Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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"

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.

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

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

When I was an engineer in the offshore drilling business in the early 80s, when we were in the office (not on a rig or in a shipyard), it was very common to call up a vendor to take us out for lunch and a couple beers. Usually that was it but there were days we took the afternoon off.

Alcohol at lunch in a business setting was much more widespread at the time.

Seriously. I was drug tested when I worked at the shipyard. Not in my current job in tech. That doesn't bother me in the least, because I had hundreds more ways to accidentally kill either myself or a coworker when I was welding 100' up on the side of a ship than if I hazily mis-click a dialogue box now. No one complained about it at the shipyard, either, because we didn't want to get killed by a high idiot.

Surely, occam's razor applies here.

Low level workers have the highest chance of getting injured while operating heavy machinery -> highest chance of being drug tested by the police in such cases -> the management would rather spend money on drug testing than on the lawyers later on.

High-paid workers have a pretty small risk of injury -> very small risk of the government testing them -> management is not incentivized to spend money on drug testing (and possible hiring costs later on).

It's actually the same reasoning as with remote work. Lower level employees are easier to replace. So they can be more strict on those. And drugs and certain equipment can create dangerous situations. Where dangerous here means "has the potential to create expensive liability related lawsuits". Which is of course something companies do care about. This is less of an issue with office workers and creatives.

As an organisation we’d like to drug test everyone, except those with enough leverage to tell us to get lost.

Hm, one might think at least some of those are the ones you'd especially like to test. (Just not actually get to test.)

They test warehouse workers because their insurance demands it. Personal injury settlements are expensive and drugs increase the risk. If employers cannot show that they are taking efforts to discourage it then they could end up being held liable (and the insurance not covering it).

If you are lifting heavy boxes in the warehouse and you are on drugs, you can physically harm someone. There is no way to directly correlate using drugs and performance of an engineer, for all we know, small infrequent drug use improves performance ( not talking about abusing drugs heavily)

> 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.

I always thought companies that do drug testing got some kind of discount on their own insurance rates for it.

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