Your legal defense cost you everything, and you pled out...over a single charge related to a curl request?

> [...] I’ve always disclosed that I have baggage and can’t pass a background check. Even with this, I’ve had offers put on the table, only for them to be terminated or rescinded at some point. It's not because I'm not telling the whole truth: when people ask, I tell; if they just say "oh what'd you do" and I say "well, according to the government, this, but this is the real story" it's found to be fascinating, sad, and annoying at the same time.

I call shenanigans. Investigating candidates like you is what I do for a living. Your offer rate is impressive, and yet they are constantly being rescinded. They're clearly discovering something about you during the background check that is worse than you're letting on, a process you are overly-unnerved by despite the pettiness of the conviction. Either this crime isn't as innocuous as you claim or you have an unfavorable history that extends beyond it. We've hired convicted sex offenders who were transparent and brought less drama to the table, so one wonders why you're having so much trouble with something so petty.

You also come across as someone acting out the textbook definition of autistic, and your narrative raises every single red flag of a GoFundMe grift. I don't believe a word of your story, and caution anybody considering getting involved to perform thorough due diligence.

> I wonder if he's downplaying it to potential employers and then background searches + googling reveals the truth?

That's usually what I find, hence my speculation. The pretext is always the same-- I have baggage, won't pass a background check, but here's what really happened. It's usually a semi-accurate account of their latest conviction and framed as though this is their biggest obstacle in life. Every now and then some well-meaning fool (or cheapskate) mistakes feigned honesty for integrity and skips the background check to feel good about themselves helping some poor soul overcome a hurdle, and never discovers the rest of the story.

> In addition to the prison sentence, [name], [age], of [location], was sentenced to [y] years of supervised release and ordered to pay [r] in restitution and [f] in forfeiture.

lol, you wordsmith. "Wasn't incarcerated" indeed. You got both probation and restitution after all.

This sentence was handed to him for a yearslong operation involving reselling of access to stolen credentials (running a platform that injected them into curl requests and submitted them to the destination on behalf of his own clients, I assume), and an extortion attempt (a shakedown over the vulnerability that facilitated this?), with the stated impact of:

> One of the [victims] sustained losses of approximately $[m] million

I recognize that claimants always exaggerate those numbers. So you made lot of money doing something illegal and have been ordered to pay it back. You can't escape garnishment for this, not even through bankruptcy, and you will be making things right over time. The crime itself, big fucking deal. You didn't kill anybody through reckless negligence. We all do dumb shit in our youth, and my own company wastes way more than that YoY on legit-but-broken SaaS products.

So here's some constructive criticism: you are clearly a competent developer. Stop with the lies-by-omission and reframing of the situation and own what you did. Your lying about it is earning you those rejections, because there's only one way to respond to deception of this magnitude. Even if you slip past screening, anyone in Payroll who sees a multimillion-dollar garnishment order against you (or anyone who Googles your goddamn name) may ask questions, so you'll always be on borrowed time. Get ahead of the narrative by owning it. "Yes, I did this, it was a dumb idea when I was a stupid kid who didn't know any better, but I've learned my lesson." The "trust-me-I'm-autistic" stuff is deplorable-- cut that shit out.

Regardless, the OP's claims don't add up, since there weren't any DOJ press releases since 2020 for a computer crime where the defendant plead to a single charge and didn't serve time, and also happened to be a guy who is well-known in the Ruby community. (The guy doxxed in the dead comments was sentenced to several years in March and is currently serving in a federal penitentiary where he wouldn't have access to the Internet.)

I'd guess you're feeling stressed, and maybe your resilience (which is good) has you leaning on your sense of humor. And that humor can get mixed with stress and defensiveness, for some odd combinations.

The resume probably isn't the place for that resilience exercise. You have experience to be proud of, so try to focus on that, and not feel insecure. (Similarly, don't have "lost" in your email address.)

Think of your resume as a place to show competence and corporate decorum. Imagine that some of the people looking at your resume are looking for red flags more than anything else. Also, imagine people who want to hire you, but it's easier and lower risk for them, if the resume that corporate looks at and files away doesn't have red flags in it.

Also: sadly, ageism is a thing. Most techbros don't want to see "20+ years" of experience. Maybe cut the "BUZZWORDS" section entirely.

I'm not an expert on this, but you might want to just start with the "EXPERIENCE" section (with your current good bulletpoints, and keywords, for each job). Then add on a section after that for any selling points that can't be put under "EXPERIENCE", such as independent projects. Name, city, and contact info at top. And delete everything else. If it fits on one page, all the better.

Maybe think of your resume as projecting the confident image you'd like to have right now, not the resilient humor that feels necessary right now.

Good luck. There's good stuff in your resume, and you can do it.

It's time to call that in. Get your friends together and tell them that this time you need their help. Don't face this alone.

And judging from your resume - and I mean this with all kindness - you may need some mental health support. I don't know how it works where you are, but are there public or charitable options for this? Please: try to find some help. I suspect you may need this before you can find solutions to your more tangible problems.

I wish you well.

Get rid of the emojis.

The "Bugs and Features" section should not exist.

"Hi mom (very dead; very sad)" is completely inappropriate.

You say you are "Very detail oriented," which is incoherent, since someone who actually was detail-oriented would not have omitted the hyphen.

You say you are a "Voracious writer," which is incoherent, since someone who wrote a lot would know that that the word "voracious" relates to consumption, not production.

The story about sticking a fork in a light socket is inappropriate and weird.

This résumé is fundamentally inconsiderate. It appears to be intended to make people feel ill at ease. I strongly recommend you reconsider it.

ALSO: I don't know you, but I can't shake the suspicion that the résumé and the cURL incident are related, i.e., that there's a fundamental TPJ issue preventing you from understanding how your actions will come across to others.

That means the quick fix here is to skip all the "fun" side-tracking and focus on the raw skills you can offer.

The sustainable fix is to figure out why you ever could think this was a good idea in the first place. As my parent poster said the answer to this question might easily also answer to the root cause of a ton of other problems in your life.

Now times of economic distress are not the best time for introspection, but you might wanna address this sooner than later.

Really well put. While reading this, there were a few points at which I felt my gut tense up in disgust. I can't remember the last time I felt so revolted by something I've read, and I have a very hard time figuring out how a resume, which is supposed to make people want to hire you, could end up doing that.

OP, please consider dropping this completely and switching to a regular resume format.

Tech recruiters receive hundreds of normal resumes that don't require that extra effort/risk.

found only 1 emoji.

> "Hi mom (very dead; very sad)" is completely inappropriate.

that's pretty bad ... actually, i would assume mental problems just from reading this. [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanging

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

- Inigo Montoya

  "in... recovery"
  "drank the chemicals beneath the sink"
  "stuck a fork in a light socket"
  "tried a Tide Pod"
  "Hi mom, (very dead; very sad)"

You think this is funny, but you sound like a nut. If you're convinced you're actually actually funny, go try stand up. Good luck.

If you are actually autistic like you say, that would explain why you don't get it.

Just cut that out. You can't really afford to turn people off when oh yeah I'm also a felon.

> 1. The effectiveness of clever on other people is highly contingent on outside factors, over which you have no control and of which you may not have any knowledge; i.e., just because you intended to be clever doesn’t mean you will be perceived as clever, for all sorts of reasons.

> 2. The failure mode of clever is “asshole.”

2. What is funny also depends on the context. The same joke will land differently if you tell it on the internet, in a chat, on a date, in a pub, to a stranger to a friend etc. If you have a hard time understanding what the context does to a joke, don't make them.

3. The purpose of jokes (typically) is to lighten the mood and to ease potential tensions in social situations. If you dice a 0 on joking however the outcome will be that people will see red flags and connect you with that weird guy that totally overdid it for them. If you are constantly rolling zeros, maybe stop rolling because it is hurting yourself.

Are you sure it said that he DID do those things when you read it?

Either way, they certainly pay better than retail.

Best of luck, friend; I hope you're able to turn this challenge into an opportunity

Perhaps also broaden horizons to typescript and (pains me to say this) react.

Good luck.

Edit: just looked at your resume. It is a bit ... fruity - might be worth sticking to something straight-laced and focusing specifically on skillset until you are out of the danger zone.

Thanks for the feedback. It's a bit strong, indeed; I've just used the format for so long (normally with great success — even tested it at some point prior to this incident happening) that I hadn't considered the pollution until you brought it up. I'll trim it moving forward.

I realize this is harsh, but I'd rather not sugarcoat. Your resume, by area, is like 75% crap and 25% really genuinely good experience. I would take that 25% and stretch it out as much as you can.

>Saved the company more than $600,000 by optimizing infrastructure costs.

Wait, what? Expand on that, my brother! That's a huge win which one should be proud of, I think that could easily be two bullet points. "Optimizing infrastructure costs" is very weak - did you move to a different cloud provider?

I don't doubt you're a strong engineer, I think if you fix the resume you'll get callbacks almost immediately.

Remember that the point of a resume is not to get hired, it's to get to an interview.

I would remove anything that "show's your personality" that's not an achievement.

You’ll probably need to get a temporary job. I suggest a union job like warehouse worker so you can get benefits.

Don’t let your pride get in the way of contracting.

They originally got fame because they were grad students trying to live off of tiny wages, so they calculated the most efficient foods in terms of calories per dollar. They have expanded since then, but the basic concept is still there.

Are your friends even aware of your situation? Have you given them the chance to offer help?

Last time I found myself in a similar situation I told everyone about it. A friend of mine who is bootstrapping a startup offered me some work for enough money to cover my month's expenses. I'm sure his team could have done the work themselves, but he had the work and had the budget and wanted to help.

Given your legal circumstances, you might want to look into moving over to contracting/freelance/consulting anyway. You're less likely to deal with the taboo of your legal situation when engaging as a representative of a company on equal footing. Start with leveraging your network, then LI, then finally hit up Upwork and the like if you're still not finding anything.

I’m not too bad at concealing this stuff and promoting the good parts after a bit of practice. Let me know if you’d like a review and some advice.

The reality is that us neurodivergents are lucky if we find work where people accept us, and sometimes we have to suck it up and conform effectively in order to make a living. If most teams I’ve been on knew the real me, well, they’d find a way to disappear me pretty quickly. Sometimes you don’t want people to know the real you. That’s not an insult at all so much as an observation of how things go.

If you are really down to $16, you are in a dire situation.

I don't know where your family is, but you basically need to move in with them if your legal situation allows. Having $16 while living with family is basically a non issue. They'll feed you and make you get up in the morning.

Being down to $16 on your own is life threatening.

Get back home to family of some sort.

Getting work on up work isn't as easy as it sounds IMO.

When this happened to me at 24, I got a job in car sales even though I had a mechanical engineering degree. I made $8k the first month. $12k the second. 6 months in I had a pipeline and it figured out and averaged $18k a month for a few years. It saved me.

Personally I think the advice for going independent and doing contract work is your best bet, but I think you may be out of funds and time to do that even. You either need family or friends to lend you money, or move back in with family. Moving in with a friend won't cut it, because they aren't as happy to feed you.

Can you form a company and do contracting work instead? It's more work to get work, but maybe they don't need the background check. The companies I've worked with seem to hire contractors more freely than employees.

    Freelancing sites like Upwork are probably my next go-to,
    even if it rattles my pride and my usual rate, at least I
    won’t be homeless and starving.

> My friends: well, I am usually the person that is supporting them when they are in crisis.

At $16 you can involve them.

While you are there, have some of them help professionalize resume and business writings.

While you are there, have some of them help test run and clean up contractor interviews.

2) Your resume feels a bit unprofessional; while I like authenticity, you can show that in person during the interview, I wouldn't recommend doing it in your resume. Your resume should be way more boring than it currently is.

I was a short order cook to fill the gap after graduating with my BSEE...

A recruiter could be an excellent ally for you.

As a newcomer you'll waste hours and maybe even money (you have to spend in-platform 'credits' to submit proposals) on proposals that won't even be read most of the time.

Overall it's loaded with personality, and OP sounds like a fun person to know.

That said, when hiring for a serious role (which most are) it would make a me a little bit nervous. I'd interview them though, which is arguably the whole point of the resume. It would definitely stand out and get my attention.

The reality is everyone is quirky and the only difference is most of this is hidden and covered up with lies and omissions.

Definitely this resume shows he's a bit less self aware and less aware about how other people think. But for a programming job, it's not a red flag.

People who call this stuff red flags don't realize the amount of shit people actually hide. The majority of people have 10x more shit worse than this completely hidden from the resume. This stuff is actually tame. People call it out because it's deviant.

The more serious shit like stole money from my employer or slacked off at work, all of that flies through the filters because nobody puts that shit on their resume and hiring managers are red flagging superficial shit like quirkiness and awkwardness. It shows how biased people actually are. They don't even know how to judge character themselves, they just rely on stereotypes of "professionalism" Just remember the truth about "professionalism"... it's just a way someone appears... It's not an intrinsic part of a human being.

In actuality the quirkiness of his resume shows he's a little bit more honest. He won't stab your ass in the back as he's open about other things people hide.

Actually... the other way to think about it is that hiring managers and coworkers only want to work with people who put up a façade. Nobody wants to deal with the true reality of how people actually are and if someone can't present a good facade he's not a good hire. But either way I would say the chances that this guy stabs you in the back in a really serious way are much lower than someone with a "professional" resume.

I'll be honest, I won't hire this guy based off of the same biases. But I admit my biases and I'm self aware. We don't actually have any real data on whether a person with this type of resume is more likely of ending up being a problem. Everyone just helplessly follows their gut and biases.

> Question: What’s your favorite question? > Answer: Why? (No, literally, “why?”)

It's incredibly inappropriate in a resume.

It certainly is unusual, and probably inappropriate in a resume, but I've always felt the strict conventional rules for resumes stifle a lot of creativity and strip people of their personality and uniqueness. It probably would get them rejected from most companies, but I think it would also help them get noticed by other companies. They only need to get through to one!

In a nutshell, unprofessional.

Your head in the right place. You're doing whatever you need to do to keep your head above water. It sucks right now, but regardless of how things turn out, there will come a day where the things that seem insurmountable right now will just be a fading memory. That day will come sooner than you think.

I've been terminated three times, and my job history as of ~2020 looked a lot like yours. I have more experience, and a seven-year stint at a large company, but had gone through a series of jobs where I didn't stay more than a year or so. It definitely reduces the number of responses you'll get, but it's not a disqualifier in and of itself. My approach for dealing with that was to be very up front about it, and to make it a point to be articulate what I learned from each experience.

The first time, I was working for a very small company and joined as their second engineer. The first engineer was still there, and their entire experience before starting was a boot camp in another language. They did fine work all things considered, and were very productive. He was a good fit. I, on the other hand, was at the point in my career where I was transitioning away from "implementation" and toward "architecture". I wasn't as fast as he was and was making more money. When the time came that the owner let me know he was planning to let the first guy go, I raised my hand and volunteered to leave instead. It was a better decision for the company as a whole, and I believed my relationship with the owner was such that he'd appreciate my candor and treat me well. I was correct - while I was technically "fired for cause", I volunteered to help if he ever needed it and he continued to pay me until I found another job. That only took me about a month, but it was very, very helpful. I just told the unvarnished truth about that one, but highlighted that I better understood my own strengths and weaknesses along with the importance of finding a role that fit me well.

The second time was a combination of several things: burnout, financial details of an upcoming IPO, and my own mental health concerns. I was being pulled in so many directions I was missing deadlines, but I was missing them because I was "putting out fires" that were more important to the business. I was hired just before their options pool for new hires started to run dry. They reduced the grants to new employees and were looking for people they could let go to replenish it, as they couldn't expand the pool due to an upcoming (unannounced) IPO. The pressure from them forcing me out exacerbated the anxiety I was already having, and I ended up taking my accumulated vacation time to try to get my shit together. The company suggested that I file it as FMLA leave, which I did. When I returned, they assigned me a project that would take about two weeks to do correctly, then fired me when it wasn't completed after a week. That hurt, and it took a while to recover. I couched this one as my having learned that the importance of understanding as much as possible about the context of the business as a whole, and in clearly communicating both my own time estimates and any changes to those timelines that I encountered as early as possible.

The third time... well, I'm not sure. It was a small company, and my direct manager wasn't entirely fluent in English. There were a couple of cases where I misunderstood the requirements for something even after I put them in writing and got acknowledgement from him. I was told I was "let go" and not given a reason. I contacted HR, and they responded that they weren't able to provide me with any details either. I honestly don't know if I was technically fired or not. I filed for unemployment and received it, so I can only assume that I wasn't fired "for cause", but they could have also just decided it wasn't worth fighting. For that one, I approached it as "The conditions under which I was let go are still unclear to me. I've reached out to them to try to better understand so I could learn from the experience, but they've refused to help."

Basically... you can't change your history, but you can change how you talk about it. Treating it as something bad to overcome isn't helpful. Finding the positive in it completely changes the tone of the conversation, and ultimately that's what people remember afterward. Trying to hide it or downplay it is a much bigger red flag in my mind that acknowledging it and using it to highlight your strengths.

> Its gonna get better.

My partner got a lot of this as she was dying of cancer. It did not get better, and this kind of "optimism" helped no one, just the opposite.