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Comment by incomingpain | Hacker News Reader

It's a statistically confirmed reality of substance abuse in our industry.

I posit 2 factors.

1. You can readily do it while doing your job. If you're in a factory with both hands building the widget or on a roof nailing shingles. Your hands are too busy; but with IT? 1 hand on mouse, other hand on beer bottle. Sure construction workers aren't sober angels, but they aren't as inebriated as IT.

2. The inherent negativity of the industry. Many jobs are about 'fixing something broken' and tickets and new 0day and we have to patch. Generally speaking the industry is something negative. When dealing with negativity dayin-dayout it takes a psychological toll which nobody addresses appropriately.

When these 2 factors collide, they feed into each other.

edit/ Sorry, didn't figure my posits would be so controversial. downvoted quite heavily.

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>> If you're in a factory with both hands building the widget or on a roof nailing shingles

There is a long history of construction workers on amphetamine, opioids or cocaine.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31685308/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32677121/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35700122/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35143279/

A job in construction is very challenging, both physically and mentally. Many in the construction industry resort to drugs and alcohol to cope with stress or to self-medicate physical pain. Some of the reasons that construction workers turn to substances include:

* Long work days

* Physical pain and injury

* Stress (pressure to work quickly)

* High risk of work-related disability

https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/workforce/b...

You're arguing with a rather minor point of my post.

Most construction workers I know aren't working unless they have hit a joint. The point wasnt so much about whether blue collar are doing it, but rather the convenience and ease.

I think you may have fallen into the classic white-collar trap of thinking too little of your blue-collared working peers; they're perfectly capable of getting fucked up on the job. The difference tends to be that their mistakes can have direct human morbidity and mortality associated with them, and are often followed by a drug test.

Drinking on the job is a way of life in construction. Beers with lunch is basically a given. I grew up with a lot of family and members of my immediate community working these sorts of jobs. I didn't realize bringing a cooler full of beer to work wasn't the norm until I was much older.

Builders and beer, it worked for the Pyramids and it worked for the skyscrapers. Might be the oldest professional tradition on Earth.

Seconded. No matter how good you feel you are in this field, chances are great that 90% of your work is based on negative input. Relatively few developers get to work on green-field projects with any frequency, and even those can (and will) quickly become slog-fests of bug patching. The more management overhead there is in the company, the faster this happens (IME).

If you can remap this in your mind to be expressed as improving negative experiences, then maybe it will seem better emotionally :)

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