Tech companies grapple with workers smoking weed on the job | Hacker News Reader

Tech companies grapple with workers smoking weed on the job

sfexaminer.com

16 pointsjeffthechimp52 comments

It’s legal in Canada under similar age restrictions as alcohol. I would think companies can deal with (over)usage of either in terms or job performance or lack thereof. Hard to meet deadlines drunk off your ass or sitting there with in a gadda da vida on repeat. Smoke outside and don’t offend those working in your vicinity and things should be fine.

I used to be pro-legalization but it was a total bait and switch. Weed has become completely normalized now. I’ll be walking around DC with my kids in the middle of the day and everything will reek of weed. (I thought the smell was sewer gas until my wife pointed it out.)

I live in DC on Capitol Hill and my partner and I take long walks every day. DC is a big place, but what you describe is not our experience, even in Colombia Heights or Georgetown. Maybe once in a while someone's using a vaporizer or smoking on their step, but that's a far cry from everything reeking of weed.

For what it's worth, the sewers here do stink. I'm glad we're a ways back from the street.

I used to live L and 4th street NE and it was really bad by the Safeway. Obviously Capitol Hill and Georgetown are going to be an older crowd with more decorum.

I guess we should go back to throwing those guys in prison, for the decorum.

Please don't troll. That's clearly not what was being suggested.

You're right, it turns out what the parent meant to suggest was only that they should be tortured.

We should have corporal punishment for using drugs in public like in Singapore. Nobody should rot in prison merely for being a public nuisance. But a good thwack and some public humiliation would be a proportionate response.

Ah, I understand now, I didn't realize I'd been going back and forth with an out-and-out fascist. Don't think there's much more point to this!

OK update: we walked by Freedom Plaza and all those skaters were definitely smoking weed. We should make an app. Like Waze for weed. Oooh "Haze"!

M Street definitely smells like pot, cars are crop-dusting it pretty much everywhere in the city, and even the GWU hospital waiting rooms reek. You're not literally smelling it every minute but it's impossible to live life without you or your children smelling it.

Pro- decriminalization was the reasonable compromise. If it's illegal but not criminal, then it's OK to do it away from anyone who doesn't want it around the., like Colorado safety stops.

I am part of the 26% that has done this, although in the past few weeks I have finally found some momentum in changing this habit.

For me, it felt as though the content of my work is what drove me to do this. Building CRUD applications, refactoring legacy code, writing exhaustive tests, etc were all things that I would get stoned for, saving things like writing design docs and meetings for the non-stoned days. Combine this with a decade of using cannabis to make mundane tasks more interesting in my personal life (playing a video game I have already logged 1K+ hours in, watching a TV show I have seen 10x times, washing dishes, etc) and it's easy to see how I got to this point. The reality of adult life and software engineering as a career is that a lot of it is just boring. Now, whether or not smoking pot actually fixed that boredom is a different question...

Yet lots of tech companies have unlimited beer on tap. It is time to end this ridiculous double standard.

There are often general norms and policies about when it’s appropriate to use that tap though. This article is exploring what those should be for another substance with different properties.

I worked at an office where the beer tap was locked most of the time and could only be unlocked by the residential "Workplace Experience PM" for officially sanctioned events.

A similar locking cabinet could be used for fast-acting cannabis gummies.

Or maybe just let people find whatever mental state they prefer, and if their work output is sufficient to justify their salary, fuck right off with telling other adults that they must remain sober at all times.

Set rational expectations. The on call people need to remain sober, as well as anyone operating or maintaining critical infrastructure or machinery. If you're dealing with the public, you should probably be mostly sober. If you're doing data entry requiring precision, you probably shouldn't be doing 5 grams of mushrooms, but a few beers or a little weed might get you in the zone and make the work enjoyable.

If someone produces excellent output while a little drunk or high, or maybe they like to trip for inspiration, or they take a second Adderall to plow through a project, that should be a decision up to the worker and their doctor.

Set behavioral expectations for respectful workplaces, but let's not pretend that a sober, unaltered state of mind is the one and only appropriate condition for all work situations. Fetishizing sobriety and stigmatizing altered states are anti-human ideas.

I've worked at high level isp positions and many of the top engineers - CCIE level - were working while high as fuck. They did excellent work, but could get a case of the giggles at silly things. Management knew and would ignore it unless someone behaved inappropriately. Altering your state of mind is not a sin - behaving badly is not an inevitable consequence of drug use. Drug use is not always behaving badly.

> Fetishizing sobriety and stigmatizing altered states are anti-human ideas.

The exact opposite is true. There’s nothing “human” about using substances to “alter” your natural state.

You mean besides the fact that we've been doing it since the dawn of the species?

And? What makes it “human.” I use a ton of coffee to alter my mental state—I’m not going to glamorize it as being more “human.”

Some think that use of psychoactive substances were key to humans becoming "humans" and developing the capability for higher reasoning. What makes it not "human" to alter your mental state?

It's hard for me to imagine a definition for the adjectival "human" that doesn't boil down to "stuff we've been doing consistently since the dawn of the species". You're wrong: intoxication is essentially, intrinsically human; it's one of the most human things you could come up with.

That doesn't make it good, or mean we can't prohibit it; I can think of other human things that we can't reasonably tolerate. But your specific argument was weird, and faulty.

Tool use one of the key distinguishing characteristics of humans.

By and large substances that alter human consciousness have been frowned upon since the dawn of civilization. Religions tend to tell you to avoid them (Islam expressly forbids all mind-altering substances, Christianity and Judaism say ok to alcohol but only within limits of sobriety).

In current times it seems especially prudent to resist openness to marijuana lest it serve as a gateway to harder drugs. Because, we are sort of going through an opioid crisis of epic proportions: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm

When I'm driving home from work, I have to pass a certain intersection which is filled with folks on hard drugs, and sometimes they're very brave in that they like to walk into oncoming traffic while barely alert, you have to basically be _super_ careful and ready to brake hard in an instant to make sure you don't kill them, and that really irritates me. And I can't help but think that this is the result of the recent openness to drugs, including by our libertarian-inclined peers in the tech sector. Somehow or other the comedians and edgelord warriors won this one, and everyone thinks marijuana is cool, even when the science is out on its harm: long-term usage causes memory and general cognition impairment, usage by adolescents and pre-teens results in even more serious and lasting damage.

It kind of makes me want to pull all of my hair out when you have streets like this in every other large city it seems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi1Kf-1qd6Y What a shameful and irresponsible thing to do, to be defending recreational drugs in any manner at this point.

You’re looking at history through a very Western lens. In other cultures, some substances were ritualistic and culturally important.

Or an East Asian lens: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/cgvienna/eng/ljzg/zfbps/t127411.... ("The Chinese government believes that drugs are a worldwide public hazard confronting the whole of mankind, and drug control is an imminent and common responsibility incumbent to international society.")

Or a South Asian lens: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bangladesh-drugs/banglade... ("Bangladesh sets death penalty for drug offences in draft law")

Or an African lens: https://fileserver.idpc.net/library/Drug-laws-in-West-Africa... ("In Nigeria, the death penalty for drug-related offenses was replaced by life imprisonment in 1986.")

Either way, the comment I replied to tried represent a whole of humanity stance on something, since the dawn of civilisation, that is clearly false.

We can both come up with examples to suit our viewpoint. I didn’t say that person was wrong. I just said that person was being selective.

Alcohol is fundamental to mainstream Christianity. It's a central part of the story of Christ. Which is no surprise, since the faith comes from the region and culture that invented brewing. For Catholics, imbibing is almost a sacramental requirement (you can skip the chalice if you want now; I'm not sure if that was always the case pre-V2; consecration of wine, though, is I think an actual requirement).

I mean Mormons don't drink-- wine appears in the Bible but imbibing isn't exactly integral to the belief system

Which kind of makes my point for me, given how idiosyncratic Mormonism is. Meanwhile: imbibing is, in fact, integral to the belief system of what might be a plurality of Christians (Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans).

Add Judaism to the roster as well; wine is an integral part of the Seder.

But hey, neither would be okay with imbibing to the state of inebriation, so the point that leading religions advise against mind-altering substances is still valid in... a technical sort of way.

Yes, I do remember when Yeshua Ha-Nozri transformed water into wine at the wedding ceremony in Cana of Galilee, he followed the miracle up by saying "please enjoy responsibly".

Paul, Solomon, and a few prophets weren’t too keen on wine. Jesus, the only omniscient one in the bunch, clearly anticipated this very thread:

“The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.”

That's because "integral" would be understating it. Catholics consider the Eucharist the most important sacrament, at the very center of Christian life. Quite seriously the one sacrament to rule them all and bind them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharistic_theology

(I'm well aware that getting buzzed is not by extension at the center of Christian life. The above comment was simply too ironic not to respond to.)

> you can skip the chalice if you want now; I'm not sure if that was always the case pre-V2

IIRC from childhood, before Vatican II only the priest drank the consecrated wine; the congregation received the bread only.

In the Episcopal Church, all hands get both bread and wine — indeed, when the Church of England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, Article 30 of the C of E's Thirty Nine Articles of Religion (1571, and still in the Book of Common Prayer) included the following: "The Cup of the Lord is not to be denied to the Lay-people: for both the parts of the Lord's Sacrament, by Christ's ordinance and commandment, ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike." [0]

[0] https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/109014/Thirty-Nine-A...

Embracing the full range of experience available to you, and using tools to achieve those states is intrinsically human. There's nothing superior or desirable about not using chemical tools to alter your state, and it's silly to think that way. Teetotalling is masochism.

You might not like changing from your baseline, but maybe you don't like blue or purple and prefer red cars. You don't have to like everything, and not everything has to be to your taste.

> Embracing the full range of experience available to you, and using tools to achieve those states is intrinsically human.

No that's a very post 1960s European/American thing. For most of the rest of the world, it's all about doing what you're supposed to do.

The idea that there is one "thing you are supposed to do" that defines human experience is ironically a pretty modern reactionary mindset. They were smoking cannabis in ancient Scythia - it's "what you were supposed to do".

Tell me where in the Bible or Quran it tells you to “embrace the full range of experiences?” Let’s throw anything Confucius wrote for good measure.

How on earth do any of those texts have any ability to inform our idea of 'what it is to be human' compared to the actual weight of evidence of what humans have been doing since the dawn of history? What a bizarre non-sequitur!

They’re evidence, from a large cross section of the world, of what humans have been doing since the dawn of the written record. Nearly everyone spent their lives working, eating, raising children, and fighting. That’s what an American shares with people in a Bangladeshi village. That’s what makes you human.

Yes - and whenever those people could, from the dawn of history, they were also getting drunk, high, and tripping balls.

Ironically resulting in many of the modern religions which eschew the use of substances.

Some humans did that, and the others found the behavior odious enough to develop social norms against such behavior. Humans have always had many vices, sure. They lie, cheat, steal, murder, etc. That doesn’t define their humanity.

And other societies developed social norms which sacralized and ritualized the usage of such drugs, or which totally normalized them. Again, the idea that there is a single social expression of what constitutes 'humanity' is a very reactionary mindset that flies in the face of all evidence and history.

Yeah sorry, no thanks. Software is buggy enough already. How about the guy working on that new autopilot navigation system for Boeing? Smoke all you want on your own time, but I prefer the engineers keep their faculties intact.

This is the crux. I wonder how much this is part of the WFH preference. Some people have tasks and a mental constitution for which cannabis is perfectly fine. Other people have the same tasks, but won’t perform up to par when buzzed. They may not be able to tell, the inner and external experiences are different. And there is work for which you really shouldn’t even take the chance.

Need everybody to be responsible enough to know where they stand. If you’re underpaid/underappreciated, that’s one thing. If you’re well-paid or appreciated you really should be bringing your best.

Given the effects of ADHD and anxiety meds on children, “sobriety” hasn’t really been fully fetishized in a while. If you don’t think so, take one of your kid’s meds and see what you think.

Not having heroin and clean needles in the office kitchen is akin to having to wash your own beer glass. It is time to end this ridiculous double standard.

You don't have to be stoned to work here.... but it helps.

This article is based on a nonscientific data collection from Blind gossip.

There is no epidemic of working while high.

There are other studies, though, as the article says. A December 2021 study from the University of Michigan surveyed 803 software developers about their use of cannabis and found that 35% had tried programming while using cannabis, and 18% currently do so at least once a month.

heavy smoker. I have a negative ion generator air filter near my desk and really helps keep the smell and sediments within the room.

Now that people are paying attention to ventilation, there's an upside: If you can smell my smoke its less likely any of my other emanations or exhalations will trouble you.

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