It would be interesting to test white collar workers.

1) Contract language that says your workforce has to be drug free (government sourced contracts doubly so)

2) Insurance. If you have a fork lift driver run into a rack of transmissions (or drive your work truck into a building) your insurance is going to demand a urine test. If the urine test comes back unclean they will deny your claim.

Look, you got one task, one task only, it's not even hard to figure out, do not, repeat, do not, get high the week or two before your pee test. That simple. There are human bipeds burning valuable oxygen right now, who can't follow a test that elaborate and complicated. They are literally the kind of people where if you told them not to lick a circuit breaker, would turn around and an hour later electrocute themselves and probably a coworker or two by licking a circuit breaker on the jobsite. Whats the minimum IQ and discipline level necessary to pass a pee test? Not much, but there are failures out there walking around...

Its interesting that as far as I know this is the first strictly chemistry based IQ test. AFAIK there is no "pee in a bottle to determine if you can fizzbuzz" test for code monkey work. No chemical marker that can identify if you know the modulus operator... not yet...

In case someone is wondering, hair follicle tests are apparently problematic [1]; had to look that up because I remembered correctly that follicle tests can show use over the long-term, but didn't know some of the intrinsic challenges with that method. Come to think of it, I've never been asked to submit a hair sample when I've had to pass FBI interviews and drug tests to gain admittance to extremely-sensitive data centers at some of my clients in the past.

The "week or two" needs contextual guidance. An article on Wikipedia [2] gives a good run down of the detection periods. I would imagine detecting pot is the most common request, so that's about 100 days on the conservative side for a heavy (daily?) user, but apparently three weeks is fine for more casual users (what, once a week?).

[1] http://www.fleetowner.com/driver-management-resource-center/...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_test#Detection_periods

There's also the possibility that giving up an addiction is not an intellectual activity (if you think about it a little!)

But the process of getting addicted certainly involves making some choices poorly.

Addiction is continued use in the face of adverse consequences. [1] You may have a physical dependence on coffee, but it doesn't sound like you're experiencing negative consequences in your life from its use.

[1] https://www.addictioninfo.org/articles/2216/1/Addiction-Do-Y...

Have you ever seen a lathe accident, for example?

You can't spot test for being high on marijuana or pills like you can for drunkenness, so you rely on the urine test to keep everyone on the floor safe from being crushed in a press by a stoned co-worker (or themselves.)

You have two job applicants. The only thing you know about them is their resume (nicely embellished) and how they performed at their interview (nicely rehearsed). One applicant passes a drug test, one does not.

Can you really say that drug test outcomes don't change the risk assessment of each candidate?

We can have a conversation about whether employers ought to have access to that information, the same way we can say that employers ought not to have access to a candidate's medical history or prior salary figure, because society is better served when employers don't have access to these prejudicial sources of data. But that is a different question than whether the information is useful at all in hiring decisions, which of course it is.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/business/economy/drug-tes...

Remember, new hires are not guaranteed to add value - even if they worked for free, there is always a risk that some will reduce value. If a new hire's inability to show up on time holds up a production line, or a new hire's irresponsibility damages equipment, then you're better off not making the hire, even if you desire, in the abstract, to hire more people and expand your business.

Though now that I think about it I have technically worked at two companies that didn't drug test: my own, and a small 3-man startup I did some work for.

It's worth mentioning that I live in a red state. I suspect blue states have cultures that are a little more lax on drug testing, though I have no real data to back that up.

But I imagine if we interviewed 20 people for a position, we would most certainly not have 18 no-shows.

Can someone who smoked a joint a couple days ago be trusted not to smoke one 30 minutes before starting work with the concrete cutters? Trusted enough to bet your company on? (Because you know that if the worker smokes a joint just before working with the concrete cutters, and someone gets injured or killed, the owner loses the company in the lawsuit.)

For those of us who are unfamiliar or ignorant about this, which parts of the Southeast are most prosperous?

Those actively gaining on rankings of 'prosperity' include Nashville, Charlotte, Charleston SC, and Raleigh-Durham [1]. Atlanta has a good amount of preexisting prosperity, though it's not ranking as high now. Greenville has seem a fair bit of growth as well.

Subjectively, you can perceive that these metropolitan areas are doing a lot better than others in the Southeast.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/metro-monitor-2017/

In case it's helpful, here's my story from two years ago about living with undiagnosed narcolepsy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984478

One of my memories of that job was sleeping fully-dressed for work, then leaping out of bed when my alarm goes off. I'd carefully balance on my feet and wait for the tiredness to pass.

That's not sustainable. I can't do that more than a week at a time.

So there's all this anger focused toward people who are genuinely lazy, and it's impossible to separate it from people who have a genuine medical condition. What's the solution?

One way to handle it is to be upfront with your employer. This tends not to work. Recruitment in software has heated up to the point where any small flag against the candidate is enough to pass. No one would voluntarily jump in with someone whose attitude is "Well, I couldn't sleep until 3am because of being wide awake since 10pm, so I'm gonna show up around noon if that's ok."

It makes scheduling meetings extremely difficult. Morning standups are out. How many of you have weekly standups?

I still two years later have no idea what to do about this. I'm working remotely part-time, putting in full-time hours, just because I feel lucky to have any sort of job.

The point is, the next time someone posts in a company-wide Slack channel that they're feeling sleepy and will be in later, consider there might be more going on than meets the eye. Relationship problems and medical conditions both need to be concealed, and it takes a toll.

The thing is, it's not up to you to care. We have to deal with it or we're cut. And that's fine. But maybe some context will help, somehow.

It's a medical condition. Employers need to provide reasonable accommodations if you're able to fulfill the job. Are you able to do the job on a slightly shifted schedule? Chances are it's the case.

> It makes scheduling meetings extremely difficult. Morning standups are out. How many of you have weekly standups?

Could do afternoon standups. Problem solved.

One of those requirements is "reasonable accommodation," which is a term that means that employers face big lawsuits from the government if they don't reasonably accommodate employee disabilities.

This means that if an employee has a condition that allows them to do the work, but needs special stuff, such as software to allow them to write code while blind, or a wheelchair-accessible entrance, then the company has to provide it. Otherwise, the employee can ask the government to sue the company on her or his behalf.

But yeah, dude, capitalism is a disease.

And beyond that, what guarantees that the EEOC is going to act, and that they'll find in your favor?

There's no guarantee for anything in life. There is even a strong likelihood that justice won't be served. But that is a far cry from throwing up our hands and claiming a rigged system. There is a reason why so many malls, stores, and restaurants have disabled-accessible entrances, and it's not wishful thinking. It's enforcement at the state and local level.

How does an individual make sure that rule is enforced?

And then you're in a situation where you've raised litigation at past employers, and that will follow you around.

The point is, the worst possible situation to be in is that everyone knows you're narcoleptic and knows you're not choosy about raising legal action. No one will touch you. The best option seems to be to conceal it and part ways as amicably as possible.

It's also, if I understand correctly, kind of legally required that they make "reasonable" accomodations. This sounded pretty reasonable to me - they didn't even have to buy any equipment.

I bet you'd get approx. 0 noshows if you bumped salary.

> Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test.

So don't give drug tests?

> Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of showing up on time (or at all) even after that’s explained as a part of orientation.

Try paying more?

As a pilot, I seriously don’t care if you show up to work high or not - unless you’re doing maintenance on the jet I’m supposed to fly.

Better is to use impairment testing. An impairment test is a test of cognitive function, alertness, reaction time, hand-eye coordination and similar objective things that actually correlate well with how well you can do your job now, instead of sometime in the past.

On top of that, impairment testing can catch when you are impaired for reasons OTHER than intoxication. If your aircraft mechanic is not fit to do maintenance on your jet that morning because last night he found his wife sleeping with his best friend, they argued all night, and she announced that morning she is getting a divorce, leaving him a tired, emotional wreck who will make mistakes left and right at work...an impairment test can catch it. A drug test cannot.

In addition, generally there is lag between drug testing and results. Impairment testing can be quick (a few minutes) and cheap so that you can do it to every employee, every day at the start of their shift.

Exactly this. Pot is probably the most common and it stays in your system for 30 days after use (probably the longest that is tested). Essentially the screen will fail a guy who smoked pot two weeks ago, but pass a guy who shot up heroin all last week. Like the polygraph test, they are deeply flawed, in this case, for testing for intoxication.

Also, imagine if drug tests failed an applicant for having a beer in the last 30 days. Like it or not, pot is replacing beer for a large portion of Americans, time to adapt.

https://equilibriabook.com/toc/

Here, I think it's something like, "insurers move very slowly to new systems, and until this new testing has a lot of data behind it, they won't adjust premium. to account for it being better. Furthermore, juries will continue to give punishingly big damage awards for using it, on the mistaken believe that a toker shouldn't be on the job even if he wasn't high and passed the reaction test."

But it's the best signal we've got. Ignore it at your peril. Perhaps you are too young or live in too modern a world to understand how dangerous rare events are. Constructive paranoia has helped select evolutionary survivors for a very long time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/science/jared-diamonds-gui...

Except that's not true. We can actually test for sobriety. And by doing drug testing instead, we're actually using a worse signal in place of a better signal!

See e.g., http://www.predictivesafety.com/news/2017/2/6/the-advantages...

> Perhaps you are too young or live in too modern a world to understand how dangerous rare events are. Constructive paranoia has helped select evolutionary survivors for a very long time.

I'm not really sure if there's more than a vague analogy connecting Diamond's hypotheses to drug testing policy. And I don't find that exceptionally vague analogy to be compelling evidence. (And I'm one of those people who doesn't even buy a lot of Diamond's work anyways; in fact, I think I'm in good company on this one among the sober, grown-up anthropologists out there...)

My weathered experience tells me to prefer hard data over vague analogies to pop science writers who are themselves known more for their well-written vague analogies than their well-researched hard science :-)

Administer sobriety tests the same way you currently administer drug tests -- upon application, and randomly. They're a lot cheaper so you can actually get more data for less $/time.

So you could smoke a joint today (ok, maybe a bit more than a joint), and nothing more - and three months later they take a hair sample and find you a dirty guilty pot smoker. Yer fired! Or not hired in the first place.

Even in the best case scenario, you have to abstain for 30 days; so if you're a regular user of weed, and you want to change jobs, you'll have to plan ahead, or just be out of work for 30 days while you let it get out of your system. Doable if you have savings, I suppose.

As far as "random drug testing", I honestly think its more of a threat to instill fear, than something actually done. Drug testing isn't cheap, and a true random test would test all employees, but due to the expense, only the larger companies could conceivably do it. Smaller organizations would tend to only do testing "after the fact" or if there is credible reason to believe that a certain person is having issues (visibly impaired or something) - then a "targeted test" under the guise of a random test can be done.

Even then, such a test might only be correlative, and not indicate the true cause; someone might, for instance, cause an accident or such due to a heated argument they had just before the incident with a coworker, but they get tested and fail the test because of a party they went to a couple weeks before where they smoked some weed.

If you have that capability you [probably] are also able to make sure it does not negatively impact you.

Seems really arbitrary and pointless when you take out all the drug war baggage out of it.

Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline.

Its not a simple binary "have you been within 10 meters of the devils weed in the past month T/F" question.

To fail a test after 30 days of normal peeing takes something like weeks of Cheech and Chong 2.0 behavior to build up the level of metabolites in the body. There's a whole spectrum of use vs time required to test clean. A buzz a couple days ago will not fail a test. Wake and bake the morning of the test is a fail. The kind of person dumb enough to wake and bake the morning of a pee test is not the kind of person I'd want on a jobsite.

There's also the question of motivation. There are supplements which basically make you pee alot to pee out the THC and there are test kits at walgreens for $10 that are fairly accurate to determine if you pass. To fail a pee test you have to be unmotivated enough to not even try.

Responsible intelligent users will not have trouble passing a test. Irresponsible or unintelligent users are doomed, but those are the kind of people that cause workplace fatalities anyway, so no real loss.

This is all aside from unemployment fraud type stuff.

I don't think that's true.

  Your first use will usually stay in your system for 5-8 days
  If you use cannabis 2-4 times per week and then stop, you’ll test positive for 11-18 days
  If you smoke 5-6 times per week, it’ll stay in your urine for 33-48 days
  For Medical cannabis patients and people in the #smokeweedeveryday club, 
  THC-COOH will stay in your urine for 49-63 days

Even if it was true, the fact that it is so easily passible doesn't help the argument that it's not pointless and arbitrary.

"There are supplements which basically make you pee alot to pee out the THC"

Frankly, there is level of education and willingness to study I don't expect from dude hired for simple construction or retail job and you are quite getting there. For the record, I know construction workers.

"there are test kits at walgreens for $10 that are fairly accurate to determine if you pass. To fail a pee test you have to be unmotivated enough to not even try."

I mean, why would he wasted $10 on that? Cheaper to do the test and if you fail then look for job elsewhere. Claim here is that now is a good time for blue collar workers so presumably they can try elsewhere. And maybe they will pee enough from beer they drink more then they smoke in the meantime, so they will pass without really knowing why.

"Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline."

Self introspection and awareness? Yep, there is no difference between that and hypothetical chocolate or sex tests.

At that point (and a lot of states are already there!), "Jeez, just don't smoke for a few days" doesn't cut it - 30 days is probably a safe guideline. When it comes to this for a lot of fine prospective employees, I would think it's time to reconsider the value of these tests as a proxy for introspection/awareness/intelligence.

If that was true it would be more efficient to design a test (assuming such a test is currently possible) to measure self-introspection, awareness, intelligence, and discipline. Oh, wait -- don't many people claim an undergraduate degree is also a signal for those things?

So a young person decides to sort themselves out, stops smoking and goes job hunting. They're ready to go! And then? What, wait around for a month with nothing to do? Eventually get bored, hang around with their mates and boom, cycle repeats.

What point are you trying to make?

Are you implying people can not abstain from sex for a month?

Drug tests are completely arbitrary, unrelated to job performance, and employers who use those drug tests don't deserve any sympathy when it comes to labor shortage.

It's actually ok to have used drugs in the past, you just have to be honest about it and write a letter saying something about not doing so moving forward (an acquaintance of mine had to do this... not sure what the specifics were).

Once people are have a clearance, most of the tests are decidedly not random. They can be requested for erratic behavior at work (e.g., passing out), but they are especially common for people who are formally busted somehow for illegal drug and/or alcohol abuse. Get a DUI, yeah, you're going to be "randomly" chosen for a test more often than anyone else you know.

If you look at the system holistically with regards to drug testing for folks with clearances, most people would say that the implementation is fairly reasonable. The rules seem incredibly draconian on the surface, but the actual enforcement is decidedly less so.

I have also heard they mostly stopped drug testing people as they where having difficulty finding enough competent, honest, non-drug users in technical fields. Or possibly more importantly they did not want discrete drug use to be a means of blackmailing someone.

PS: I can only recommend someone either answers all questions accurately and only those specific questions asked, or discreetly declines an investigation and looks for another line of work.

They do however ask about drug usage both on the application and when doing their investigation.

Reading a book is the longest lasting. You can also play a videogame to release endorphins if that's what you're looking for.

Pass the test, and you can clock in and get to work. Fail the test, hit the nap room (unpaid) for a while, and try again when you wake up.

It would catch people who are drunk, high, having a stroke, or just sleepy, rather than just the guy who used cannabis two weekends ago and is perfectly capable of working now.

Because they are famous for low specificity and low sensitivity.

Is a score on a video game quantifiable enough for you? There are so many "brain training" games that do nothing but score you on your observation, working memory, reflexes, etc. Back in college, everyone had to participate in the psych experiment test pool, where many of the experiments were coded in extremely rudimentary Visual Basic, to show video clips and record the time intervals between on-screen events and keypresses.

That's more objective than a human checking your eyeballs to see if there are too many involuntary movements, or making a subjective determination that there weren't enough social displays of submission to the tester. And it scales better to have X computers set up for employees to test and clock in at the same time than to have a supervisor processing the whole line one by one.

I suppose the system could compare your current score with your baseline / sober scores. Or, mentally slow people would simply have less tolerance for being fucked up at work.

All everyone is talking about is weed which I’m sure most of us agree shouldn’t be tested for but we don’t even know what the failed tests failed for.

And no one is required to work for you at the wages you can afford to pay...

Want affordable workers? Increase supply or decrease demand. If you can't do the latter, focus on the former.

If labor is turning into a seller's market, buyers are going to have to adjust.

Hell, you could set up an old Atari with Frogger in it, and require employees to score X points before clocking in. It might not have a very strong correlation, but it sure would be cheaper and more goal-specific than drug testing.

It would more likely take the form of "watch this simulated surveillance video of the work floor, and press the space bar to stop the machinery on the entire production line". When someone steps over the warning tape on the floor around the person-shredder, you press the button. If someone gets their sleeve stuck in the dude-grinder, you press the button. If the part-spewer starts stamping out misaligned doohickeys, you press the button. If your response time is too slow, you aren't fit to clock in for today's shift. Or it could be a simulation of operating the actual machine that employee uses, attempting to predict their productivity for the day.

It has the added benefit of sneaking safety training videos into the daily workflow.

I am not even aware of any jury trial that has decided on the impact of random drug screenings. As far as I am aware, most claims relating to workplace injuries are settled long before the jury pool is even tapped, and many of the remainder are settled before the jury gets a chance to reach a decision. So I think the question you should be asking is if it is likely that any actuary would be willing to analyze the experimental data from such a program, to adjust their company's insurance premiums for anyone using similar software.

If a correlation can be shown, the premiums would be discounted. Actuaries are better with the math than juries are, after all.

A labor union or government regulator could possibly demand such a system in lieu of random drug tests, but your average company does not have enough commitment to worker safety--for its own sake, rather than for its impact on their worker compensation insurance premiums--to experiment in this fashion. They would need a reason that increases revenue or cuts costs.

Does such a thing exist? Is there any independent evidence that it actually works?

I'm not sure exactly what industry the original poster was referring to, but broadly my experience has been that there are many people who are just unreliable. I worked in retail a few years ago, and it was incredible. People just don't show up, or show up so intoxicated from the night before that they're not actually capable of doing their job.

Now, as a developer, I think I can count on one hand the number of times someone has shown up too hungover to work, and I can tell you exactly (0) the number of times someone has just flat out failed to show up when they were supposed to be working.

> So don't give drug tests?

For lots of jobs that may not be an option. Operating heavy machinery puts lots of lives at risk, or it could be an insurance requirement.

> Try paying more?

Again, people are flaky. Suddenly paying someone more isn't going to make them start showing up on time.

Anecdotally, I know several people who worked retail throughout college and showed up super hung-over basically every weekend, but who are now extremely responsible professionals in software, medicine, etc.

Again, I think salary and a sense of career prospects / something worthwhile to lose are far more important than individual proclivities or responsibility.

People know their retail jobs are bullshit, dead-end positions. There's nothing to lose and 10 more identical jobs waiting for them on the market.

> For lots of jobs that may not be an option. Operating heavy machinery puts lots of lives at risk, or it could be an insurance requirement.

Sounds like a policy (law) option to me.

But in terms of initial applicants, who may not be as flaky, advertising higher starting salary may bump up the non-flakiness of people showing up for an interview.

It seems to work for the highly paid developers who have had zero no-shows on your watch.

Otherwise, it appears that you're implying that developers are less flaky than other people.

That's not the objective. Offering more money for the position buys you a better chance of finding someone reliable.

Those who are good employees are already employed, and probably at a decent compensation level. Whenever this topic comes up, I always ask, "What compelling reason are you giving for people to come work for you?" I never get a satisfactory answer, usually because the people know that they have nothing compelling over the next job.

Pay better, and higher quality workers will be applying for your position.

That's both the easiest solution and the one last chosen. Complaining about how shitty the workforce is usually comes first. :)

While I agree that drug tests are a scam as a white collar worker, I do think they're necessary from a liability perspective if you're in construction, manufacturing, or driving a company vehicle.

I fully support the use of recreational drugs on someone's own time, but you have to weed out (forgive the pun) those who are under the influence when loss of life or limb is a risk.

Just not weeks after consumption...

My point is that the test is testing the wrong thing. A sobriety test would be best.

Doesn't that say something about the effectiveness of testing?

Culturally, recreational drug use isn't that big of a deal, at least to millennials. You can completely be responsible enough to enjoy some cannabis on personal time, while also doing your 40 hours productively.

The problem is one of information from the POV of the employer: they are ultimately responsible for what the worker does on the job.

Even if P(no problem | drug use) = 0.99, the amount of negligent liability they will incur if an accident does occur, the person was intoxicated, and the employer could have checked for drugs, but didn't, is probably so high that they can't take that route.

What do you think, time to build and monetize a solution to solve this problem?

I think I have some ideas to help with this type of worker onboarding and retention, personally.

  - got another job but forgot to tell you
  - changed my mind
  - just too tired or busy
  - didn't think I had a real chance, so I didn't bother
  - too nervous about the interview

How can one possibly ever get out of poverty if s/he can't even make it to an interview?

(a) Two working parents or a single parent family may result in children "being raised by wolves" to some extent. These are good parents/people but child rearing is a time intensive business.

(b) Lack of jobs for young people. In my neighborhood, a lot of lawn mowing jobs are done by services instead of the neighborhood kid. The "entry level" jobs are often taken by older people who can't afford to retire.

(c) Single child families where parents spoil their children resulting in a sort of learned helplessness. I can't think of anyone of my friends children that mows their parents lawn of shovels the driveway. The dad or mows the lawn and snow blows the driveway. My brothers kids are the exception.

(d) Lack of exposure to real world failure or responsibilities. How many parents are going to let their kids walk to school never mind use a chainsaw or go hunting by themselves?

Now I imagine explaining to my friends or wife that I hired a 13 year old to paint our house. With 0/0 stars on google, angies list, etc. It's hard for young people to "break in" to something as mundane as yard work and painting.

Nowadays, far fewer people get newspapers, and the newspaper deliver jobs are looking for someone with a car. And I assume they pay for them online.

In the vision of life that is projected for students, the trades do not find themselves anywhere in that vision. It should come as no surprise that we have a shortage right now, it should only surprise us that it's not worse. Immigrant labor has long hidden the fact that American's are raising their kids to avoid the trades, and we will all pay the price for it.

http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/

Your parent comment is also right that this lack of personal responsibility is cultivated or exacerbated by poverty. Personal responsibility is as much a skill as it is a trait. Therefore, if one has neither work experience nor a role model for responsibility, one tends not to have good work ethics.

IMO, the solution is thus both to praise personal work ethics and to break the trap through social programs at the same time.

My concern is that the "something else" might be counter-effective but well-intentioned policies intended to help.

The question is how much the rest of us are involuntarily having to provide for them, and more relevantly, whether or not society is even really being improved if the result is an increasing number of people so unable / unwilling to contribute to society that they can't even be bothered to show up for an interview.

It is very easy to spend other people's money supporting people perceived as downtrodden. It just might not be the solution proponents think it is.

"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the outcome".

I see no moral hazard in coercing people

and that's the problem. Coercion is inherently immoral as it denies agency, which is the very essence of humanity. Agency / self-control is the fundamental difference between being a human being, and being a piece of property.

There's also the argument that the money you own isn't truly yours. It's the product of a large amount of investment on behalf of your parents (which varies for everybody) and the government in terms of education (of you and everyone else to create an economy where you're able to perform your current job) and infrastructure, with the end result of you being able to perform your job. So its taxation is not theft because you do owe that money back to the rest of society. I think preventing hunger/homelessness is in general a good way to spend that money

Living in groups--and people are very much social creatures--means there are rules you follow that you didn't necessarily decide on, or ultimately you get kicked out of the group and probably don't continue your genetic line.

Left unqualified, that's kind of a silly claim to make--it sounds good to some but doesn't really get us anywhere.

Graduation rates are are higher than ever. Over 30% of people have Bachelors degrees or higher. Literacy rates are higher than they ever have been.

Our people aren't dumber, they just realize that when the business managers and owners are making millions while they don't get wage increases above inflation, they have no incentive to care.

Producing it seems, graduates unfit for basic employment according to previous posters. Quantity is clearly not quality.