Apparently, in the age of the internet your sins follow you forever. Humans are imperfect and do not always make sound decisions or decisions that everyone agrees with. We need to be able to respect this and work together rather than taking away people's livelihood.
This team sold tools to help people take others' lives and livelihoods, to people known to do so. How long should the consequences follow them? For what reason should anyone else give them a "reset"? There's no evidence that I can find that they even expressed regret about what they were doing, just moved on to a new scam. Coinbase is late but right to fire them.
In the early 2000s I worked for an early cloud company. We interviewed someone whose name I recognized as someone associated with a very well known person that had been convicted for computer crimes, and that this someone had testified to avoid prosecution himself. (Edit: he had plead guilty.)
Despite the someone’s recognizeable name, at no point did he disclose this aspect of his past. We decided to pass on him.
Did you pass on this person because of the prior conviction that he chose not to volunteer, or because he flunked the interview and wasn't a good fit for the team?
Did you judge him better or worse because he cut a deal?
More importantly, if we take the implication that he was passed on because he didn't volunteer info to a question you didn't directly ask -- can you really blame him for not volunteering the details?
It’s been more than 15 years and my memory is hazy. The part I remember is recognizing his name.
But I don’t know. We were a company that provided cloud computing services and he had previously plead guilty to computer hacking crimes. With more life experience I wouldn’t hold that against a person today but at the time I probably did. My thinking then was that it was relevant information that he should have disclosed.
Why would you feel they’re required to disclose that information? In eleven states and thirteen cities, it’s even illegal for you to ask as an employer (“ban the box” initiatives), public or private (its drastically more states and cities for only public employers not permitted to ask).
And helping regimes like Saudi Arabia oppress their people was definitely a sin. I'm okay with these individuals losing their jobs. It should give them time to rehabilitate themselves if they so choose.
