I worked with small / medium manufacturers in the prosperous part of the Southeast. Hiring is brutal currently.
Last week one company setup interviews with 20 possible new workers. One showed up for his interview, and one wandered in the next day. 18 nonshows.
Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test.
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.
Sub $160,000 houses (3-4 bedrooms, land, average schools, 15-30 minute commute) are now selling in 1-3 days, compared with 3-6 months five years ago. There’s definitely a boom getting started here.
I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober, and not hungover what business is it of the employers what the employee does on their own time?
The drugs that are readily detectable are mostly the ones that don’t matter too, while the ones that are more concerning (to me anyway) are either not tested for or are not detectable fairly fast.
And alcohol is ok to abuse. Why?
It would be interesting to test white collar workers.
It is BS, but I was under the impression it's more a CYA strategy for liability if a worker has an accident that puts the company at risk. IE imagine a roofer drops a shingle on someone's head, accidents happen and the roofer was sober but if they can't pass a drug test the company could be in serious hot water in a negligence lawsuit. BS runs downhill, so to speak.
You can also deny workman's comp claims if somebody blows a drug test. They are powerfully financially incentivized to fish for a hot sample in the case of an accident.
Basically shit rolls down hill-most of the factories I work with care because of 2 reasons:
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.
stealth intelligence test. For a variety of interesting historical reasons, the government hates intelligence tests as a hiring criteria and this is the blue collar stealth/workaround IQ test. Its the blue collar equivalent of fizzbuzz or a gitlab repo.
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...
> ...do not, get high the week or two before your pee test.
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?).
My addiction to coffee involved no poor choices, I don’t regret it and it makes me a better person. Lack of it makes my performance much worse, I get a migraine with vertigo and vomiting.
You seem to be confusing physical dependence with addiction. By your definition, you'd be addicted to food, as I'm sure you'd have adverse consequences, including worse performance, in its absence.
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.
If you are unable to refrain for 2 weeks, then you are not the kind of person who they want to hire, because it means you will also not refrain when you are on duty.
Its a different sort of refrain problem. We expect you'll refrain from activity X when we tell you to for a short reasonable period of time. When X is smoking weed this is seen as a big problem, mostly by weed smokers. When X is applying electrical power to this machine's cabinet someone is working in by hacking around the lockout-tagout locks, this seems a common sense test for a jobsite. We can't test for the latter but we can proactively predict by testing for the former. There are plenty of blue collar jobs where lack of awareness and self control and logical analysis of cause and effect mean someone dies. Weed smoking is a simple test of self awareness and self control and intelligence (WRT understanding the whole problem situation)
> I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober
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.)
I’ve seen a fair few industrial accidents including amputations and deaths. I don’t think that the injuries we have each seen are very relevant.
The things that are detected and punished are not necessarily the things that cause harm. Smoking pot a week ago isn’t actually a problem. Being tired from watching Netflix all night is far worse, as are a few other things, including drugs which aren’t readily detected. The imperfect system currently used causes one hell of a lot of harm. There needs to be something, but the current system isn’t right.
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.
If the complaint is that you can't find enough workers because too many are failing drug tests[1], then your hypothetical of having "two job applicants" (for an implicit one spot to be filled) is already moot.
I mean, that's the thing, it's a hypothetical. The non-existence of workers with clean drug tests in the real applicant pool doesn't mean that a failing drug test is less of a risk signal in real applicants.
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.
I have never had a drug test, and that includes several jobs working for defense contractors. (The law said they had to have a plan for testing anyone they suspected of drug use. It didn't say they had to suspect anyone.)
I've never had security clearance of any kind. Highlights that all required drug testing were: restaurant national headquarters, towing/insurance national headquarters, theme park, defense contractor for non-secure projects, and a bank.
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.
Here's the sectors I've worked in throughout my career: Insurance, banking, marketing, entertainment (theme park), restaurants, and defense. Every single one of my jobs in those sectors required drug tests prior to employment.
It's not about whether they can or can't. It's about the massive liability for the company if they fuck up on the job and cause property damage or bodily injury.
That could be true in a causative sense, but not a correlative* one. Not that it's ethical to do so, but by testing for marijuana smokers, businesses/insurance companies may by proxy be testing for other traits likely to cause accidents
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.)
> Can someone who drank a beer a couple days ago be trusted not to drink one 30 minutes before starting work with the concrete cutters? Trusted enough to bet your company on? (Because you know that if the worker drinks a beer just before working with the concrete cutters, and someone gets injured or killed, the owner loses the company in the lawsuit.)
As others have pointed out, wages for these job openings that cannot get people to show up are frequently so low that its not worth showing up for them in the first place. Many of these No-Shows have to prove that they are "actively seeking a job" to continue getting whatever benefit they currently receive. And these people are doing the (short term) math, the wages from the job + a full work week < money they get for free from the government. Brutal problem, but paying wages that are market for the kind of employee you want _should_ change that
Let's define Southeast as below the 36°30' and east of the Mississippi (i.e. we're definitely excluding VA, DC, WV, KY, and anything west of the Mississippi including Louisiana).
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.
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.
> One way to handle it is to be upfront with your employer. This tends not to work.
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?
No employers will not make reasonable accommodations. Business is profit over people, you requiring accommodations means more effort for them. Just try to tell your employer you have depression and see how "reasonably accommodating" they will be.. capitalism is disease
When you graduate, at your first tech job you'll have to sit through various mandatory training. One of those describes the employer's requirements under U.S. (or EU) law.
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.
Yes, those things can happen. Doesn't mean they will. Remember, a large chunk of people in this country are working under at-will employment. That means that if the company doesn't want to accommodate you, they don't have to; they just let you go without saying why. The onus is now on you to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (and spending large amounts of money on legal fees to do so) that you were let go because of that.
Fair enough, the employee will notify their state office that handles ADA complaints.
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.
Start with putting in an effort with the employer, and your final means would be the justice system. It's the law. But you could start with the manager, move on to HR, move on to the courts if you need to. And don't skip levels. Only elevate as necessary.
This doesn't quite work. The official reason for firing me had nothing to do with my narcolepsy, for example. It would normally be a minor infraction. But when someone wants to get rid of you for showing up late, they can almost always find a way.
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.
I know a lady who runs a hospital pharmacy. She was telling me that one of her employees has narcolepsy, and about the accomodations they made. It wasn't even that much - supervisors asking the employee if they needed to get up and walk around, and not being surprised if the worker was asleep at their desk.
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.
Ultimately, my solution was remote work. Interestingly this also solved the problem of high cost of living on the west coast (moved to the Midwest). It also helps distribute economic and social influence across the whole of the country instead of densely packing it into a few privileged areas.
> Last week one company setup interviews with 20 possible new workers. One showed up for his interview, and one wandered in the next day. 18 nonshows.
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.
The thing about manufacturing jobs is that they often involve operating heavy machinery. Drug use and intoxication drastically increases the chance of death or dismemberment - for the inebriated, or often, others around them.
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.
Drug tests don't test for intoxication. They just test test for something that correlates somewhat with having been intoxicated sometime in the recent past.
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.
That sounds like a much better idea; any reason this hasn't caught on as a replacement for drug testing? It opens up for a lot of good workers who'd otherwise be rejected, and it is more robust against the thing you actually care about preventing.
But what would it have to be about, for employers to consistently turn down an approach that gets them access to a bigger class of labor and better filtering for safety?
Good question, and worth investigation. While you do, please keep in mind that employers are not monolithic, but made up of lots of different humans with their own agendas. (And lots of those agendas include the objective of "cover your ass".)
There's a great book about (what might be) the general problem here: that there are many factors that keep us at a bad equilibrium, where a bunch of people would have to change at once to accomplish anything.
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."
My grandpa took a part time job after retiring after 30 years at chevron/ortho. Failed his drug test. Turns out, they lost the sample, and in the testing companies mind, he couldn't be proven to pass, so he failed.
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.
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!
> 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 :-)
I'm not suggesting you do (although I know others on this thread are suggesting that).
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.
Drug test measure whether you smoked weed anytime last weeks, up to three months if I recall right. It has little to do with whether you are high first day on the job. It has more to do with drug war then with incidents.
It's basically only about weed; pretty much all other "hard drugs" (cocaine, meth, etc) flush out of your system within hours to a few days (assuming you can abstain that long - which isn't a given depending on how far into them you are), while THC and such from weed hang around in the body for about a month (30 days or so), and as you noted - up to 3 months (for a hair sample test).
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.
No it isn't. You've probably been seen and healed by a great doctor that smokes or has smoked weed recently. There is a good chance your financial advisor, lawyer and/or boss smokes or has smoked weed recently. Most professionals who do certainly don't boast about it with the witch hunting Puritan culture in the US, but there are a lot of them out there, and you've probably never noticed because it's not noticeable.
So if there was a test that could tell if you've eaten chocolate in the last 30 days, then you required applicants to not eat chocolate ever, passing that would be an indicator of a good employee?
Seems really arbitrary and pointless when you take out all the drug war baggage out of it.
I think it odd that the strongest opposition to testing is from people who clearly don't smoke.
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.
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
Marijuana, Single Use in urine wears off after 1-7+ days. So no, it is not just that the person baked in the morning. Regular usage, 7-100 days and that is not "going completely stoned every day at that period".
"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.
I used to approach drug tests with this mentality, but legalization and decriminalization across various states will muddy the picture. There will be a lot more everyday partakers as it starts being sold in safe storefronts, in forms that don't stink or make you hack a lung (cute vaporizer pens, delicious edibles). There will be a lot of middle class, white-collar people that prefer a "feel good" gummy bear after work over a beer.
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.
> Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline.
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?
Yeah because you don't have to smoke pot to understand bodily autonomy, you just have to treat people with respect. If you've gotten drunk this month you don't deserve the job you have is basically what you're saying.
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.
Do you really think that's an appropriate job requirement? Should we also have fasting requirements for our jobs? For context I don't smoke, but I'm also not deluded enough to think that we should be testing arbitrary datapoints about their personal life. If they can do the job, they should get the job, and if they can't then they shouldn't. If you aren't hiring capable workers because of puritanical ideals you're wasting money.
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.
Meh. You have to write down any drug use on your application, and they will most likely ask you about that in the poly. The poly is what busts a lot of people.
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.
As I understand it practice the rules can be fairly flexible.
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.
I know you can get a Secret and I have heard you can get a Top Secret depending on the agency. Though some agencies give random drug tests to people with Top Secret clearances and many contractors also have their own testing policy.
They do however ask about drug usage both on the application and when doing their investigation.
Id be surprised for TS I looked at a job at Hanslope Park which would have required DV (TS) clearance and you had to have drug tests. Didn't get a second interview was well over qualified - but one has to keep the DHSS happy or id lose my nugatory benefits.
Why not just give an automated field-sobriety test for alertness, judgment, and reflexes at the start of each shift?
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.
How exactly would an automated sobriety test make use of a qualitative metric?
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.
Exactly. The only downside I imagine is that it could give false-positives to retarded people. Reaction speed is pretty well correlated with intelligence.
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.
That could be fought while there is little leeway in terms of fighting "my training and 15 years of experience allowed me to determine that the subject was impaired".
No one is required to give you a job. The increased cost to do that everyday is not worth it to the company if they can weed out possible irresponsible workers from a drug test. It’s work, not a babysitter.
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.
This whole tree of comments is a response to someone complaining that it's hard for a company to find workers. Nobody's saying that company is required to hire anyone - we are just making suggestions to help them with their problem.
If labor is turning into a seller's market, buyers are going to have to adjust.
I think you underestimate the cost differential between contracting with a lab to drug-test your employees on an ongoing basis, and with hiring a software developer once to make a rudimentary video game that positively correlates a passing score with operating heavy industrial equipment safely for the next 8 hours.
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.
Considering that drug tests for operators of heavy machinery are mostly about legal liability, has a system like you propose ever been tested in front of a jury?
You would have to ask a lawyer that specializes in corporate ass-covering. I'm more interested in practical solutions that result in actual safety improvements.
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.
Right... but this thread is about employers complaining that they can't find qualified applicants. They can't have it both ways. If they want to continue to be picky, and carry on with the "No one owes you a job" bs, then they shouldn't be taken seriously when they complain about not being able to find people.
Other than being extremely complicated to setup, has the ability for people to socially engineer themselves out of it and costing 1 hour of work per day per person yea you could do this .
> I bet you'd get approx. 0 noshows if you bumped salary.
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.
> 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... 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.
> Again, people are flaky. Suddenly paying someone more isn't going to make them start showing up on time.
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.
Right, people can be flaky, and those that are flaky will continue to be flaky, regardless of the amount paid. But paying more can attract more of the people who aren't flaky.
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.
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.
I would be okay with drug tests that didn't fail you for weed. That can show up on a test weeks after it's been consumed. The drugs that would actually significantly impair you (alcohol, opiates) clear out of your system in hours/days.
There are drug testing companies that exist solely to farm out the work to a lab and remove any marijuana hits from the results. Some companies in places where weed is legal use these.
I imagine that there is probably an issue with these workers making half of what software engineers make, but with higher expectation of no drug use. I'd imagine recreational drug use is even greater in lower-waged workers.
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.
> 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.
At the very least, it'd be worth contacting the noshows and finding out the reasons, encouraging them to be honest. Work out what it might be -
- 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
It's almost as if extended poverty has ruined people's ability to function in a job market that wasn't there for them sooner. Poverty is called a trap for a reason. It's a self-reinforcing cycle as much as it's an income bracket.
They say "There are no bad dogs, just bad owners." I think the problems are cultural.
(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?
That's a good list...a lot of it rings true, especially point B. The chances for me to work when I was young were everywhere. I did mow lawns, I raked leaves, painted houses, and every other odd job that a 13 year old would be allowed to do.
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.
It's funny- I was an unlicensed grey market house painter for a while in college. I booked most of my jobs while standing on top of a ladder, where somebody would stroll up asking me if I'd do their house next.
Yep. When I was a teenager, I had a job delivering newspapers. I had to get up and out very early in the morning, even in bad weather, and deliver papers on my bike, and collect the payments for them in the evening.
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.
I think it's both the dog and the owner and our culture that looks down on the trades, or blue collar work. Kids are being raised and taught to work hard so they can avoid working with their hands. Trade jobs are almost seen as a punishment and schools do nothing but funnel all students into the college pipeline.
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.
Kids don't walk to school in many modern neighborhoods because they're not designed to be safe for walking, sliced through by wide high-speed arterials that encourage driving at dangerous speeds. I grew up in a 1900-1920s neighborhood and most kids walked to school.
For my first job out of highschool I applied to over 40 locations, and finally got an unpaid job tips only as a rickshaw driver. I'm pretty sure it was illegal for them to do that, but I also really needed a job. For context I'm 28 and live in the american south east.
You are right that this is a problem with personal responsibility.
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.
Wouldn't surprise me if this was achieved through apps as much as anything else in the future. Imagine an Uber-style app for odd jobs (lawns, etc) that focused on teen/young workers. The app could have gamification or reminders that if you commit to a job, you go hard and complete it well. If you don't have the energy or ability to keep performing jobs to that level, then take on fewer jobs or use a different app.
Sure, but personal responsibility is learned/cultural. It could take a while for people to break the cycle when they grew up seeing their parents make poor decisions, who also grew up seeing their own parents make poor decisions, etc. Not saying that all poverty is a result of poor decisions but that the two feed on each other
They do--but this (a difficulty in getting lower-paid workers to even show up) is a new phenomenon. We've always had lower-paid workers and poverty, but something else has changed.
My concern is that the "something else" might be counter-effective but well-intentioned policies intended to help.
Personally I don't think we should be incentivizing people to show up to work under threat of homelessness/starvation like we did in the past, even if it may be more effective. If people want to live their lives in the "comfort" of SNAP and SSI, I'm personally ok with it. The market will adjust and maybe those blue collar jobs will begin paying even more (or people will adapt)
Nobody questions your personal ability to voluntarily provide for them, though.
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.
Well ok, but that's up to our votes to decide. You may vote one way and I will vote my way. If you don't want to provide for these people under these circumstances, vote for someone who will roll back welfare. The system wouldn't work if taxes were voluntary (how many people were poor before welfare when charity was the only way people got help?) so I see no moral hazard in coercing people who don't want to support the poor to do so
"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.
I used coercion because I knew that was how libertarians/other people who generally don't agree with me see it. I actually see it in the following way: the world is not a perfect free market, and in many cases letting a free market run its course results in the poor/disabled/children of bad parents needlessly being hurt or dying. I think its more just to pay to feed 20 poor people than to let 1 die due to poverty. Its not like this imposes some seriously constrained living conditions on everybody. I earn income in the highest nominal tax bracket and nobody I know making this much, including myself, is hurting because of our current system
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
Coercion isn't immoral any more than breathing is immoral. It's been a part of the human condition since before we were human.
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.
We don't know what the circumstances of the interview were, though. It easily could be a minimum wage job, and the other people just found something else.
In those other cases, was the offering better than other companies in the area? Was there a compelling reason to choose that company over the others, and yet a majority of applicants still didn't show up to interviews?
This is what's known as a collective action problem. I don't have the answers, and the few people who've actually tried solving it haven't had much luck.
No, this is what happens when employers show their workers absolutely no loyalty over decades. If people have no reason to care about their job, they won't care about it. The labor market is tight enough so that they can't just fire everyone who behaves like that, otherwise everyone would quit.
That’s a factor, but the collective dumbing down is as well. We now have a nearly feral workforce and body politic, because contrary to expectations, they’re unpredictable and hard to control.
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.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News, especially on divisive topics? We eventually ban accounts that do this repeatedly and we've had to ask you before.
Last week one company setup interviews with 20 possible new workers. One showed up for his interview, and one wandered in the next day. 18 nonshows.
Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test.
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.
Sub $160,000 houses (3-4 bedrooms, land, average schools, 15-30 minute commute) are now selling in 1-3 days, compared with 3-6 months five years ago. There’s definitely a boom getting started here.