I had to quote this one for emphasis because a lot of engineers actively disbelieve it, to their detriment. Ditto "All tech companies are actively hiring engineers all the time. You will never waste appreciable amounts of their time getting in touch with a hiring manager and offering to chat about the possibility of working together."
Incidentally: a company's best performing employees very rarely come from their outsourced recruiting pipeline. If you come from outside their recruiting pipeline, their prior expectation of how good a candidate you are may be higher just as a result of that fact.
This may be beyond obvious, but it can help to network by going to technical meetups[1], conferences and the like. You may not meet hiring managers, but you'll meet your peers who may know of open jobs at their companies and can help you get interviews.
[1] I don't know how things are in Orlando, but every week lately I've been getting emails from Meetup.com about yet another new technical meetup group that is starting up in my general area. One would hope that you can find some that would be relevant to you.
Now I treat it as a job-lead generator.
0. Choose three things in Dev you are good at and make them your calling card. Loved automating sysadmin - puppet, ansible and salt should be all over your blog.
1. LinkedIn is great, take sometime this evening to update your profile, focusing on the three calling cards. Everyone you take for coffee will look you up - a LinkedIn profile without a photo and upto date data is like not wearing a suit at an interview. It might be ok but most people just expect it.
2. Don't hide your past - don't ever ever lie about it - that will wrap you up in guilt and fear and shoot your sanity to pieces.
3. You seem to feel you have a justification for the actions you took - see a lawyer, take reasonable steps to have your side of the story into court (counter suing your employer?). Someday your past will be used against you for political reasons - it will be very helpful to say "I am still in process of counter suing and the case is with the Florida blah" as opposed to "but I was innocent"
5. Taking people to coffee is great - taking them to coffee to discuss their experiences with your calling card areas is even better cos it has a higher hit rate and the "got any jobs going?" part comes much later
6. Never ever lie about your past. Ever
7. See 6. No matter how tempted.
If it were me (it isn't, so again, grain of salt), gentle contrition and hard-earned wisdom would be the narrative I'd apply. He's got nothing to beat himself up over, but the message he probably wants to send to employers is "that sucked, not ever doing that again".
I am overly cautious on public records that are not obviously favourable to oneself - certainly have an attitude of juvenile regret, but I would be tempted to look at this area closely. But it is certainly a long term thing and will not help getting a job now.
If that happens to you, I think the impression you don't want to create is that you vigorously contest the criminality of your actions. That impression comes freighted with the concern that you might think exploiting vulnerabilities without permission in order to make a point on Twitter is a good idea. That concern is, to many employers, both valid and relevant.
Instead, I think you want to create the impression that you've learned that the standards are strict for not messing with other people's systems without permission. And that you've learned better than most other professionals that systems in production are not to be trifled with out of process. And thus that of all the people a firm could hire, you're among the least likely to cause outages and disruption by making dumb out-of-process changes.
For whatever it's worth: if you want Exhibit A for why I don't have a lot of sympathy for people involved in "Lulzsec": breaking into sites and circulating credit card numbers and dumping databases created a set of circumstances that law enforcement absolutely had to respond to, and that's what sets up the crossfire that undisciplined but well-intentioned bug hunters get caught in. The people who go beyond doc'ing vulnerabilities to dump databases and take down sites are in some sense ruining things for everyone else.
I read that he POC'd a site, and then disclosed it the same day to @lulzsec.
The latter is what got him the felony, but you make it seem like the former or his timing was the problem.
The timing was a major problem. If you do have to defend yourself, I think saying you misjudged the nature of lulzsec is a defensible thing to say.
Re: jcampbell - I can't reply direct yet, but I am not sure that it is illegal to tell people how to pick a lock in the UK, even if you shout it out in some of the rougher pubs in the East End. It's just illegal to "go equipped".
I guess how the law is, and how the law would be under a sensible compromise is the OPs problem.
So, poor timing, poor choice of people to reveal it to.
I'm not in a situation where I can leave Orlando right now, but I will keep it in mind.
Thanks a bunch!
If I were the hiring manager (and I've been a hiring manager before) and were aware of your probation, I'd be curious and want to skim the plea agreement. But if you were doing white-hat stuff, as you say, it wouldn't interfere with me offering you a job.
I'd imagine federal probation is related to that program and has similar standards?
A petition to move to a larger job market (SF, Atl, or Austin) might start a discussion which opens other options to you.
I think your felony conviction isn't your worst problem. Your worst problem is that you're trying to get jobs in Orlando and using recruiters to do it. Both of these are bad strategies. Working with recruiters is the bigger mistake.
It is almost certainly not true that recruiters maintain an "oligarchy" over tech jobs in Orlando. All things being equal, hiring managers would rather not rely on recruiters to fill positions, because recruiters are very expensive. It may be the case that it's hard to get a job from online job ads in Orlando without working with recruiters, but job ads are not the best way to find jobs anyways.
Here are some thoughts (grain of salt; I'm not you, and you know more about your situation than I do):
1. You're in the hottest market for tech talent that I've seen in my whole career. That could change tomorrow, and eventually, after some number of "tomorrows", will change. When that happens, your criminal record could suddenly become a much bigger problem than it is now. So I'd move quickly to find a full-time role and to start establishing a career track record. The longer you maintain full-time employment with established firms, the less relevant your background becomes.
2. I urge you to cast a wider net than Orlando. You don't necessarily have to move to get a job that isn't based out of central Florida. But you're also quite young; if you don't have a very good reason to stay there, consider finding a job in a larger metro area --- Austin, Atlanta, DC --- and moving for awhile. I left Chicago for SF early in my career and eventually moved back, and while I don't love SF, I'm glad for the experience of trying it out.
3. Stop working through recruiters. Recruiters are bad news for developers even without a criminal record. But when you understand how most recruiters work, transactionally, like real estate agents, you can see that any potential obstacle to placing you is going to make you disproportionately less lucrative in their business model.
4. I think you'll find that most software companies aren't particularly rigorous with background checks. If you're not trying to land a role where a CFAA conviction is relevant, I don't think you're obligated to bring your background up.
5. The best way to find a company that hires directly is to simply assume that they will all hire directly, if you find the right person to talk to. Two things you can do right away: first, make a list of tech companies in your region and start finding people you can grab coffee with, and second, start showing up at meetups and asking people about their jobs, what they're working on, and what they like about the jobs. One thing you're going to find out quickly is that employees in tech shops are usually incentivized to help recruit people. By talking to them about working at their company, you're often doing them a favor, by setting them up to collect 4-5 figure bonuses.
So: Act as if your conviction is not a problem. Start looking outside Orlando, which might be problematic even for developers without criminal records. Stop trying to work through recruiters. Assume every company hires directly. Make a list of companies you might want to work for in your area and start finding people who work there to talk to. Show up at meetups and make conversation with people about their jobs, and see where things go from there.
There are going to be jobs where a criminal conviction is a roadblock (unfortunately, many jobs in my field are like that; consulting clients, for instance, all tend to background check consultants; another place you'll have trouble is finance). But my guess is that the majority of dev jobs are not like that.