From Prison to Silicon Valley: Slack Hired Three Former Inmates to Work in Development

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Slack, one of the most diversified Silicon Valley companies, has recruited three ex-inmates into the development department. The Atlantic discussed how the Slack onboarding program works.

Jesse Aguirre's Slack workday begins with a standard technical meeting - programmers call it "stand-up" - where he and his colleagues plan the day. In the office gathered people who worked in the leading companies in Silicon Valley and studied at the top universities in the United States. Aguirre, 26, did not even graduate from high school and spent most of his adult life in prison. Slack is his first real employer. But in the few years that he learned to write code, Aguirre developed what is arguably the most useful skill for a developer: the ability to solve problems on his own.

Aguirre joined Lino Ornelas and Charles Anderson in the first set of Next Chapter, which Slack launched with Last Mile, the WK Kellogg Foundation and Free America. The Next Chapter's goal is to help ex-prisoners get jobs in technology. The project appeared last year as an internship that does not guarantee full employment, but in June this year, just a few days before Slack's IPO, Aguirre, Ornelas and Anderson were offered full time with options to buy the company's shares. Aguirre and his friends were faced with a new question: will they succeed? Naturally, access to a well-known organization in itself does not promise this.

“It's true that nothing can stop power like work. But getting back into society after jail is challenging - one job without additional support is usually not enough,”says Katherine Catcher, executive director of Root & Rebound, a California-based ex-inmate adaptation program.

It is difficult for ex-prisoners to find and keep a job. Nearly two-thirds of these people in California return to prison within three years of being released. Full-time work is one of the most effective ways to reduce relapse, but it is not easy to find if a person has spent most of their adult life behind bars. For various reasons, including discrimination against persons with a criminal record, the unemployment rate among them is more than six times the national average.

“When I got a job offer, I felt like a college guy who was called into the NBA. But given my past, I also feel like I have a lot to prove,”said Aguirre.

He first became involved with software development while in prison at Ironwood Prison in California, known for its progressive rehabilitation programs. In the first month of Last Mile, a prison business and programming program, Aguirre and his fellow students did not have access to a computer. They wrote the code on paper. In his first project, Aguirre recreated the code for the In-N-Out Burger site, using only a printed copy of its home page as a guide.

Drew McGahie, the curator of all three ex-inmates at Slack, was amazed at their ability to tackle tasks that don't have ready-made solutions. “If you remember their experience, then everything becomes clear. All of them learned to write code in an environment that did not have access to the Internet. They have a drive,”McGahie said.

But from the very beginning, Aguirre was clear that the prison stigma does not disappear anywhere after release. Some Slack clients restrict access to their data to individuals with a criminal record. All three interns were put on the test automation team, which writes programs to test the quality of other developers' code, precisely because it does not use customer information.

Before starting Slack and moving to Silicon Valley, Aguirre, Ornelas and Anderson had a couple of other issues to solve. First, they were released on parole in other jurisdictions, changing which is a lengthy bureaucratic process. Second, finding affordable housing for people with a criminal record - especially in the San Francisco Bay Area with its limited real estate market - is a day job in itself. Aguirre was forced to leave his first room because a neighbor did not want to share it with a former prisoner. After living with a friend for almost a year, Aguirre applied for more than 50 apartments before he could find a permanent home.

“Finding a job is one thing: we all know that the stigma associated with imprisonment makes it really difficult to find a job, but the same applies to housing,” says Kenyatta Leal, who has also served time in prison in the past and currently works for Slack as "Onboarding Manager" for Next Chapter.

Leal acts as a play-coach, assisting Aguirra, Ornelas and Anderson on housing, finance, corporate governance, and more. They also have a tech mentor, work culture mentor, and career coach, and Slack's nonprofit partners help interns with housing, parole, travel, and educate fellow Slack employees about US criminal law. All this helped Aguirra to feel calmer in the office, despite the fact that he came from a different environment than many of his colleagues.

Aguirre grew up in Linwood, California, in a predominantly Hispanic community in southern Los Angeles County. When he was 11, his family moved east to Orange County, where Aguirre contacted members of a local gang a couple of years later. The local police convicted him of minor offenses, such as drawing with chalk on a telephone pole, but no serious charges followed.

Later, on March 13, 2010, local mafia member Ramon Magan was shot with a shotgun. Witnesses said it was not Aguirre who killed him, but it was he who handed the gun over to the man who ultimately committed the crime. Aguirre was charged with attempted murder, assault and gang membership. A few weeks after he turned 18, he was sent to prison for life.

Aguirre's verdict caused a public outcry. In 2014, the California Court of Appeals ruled that Aguirre had an "ineffective" lawyer and that the verdict "raised issues of cruel and unusual punishment." At the rehearing, Aguirre's sentence was reduced to seven years, to which was added the ten years imposed by the state for liaising with gangsters. Then, on Christmas Eve 2017, Aguirre learned that Jerry Brown, who was then Governor of California, had decided to cancel that ten-year increase, citing Aguirre's exemplary behavior and work ethic in prison. By that time, Aguirre had received his GED (General Educational Development - the equivalent of a high school diploma), completed his programming studies and spent almost eight years behind bars. He was ready for immediate release.

Last year, Slack CEO Stuart Butterfield and a group of colleagues attended the Last Mile program at San Quentin Prison, north of San Francisco. Butterfield was particularly impressed with the rigor of the project and the quality of the software the prisoners created. Around the time Aguirre was released, Slack began laying the foundations for its Next Chapter program.

The goal of Slack for Good, the company's philanthropic arm, is to bring under-represented people into the tech arena. “Our two core values are to unite and empathize. Next Chapter has become not only a way to raise awareness of an incredibly important issue in the United States, but also to make our employees understand that these values are important to us,”said Deepti Rohatgi, head of Slack for Good.

The first set of Next Chapter took three out of ten candidates. They all went through a rigorous interview, which, however, resembled a conversation between Slack recruiters and any entry-level programmer. Aguirre became one of these three people.

“If you want to delve into a social issue, you have to get closer to it,” says Leal, who also completed the Last Mile program during his detention in San Quentin. There Leal met with Duncan Logan, CEO of the Rocketspace accelerator. After his release, he worked for Logan for five years.

“This is a huge paradigm shift - from living in a six-by-nine-foot cell and having minimal impact on your life to being suddenly caught up in the 21st century gold rush,” says Leal.

Now, he not only helps the interns get started, but more importantly, he tells the rest of the company what it means to be imprisoned in the United States. However, the hiring of three people with a criminal past does not particularly affect the overall situation in the country, where more than 600 thousand people are released from prison every year. “Programs like Slack help freed-up citizens feel valuable, but there is no need to hope that the tech sector can solve all social problems. We are expected to be applauded by companies like Slack, but we understand that private businesses have largely turned their backs on everyday housing and health care, and that it is being done by nonprofits and community organizations,”adds Catcher.

According to a spokeswoman for the Slack press service, the company admits that one project will not solve the global problems of adaptation of prisoners. However, she noted that Slack hopes to help at least its employees who have been in prison.

Beyond the impact on the lives of Aguirre, Ornelas, and Anderson, Next Chapter's most important takeaway could be a shift in the outlook of Slack employees and, if lucky, the tech industry as a whole. Slack is already beating some of the competition when it comes to finding talent across different social groups. Creating a plan to hire ex-inmates and changing staff attitudes towards those who have been in prison can lead to an even greater shift in public opinion. Slack has hosted many corporate meetings on criminal law, including "release simulators," in which employees simulate the problems of ex-inmates, including finding housing and registering a car. Over the past few years, more than 200 employees of the company have visited San Quentin Prison to train aspiring developers.

“When we first got to Slack, there was fear,” admits Leal. Some employees hesitated to work with ex-prisoners, while others believed that the program could distract from more important tasks. Leel says his conversations with the Slack team helped change that attitude.

Aguirre has been at Slack for six months. He has become one of the senior members of his team, so new employees come to him for advice. On Fridays, he teaches courses to help developers in other departments understand how test automation works. He usually dines with Ornelas and Anderson.

“Now I appreciate the little things - the ability to go anywhere, place an order with Uber Eats, talk to my mom on the phone whenever I want,” says Aguirre.

He continues to improve his profession. Aguirre wants to move to front-end development, which will allow him to tackle the Slack features that users see. (Building certain parts of an application doesn't require programmers to access client data.) “I don't like to think ahead because things are always changing. But I hope that in five years I will have a good track record and that my story will help others to change their attitude towards people with my past."

Some of Aguirre's friends in Orange County don't really understand what programmers do, but they do know what high technology is. Aguirre tries to get them into programming by offering to send them books for beginners. “I tell them this is not like working for an old traditional company. This is something new,”he notes.