4 ms·

Good of them to do that and nip this practice in the bud before it has a chance to become widespread. After having just pee'd in cup last week for a pre-employ

by angdis 15y ago

Good of them to do that and nip this practice in the bud before it has a chance to become widespread. After having just pee'd in cup last week for a pre-employment screen, I do hope that someday governments will also ban senseless and stupid drug testing for jobs that don't actually require 24/7 sobriety (eg software engineering).

untog 15y ago
When I moved to the US I was absolutely blown away at how common this practise is. A friend applying for a common office job had to do it- I had assumed it would only be for people handling live firearms and the like. Little did I know...
- drucken 15y ago
  The only place I know it is routine outside of the US is in trading roles for banks. Then again, many financials are American...
paulhauggis 15y ago
"ban senseless and stupid drug testing for jobs that don't actually require 24/7 sobriety (eg software engineering)." It should be my right as an employer to hire anyone that I wish (just like it is your right as an employee to not accept a position or quit). You say it has no effect, but you can't tell me it has no effect on productivity, I just won't believe it (I've known too many pot heads in my life). Also, if my company required my employees to be on-call with customer support, I don't want someone under the influence of anything handling these sorts of emergencies. If you ban drug testing, employers will just hire people who they think are drug users less often and you won't really be able to prove it.
- barrkel 15y ago
  It should be my right as an employer to hire anyone that I wish No, it is not your right; it must not be that absolute. That gives free reign to racist and other discriminatory practices, and the greater good absolutely and certainly trumps one's individual right here. The kinds of practice you are advocating here - absolute freedom on the part of employers - have had a strong part in fomenting civil war and terrorism in various places around the world. Closest to my own home, Protestant practices in Northern Ireland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_in_Northern_Ireland#Employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_in_Northern_Irelan... - and laws curbing this kind of segregation have had significant effects in reversing it. It's hard for me to express how certain I am that the real world (tm) has proven your point of view wrong here. People do kill over this.
- drucken 15y ago
  I hate with all my passion recreational drug users or to be more precise, of those who make their behaviour known or otherwise affect my life. However, for the purpose of employment, drug testing is needlessly intrusive in all but a few special cases. It is just simply not needed and risks creating far more problems than it attempts to solve. Going down the path of money trumps all other concerns or "perfect market results in perfect results", you would soon arrive at a "Gattaca" situation and beyond where unless every single DNA base you possess is perfect, every behaviour is perfect from birth, everyone you have ever networked with is similiarly perfect, etc., you will never be employable or move beyond a specific bracket alloted to you by society. In the meantime, costs to existing businesses and challenges to entrants would skyrocket in a self-defeating spiral, while incredible talent that may suit your company dies by the wayside unused or misallocated. Drug testing and much more, as technology now and in future allows, may be fine for the cutting edge of physical endeavours or positions of massive responsibility for human individuals where even a second of downtime could make or break a company, but for anyone else, that is well beyond reasonable. A basic analogy in one respect would be like applying military critical software certification standards and testing for bug-free processes (the kind that causes operating systems and software designed in the 70s to still be used) in all software ever produced from now...
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  > It should be my right as an employer to hire anyone that I wish (just like it is your right as an employee to not accept a position or quit). Would you also refuse to hire an employee who drinks heavily on Friday/Saturday nights, yet never once comes to work drunk? Furthermore, would this even be legal (or ethical)? Drug testing in the work environment has been shown to be counterproductive for many reasons. Since you seem to care more about the practical impact (not the ethical one), I'll focus on this one: marijuana remains detectable in the system for two weeks after use, whereas most drugs (like cocaine) are undetectable after two days. So what's the message that you're sending your employees? 'On Friday night, rather than use marijuana, I'd prefer it if you used cocaine or methamphetamine instead.' That way, they'll be sure to pass Monday's drug test, which they'd have failed if they had been 'foolish' enough to inhale from a bong instead of a crack pipe/meth pipe! So even if you think your employees shouldn't use drugs on their own time, even if it never affects their work, drug testing in the workplace is the worst way to encourage healthy behavior.
  - ericd 15y ago
    You're creating all kinds of strawmen here. Pot being banned doesn't make people smoke crack. And sure, it's legal and ethical for an employer not to want to employ anyone they don't want to work with, as long as it's not a protected class. Drug use wasn't one of those, last I checked. It's not necessarily a smart idea to fire qualified people who smoke pot on their own time just because you don't like the idea of having pot smokers represent your company, but it's not wrong.
    - mattmanser 15y ago
      It's not wrong for your employer to start dictating what you do on your own time? Damn you Americans have one fucked up country, all hail your corporate overlords! Guess who doesn't take those tests too? The CEOs and the directors and the partners. They can snort as much coke as they want, but woe betide the worker bees doing it. The utter hypocrisy of it all is astounding.
      - ericd 15y ago
- angdis 15y ago
  Sorry, but productivity is best measured by evidence previous work-- not one's piss, blood, hair, or facebook friends. The other reason that drug testing is senseless and stupid is that it is imprecise. "False positives" do wreck careers and/or cause enormous hardship on good people, you might call it collateral damage, but to the people it occurs to it is a disaster. In my own case, I had been scheduled to submit to a hair test as pre-employment screen. I showed up at the testing facility and was told my hair was too short and that a urine sample was required instead. These are different tests and the urine sample does check for alcohol consumption whereas the hair test does not. The previous night I shared a bottle of wine with dinner with my wife and I had also taken advil because of the headache induced by the stress of giving my termination notice at work. Everything turned out OK, but the stress caused by worrying about a stupid false positive because of the wine, advil, or my prescription was really not a nice experience. If there had been a false positive, I would have been begging for mercy, disclosing my drug prescription, explaining away the advil and wine. I guess some people would see value/pleasure in that. I fucking don't.
- drcube 15y ago
  It should be your right to fire poor performers, regardless of their drug history, and your right to continue the employment of top performers, regardless of their drug history. If someone isn't up to snuff, cut them loose. If someone works hard, smart and productively every day, why do you care what they do in their off time? This isn't like mandating your employees be sober, which is a worthwhile rule. But imagine if you had a test which would detect whether an employee has had a beer any time within the past month. Do you think that would be a worthwhile test to base their employment on? It's a waste of money in addition to a violation of privacy. Fire the people who don't perform to your expectations. Keep the ones who do. How hard is that?
- carguy1983 15y ago
  Half the people in silicon valley are stoned nearly every night. Including all the ones that work at Google, FB, Twitter, whatever. Trust me, I've known a lot of pot heads too. Whoever you are, stay the hell out of California please.
nirvana 15y ago
It was the US government that created the drug testing for jobs, when they passed laws requiring it for a variety of government jobs. This had a secondary effect of requiring it for private employers working with government, and then it grew from there. I did it once, many years ago, and then adopted a policy of refusing it (even though I don't use drugs or even alcohol.)
- hippee-lee 15y ago
  What I find funny about the drug testing policy is how easy it is to circumvent and the side industry that exists to provide the tools needed to circumvent it. I could see the same thing happening if employers started requiring social media credentials. An new kind of social network would have an easy differentiator - "Come to our new social network, along with everything else, you can trust us because we give you two logins: a secure login that you keep for yourself and a compromised login that you give to the government and your employer."
  - zig 15y ago
    Give us both logins, please.
    - hippee-lee 15y ago
      Well perhaps its one login with a safe word, like the spy's do in the movies when the agents on the phone ask them if they are safe and there are several words they can use to respond to. I wonder if it is something I might use, not just for an interview with a potential employer but on other computers, not under my control.
tocomment 15y ago
But how can you work on your side projects that employers expect you to have done if you're not sober 24/7?

by angdis 15y ago

untog 15y ago

When I moved to the US I was absolutely blown away at how common this practise is. A friend applying for a common office job had to do it- I had assumed it would only be for people handling live firearms and the like. Little did I know...

drucken 15y ago
The only place I know it is routine outside of the US is in trading roles for banks. Then again, many financials are American...

paulhauggis 15y ago

"ban senseless and stupid drug testing for jobs that don't actually require 24/7 sobriety (eg software engineering)." It should be my right as an employer to hire anyone that I wish (just like it is your right as an employee to not accept a position or quit). You say it has no effect, but you can't tell me it has no effect on productivity, I just won't believe it (I've known too many pot heads in my life). Also, if my company required my employees to be on-call with customer support, I don't want someone under the influence of anything handling these sorts of emergencies. If you ban drug testing, employers will just hire people who they think are drug users less often and you won't really be able to prove it.

barrkel 15y ago
It should be my right as an employer to hire anyone that I wish No, it is not your right; it must not be that absolute. That gives free reign to racist and other discriminatory practices, and the greater good absolutely and certainly trumps one's individual right here. The kinds of practice you are advocating here - absolute freedom on the part of employers - have had a strong part in fomenting civil war and terrorism in various places around the world. Closest to my own home, Protestant practices in Northern Ireland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_in_Northern_Ireland#Employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_in_Northern_Irelan... - and laws curbing this kind of segregation have had significant effects in reversing it. It's hard for me to express how certain I am that the real world (tm) has proven your point of view wrong here. People do kill over this.
drucken 15y ago
I hate with all my passion recreational drug users or to be more precise, of those who make their behaviour known or otherwise affect my life. However, for the purpose of employment, drug testing is needlessly intrusive in all but a few special cases. It is just simply not needed and risks creating far more problems than it attempts to solve. Going down the path of money trumps all other concerns or "perfect market results in perfect results", you would soon arrive at a "Gattaca" situation and beyond where unless every single DNA base you possess is perfect, every behaviour is perfect from birth, everyone you have ever networked with is similiarly perfect, etc., you will never be employable or move beyond a specific bracket alloted to you by society. In the meantime, costs to existing businesses and challenges to entrants would skyrocket in a self-defeating spiral, while incredible talent that may suit your company dies by the wayside unused or misallocated. Drug testing and much more, as technology now and in future allows, may be fine for the cutting edge of physical endeavours or positions of massive responsibility for human individuals where even a second of downtime could make or break a company, but for anyone else, that is well beyond reasonable. A basic analogy in one respect would be like applying military critical software certification standards and testing for bug-free processes (the kind that causes operating systems and software designed in the 70s to still be used) in all software ever produced from now...
chimeracoder 15y ago
> It should be my right as an employer to hire anyone that I wish (just like it is your right as an employee to not accept a position or quit). Would you also refuse to hire an employee who drinks heavily on Friday/Saturday nights, yet never once comes to work drunk? Furthermore, would this even be legal (or ethical)? Drug testing in the work environment has been shown to be counterproductive for many reasons. Since you seem to care more about the practical impact (not the ethical one), I'll focus on this one: marijuana remains detectable in the system for two weeks after use, whereas most drugs (like cocaine) are undetectable after two days. So what's the message that you're sending your employees? 'On Friday night, rather than use marijuana, I'd prefer it if you used cocaine or methamphetamine instead.' That way, they'll be sure to pass Monday's drug test, which they'd have failed if they had been 'foolish' enough to inhale from a bong instead of a crack pipe/meth pipe! So even if you think your employees shouldn't use drugs on their own time, even if it never affects their work, drug testing in the workplace is the worst way to encourage healthy behavior.
- ericd 15y ago
  You're creating all kinds of strawmen here. Pot being banned doesn't make people smoke crack. And sure, it's legal and ethical for an employer not to want to employ anyone they don't want to work with, as long as it's not a protected class. Drug use wasn't one of those, last I checked. It's not necessarily a smart idea to fire qualified people who smoke pot on their own time just because you don't like the idea of having pot smokers represent your company, but it's not wrong.
  - mattmanser 15y ago
    It's not wrong for your employer to start dictating what you do on your own time? Damn you Americans have one fucked up country, all hail your corporate overlords! Guess who doesn't take those tests too? The CEOs and the directors and the partners. They can snort as much coke as they want, but woe betide the worker bees doing it. The utter hypocrisy of it all is astounding.
    - ericd 15y ago
angdis 15y ago
Sorry, but productivity is best measured by evidence previous work-- not one's piss, blood, hair, or facebook friends. The other reason that drug testing is senseless and stupid is that it is imprecise. "False positives" do wreck careers and/or cause enormous hardship on good people, you might call it collateral damage, but to the people it occurs to it is a disaster. In my own case, I had been scheduled to submit to a hair test as pre-employment screen. I showed up at the testing facility and was told my hair was too short and that a urine sample was required instead. These are different tests and the urine sample does check for alcohol consumption whereas the hair test does not. The previous night I shared a bottle of wine with dinner with my wife and I had also taken advil because of the headache induced by the stress of giving my termination notice at work. Everything turned out OK, but the stress caused by worrying about a stupid false positive because of the wine, advil, or my prescription was really not a nice experience. If there had been a false positive, I would have been begging for mercy, disclosing my drug prescription, explaining away the advil and wine. I guess some people would see value/pleasure in that. I fucking don't.
drcube 15y ago
It should be your right to fire poor performers, regardless of their drug history, and your right to continue the employment of top performers, regardless of their drug history. If someone isn't up to snuff, cut them loose. If someone works hard, smart and productively every day, why do you care what they do in their off time? This isn't like mandating your employees be sober, which is a worthwhile rule. But imagine if you had a test which would detect whether an employee has had a beer any time within the past month. Do you think that would be a worthwhile test to base their employment on? It's a waste of money in addition to a violation of privacy. Fire the people who don't perform to your expectations. Keep the ones who do. How hard is that?
carguy1983 15y ago
Half the people in silicon valley are stoned nearly every night. Including all the ones that work at Google, FB, Twitter, whatever. Trust me, I've known a lot of pot heads too. Whoever you are, stay the hell out of California please.

nirvana 15y ago

It was the US government that created the drug testing for jobs, when they passed laws requiring it for a variety of government jobs. This had a secondary effect of requiring it for private employers working with government, and then it grew from there. I did it once, many years ago, and then adopted a policy of refusing it (even though I don't use drugs or even alcohol.)

hippee-lee 15y ago
What I find funny about the drug testing policy is how easy it is to circumvent and the side industry that exists to provide the tools needed to circumvent it. I could see the same thing happening if employers started requiring social media credentials. An new kind of social network would have an easy differentiator - "Come to our new social network, along with everything else, you can trust us because we give you two logins: a secure login that you keep for yourself and a compromised login that you give to the government and your employer."
- zig 15y ago
  Give us both logins, please.
  - hippee-lee 15y ago
    Well perhaps its one login with a safe word, like the spy's do in the movies when the agents on the phone ask them if they are safe and there are several words they can use to respond to. I wonder if it is something I might use, not just for an interview with a potential employer but on other computers, not under my control.

tocomment 15y ago

But how can you work on your side projects that employers expect you to have done if you're not sober 24/7?