I worked at Blizzard and there was a joke that we didn’t have drug testing because we would lose the design team and half the QA testers. In gaming QA getting high is kind of a prerequisite.
Same thing happened at an Amazon all hands Circa 2004. You could ask questions anonymously via a literal question box and someone asked is Amazon ever going to drug test? Jeff laughed for about 15 seconds straight and then said no he didn't want to lose his engineers.
I have a friend who is just about to start at Amazon in the UK and in her employment contract it specifically mentions that they do drug test, so I guess a lot can change in 16 years.
I think in general drug testing is pretty unusual here, and employers have to be able to demonstrate good reason for administering it. I've never worked anywhere, including a couple of household names, where employees were drug tested.
I've been in lots of companies where drug testing was required for the employees in manufacturing, shipping, trucking, etc. Insurance and liability reasons, quality control, lots of reasons.
But then it gets pointed out that this isn't enforced on the office workers and is discrimination. So now everyone gets tested.
Yes? Your point being? Amazon UK is still part of Amazon, and was part of Amazon in 2004. You think engineers in the UK are any more or less likely to do drugs than engineers elsewhere?
You're getting downvoted, and I think saying it was 'insensitive' may be the wrong take here, but I would be willing to bet that Amazon drug tests its warehouse workers even in legal states.
This has been the case at every “startup” or “tech” company where I’ve worked. Even the “enterprise” company where I worked for almost a decade had noticeably low “random” drug testing for IT. “Low” meaning “I didn’t see or hear of it happening unless someone was obviously out of their minds at work the entire time I was there.”
Where I live (outside the US), virtually no company ever tests for drugs...
Even in the US, a lot of large companies do not test for drugs. This is not to take a cheap jab at banks, but I personally know some investment bankers in NYC, and if some in their group were seriously drug tested they’d probably break the test machines...
I interned at a securities finance company that did drug testing at some point. There were lots of management changes, so the random screen may have been an MBA/finance type who didn’t get it. Notable quality engineers who failed their tests were retained, so I imagine they must have seen the error in their ways.
They did have drug screening as part of the application process. I imagine they lost a lot of quality applicants. I only persisted because I was one of those annoying self-righteous tea totalers at the time.
> According to the etymological dictionaries, the tee- in teetotal is the letter ‹t›, so it is actually t-total, though it was never spelled that way.[4] The word is first recorded in 1832 in a general sense in an American source, and in 1833 in England in the context of abstinence. Since at first it was used in other contexts as an emphasised form of total, the tee- is presumably a reduplication of the first letter of total, much as contemporary idiom today might say "total with a capital T".
I worked at a ‘startup’ in the Healthcare sector that drug tested everyone on initial hire. They were spun off from one of the big US hospitals though. I’m not over exaggerating when I say we lost a huge amount of exceptionally qualified applicants who dropped out of the process or refused to accept the offer specifically due to the drug test requirement.
Yea fuck that, I’d refuse point blank. This is 100% private information. If I behave like I’m high/drunk/stoned at work by all means fire me, but what I do when not at work is my business alone.
Yeah, the tech side of the company was pushing to remove the requirement for as long as I was there. But it was pretty much just a blanket requirement for all employees since most worked in medical facilities where that’s normally required.
At this point in my life, I’d reject it. But it’s hard to say no when being offered twice your current salary and a significantly shorter commute.
I had a boss tell me that once. My young, straight, naive self thought he was talking about cannabis. Years later when I talk to those old coworkers and hear the stories of what they were doing I’m kinda surprised we got anything done at all.
If you can keep from throwing anyone under the bus, what besides cannabis are you talking about? Binge drinking? Coke? Ayahuasca-fueled technical design?
few code monkey/designer friends of mine are drug free. almost everyone does lsd/shrooms occasionally. or other stuff. the only ones that don't are on SSRI but wish they could do psychedelics. this is the reality we live in. My social circle might be biased though.
It's hard not to do drugs in a country that decriminalized all drugs and it's legal to grow weed and shrooms at home. Plus all the access to clean stuff from the darknet. I recently ordered some LSD, sent to a lab for analysis, it was completely pure LSD-25 without any contaminants. Darknet changed a lot in the drug scene.
As far as pay that’s most definitely true. Even though I don’t know what it was like after the Activision acquisition, a company I also worked at. I can tell you that the culture you describe came from Activision because there were about 70 employees when I joined the Diablo 2 expansion team at blizzard in 2000 and I felt we were cared about. Freebies, 10th anniversary party in Vegas where we could take 3 friends and some moved up to different places in the company. Blizzards much bigger now so I don’t know about how the merger affected the culture or if it turned toxic. I wouldn't call layoffs as an indicator of that because that's very common in QA.
This is funny because Google SRE, who are pretty good at devops, are also notorious alcoholics, or at least that's the internal meme. Judging by the prominent liquor displays I'd guess there's some truth to it.
If you’re on call 24 hours a day that means you either have to be stone cold sober or a functioning alcoholic. On call arrangements are a really good reason for unionization. Possibly one of the better ones.
Nobody in Google SRE is on call for 24 hours. They have teams spread across time zones that rotate through the day. They also get paid more when they’re on call.
> …I use the term "faucets and toilets" to mean the same thing. It should always work, be boring, obvious to use, and ideally not even be considered technology.
I like that, but I think that's something different than expressed by "the user is drink" or "the user is high".
Assuming I understand you correctly, "faucets and toilets" is a way of summarizing that UX design should favor popular convention when possible.
"The user is drunk/high" is a way of saying that, regardless of the novelty of a particular interaction (not all of which can be faucets/toilets), designers should assume that users will always be more-or-less impaired by the distractions of life.
As a random QA guy, I must mention that the cost effectiveness of determining whether a website is usable when high is questionable at best unless we are talking about a snack or pizza ordering website.
You're much more likely to have a visitor base that is likely to be intoxicated, and Browsing Under the Influence is still legal. I would thus offer my services as fellow QA to determine website usability while under the heavily intoxicated; client may specify desired level of user intoxication from mildly tipsy to fall over drunk.
Amazon was an early investor, and they now offer same day delivery in the metro areas Kozmo serviced.
Netflix allowed for returning DVDs via pre-paid mailers, instead of dropping them off at Kozmo dropboxes at random local businesses.
They also worked with some local eateries to deliver food.
I had once ordered a dozen bagels, a Pokemon DVD, and I think a magazine in a single order.
I loved the concept and the company. According to the documentary, they were on the path to profitability, but threatened the existing status quo of then incumbent providers.
For many applications, especially CRUD, if your UI isn't so obvious someone with low executive function can successfully use it (half asleep, fucked up on some drug including alcohol/prescription), then it's not as low-friction as it could be.
I remember being stoned out of my mind, trying to grab an Uber back home.
I realized how terrible the Uber UI is. There's a shitton of confusing information and buttons competing for attention, all at an equally ambiguous grayish tone. I just want to go home. I was with a friend who was equally high, and we kept laughing at how absurdly bad and confusing the UI is. Eventually the Uber arrived and I got home safe.
There is this famous case of a woman who was high and trying to request a Uber ride. She thought it was weird that the app was asking her so many information and so eventually gave up. Next morning, she realized she was almost there to become a driver herself.
I heard a story from an Uber driver about a drunk woman he gave a ride to who intended to Uber like 3 blocks, but who ended up Ubering over an hour to the wrong city before she realised her mistake.
I routinely use the Uber app while entirely sober and have the exact same reaction. It's utterly terrible and I can't imagine what it's like for my parents to use it.
Have them try GoGoGrandparent.com! A way to use Uber and Lyft with a phone call. Call and press 1 to get picked up from home, call and press 2 to get picked up at your last location. We screen their drivers, make sure the cars aren’t too big or too small and monitor GPS and trip pickups so that if it looks like a driver is getting lost we can get them back on track. Our mission is to help people age independently in their home for as possible, regardless of their age - or sobriety!
Thanks for sharing this. What a delightful idea! My grandma is forever complaining about all the things she can't do anymore, but won't touch the internet, much less a smartphone!
This may help restore some of her independence, and I look forward to sharing it with her!
Haha awesome, if you ever have any feedback please feel free to send me an email: justin@gogograndparent.com. I'd love to hear how we could improve the service and/or what we could do to make it easier to adopt.
I'm still traumatized by the several years of using Windows in my native language. I was yet young and eager, but nonetheless had to spend plenty of cumulative hours wandering helplessly through the control panel, trying to decipher what they meant by all those attempts at translation.
I've been using only English interfaces for more than a decade, but recently-ish relived the phenomenon with MS Office, and it doesn't get easier with experience.
Same here. I always set everything to en_US, because that's the native language of computing. Any time I've had to use something in my native language (Polish), the translation was terrible - and the only reason I was not confused was because I could mentally untranslate the Polish text to the most likely English original.
Speaking of computing and translations: the most annoying case I've had was not with UIs, but with books. Back in the day, I bought two C++ books by Scott Meyers (Effective C++ and More Effective C++), both published in Polish, and each by a different publisher. In the first one, they translated "template" -> "szablon" and "pattern" -> "wzorzec", and in the other, they translated "template" -> "wzorzec" and "pattern" -> "szablon". Took my teenage mind quite a while to make sense of the confusion.
Same experience here. In college ( portuguese speaking country ), the teachers forbade us to buy translated books. We had to work with the english editions only, and I'm lucky this was the case having seen some of these translated books later.
I think excel used to have a translated macro language, so if you used the Dutch Excel you’d have to use Dutch words for ‘if’, ‘then’ ‘else’ etcetera. Truly insane.
It still is that way. And whats even more maddening: you have to replace the commas in the formulas with semicolons. Probably because the comma is used in numbers in Dutch. It has driven me nuts more than once though!
I think there would be a compromise in making if US gave up imperial units and Europe would give up the decimal comma. Or at least I would like that kind of compromise. The next hurdle would be to all agree to use ISO date format...
Indeed, that's one problem I had with it recently—with formulas. I search the web on how to do some thing, and then have to stare at the list of functions to find the same ones in my language. Doesn't help that functions are named like it's the 80s, with arbitrary abbreviations.
I am talking about the formula language you're using in spreadsheets for calculations etc, I don't think that is legacy. I don't think I know anyone using the Visual Basic thing, I actually thought that's not part of Excel anymore except for compatibility support, but yes I guess Visual Basic stays in English.
I’m learning a foreign language right now, trying to break through to fluent conversation, and I have just changed my phone’s language thanks to your comment :)
I have set it to my first language which is non-English (Kannada, a South Indian language). And I can use Uber just because of my muscle memory. The UX is supremely fragile and confusing!
It seems a bit unfair to expect an app to work without being able to read the language. Was the translation bad or are you just saying that the buttons weren't obvious without a description you could read?
I disagree that it's unfair to expect apps to work without reading. Some apps, sure, but I think a taxi application ought to be usable without being able to read. Consider
1. The user is drunk, and can't understand meaning of the text.
2. The user is preoccupied with other tasks, and skips over the words.
3. The user is illiterate. Functional illiteracy is prevalent in the United States, and being unable to recognize the characters of one's own language continues in many countries, too
My company invests in ensuring many of their products are usable for the illiterate. I doubt it's the only company that does so.
Designing for the illiterate (or inebriated) is a nice goal, but designing for people to change their app into a language they cannot read, and then expecting it to all be easily usable, is not really a particularly great design goal. In that instance, a button could have a single word that 99.9% of people can read, but if you've changed it to Spanish it may render the button incomprehensible. I personally can't think of a single app I use that is completely usable without basic reading comprehension. I'd be curious about examples though (assuming reasonable complexity) because it'd be some potentially useful design that I'd be interested in seeing (and potentially using).
Adding to this, I'm curious how someone who cannot recognise the characters of their languages would use input fields, too? I don't think I know of many input fields which are particularly accessible if one doesn't recognise language characters without using speech recognition (which kind of sidesteps the issue).
As a (hypothetical) example, I'd imagine a pizza app to be pretty usable if I didn't speak the language (illiterate may be a bit much as I'd need to know my address):
Put in my postcode & choose my address; choose a pizza size & toppings from icons/photos.
Add credit card info into a standard looking form & that's it (or even, touch the fingerprint sensor when the fingerprint icon comes up)
I think the trouble isn't that you wouldn't know the Spanish for "OK" (or "pepperoni") but if the app lacks proper information hierarchy so you don't know what to do next.
If you're a foreigner you would probably be tripped by the post code/address. I certainly was when the petrol station asked for my post code in the US! (My card postcode does not fit the US format.)
Source: used to work for a direct Uber competitor (not in the US)
Drivers and platforms definitely don't want too intoxicated passengers. Reasonably drunk? Sure. Completely high/passed out/etc? Nope. It's just too much of a mess to handle. There is indeed a vomiting fee, but it's more used as a deterrent for the users: it does not cover the actual cleaning + lost rides on a busy Saturday night...
Bit of anecdata: sexual intercourse in the car is also not ok, and gets you banned. Yes, it happens. Drivers don't like it.
Ironically, part of the reason traditional taxi networks enjoyed their local monopolies in many cities was to compensate them for being considered part of public transport infrastructure, and forced to do the things that's not in their best interest (but is in the best interest of citizens).
How do you understand something like 'withdraw, with conversion' or 'withdraw, let your bank handle the conversion', without language? Is there an obvious image or button shape that'd signify this without prior knowledge? Curious, not sure I've seen an instance where this is obvious from any other cue.
To expand on this: the mapping between images and other cues to a precise meaning is often actually pretty poor. To correctly navigate using images you often have to have prior knowledge, with the exception of the most downright obvious images or visual cues possible. On the other hand, text can have essentially arbitrary precision (although past a certain point it becomes difficult to parse) - and is thus actually often superior for first-use (or infrequent use) scenarios. The ideal is to have the best communication possible, and while I'm not sure as to the extent that Uber reaches that goal, text being unreadable and the app being unnavigable because you changed the language is, in my view, more on you than on the app developers.
> How do you understand something like 'withdraw, with conversion' or 'withdraw, let your bank handle the conversion', without language? Is there an obvious image or button shape that'd signify this without prior knowledge?
Let's say you're in Europe and and have a card in dollars:
Right. Because you have numbers written in a common language, you can work out what your buttons did. Without that you wouldn't realise until you actually were hit with the conversion fee on one side or the other. If you changed the language and the numbers were written in Chinese, and then you blamed the ATM for being difficult to use without a translation app, how on earth is that not a problem with what you decided to do?
For that example, I'd say the text wouldn't help most people regardless of language. One would have to know a fair bit about the mechanics of currency conversion. I happen to know that, and I still would have to pick randomly, because this would come down to exchange rates that the interface isn't exposing.
The correct user-focused interface solution for that particular problem is to show the actual costs next to each button. And then I'd think one would make the cheaper option the obvious default (e.g., bigger, greener), with the more expensive option less favored.
I agree, that's a lot. High/drunk people are legitimate users, especially for something like Uber!
Another heuristic I user is, "can a person with an upset toddler work this?" Spending time around parents with small children made it clear that even the smartest person can end up with what is effectively a cognitive impairment if they are trying to keep a small child alive. Attention? What's that?
Arguably drunk people are the core user group of Uber. Aside from consultants and high powered executives, most people (pre-pandemic) went to bars far more often than they go to airports or other places where taking a personal car is inconvenient or otherwise illegal.
> Another heuristic I user is, "can a person with an upset toddler work this?
Incidentally, another UI that fails this is those automated answering services that “cleverly” let you answer with your voice instead of “press 1 for whatever”. The screaming toddler (or pet) will repeatedly short-circuit the process and get interpreted as an incomprehensible answer.
I got 3M safety earmuffs specifically for my kid. They reduce the noise to a more manageable level, which is useful if either of us have a headache. But we sort of got used to the noise, so we don't use them much.
Seconded! I love my 3M earmuffs, low-end Peltors. I can add earbuds underneath them if I want a little music or generated noise to completely remove audio distractions.
If it happens often enough, you might train your kids to use the high pitch screaming sound though, as that will get them the attention. Scary thought what might develop from there!
This is indeed a good test. I realized how bad Youtube UX is when I was using it to find children's song with my baby in my strong (right) arm. That's when I realized how much swiping, scrolling and tapping you need to do when you use Youtube. Also the recommendations were really a pain in the ass. We watch Youtube in 3 different languages and that is beyond the ability of the recommendation engine.
I think your complaint is justified. I am currently tired, going to sleep momentarily, but not otherwise impaired, and it took me almost a full minute of staring at the screen, trying to figure out what you were trying to demonstrate.. Because it wasn't immediately clear to me if it was asking you to do something or if it was just a random screenshot to show the uniform grayness of the interface.
Our country had multiple car ride company launch a few years back and you could choose between Uber, Grab, Gojek, etc to get someone to drive you.
The UI for Uber was the cleanest and most easy to use. I remember having to just do 2 steps to get a ride, as opposed to about 6 steps on the other offering the same service (e.g. Grab: choose "Ride", input Pin, input current location, input where to go, tap book, tap confirm)
Uber got out of the market way back, and the other ones are now getting up to speed to how advanced its user flow was. Grab now ask you to input where you want to go to first for example (like Uber back in the days).
I've never used Uber but I've used other apps (Lyft). And I have to say it looks pretty clear to me (of course I'm not drunk right now so...).
I don't expect you to understand the app if you use it for the first time when drunk, but I feel like if you've used it sober before and they didn't just completely change the UI you should be able to grok it. Maybe not if you are completely dead drunk, but I'd say you'd have the same problem with other apps you don't have already internalized completely.
What apps do you think would not have confused you in your state at the time?
A common dream theme for me is inability to operate a smartphone. The apps will lag or disappear. I'll tap on the wrong items and mistype words. It is a very 2021 interpretation on the "running late" dream trope.
That's a common reality for many. It's the reason I always buy the expensive flagship phone for my wife and myself. Lagging and disappearing apps (and hanging and/or rebooting during phone calls) is a constant occurrence on underpowered smartphones. Had such a phone once, and it did a "death through thousand papercuts" number on my psyche. Never again.
I have always found Google Maps incredibly confusing and difficult to use. Its never clear what mode you are in, how to go back or where back will take you? The confusion is compounded why I use CarPlay. Its so frustrating and dangerous. WTF!
It matters. Problem is, UI designed for company success does not look like UI designed for usability and customer satisfaction. Company success has little to do with customer satisfaction these days.
What Uber is doing is likely by design, for the most part. They do highlight the user journeys in the app that generate more revenue, over others that might be cheaper or more close to what you need. That usually means the lower-revenue paths get more convoluted and longer.
On the other hand if you’re price insensitive, you should be able to be on your way fairly easily. What they have is not necessarily bad UI, it just doesn’t have your optimum as the highest priority.
What does this even mean? Uber extracts money from you when you take rides. So how is a UI that makes it overly complicated to do that “designed to extract as much money from you as possible”?
You can make the happy easy path the most profitable choice, and make the less profitable choices harder to use.
Imagine a "tap here to go home" button that automatically calls an UberX Black Elite(tm) car and takes you to your already-designated home location. But if you want to use a regular uber, or uber pool or whatever, you have to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, don't forget to set your destination, maybe key in where you are right now since location services can be unreliable in some environments? Wouldn't want the car dispatched to the wrong location now would we?
Taking an Uber ride is easy as long as you don’t want to optimise for prices. I meant extracting as much money from you as possible in the context of other options in the app that might be more economical for you (if you don’t mind waiting, for example), not in the sense that Uber providing a service for you is somehow an involuntary extraction.
It wasn’t clear before so I edited the comment, my apologies.
They do, they just stopped calling it surge pricing (or anything else). They just show you the higher price with a microscopic grey text underneath that says 'there's a lot of demand, prices are higher now'. If you don't take that route often and know the average price, like when you're travelling or in a city that you're unfamiliar with, you'd be excused to think that's the normal price and just go for it instead of waiting a few more minutes or checking Lyft instead.
I feel this is posted as a joke (it might not be), but as a Dutchie, I've seen the following when people were stoned:
* Being fully capable of programming C++ (my friend, he's an expert at the language)
* Talking about quantum immortality (another friend)
* Losing one's English (me)
So My feedback to your text: you need to state how the experience is affecting you. I know how it'd affect me, when I'm too stoned I don't even understand what eating is, let alone use a website.
I agree. Being stoned is not a consistently hindering state like being drunk is. Drunk QA testing is valuable because alcohol affects things like judgement and motor control.
The QA tester ought to be using a dab rig with the same amount of shatter at the same time before testing to rule out any variance in quantity or potency between unit tests
Agreed. Once we've nailed metric and test kit we could expand our services to offer precise reproduction of Highness levels. Highness-on-Demand or Highness-as-a-Service could become indispensable supply chain elements for serious QA setups.
If you could record yourself getting high, and then doing the QA, that'd be worth it. I just want to make sure you're plenty ripped before you start the process.
I made and posted this idea yesterday, expecting exactly zero attention, so paying for Glitch didn't even cross my mind. It's on a /premium/ plan now, so it's ready for anything.
Anyhow, I do find this useful and will give it a try. Wish the page would have more info as to what is included in the report. Also, how high the person was.
If it is not a scam, I like it. Simple and clear, site usable without JS involved, to display a simple information, which is: "I am offering this. Call out if you want what I offer." Out. I hope this is working out for the person(s?) behind it. No asocial media stuff I need to sign up to, or other wall I need to climb over, to be able to use the service.
Thank you so much. Happy to hear you appreciated the straightforward approach. I'm so tired of signing up for services, managing passwords, and having buggy experiences.
I used to playtest the games I worked on blitzed... I found so many issues with them that way. I soft locked the first level of halo 2 that way (after release).
My coworker, Jaime Griesemer, did the controls for the warthog when he worked on halo. He told me he tested passing driving the vehicle with the controller upside down on hard, and using his tongue on easy. His goal was the controls were good enough his grandmother could beat the mission on easy.
The UI of US real estate websites horribly invasive and inefficient compared to European sites. They ask you to sign up or sign in via I auth for a simple property lookup. They prompt you to enter preferences then reload or ajax refresh the page. This is ridiculous, just offer a proper query filter and leave the user alone. I understand, the agencies want to push the data into some crm and follow up with retargeting etc. The victim is the user experience.
Letting the potential buyer/renter view the properties without obstacles is certainly the better approach than retargeting after pissing them off.
There is a saying that goes, "So easy a child could do it." This is a variation that goes, "So easy a stoned user can use it"
Also, there is the term "Child proof" for things that are hard to break or inadvertently misuse. A stoned user can test for "Stoner proof", which is conceptually similar perhaps.
Take the case of user input validation. It's not uncommon for systems or UX without validation to break when someone does something that just makes no sense. A stoned user is perhaps a fairly effective chaos monkey (google it) for testing in this case.
As an example, many (I mean many) years ago I found an online ordering site for wine that would allow you to enter negative numbers for quantity to ship. You could fill your cart with wine, then throw in -20 orders of some other wine and basically null out your order - or turn it into a refund. It also had you look up the shipping costs from an on-page table, and type it in. You could of course, type in negative shipping cost which it gladly added to your total.
QA is orderly process of utilizing techniques to create instability in stable systems.
Everything has a breaking point. QA is finding out if the breaking point is above specified threshold or not.
QA knows anything can be broken at some point. The job of QA is to verify that it meets specified criteria under certain stress conditions and document them.
QA is more than randomly pushing buttons hoping to pop open the box.
