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Comment by cwilson | Hacker News Reader

No, because of the thousands of people I've encountered in the industry (you could say my sample size), a very small portion of them were regular pot smokers. Of those, an even smaller portion were actually productive (especially engineers) while high.

My conclusion is based on a large amount of data analyzed over a lengthy period of time.

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I'm happy to concede your point that it is a rare person indeed who is productive in programming while high, but I don't think that has too much bearing on how many engineers smoke pot in general.

I mean, of the thousands of drivers I've met in my life, a vanishingly small percentage of them are skillful drivers while drunk -- doesn't mean they don't drink when not driving, though.

Personally, I'm a lot more inclined to light up a doobie when I want to prevent myself from working, and gently force myself to chill out and enjoy the process of making dinner with my wife, or tidying up the garage.

I suspect we know an overlapping set of people, and there are definitely some regular (once a week?) pot smokers in the set of productive engineers I know in the Bay Area, and a much larger number of occasional (monthly?) smokers.

The real pot fiends are usually vesting in place or in boring ops/admin jobs at tech companies (uh, Yahoo!), but even at startup parties there is a moderate amount of pot on the weekends.

Could there be under-reporting at play in your data set? I imagine that there would be a number of unknown smokers on a scale of thousands of people met.

You do have the creative/productive phases though, which have to alternate for creativity/productivity. Or since this is horrible misleading naming, let's call it open and closed mental periods, as John Cleese called them during his talk at video arts (http:;;//vimeo.com/;;18913413 remove assembly comments). Marijuana does, in small doses, help to enter the open period (playing around and picking an idea), whereas drugs such as caffeine or nicotine aid closed mode thinking (ironing out the kinks).

I can't dispute your data and don't want to play the anecdote game (by sample size, you would certainly win), but at the very least, you must admit there is a stigma and unless you're dosing every person with truth serum, let alone asking them about their illicit drug use in the first place... you're probably not getting the whole picture.

Yes, yes, I know unproductive pot users. I knew them before they found pot. Pot became their excuse for their largely existing laziness but in most cases it didn't fundamentally change them and "make" them unproductive.

edit: Oh, to make sure we're on the same page, I wouldn't advocate going to work high. I actively avoid being high in social situation, though I do tend to get work done on my side projects even when not 100% sober. But I guess I'd still consider arrogant and inappropriate to go to work high.

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