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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: net.jobs
Subject: Re: Drug Testing
Message-ID: <624@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Sun, 16-Mar-86 08:16:36 EST
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.624
Posted: Sun Mar 16 08:16:36 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Mar-86 01:24:07 EST
References: <263@bu-cs.UUCP>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 41

Many of the best software and hardware people I've worked with have
been drug users.  Some of them have been drug abusers.  Some of them
have used no pleasure drugs (non-medical) at all.  Whether they used
drugs seemed to have no relationship to whether they did a good job,
were moral, etc.  I knew one manager who brought a 6-pack of beer to
his interview and drank it during the interview.  He was hired.  I
worked for him.  He taught me a hell of a lot of good things and never
let his addiction interfere with his work (or vice verse).  In the same
company (not Sun) a kilo of pot was brought to work one evening to
weigh it out and break it down into pounds and 1/2 pounds for the
various employees who had chipped in to buy it.  (This was in the days
when ordinary mortals could *afford* to buy a pound of dope  :-)  Of
course they closed the door of the office, so it was OK.  This company
also had a nationwide secure mail system (which Unix has never had, as
far as I can tell), and it was used for cross-country drug dealing.
On the other hand, one straight-arrow I worked with who looked and
acted an awful lot like Clark Kent was in reality Supercoder.  However,
he was a pretty bad manager, and ended up trying to fire me for
insubordination because our technical viewpoints disagreed.

People who want to test me for drug usage, psychological factors, hair
length, beardedness, sexual preference, profanity, dress code, or any
other irrelevant factor are unlikely to be much fun to work with anyway.
I'll go my way and they can go theirs.

[OK, OK, I admit it, I *was* pressured to stop wearing skirts to work
by the ex-President of Sun Microsystems, Owen Brown.  But, at the time,
he and the rest of the company were figuring out whether they could all
work together.  I decided not to rock the boat, stopped wearing
skirts, and stayed with Sun.  I later discovered that this incident was
the first major schism between conservative Owen and the more
enlightened founders/managers at Sun, who supported my wearing whatever
I wanted.  Owen left some time thereafter and the dress code faded into
oblivion, as Sunny Kirsten so outrageously demonstrated.]

My favorite part of this debate is realizing that organizations which
turn down people for irrelevant reasons will lose both by diverting
their effort from satisfying their customers, and by rejecting people
who would have been better qualified "except for this factor".
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa