4 ms·
Why not just give an automated field-sobriety test for alertness, judgment, and reflexes at the start of each shift? Pass the test, and you can clock in and ge
by logfromblammo 9y ago
Why not just give an automated field-sobriety test for alertness, judgment, and reflexes at the start of each shift?
Pass the test, and you can clock in and get to work. Fail the test, hit the nap room (unpaid) for a while, and try again when you wake up.
It would catch people who are drunk, high, having a stroke, or just sleepy, rather than just the guy who used cannabis two weekends ago and is perfectly capable of working now.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoOther than being extremely complicated to setup, has the ability for people to socially engineer themselves out of it and costing 1 hour of work per day per person yea you could do this .
- killjoywashere 9y ago> Why not just give an automated field-sobriety test Because they are famous for low specificity and low sensitivity.
- solipsism 9y agoLow specificity and low sensitivity regarding whether drugs were ingested. This is not the same as measuring capability to work safely.
- dagw 9y agoWhy not just give an automated field-sobriety test Does such a thing exist? Is there any independent evidence that it actually works?
- darpa_escapee 9y agoField sobriety tests are like polygraph tests: highly subjective, easily influenced by bias and have little to no scientific backing.
- vkou 9y agoNeither are drug tests for determining whether or not someone is high when they show up to work.
- darpa_escapee 9y agoI agree. However, I'd rather get pinged via a quantifiable metric like BAC than someone's opinion regarding my perceived impairment.
- vkou 9y agoIf BAC tests pinged you as drunk three weeks after having a drink, you really wouldn't.
- darpa_escapee 9y agoThat could be fought while there is little leeway in terms of fighting "my training and 15 years of experience allowed me to determine that the subject was impaired".
- vkou 9y agoIn theory, yes. In practice, no. You may be sober as a judge at work, but you'll be out on your ass before you blink if you fail a drug test.
- logfromblammo 9y agoHow exactly would an automated sobriety test make use of a qualitative metric? Is a score on a video game quantifiable enough for you? There are so many "brain training" games that do nothing but score you on your observation, working memory, reflexes, etc. Back in college, everyone had to participate in the psych experiment test pool, where many of the experiments were coded in extremely rudimentary Visual Basic, to show video clips and record the time intervals between on-screen events and keypresses. That's more objective than a human checking your eyeballs to see if there are too many involuntary movements, or making a subjective determination that there weren't enough social displays of submission to the tester. And it scales better to have X computers set up for employees to test and clock in at the same time than to have a supervisor processing the whole line one by one.
- skellera 9y agoNo one is required to give you a job. The increased cost to do that everyday is not worth it to the company if they can weed out possible irresponsible workers from a drug test. It’s work, not a babysitter. All everyone is talking about is weed which I’m sure most of us agree shouldn’t be tested for but we don’t even know what the failed tests failed for.
- itkillsbrnsells 9y ago> All everyone is talking about is weed which I’m sure most of us agree shouldn’t be tested for Speak for yourself, pothead.
- throwawayjava 9y ago> No one is required to give you a job And no one is required to work for you at the wages you can afford to pay... Want affordable workers? Increase supply or decrease demand. If you can't do the latter, focus on the former.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- xbzbanna 9y agoThis whole tree of comments is a response to someone complaining that it's hard for a company to find workers. Nobody's saying that company is required to hire anyone - we are just making suggestions to help them with their problem. If labor is turning into a seller's market, buyers are going to have to adjust.
- logfromblammo 9y agoI think you underestimate the cost differential between contracting with a lab to drug-test your employees on an ongoing basis, and with hiring a software developer once to make a rudimentary video game that positively correlates a passing score with operating heavy industrial equipment safely for the next 8 hours. Hell, you could set up an old Atari with Frogger in it, and require employees to score X points before clocking in. It might not have a very strong correlation, but it sure would be cheaper and more goal-specific than drug testing. It would more likely take the form of "watch this simulated surveillance video of the work floor, and press the space bar to stop the machinery on the entire production line". When someone steps over the warning tape on the floor around the person-shredder, you press the button. If someone gets their sleeve stuck in the dude-grinder, you press the button. If the part-spewer starts stamping out misaligned doohickeys, you press the button. If your response time is too slow, you aren't fit to clock in for today's shift. Or it could be a simulation of operating the actual machine that employee uses, attempting to predict their productivity for the day. It has the added benefit of sneaking safety training videos into the daily workflow.
- itkillsbrnsells 9y agoWhy not just not cater to druggies or enable their behavior at all?
- Aloha 9y agoI couldn't pass a field sobriety test well rested and stone sober most of the time - this isn't a reasonable test.
- Aloha 9y agoI was unaware that being utterly uncoordinated with a lazy eye was cause for down voting.