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.