Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulhauggis | Hacker News Reader

"ban senseless and stupid drug testing for jobs that don't actually require 24/7 sobriety (eg software engineering)."

It should be my right as an employer to hire anyone that I wish (just like it is your right as an employee to not accept a position or quit).

You say it has no effect, but you can't tell me it has no effect on productivity, I just won't believe it (I've known too many pot heads in my life). Also, if my company required my employees to be on-call with customer support, I don't want someone under the influence of anything handling these sorts of emergencies.

If you ban drug testing, employers will just hire people who they think are drug users less often and you won't really be able to prove it.

View on HN

It should be my right as an employer to hire anyone that I wish

No, it is not your right; it must not be that absolute. That gives free reign to racist and other discriminatory practices, and the greater good absolutely and certainly trumps one's individual right here.

The kinds of practice you are advocating here - absolute freedom on the part of employers - have had a strong part in fomenting civil war and terrorism in various places around the world. Closest to my own home, Protestant practices in Northern Ireland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_in_Northern_Irelan... - and laws curbing this kind of segregation have had significant effects in reversing it.

It's hard for me to express how certain I am that the real world (tm) has proven your point of view wrong here. People do kill over this.

I hate with all my passion recreational drug users or to be more precise, of those who make their behaviour known or otherwise affect my life.

However, for the purpose of employment, drug testing is needlessly intrusive in all but a few special cases. It is just simply not needed and risks creating far more problems than it attempts to solve.

Going down the path of money trumps all other concerns or "perfect market results in perfect results", you would soon arrive at a "Gattaca" situation and beyond where unless every single DNA base you possess is perfect, every behaviour is perfect from birth, everyone you have ever networked with is similiarly perfect, etc., you will never be employable or move beyond a specific bracket alloted to you by society. In the meantime, costs to existing businesses and challenges to entrants would skyrocket in a self-defeating spiral, while incredible talent that may suit your company dies by the wayside unused or misallocated.

Drug testing and much more, as technology now and in future allows, may be fine for the cutting edge of physical endeavours or positions of massive responsibility for human individuals where even a second of downtime could make or break a company, but for anyone else, that is well beyond reasonable.

A basic analogy in one respect would be like applying military critical software certification standards and testing for bug-free processes (the kind that causes operating systems and software designed in the 70s to still be used) in all software ever produced from now...

Sorry, but productivity is best measured by evidence previous work-- not one's piss, blood, hair, or facebook friends.

The other reason that drug testing is senseless and stupid is that it is imprecise. "False positives" do wreck careers and/or cause enormous hardship on good people, you might call it collateral damage, but to the people it occurs to it is a disaster.

In my own case, I had been scheduled to submit to a hair test as pre-employment screen. I showed up at the testing facility and was told my hair was too short and that a urine sample was required instead. These are different tests and the urine sample does check for alcohol consumption whereas the hair test does not. The previous night I shared a bottle of wine with dinner with my wife and I had also taken advil because of the headache induced by the stress of giving my termination notice at work. Everything turned out OK, but the stress caused by worrying about a stupid false positive because of the wine, advil, or my prescription was really not a nice experience. If there had been a false positive, I would have been begging for mercy, disclosing my drug prescription, explaining away the advil and wine. I guess some people would see value/pleasure in that. I fucking don't.

It should be your right to fire poor performers, regardless of their drug history, and your right to continue the employment of top performers, regardless of their drug history.

If someone isn't up to snuff, cut them loose. If someone works hard, smart and productively every day, why do you care what they do in their off time?

This isn't like mandating your employees be sober, which is a worthwhile rule. But imagine if you had a test which would detect whether an employee has had a beer any time within the past month. Do you think that would be a worthwhile test to base their employment on?

It's a waste of money in addition to a violation of privacy. Fire the people who don't perform to your expectations. Keep the ones who do. How hard is that?

> It should be my right as an employer to hire anyone that I wish (just like it is your right as an employee to not accept a position or quit).

Would you also refuse to hire an employee who drinks heavily on Friday/Saturday nights, yet never once comes to work drunk? Furthermore, would this even be legal (or ethical)?

Drug testing in the work environment has been shown to be counterproductive for many reasons. Since you seem to care more about the practical impact (not the ethical one), I'll focus on this one: marijuana remains detectable in the system for two weeks after use, whereas most drugs (like cocaine) are undetectable after two days.

So what's the message that you're sending your employees? 'On Friday night, rather than use marijuana, I'd prefer it if you used cocaine or methamphetamine instead.' That way, they'll be sure to pass Monday's drug test, which they'd have failed if they had been 'foolish' enough to inhale from a bong instead of a crack pipe/meth pipe!

So even if you think your employees shouldn't use drugs on their own time, even if it never affects their work, drug testing in the workplace is the worst way to encourage healthy behavior.

You're creating all kinds of strawmen here. Pot being banned doesn't make people smoke crack.

And sure, it's legal and ethical for an employer not to want to employ anyone they don't want to work with, as long as it's not a protected class. Drug use wasn't one of those, last I checked. It's not necessarily a smart idea to fire qualified people who smoke pot on their own time just because you don't like the idea of having pot smokers represent your company, but it's not wrong.

It's not wrong for your employer to start dictating what you do on your own time?

Damn you Americans have one fucked up country, all hail your corporate overlords!

Guess who doesn't take those tests too? The CEOs and the directors and the partners. They can snort as much coke as they want, but woe betide the worker bees doing it.

The utter hypocrisy of it all is astounding.

You're missing the point - it's their right to employ who they want (with a few mandated exceptions), just as it's the workers' right to work for whomever they want. Yes, some employers use that right to make decisions based on poor metrics, but that's the price of freedom for all, and other employers who aren't bigoted can benefit.

Half the people in silicon valley are stoned nearly every night. Including all the ones that work at Google, FB, Twitter, whatever.

Trust me, I've known a lot of pot heads too.

Whoever you are, stay the hell out of California please.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com