. If the FDA revoked the licensing of Prozac or the DEA scheduled it tomorrow, suddenly tons of people would be guilty of drug-crimes. It'd criminalize being depressed.
The same is true for the current state of drug laws. We're criminalizing people with anxiety, with existential pain, stress, curiosity, etc.
What's different about stealing cars for money for medications, versus stealing cars for money for bread? Or robbing to afford rent? Are people that steal money for opiates less likely to cause a work incident than people that steal money to fund a kickstarter campaign?
Medical issues should only be taken into account if they're relevant to the job at hand, which, at a tech company, is relatively rare. Otherwise, acceptable job performance should be the only measurement considered as far as medical is concerned.
Discrimination in job applications is perfectly legal outside specifically protected classes in the United States, including under various state laws.
The nationally protected classes are race, sex, pregnancy, religion, national origin, age, veterans status / military service, bankruptcy or bad debts, genetic information, and citizenship status (exclusive of work eligibility).
Under various state laws, there may or may not be additional protections for sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, medical condition, political affiliation or activities, military status, different age limits, familial status, public assistance status, and/or use of "lawful products" (e.g., tobacco, alcohol).
Outside of these classes (or within them where the state doesn't recognize the class) it's generally legal to make hire/fire decisions with few limitations.
Given "at will" employment conditions in many states, proving discrimination is generally a case of showing specific evidence that a protected class was material and specifically related to the action. That can be difficult, though not impossible.
One way to think about interviewers ignoring current immoral and unethical laws would be to step back and consider past immoral and unethical laws.
Going back a couple decades, being gay or holding the wrong political beliefs was something of a hiring problem.
Given that "we" forget that technology and fads might change, but people never do, you can safely assume that if being "outed" a couple decades ago eliminated about 95% of employment opportunities, then the equivalent today will eliminate a similar percentage.
> What's different about stealing cars for money for medications, versus stealing cars for money for bread
They are totally different!
Someone stealing for bread, i.e. to survive, will never consider crime if they don't absolutely have to. So they may have committed a crime, but they are not a criminal.
But someone stealing for drugs demonstrate a level of selfishness that does make them a criminal, i.e. someone who does not care about other people. This is something will not change even if they have enough money to buy their drugs. That selfishness does not go away.
But someone stealing for drugs demonstrate a level of selfishness that does make them a criminal
Perhaps you'd like to become acquainted with addiction[1] and substance dependence[2]. They are real issues that people (those who you call criminally selfish) have to deal with, (generally) alone.
Due to societal attitudes towards drug use and the overly harsh treatment of users by the criminal justice system, people suffering from addiction often do not receive the medical and psychological attention they need. In a better world we'd be willing/able to provide that, but we aren't there yet.
People start doing drugs for many different reasons, but some people can't handle their crack. An addict can be a threat to themselves and/or others, not because they are "bad" or "selfish", but because they are mentally ill. Addicts need rehab, not punishment.
They were selfish to start using the drug. The dangers of drugs are known to all, they can not claim ignorance.
On top of that addiction is no excuse to harm others by stealing or other activity. It might feel absolutely horrible not to have the drug, but it is not necessary in order to live.
Someone who is so consumed by their addiction that they have no self control left, and they steal, is someone who is not employable.
This doesn't mean they should be ignored - it's two different things. People should certainly help them, but at the same time they do not make good employees.
They were selfish to start using the drug. The dangers of drugs are known to all, they can not claim ignorance.
Drug use includes a risk of addiction, not a guarantee. Just like a lot of activities, there is a choice to be made considering the risks involved. For some people, the level of risk is acceptable. Unfortunately, brain chemistry is very complex and users rarely take the time to understand what they are doing to themselves. The result is often an unexpected rollercoaster of self-destruction.
they do not make good employees.
On that point I agree. I'd be willing to look the other way at drug-related charges for a fully recovered junkie, but someone who is in the middle of the recovery process (or possibly hasn't started) would be a no-go.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that we need to stop demonizing drug users. Addiction isn't an excuse for criminal behavior, but it shouldn't be a crime or carry so much social stigma.
What if it's necessary drugs, like anti-psychotics? What if they have a physical dependency? What if it's life critical, like a benzodiazepine addiction?
Was it their fault in the first place? i.e. did they start using it for a good reason and are now dependent? Or did they start using it because they like how it feels?
> What if it's life critical
Like bread.
You are being a bit too simplistic - the specific details don't matter, what matters is the person's state of mind. Is he stealing because he does not care about the other person, and only about his own enjoyment? Or is he stealing because he has truly no other choice and he feels bad about it?
It's impossible to really know someone else's mind, all you can do is judge based on behavior.
When I still worked for a company and not myself, and was assisting in the hiring process, I was much more inclined to overlook drug-related crimes as I felt then - as now - that these very often should be crimes in the first place. On the other hand, I remember once we had a job application from a recently-released convict (jailed for kidnapping, resisting arrest and assault of the arresting officers). The nature of his crimes, along with the high profile of his case, meant that we replied 'thanks for your interest, but you don't meet our criteria' and binned his application. We didn't want any attention from media, and our clients (many whom of which where schools) would likely not have appreciated our employment of such a person.
If they care, one major reason is an employer's liability for everything an employee does.
Perhaps if you could insure your company for each employee, it would be clearer whether you should hire someone and employers would take more well-justified risks on people.
It's a bakery, requiring little to no skills, and nothing more than being able to repeat physical activity, and only 35% make it through the program (a 10 month on-the-job job).
I don't think this is the "success" story it's being made to be.
The most obvious metric of its "success" is the simple conditional 35% > 0%.
And while I agree, the motivation behind the CEO's thinking is based on bottom-line thinking, and not do-gooder motivation, its still nice to see SOME outside-the-box thinking on this issue.
"Brady also said that it was immaterial whether or not open hiring was a better way to do business. His goal is to make sure his business also helps the community and helps people out of poverty. With that goal, there’s an imperative to try new things. “There’s a lot of recognition that the things people have been doing aren’t working,” he said."
When you pay a low wage for a job that literally anyone of the street can do after about 10-30 minutes of training, you can hire and fire all day long, it will not affect your bottom line.
So it is true that it's immaterial to his business - whether it's open hire, or day laborer, or something else.
But I'm not sure how exactly this method helps anyone? Because most of the employees are gone after 10 months.
Does this mean they've made enough money to move into a better job?
Or does this just reinforce the stereotypes about convicts, drug addicts, and the mentally ill?
>only 35% make it through the program.
That is better than not having the program at all and having the addicts stay where they are. I think it is a success, because helping one addict is successful and now that person is a beacon of light. Other addicts will see that they are doing something productive, they got clean, and that maybe, they can get clean and get a job too. I think there's more to it than just who made it through the program.
Programs aren't measured solely by absolute success rate. They are also measured by success rate relative to alternative approaches to the same problem that could be enabled by the same resources.
Which is to say "35% > 0%" sounds good, but would wilt in the presence of "35% < 45%". Might I suggest a different set of evaluation criteria?
that's like saying that a company that only hires 10% of those it interviews is a failure. they have a waiting list of applicants, which allows them to set their quality bar high enough to reject the bottom 65% of applicants. the only difference is here the "interview" is a 10-month paid apprenticeship, while at most companies it's a 2 or 3-day unpaid blitz of tests.
Plenty of companies have quarter to year-long contract-to-hire paths for all new hires. Are all of these companies also failures? This is how all skilled work was for centuries, if not millennia. Were all businesses and guilds back then failures as well?
Either way you seem to be missing the point-- being able to choose who you retain vs. who you fire is a factor of applicant volume, not some objective measure of the quality of a company/hiring practices. Being able to reject more candidates if anything means you are better, as you have enough applicants who want to work there that you can be selective.
So basically what you are saying is with the way this bakery hires/fires and the way Microsoft and Google hires/fires - while there might be some slight differences between the two - at the end, the overall effect is the same.
And that what's really happening here with this no-interview no-skills-asked-for open-hire policy (and its high turnover rate), is that they are keeping the cream of the crop and shedding the wheat from the chaff.
The difference is interviews reject people based on what's on the paper, and in-the-interview tests are usually limited enough due to time constraints that you can't get a good picture of a persons proficiency.
If you give anyone the chance to show their worth in a 10 month program, that's sure as hell a lot less discriminatory and IMHO equates to a more qualitative hire.
Sure you can only keep the amount of people you have openings for (in this case 35%), but you are very certain you hire the person you want working for you, and not the person with the shiniest resume.
It's certainly not all bad. Giving people who would otherwise have no job prospects the experience of coming to work every day, getting used to the routine and socialization of a work environment and evaluating their ability to be a part of that system is valuable. Even if it only lasts a few months, it's much better than nothing. Especially given that the only alternative for most of them is a blanket rejection based on something they did years ago, often without an interview.
It would be better for all of society if programs like this were more common.
The problem with people who let drugs seriously affect their life is that...they let drugs seriously affect their lives, and at least from an employment point of view, where what matters is robot-like conformity and compliance, this is just not-to-be tolerated or even risked.
The sad, sad irony of this is that according to very recent studies[1], the very thing that made us addicts is the very prescription that society has deemed our punishment to be. Talk about cruel and unusual.
I wish I could say I don't struggle with relapse, but one of the few things worse then being an addict is being a lying addict.
Being unemployable by most metrics and having to constantly struggle to survive sure doesn't help with that battle.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-...
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