However, if it decreases their performance but improves their feelings towards the work, might that still be a net positive?
In other words, if you are going to be a little more pokey and error prone, but on the whole more eager to work and more resistant to burn out, that could be better than a non-cannabis user that makes fewer errors, while continuously stressing out and thinking about changing jobs.
The opposite happens though for the more creative computer usage like video/photo editing, graphic design etc. there have been some severely boring projects that kept me procrastinating, but made tolerable with an influenced state
I'm not against people using cannabis, I just don't think this is the right frame. It shouldn't be a bandaid for being in a bad situation and it's kind of sad if one would give up their aspirations for betterment because the high masks them caring enough about it.
Such that I think this comment of calling it a band aid for being in a bad situation is overblown, and that the situation in general is more comparable to drinking coffee to remain alert.
I'd be curious to know if you also think that drinking coffee to overcome tiredness at work is also equal to giving up aspirations for betterment.
However in the long run, it ends up giving license to shitty employers to continue being shitty, and perhaps to become even worse.
Such employers need to feel the negative consequences of their behavior. Their business needs to suffer from high turnover and poor quality work, and if they don’t change then they need to fold.
Businesses are, at the end of the day, just people - people who live together and participate in the same society. I can’t honestly say that the best outcome is for workers to medicate themselves to be able to tolerate their bosses. Work doesn’t have to be so toxic and awful, you know?
If your employees are stressed to the point of burnout and are turning over every few months, do you think new trainees will make more or less errors than experienced employees under the influence of cannabis?
Will their training costs be more or less than the errors made by the person using cannabis?
As the employee, if you are stressed out and hitting a wall, and suddenly imbibing cannabis motivates you to continue working more than 10 cups of coffee would, but without the jitters, that seems like a better outcome than simply feeling terrible and also not getting the job done.
That's why using drugs is really stupid, they don't enhance your capabilities, they simply give you an illusion of that.
- Kids who discover that one wasn't a big deal will then be motivated to try others and see what else they were lied to about (I did, got around to most of my checklist too).
- Taboo about drugs in general prevents harm-mitigating conversations from happening that might protect someone from one specific drug or another (I turned out ok because of conversations like that).
I’m seeing the flaw with the study. Use a better drug. Cocaine gave us the 80s. In a re-appropriating of a phrase, just say no. Much rather had two 70s and skipped right to the 90s
There are many examples of musicians that were making great music while high, such like of course the Beatles, and from the 60's I especially like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, but he's also an example of a guy that went "crazy" because of too much drugs (rather combined with preexisting mental issues). Large part of his best music is not well known because he became a victim of his perfectionism (couldn't finish what he was doing) and generally his ambitious work wasn't selling well - the Beach Boys were at the start a very non-ambitious pop/rock band, just like the Beatles, so going in more ambitious direction meant losing sales, and the rest of the band didn't like it. I think weed enhances curiosity, so it's helping in doing something that's not typical, experimenting with things and seeking new sounds - and that was something that Brian Wilson excelled at in the time when he was high all the time, the "Pet Sounds" album is a highly regarded classic that shows what I'm talking about. And unlike the Beatles, he was the producer of his own music (Beatles' ideas were "filtered" and realized by amazing George Martin who was well-educated and wasn't high, I think).
Coding while high on weed is not very good for me, it's hard to concentrate, thoughts flow in too many directions. So I think that in art weed can be a positive, but in other things that need precision and strictly logical thinking, it's negative.
Overall weed makes me more lazy. I think that most of the time when high, I'm just browsing internet (that's still not exactly negative because I usually learn many interesting things, but that's not what I would want to spend many hours of my time on). Recently I had a period of smoking too much, and then I was actually doing less music - after that, when I was sober in my free time, I started practicing guitar more, because I was more focused on my goals and more organized in what I was doing. But I'm generally a very chaotic person with a very chaotic life, so I think my experiences can't prove anything, even for me.
So we would ask:
"Do you have any programmer's fuel?"
Also related, the phrase "fire an event" is a cannabis reference:
But never as close a friend as he wanted me to be! (Anyone who knew John or the stories about him may know what I am referring to.)
He usually had some decent pot, so when I ran out, I would sometimes visit him at his Berkeley apartment and we would smoke and do some Forth hacking.
I never heard about the "nine-N instruction" though.
I ran into John again at the Computer History Museum's Homebrew Computer Club reunion in 2013. When I re-introduced myself, he didn't seem to remember me at first. Then his eyes lit up and he asked, "Did we work out?"
no info on that other stuff mentioned (!)
It doesn't seem like they tested "boring" 9-5 programming, or programming net new features.
The real question is: How do I use cannabis correctly? What can it actually do for you?
From my experience smoking once every 2 months has net benefit... It cannot help you program but it can help you higher level ideas related to programming. It can answer the why better than it can answer the how. It can be a reset and motivation and prevent you from burn out even if you are working more than 60 hrs a week. But it is dangerous in that you want to get the relief constantly, so from my experience once every 2 months is fine.
Excellent questions, and I think this is the right way to approach this substance: as a scientific inquiry, not a vice to feel ashamed of, or a godsend magic substance that solves all problems.
> smoking once every 2 months has net benefit
Strong agree. Specifically, what I've observed is after long periods of productivity with the brain "loaded" with a lot of context, a joint can help uncover lateral connections and find new perspectives and approaches. However when the brain is "empty" as on a Monday morning, smoking is just counter-productive, since there are no connections to be made, no new perspectives to be had, and the lateral thinking just means loss of productivity (focus on the wrong things).
The fundamental difficulty is with the "once" part of the plan. It's very easy to stay in the smoking loop after the first day of use (get the relief constantly like you say), and it can turn into a week of use. For many people, the risk of losing weeks to substance use loop + one more week to get back to baseline mood might end up as net negative, despite the initial benefits.
For some definition of "need", I suppose.
Such positive effects could outweigh the decline in cognitive performance observed in this paper. For example, let's say that being high has a -0.2 effect on cognitive performance, but a +0.5 effect on alleviating psychological pain, then the user is still +0.3 overall.
Too bad treating psychological issues through substance use is not a winning strategy in the long term (due to habituation), but maybe temporary and occasional substance use can be a helpful stepping stone toward finding more sustainable alternative strategies, although the dangers of addiction are a big risk too, so it could go either way.
Wait, how do you make cannabis enhance task focus? I'm unfamiliar
In my personal case it is measurably and consistently transformative for focus, opennness and creativity. To the extent that it basically feels like magic at this point and I’ve only really been working with cannabis for a couple years.
Other people it just seems to put to sleep
I’m exceptionally rigorous with my dosing and have experimented with terpenes/cannabinoid profiles to the extent where I know the relative responses I should expect are more or less deterministic.
To be clear though I am not making a comment on the study, I would generally suggest that specific task focus is impaired.
Its more of a question of, what aspect of your mindset is holding you back from performance. If you need to be exceptionally detailed oriented like a surgeon then you should definitely not be high, but if you’re framing out the logic for a protobuf interpreter, you might actually work faster
So in my view, cannabis can help alleviate tedium and improve task focus for the most boring and monotonous tasks. But any time I've tried to tackle a thinking problem stoned, the results are generally zero to negative.
I find it is detrimental when needing to do detail arithmetic, but in high level geometric and abstract relationships it can be a huge benefit.
Perhaps the stoning material of choice alters what you find very interesting.
Occasionally you'll have some crazy idea and follow it, the kind of ideas that you don't have normally.
But in general your productivity will be very low and results poor.
Don't do any kind of drugs or alcohol if you need your brain to be sharp. It's nonsense.
I said that I end up doing stuff that I usually don't, that's a different thing.
This is very rare in Europe.
Speak for yourself
The study is also not about user-facing software development, it's about leetcode algorithmic puzzles as performed mostly by students still in education and without professional experience. Despite their prevalence in interviews and impassioned defense of relevancy, at least I encounter very little of that sort of coding in day to day applications development of any sort.
Hashing it Out? Understanding Psychoactive Substance Use in Programming
Most developers mid level and upwards from majority of the companies I have held a role in are not spending the majority of their day coding, they're writing specs, doing meetings, providing guidance to their junior counterparts, assisting in support tickets on call, and if you had time, documentation. You were quite lucky to meet 30% time in any day/week/month/year spent writing code. The vast majority of developers were also not developing new, foundational code either.
So I disagree, its not misleading, its actually relevant, and arguably even more mentally stimulating than all the cruft that you actually do every day. At the least you're reusing and thinking about all the DSA knowledge everyone has lost touch with from decades ago.
It's orthogonal to your day job. The "cruft" you talk about is how we remove ambiguity and fill in details so that work isn't a series of free-floating gedanken experiments. If you're able to apply codified knowledge like LeetCode to a programming task it means someone else has already done the heavy lifting.
We "lost touch" with DSA knowledge because it turns out that it's easier to work things up from base principles using the scientific method than memorizing crap that worked for the vacuum tube generation. We don't *need* a reductive LUT approach to the process anymore.
