A graduate of Slack's Next Chapter initiative, which helps former prison inmates land tech jobs, recounts how he managed to land a full-time job at the company
Jesse Aguirre's workday at Slack starts with a standard engineering meeting—programmers call them “standups”—where he and his co-workers plan the day's agenda. Thanks: @simonestolzoff
Context & Ripple Effects
This story completes an arc the related coverage has been building since October, when The Hustle profiled The Last Mile teaching coding inside prisons across 15 facilities in five states. Next Chapter is the other end of that pipeline — the program that moves trained former inmates into actual tech jobs — and Jesse Aguirre's full-time engineering role at Slack is its proof case.
It also fits Slack's established hiring philosophy: the company's [[a:929036|decision to forgo a dedicated diversity chief and build inclusion into hiring from the start]] was already unusual for Silicon Valley in 2018, and hiring through a reentry program is that strategy taken to its logical extension.
First-order effects
- Slack gains a proven engineer through a talent channel most competitors ignore, and Aguirre's public account turns a private hire into a recruiting showcase for the Next Chapter program.
Second-order effects
- Other employers in the Next Chapter cohort and beyond face a working template — prison coding programs feeding directly into engineering roles — that makes 'we can't find qualified candidates' a harder position to defend.
Third-order effects
- If programs like The Last Mile and Next Chapter keep producing hires at this rate, second-chance hiring could harden into a standard tech talent pipeline, with prison education programs functioning as de facto feeder schools for the industry.
The trend: Tech hiring is extending beyond traditional universities into prison-education pipelines, with Slack's Next Chapter placement showing the model can produce full-time engineers rather than just graduates.