5 ms·

The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t. Outside the mi

The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t. Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstreet traders? There would be a nation wide solidarity strike. Bill Gates famously joked in the 90s that Microsoft would lose a third of their engineers instantly if they drug tested. The NSA even had to make an official exception on past drug use so people would stop failing the security screening (although they still get tested iirc).

todd3834 3y ago
Could it simply be data driven? Is there any truth that the jobs that drug test most often are or were more likely to have drug related incidents than the others? I don’t know the data but my guess would be it is based on past performance as a whole more than individual impact. Whether that is wrong or right I could see how there is an argument to be made
- throwup238 3y ago
  If it were at all data driven everyone would test for alcohol. That usually doesn’t happen unless there’s an accident and even then, a doctor wouldn’t be subject to a blood test or breathalyzer like a driver would. They’d just be allowed to go home and the matter would be handled in litigation and before the medical board.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad. Half of silicon valley allegedly is micro-dosing all sorts of things and apparently benefiting from that. Steve Jobs famously advocated using LSD. The Vietnam war famously had a lot of drug abuse. WW II soldiers and leadership were consuming epic amounts of amphetamines. And that wasn't just the Nazis. Companies aren't testing for this because they couldn't care less. Drugs isn't killing their business and they like having access to smart people who might fail a test. The main reason testing is more common in the public sector is not that drugs are bad but that the optics of people using drugs has negative political consequences when political leaders are waging this war on drugs. Also with drugs being illegal, using them necessarily means breaking the law and interacting with criminals. Which looks bad politically as well. Remote work is different. People and companies disagree about the effects but a lot of companies seem to prefer having their people not work remotely. Not because of the way it looks but because of at least the perception of its impact on productivity. Whether you agree with that or not doesn't matter. Some people are concerned about it and acting accordingly. The inequality here relates mainly to the value of the work people do. Just like companies don't like losing access to people who are smart and may use drugs, they also don't like losing access to people who have valuable skills that insist on working remotely. So they allow some people to work remotely. But of course some skills are more valuable than others so the inequality mainly relates to how easy it is to replace people with more compliant ones.
- freddie_mercury 3y ago
  > Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad As an explanation, this is implausible to the point of impossible. The same employers drug test lower-level employees but (e.g. in the warehouse) but don't test other employees (e.g. in the office). Amazon drug tests warehouse workers but not AWS engineers. It is difficult to come up for a coherent theory for that that includes "as an organisation, we don't think drugs are all that bad"
  - chii 3y ago
    obviously it is the belief of upper management that low level workers cannot be trusted to behave and work to their maximum if they're on drugs, while the "elites" require such drugs to reach their maximum potential.
    - calvinmorrison 3y ago
      No its because usually low level jobs require you to operate heavy machinery like driving a truck or operating a forklift or work on the floor of the factory, or being around those things. Or for example handling cash at registers etc. I feel like this conspiracy is the author, and apparently hn needs to touch grass a little bit
      - 6510 3y ago
        A friend from Yugoslavia told me about his job there. Their lunch room looked like a grand cafe with every possible kind of liquor and a variety of beer on the tap. Around 11 am some of his coworkers had a few beers, in the sun, in front of the building. Around 1 they had some whiskey or vodka etc. At the end of the work day some went home, others stuck around. They had a few more drinks, some went home, others went out to eat together, some went home after dinner, some went back to the office. He regularly got very drunk. Sometimes he would make a row of chairs and sleep there. 7 am his boss would be the first to arrive. He was always happy to see someone was already there and made coffee. They sat around and chatted some more and he would start his shift an hour early (not paid ofc) It wasn't that everyone got drunk at work every day, some more often than others, some rarely which made it kind of a special occasion if they stuck around. He had the same assignments as his coworkers but completed them in half the time. Sometimes, at 11 am, he would just continue drinking beer while sitting in the sun and go home an hour early. The funniest part was that they mostly talked about work. It was one lengthy extended meeting till 1 am, if they had some kind of deadline they would just work in their spare time while drinking (without pay) No culture is strange until compared. I drink 2 liters of coffee, smoke a lot and consume lots of sugar. This is perfectly normal here. edit: it was a desk job
jghn 3y ago
> The NSA even had to make an official exceptio The way I had it explained to me in the 90s was while drug use was disqualifying for things like the FBI, for the NSA it was fine-ish provided you were open about it.
- Duanemclemore 3y ago
  I have had personal conversations with people who went through involved security clearance processes in the 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. Between those times I can tell you that everyone but the FBI got more lax about pot (but not cocaine) and homosexuality (even the FBI didn't care about that by the mid 2000's) but not more lax about gambling - even in states where it was already legal. They aren't on the lookout for straight arrows to hire, they're on the lookout for people who can be blackmailed to steal information. Once things like simple weed possession became nothing more than a small civil penalty, there wasn't any way to use the threat of exposure as a way of blackmailing someone. Once people knew they couldn't generally be fired / blackballed for homosexuality, that lever disappeared.
  - locallost 3y ago
    Sounds like a circular argument. The FBI fires gay people, so they had to fire them to prevent them from leaking information because of possible blackmail. But once they stopped firing them for homosexuality there was no need to fire them because of fear they might be blackmailed because of the possibility to fire them. It's probably true for gambling, but the rest sounds like whitewashing. They fired gay people because society was hostile towards them and those agencies were part of society.
    - Duanemclemore 3y ago
      Yes, it was a completely circular argument. I am 100% not defending it. But you're completely correct that all they had to do to keep someone from being blackmailed because otherwise they'd be fired was... to not fire them. I'm sure there's a lot of moral-highgrounding about everyone outside the group being untrustworthy, and looking for confirmation of this in the most paranoid ways.
madsbuch 3y ago
this comment represent a weird sentiment: if you drugt test in one field, you should equally drug test I all fields. How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs? it seems like introducing a whole machinery to just have the same resting is an industrial scale waste of resources. However, people regularly die because of drunk and tired drivers.
- sshine 3y ago
  There is some implicit assumption that drug testing is a safety measure. I am quite convinced it is a productivity measure.
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    It's neither.
  - Broken_Hippo 3y ago
    it is neither. Otherwise, you'd see productivity being better in places that allow drug testing of normal employees and worse off in places that do not. But that's not the case: Retail employees in Norway aren't really less productive than those in the US. Plus, if it really were a productivity measure, why would you not drug test more professionals and salaried employees? Does their productivity not matter? Wouldn't more small businesses find drug testing worth the money?
    - sshine 3y ago
      Doing drugs may affect your productivity at work. Depending on the drug, and the circumstances. I'm sorry to say.
      - lumost 3y ago
        I don’t believe that this has any bearing on why individuals are drug tested at work. Particularly when tests with longer durations are used. What business does an employer have with employee drug use outside of work?
jojobas 3y ago
I would hazard a guess that low-skilled workers are much more likely to come to work cooked than someone like pilots who have a lot on the line.
hypercube33 3y ago
Is there a citation of Gates comment? I wasn't able to find anything
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Some companies require it for everyone. When I did consulting work for Home Depot, I was required to get a drug test. It didn't matter that I wasn't a W2 nor a 1099 for them but a W2 of a consulting company who HD hired to do a project for them, all of us had to be drug tested, with the reason being that Home Depot didn't think it was fair to test people working in their stores if the white collar people weren't tested too. My employer didn't require the test of anyone but since this was a big contract, as far as I know, no one refused. If I were a recreational drug user, it might have been a rather unwelcome situation to come up after years of working for the company where drug use outside of the office wasn't a concern.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  At a prior employer, they simple staffed these types of projects with people who could pass the test. “you’ll get to work for X big client, but you’ll need to be drug tested”
TrackerFF 3y ago
...I can guarantee you that most SpaceX workers are held to much higher standards, than their big boy CEO, when it comes to security clearance.
- steveoscaro 3y ago
  Musk submits to drug tests. But yeah just skimming news headlines would give you a different idea.

todd3834 3y ago

Could it simply be data driven? Is there any truth that the jobs that drug test most often are or were more likely to have drug related incidents than the others? I don’t know the data but my guess would be it is based on past performance as a whole more than individual impact. Whether that is wrong or right I could see how there is an argument to be made

throwup238 3y ago
If it were at all data driven everyone would test for alcohol. That usually doesn’t happen unless there’s an accident and even then, a doctor wouldn’t be subject to a blood test or breathalyzer like a driver would. They’d just be allowed to go home and the matter would be handled in litigation and before the medical board.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad. Half of silicon valley allegedly is micro-dosing all sorts of things and apparently benefiting from that. Steve Jobs famously advocated using LSD. The Vietnam war famously had a lot of drug abuse. WW II soldiers and leadership were consuming epic amounts of amphetamines. And that wasn't just the Nazis. Companies aren't testing for this because they couldn't care less. Drugs isn't killing their business and they like having access to smart people who might fail a test. The main reason testing is more common in the public sector is not that drugs are bad but that the optics of people using drugs has negative political consequences when political leaders are waging this war on drugs. Also with drugs being illegal, using them necessarily means breaking the law and interacting with criminals. Which looks bad politically as well. Remote work is different. People and companies disagree about the effects but a lot of companies seem to prefer having their people not work remotely. Not because of the way it looks but because of at least the perception of its impact on productivity. Whether you agree with that or not doesn't matter. Some people are concerned about it and acting accordingly. The inequality here relates mainly to the value of the work people do. Just like companies don't like losing access to people who are smart and may use drugs, they also don't like losing access to people who have valuable skills that insist on working remotely. So they allow some people to work remotely. But of course some skills are more valuable than others so the inequality mainly relates to how easy it is to replace people with more compliant ones.

freddie_mercury 3y ago
> Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad As an explanation, this is implausible to the point of impossible. The same employers drug test lower-level employees but (e.g. in the warehouse) but don't test other employees (e.g. in the office). Amazon drug tests warehouse workers but not AWS engineers. It is difficult to come up for a coherent theory for that that includes "as an organisation, we don't think drugs are all that bad"
- chii 3y ago
  obviously it is the belief of upper management that low level workers cannot be trusted to behave and work to their maximum if they're on drugs, while the "elites" require such drugs to reach their maximum potential.
  - calvinmorrison 3y ago
    No its because usually low level jobs require you to operate heavy machinery like driving a truck or operating a forklift or work on the floor of the factory, or being around those things. Or for example handling cash at registers etc. I feel like this conspiracy is the author, and apparently hn needs to touch grass a little bit
    - 6510 3y ago
      A friend from Yugoslavia told me about his job there. Their lunch room looked like a grand cafe with every possible kind of liquor and a variety of beer on the tap. Around 11 am some of his coworkers had a few beers, in the sun, in front of the building. Around 1 they had some whiskey or vodka etc. At the end of the work day some went home, others stuck around. They had a few more drinks, some went home, others went out to eat together, some went home after dinner, some went back to the office. He regularly got very drunk. Sometimes he would make a row of chairs and sleep there. 7 am his boss would be the first to arrive. He was always happy to see someone was already there and made coffee. They sat around and chatted some more and he would start his shift an hour early (not paid ofc) It wasn't that everyone got drunk at work every day, some more often than others, some rarely which made it kind of a special occasion if they stuck around. He had the same assignments as his coworkers but completed them in half the time. Sometimes, at 11 am, he would just continue drinking beer while sitting in the sun and go home an hour early. The funniest part was that they mostly talked about work. It was one lengthy extended meeting till 1 am, if they had some kind of deadline they would just work in their spare time while drinking (without pay) No culture is strange until compared. I drink 2 liters of coffee, smoke a lot and consume lots of sugar. This is perfectly normal here. edit: it was a desk job

jghn 3y ago

> The NSA even had to make an official exceptio The way I had it explained to me in the 90s was while drug use was disqualifying for things like the FBI, for the NSA it was fine-ish provided you were open about it.

Duanemclemore 3y ago
I have had personal conversations with people who went through involved security clearance processes in the 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. Between those times I can tell you that everyone but the FBI got more lax about pot (but not cocaine) and homosexuality (even the FBI didn't care about that by the mid 2000's) but not more lax about gambling - even in states where it was already legal. They aren't on the lookout for straight arrows to hire, they're on the lookout for people who can be blackmailed to steal information. Once things like simple weed possession became nothing more than a small civil penalty, there wasn't any way to use the threat of exposure as a way of blackmailing someone. Once people knew they couldn't generally be fired / blackballed for homosexuality, that lever disappeared.
- locallost 3y ago
  Sounds like a circular argument. The FBI fires gay people, so they had to fire them to prevent them from leaking information because of possible blackmail. But once they stopped firing them for homosexuality there was no need to fire them because of fear they might be blackmailed because of the possibility to fire them. It's probably true for gambling, but the rest sounds like whitewashing. They fired gay people because society was hostile towards them and those agencies were part of society.
  - Duanemclemore 3y ago
    Yes, it was a completely circular argument. I am 100% not defending it. But you're completely correct that all they had to do to keep someone from being blackmailed because otherwise they'd be fired was... to not fire them. I'm sure there's a lot of moral-highgrounding about everyone outside the group being untrustworthy, and looking for confirmation of this in the most paranoid ways.

madsbuch 3y ago

this comment represent a weird sentiment: if you drugt test in one field, you should equally drug test I all fields. How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs? it seems like introducing a whole machinery to just have the same resting is an industrial scale waste of resources. However, people regularly die because of drunk and tired drivers.

sshine 3y ago
There is some implicit assumption that drug testing is a safety measure. I am quite convinced it is a productivity measure.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  It's neither.
- Broken_Hippo 3y ago
  it is neither. Otherwise, you'd see productivity being better in places that allow drug testing of normal employees and worse off in places that do not. But that's not the case: Retail employees in Norway aren't really less productive than those in the US. Plus, if it really were a productivity measure, why would you not drug test more professionals and salaried employees? Does their productivity not matter? Wouldn't more small businesses find drug testing worth the money?
  - sshine 3y ago
    Doing drugs may affect your productivity at work. Depending on the drug, and the circumstances. I'm sorry to say.
    - lumost 3y ago
      I don’t believe that this has any bearing on why individuals are drug tested at work. Particularly when tests with longer durations are used. What business does an employer have with employee drug use outside of work?

jojobas 3y ago

I would hazard a guess that low-skilled workers are much more likely to come to work cooked than someone like pilots who have a lot on the line.

hypercube33 3y ago

Is there a citation of Gates comment? I wasn't able to find anything

Mountain_Skies 3y ago

Some companies require it for everyone. When I did consulting work for Home Depot, I was required to get a drug test. It didn't matter that I wasn't a W2 nor a 1099 for them but a W2 of a consulting company who HD hired to do a project for them, all of us had to be drug tested, with the reason being that Home Depot didn't think it was fair to test people working in their stores if the white collar people weren't tested too. My employer didn't require the test of anyone but since this was a big contract, as far as I know, no one refused. If I were a recreational drug user, it might have been a rather unwelcome situation to come up after years of working for the company where drug use outside of the office wasn't a concern.

SkyPuncher 3y ago
At a prior employer, they simple staffed these types of projects with people who could pass the test. “you’ll get to work for X big client, but you’ll need to be drug tested”

TrackerFF 3y ago

...I can guarantee you that most SpaceX workers are held to much higher standards, than their big boy CEO, when it comes to security clearance.

steveoscaro 3y ago
Musk submits to drug tests. But yeah just skimming news headlines would give you a different idea.