>>RBBron+(OP)
A friend of mine finally had his record cleared of incidents from when he was 19-20. He took courses to learn to program but even now it's still hard for him to get a job because people want to know about the huge gap in his employment history from when nobody would hire him.
>>bright+E5
Do people care about that if he does freelance work? Or has he mostly looked for employment? And if so, why not freelance?
At least in my neck of the woods (Western Europe) it's (relatively) easy to find programming work as a contractor/freelancer, and as far as I can tell employment history doesn't matter, at least not in the 'web' space of programming.