Sure your cool valley startup with a flip-flop wearing CEO isn't going to require a drug test (and probably not a formal background check), but buttoned up corporate America absolutely does as well as government and most companies who does business with government. So basically most non-small-companies outside of California. Employee drug testing got popular in the early-90s, it was even the topic of a Seinfeld joke. Though I hear its becoming less common in the last few years, and some have stopped testing for marijuana.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/employment-tren...

>There is no definitive data on how many companies conduct drug tests, though the Society for Human Resources Management found in a survey that 57 percent do so. Nor is there any recent data on how many have dropped marijuana from mandatory drug testing.

>After the Drug-Free Workplace Act was enacted in 1988, amid concerns about cocaine use, drug testing spread to most large companies. All Fortune 500 companies now engage in some form of drug testing, according to Barry Sample, a senior director at Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest testing firms.

Your citation doesn't really support any of the arguments, since it doesn't address which jobs require drug testing at those Fortune 500 companies.

For example, Walmart is number one on the list. Is it the CEO who is being tested, or the guys unloading the shipping trucks?

I have not once in the entirety of my software development experience been drug tested. Prior to my current job at Large Corporation I worked at a government contractor.

Not that I ever did drugs because there was no way I was going to risk the government coming down on me, but it's an example of how drug testing is still something mostly relegated to the lower paying jobs unless your employer has reasonable suspicion in the case of government work.

I've worked at a few non-small companies outside of California, literally none of them have even floated a drug test.

Off the top of my head....medical software companies almost always require it (hey, it's basically free for them, since they have their own labs), any company with older tech like Coldfusion, ADA, etc seem to test to weed out developers who are scraping the bottom barrel due to undisclosed personal problems, financial/real-estate software companies, and this is all on top of rigorous background checks that may or may not matter. The drug test matters.

> i've never heard of any place in tech that drug tested that didn't involve getting a security clearance

If the company is accepting US government contracts, and you would be working on a team under such a contract, then the company is likely to be required to drug test you even if a security clearance is not required.

That's actually pretty rare. I've worked at places that did government contracting and none of the teams directly servicing those contracts were tested, neither was anyone else at the company.

Thanks for the correction. I was really just going by what I've heard from colleagues, but my specialty is network security and the requirements may (or may not) be stricter there.