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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t.

Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstreet traders? There would be a nation wide solidarity strike.

Bill Gates famously joked in the 90s that Microsoft would lose a third of their engineers instantly if they drug tested. The NSA even had to make an official exception on past drug use so people would stop failing the security screening (although they still get tested iirc).

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this comment represent a weird sentiment: if you drugt test in one field, you should equally drug test I all fields.

How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs?

it seems like introducing a whole machinery to just have the same resting is an industrial scale waste of resources.

However, people regularly die because of drunk and tired drivers.

There is some implicit assumption that drug testing is a safety measure.

I am quite convinced it is a productivity measure.

It's neither.

it is neither.

Otherwise, you'd see productivity being better in places that allow drug testing of normal employees and worse off in places that do not. But that's not the case: Retail employees in Norway aren't really less productive than those in the US.

Plus, if it really were a productivity measure, why would you not drug test more professionals and salaried employees? Does their productivity not matter? Wouldn't more small businesses find drug testing worth the money?

Doing drugs may affect your productivity at work.

Depending on the drug, and the circumstances.

I'm sorry to say.

I don’t believe that this has any bearing on why individuals are drug tested at work. Particularly when tests with longer durations are used.

What business does an employer have with employee drug use outside of work?

That doesn't mean that drug tests make for better productivity.

I didn't say that drugs never have that effect. And like you say, May. The same drug might have different effects for different folks, too.

You’ve got causation backwards, look at the norway vs US overdoses per capita

Do you think employer drug tests decrease overdoses?

It’s solely a way for insurance companies to get out of paying claims.

If drug testing was motivated by productivity, amphetamines wouldn’t be tested for.

so a truck drives faster when the driver is completely sober? the plane flies faster when the pilot is not on drugs?

To any extent that a truck driver misses a pickup or fails to report due to alcohol or subsequent effects, yes, that truck that isn’t moving at all is moving slower than one that’s loaded, crewed, and rolling.

> How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs?

As long as testing is uncommon you could say that number will remain at zero or near zero simply for lack of data.

You comment implies but doesn’t state explicitly that you think truck drivers are more likely than pilots to be on drugs, is that true though?

Based on likely social setting difference due to salary difference plus the fact that truck drivers go through seedy places and do many long stretches alone, compared to pilots frequenting airports and hotels, and always working with a crew, I'm sure truck drivers use more drugs than airplane pilots. If you are not sure of this, I think your mind is "too open".

This comment betrays the old and persistent idea that lower status people are inherently shifty and lazy, while higher status people are inherently more virtuous.

Let’s say for argument’s sake that truck drivers proportionally engage in more risky behavior. This can be either the use of stimulants or simply driving tired. Why is that?

Drivers’ — like many low status workers — jobs security is more precarious and are monitored more. Therefore, they’re more likely to engage in risky behavior in a desire to simply not be fired.

Now let’s get back to pilots. Is it just that airline pilots are a high status job like ceo? Not entirely. Pilots are essentially no different than truck drivers in the sky. Ironically, it’s because planes themselves are tracked by a competent and vigorous government agency, that employers can’t put the same pressures on pilots that they can on truck drivers.

> They don't but if they do its justified.

    This comment betrays the old and persistent idea that lower status people are inherently shifty and lazy, while higher status people are inherently more virtuous.

I think this is because people are applying survivorship bias. It's really difficult to make it to those status levels while abusing drugs and alcohol. And even if you party hard at the top you must be able to "handle your shit".

Success at the top is a careful dance of social nuance. If you fly to an on-site, get drunk in the hotel bar, and are late to the meeting or smell like booze, you're social status will be impacted unless you're a wizard with social excuses or make up for it in some other way.

So--in a way--the success is the greatest drug test.

It’s not just that. It has puritan religous undertones. Work is virtuous, and god rewards those that have his favor. Therefore those that have less, are obviously outside of god’s favor. Why are they not rewarded? Because they aren’t virtuous, and since work is virtue, they must be shifty and lazy.

This is very deep seated idea in American culture. It manifests all sorts of ways. Deference to the rich, because clearly every rich person got and stayed rich through hard work and skill, instead of luck and family connections. Harsher penalities for poor people crimes, rather than rich people crimes. Constant monitoring for low wage workers, but no monitoring of high wage ones. Egregious hoops and monitoring for welfare, versus tax credits. Hell, even modern evangelical grifters leverage this idea with their prosperity gospel lies.

How rich are we talking? I'm just talking about your average schmuck pulling in $120k in a white collar job. Very unlikely that these types are leveraging family connections. It just takes a four year degree, washing your car, and being able to host some coworkers for lunch.

Disclaimer: I believe it's society's duty to shame the shifless and lazy.

And most of the behaviors that are taught by religions are rooted in anecdotal evidence over hundreds of years. Harder workers usually succeed more than the lazy. It's a lot more effective to say "hard work = heaven".

And it's not even really about "success". Giving a damn about what you do in this life is key to a life of happiness and therefore a life aimed at a target and governed by rules about how to interact with your fellow man. "Giving a damn" is the most important foundation for financial success as well.

I don't know much about this history of (e.g.) Wall Street. But for Washington, DC, I can think of a lot of people who made it pretty far up the ladder before booze caught up with them. Wilbur Mill was head of the House Ways and Means Committee. Sumner Welles was Under Secretary of State. Mendel Rivers was head of the House Armed Services Committee.

> idea that lower status people are inherently shifty and lazy, while higher status people are inherently more virtuous

It's not about that. But also statistically on average that idea is accurate in this case at least. The qualifications and self-discipline required to become a pilot are significantly higher than for a driver. Your also surrounded by many other people all the time so it's much harder to not get noticed. Also AFAIK random testing for alcohol is certainly a thing for pilots.

> that employers can’t put the same pressures on pilots

One might argue that they would more or less end up doing the same on their own. The cost/risk ratio is extremely different compared to truck drivers. Also costs of having extra pilots/allowing them to work less are not that significant relative to road transportation.

>It's not about that. But also statistically on average that idea is accurate in this case at least.

lol. No. Not at all. There is nothing to support this widely held idea. This is the very bias I was talking about.

> There is nothing to support this widely held idea. This is the very bias I was talking about.

You mean you don't think that there is a difference between commercial pilots and truck etc. drivers when it comes to drug and alcohol use?

> lol. No. Not at all.

That does sound very convincing.

I think a better way to put it is that commercial aircraft personnel are under strict legal time limits while the legal time limits on truckers are not enforced particularly strongly and the trucking companies provide incentives not to follow those rules. So truck drivers are incented to take stimulants to a degree pilots are not.

“To a degree” means some pilots will still stay up late and try to use stimulants to stay awake. But the pressure on the two cohorts is not equivalent.

How many bad economic decisions were based on cocaine usage back in the day? I think the point is that with higher paying and salaried jobs you are practically exempt from having repercussions due to drug usage while a lowerpaid wage worker is constantly in fear of getting fired over it.

arguably, by a similar logic, world war 2 was started by terrible decisions made while high on speed

Has there actually been any hard evidence to support this idea? I know there's a fair bit to support Hitler being basically a junkie by the end of the war, but pre-war I'm pretty sure he was just a meglomaniacal psychopath.

Hitler was also talking cocaine eye drops, his personal physician was batshit insane. A good match of course as Hitler himself was too.

Of course no law would have prevented this because the Nazis made the law in Germany.

Ok, what about testing politicians? Their decisions impact millions and it's in the public interest that they can reason at their best.

> How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs?

This is an interesting question but not all drugs decrease performance. For instance, if a pilot responsibly takes some wakey meds before landing a long haul flight it may be a good thing. There’s a reason for the “I can’t function before the morning coffee” expression.

I remember a documentary many years ago about long haul pilots who went partying HARD the day before flying back from Bangkok, Tokyo or places like that. They wouldn’t have been allowed to drive, but flew hundreds of passengers. It was filmed undercover, but I don’t remember if there was a backlash/consequences.

> There’s a reason for the “I can’t function before the morning coffee” expression.

Yeah, a lot of people tend to be later-risers. The realities of the 9-5 job mean that they have to get up at 6-7 to get the kids ready for school, then get themselves ready for work, and then the commute to work... despite that going completely against their chronotype.

WFH alleviates a lot of that stress.

I can’t function before the morning coffee

i recently met someone who stopped drinking coffee and after a while realized that the only reason he could not function without having a coffee before was that he must have been addicted to it. once he got off that addiction the problem went away.

the only reason that stops me from functioning in the morning is lack of sleep.

I was never "can't function" level, but stopping caffeine did open my eyes to how much of a fog I was in until the caffeine was dripped in. After a month or so of no caffeine I started realizing I could just wake up and feel instantly as alert as I normally would an hour or so into my day when taking caffeine.

But ultimately it comes down to sleep. Caffeine just masked sleep problems. If I don't sleep well, I still crave it. If I sleep well, I don't think about it anymore.

In the film Flight it is implied the plane possibly does not crash because the pilot is on drugs.

The plane did crash. There was one fatality. That is because the pilot was skilled.

Unfortunately the pilot was also drunk. And he tried to shift the blame of the vodka bottle to the deceased person. There is no amount of technical skill that should permit someone like that behind a stick ever again.

> How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs?

good question, but there is just no way to get an answer

Nearly every NTSB report of a major accident has a post-mortem analysis for alcohol and other drugs. (When it’s missing, it’s usually because no body was recovered.)

Every crew involved in a commercial aviation mishap knows they’ll be tested as well.

There may be no way to get an answer with 6 significant figures, but you can get a pretty good answer.

How many people regularly die because your grocery store cashier smokes weed after their shift?

How many people could be hurt by a drunk pilot, and how many could be hurt by working at a Walmart while high?

The point is that we test where there is no reasonable danger at all and don't test when there is. Why? We drug test poor people and not wealthy people.

My daughter worked at Publix and was only drug tested at time of employment. Just like I did when I got my engineering job. I heard Publix does random drug testing, not sure.

Walmart is the same.

“ After pilots and flight attendants have been hired, they are subject to random drug screenings. Federal regulation detail the percentage of the total employees who should be subject to random testing in a given year, and this figure is usually around 50% and varies by the positive test rate from previous data. As drug testing is random, flight and ramp crew don't know when these tests will occur. Pilots and flight attendants who are randomly selected for drug screenings will often be met on the jet bridge after passengers have deplaned. An official holding a clipboard is usually the sign of an upcoming random drug screening.” - https://simpleflying.com/pilot-drug-test-frequency-guide/

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.

...I can guarantee you that most SpaceX workers are held to much higher standards, than their big boy CEO, when it comes to security clearance.

Musk submits to drug tests. But yeah just skimming news headlines would give you a different idea.

> The NSA even had to make an official exceptio

The way I had it explained to me in the 90s was while drug use was disqualifying for things like the FBI, for the NSA it was fine-ish provided you were open about it.

I have had personal conversations with people who went through involved security clearance processes in the 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. Between those times I can tell you that everyone but the FBI got more lax about pot (but not cocaine) and homosexuality (even the FBI didn't care about that by the mid 2000's) but not more lax about gambling - even in states where it was already legal. They aren't on the lookout for straight arrows to hire, they're on the lookout for people who can be blackmailed to steal information. Once things like simple weed possession became nothing more than a small civil penalty, there wasn't any way to use the threat of exposure as a way of blackmailing someone. Once people knew they couldn't generally be fired / blackballed for homosexuality, that lever disappeared.

Sounds like a circular argument. The FBI fires gay people, so they had to fire them to prevent them from leaking information because of possible blackmail. But once they stopped firing them for homosexuality there was no need to fire them because of fear they might be blackmailed because of the possibility to fire them. It's probably true for gambling, but the rest sounds like whitewashing. They fired gay people because society was hostile towards them and those agencies were part of society.

Yes, it was a completely circular argument. I am 100% not defending it. But you're completely correct that all they had to do to keep someone from being blackmailed because otherwise they'd be fired was... to not fire them.

I'm sure there's a lot of moral-highgrounding about everyone outside the group being untrustworthy, and looking for confirmation of this in the most paranoid ways.

I think the assumption you're missing in the circular argument is that gay people could be blackmailed against other entities than the FBI. For example, "give us this FBI file or else we'll release a scandalous photo of you and this gentleman to your wife" kind of a thing.

Of course, as being gay becomes more normalized and less of a secret, FBI wouldn't need to take it into consideration.

How true or not that thinking is, I have no way of assessing, but it does make sense if you consider the premise of blackmail to 3rd parties true. The same could be probably considered for gambling (e.g. "we'll tell your local church group how much you gambled away in your drunken stupor on this weekend").

Gambling was verboten because of the presence of organized crime in the industry even where it was legalized.

Gambling is seen as a liability because gamblers often get into huge amounts of debt, which is what the FBI is really concerned about. Huge amounts of debt open people up to bribes and other corruption.

Exactly. Even in places where it was legal it was an easy way to get on the radar of organized crime, who would try to exert influence. It also could be an indicator of an affinity for risk-taking. And if there's anything they're trying to avoid in high level secret keeping... It's risk.

Wouldn't it be more relevant to determine if their potential hire has had an undiscovered affair in the past, or is currently cheating?

Why aren't they doing this now if it was really about the potential for blackmail?

I don't know how the federal government works but I am positive that in the private sector evidence of extramarital affairs can cause your clearance application to be rejected.

Anecdata: allegedly, confessing an extramarital affair (past or ongoing) during your Department of Defense Secret (relatively common level clearance) examination or renewal will result in an offer to speak with your spouse in a few days to ensure that you’ve told them. An unadmitted affair would set off far more alarm bells.

I was a carefree recent college grad and sheepishly admitted to smoking weed a couple of times, having been assured by older friends that admitting to some past experimentation was a lot better than hiding it. “Is there anyone you don’t want to find out about this?” was the agent’s response.

“Nah, my parents know…”

Later, a friend who had assiduously avoided even being around weed took ages to get his clearance. We theorized that the holdup was DIA being suspicious that he didn’t admit to such minor drug use, and wondered what else he might be hiding.

Habitual gambling still gets the side-eye for the same reason general financial problems do: higher susceptibility to the temptation of a few thousand dollars to let something slip or to look the other way.

They are. Political parties do something similar before putting you on a ticket: they require you to declare any dirt on yourself that could possibly be revealed at a later date, even if only one other person in the world knows about it. Then they assess the risk of each secret, and maybe decide it's okay. But if they manage to dig up anything that you didn't declare, you're out.

They are doing that now. I’ve had to be a reference for several people seeking security clearances and I believe every one of those interviews asked me if I thought the subject was faithful in their relationship.

This isn’t code executing in a computer. It is about prevailing societal attitudes (which are themselves self-referential and self-reinforcing) so it is necessarily kind of imprecise and circular.

Could it simply be data driven? Is there any truth that the jobs that drug test most often are or were more likely to have drug related incidents than the others? I don’t know the data but my guess would be it is based on past performance as a whole more than individual impact.

Whether that is wrong or right I could see how there is an argument to be made

If it were at all data driven everyone would test for alcohol. That usually doesn’t happen unless there’s an accident and even then, a doctor wouldn’t be subject to a blood test or breathalyzer like a driver would. They’d just be allowed to go home and the matter would be handled in litigation and before the medical board.

Some companies require it for everyone. When I did consulting work for Home Depot, I was required to get a drug test. It didn't matter that I wasn't a W2 nor a 1099 for them but a W2 of a consulting company who HD hired to do a project for them, all of us had to be drug tested, with the reason being that Home Depot didn't think it was fair to test people working in their stores if the white collar people weren't tested too. My employer didn't require the test of anyone but since this was a big contract, as far as I know, no one refused. If I were a recreational drug user, it might have been a rather unwelcome situation to come up after years of working for the company where drug use outside of the office wasn't a concern.

At a prior employer, they simple staffed these types of projects with people who could pass the test.

“you’ll get to work for X big client, but you’ll need to be drug tested”

I would hazard a guess that low-skilled workers are much more likely to come to work cooked than someone like pilots who have a lot on the line.

Is there a citation of Gates comment? I wasn't able to find anything

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