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A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

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Re: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

#131

Post by kadoban »

stareblinkstare wrote: post #93
honkycat wrote: post #90

I love smoking weed. I smoke pretty much every day. Just a little bit, a puff on the vape pen to get my groove going after work. I find it USELESS for problem solving or productivity, but hey: I don't need to be productive 24 hours a day. I just want something to take the edge off while I play a strategy game or fart around on a game prototype. I NEVER do it during work or when I have to drive. I started smoking weed…

> not funding drug lords. I avoid illegal drugs for this reason. I hate to break it to you... [Edit: it's best if I expand this comment. The people who currently sell "legal" weed whitewashed illegal operations and coordinated it with lawmakers to put them at the top. Chinese, oddly enough, play a big part at this, since we're on an anti-China bend right now it might be useful to know. This whole legal drug thing...…

You seem to be defining "drug lord" to be including even those that legally grow weed, then using that naming to say they're bad?

Re: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

#133

Post by honkycat »

stareblinkstare wrote: post #93
honkycat wrote: post #90

I love smoking weed. I smoke pretty much every day. Just a little bit, a puff on the vape pen to get my groove going after work. I find it USELESS for problem solving or productivity, but hey: I don't need to be productive 24 hours a day. I just want something to take the edge off while I play a strategy game or fart around on a game prototype. I NEVER do it during work or when I have to drive. I started smoking weed…

> not funding drug lords. I avoid illegal drugs for this reason. I hate to break it to you... [Edit: it's best if I expand this comment. The people who currently sell "legal" weed whitewashed illegal operations and coordinated it with lawmakers to put them at the top. Chinese, oddly enough, play a big part at this, since we're on an anti-China bend right now it might be useful to know. This whole legal drug thing...…

And the people who work at the farms are exploited pretty terribly as well.

Same with the meat packers, the fruit pickers. Same with the people working in all of the factories and shipping plants and driving the trucks. The invisible labor we are all surrounded by every day that touches literally everything I can see right now, aside from the tree outside my window.

And all of the money I spend inevitably trickles upwards to people who are going to use it to do things I consider evil like destroying our natural world for profit.

But! That is not a problem I am going to solve over-night. I can try and tailor my consumption to products that I vet and are hopefully more ethically sourced than alternatives. Even doing this is of questionable utility.

“No ethical consumption under capitalism” and all that.

Re: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

#134

Post by PragmaticPulp »

thewarrior wrote: post #94
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drugs significantly alter cognitive processes and perceptions. I know that reads like a duh comment because that's literally why people take them, but it's amazing how frequently drugs users forget that the drugs alter their perceptions of how the drug is impacting their lives. I've fortunately only had a few of my friends succumb to addictions, but it was surreal to watch them remain convinced that the drugs (includ…

I think that people thinking that mind altering substances cannot be a useful tool should keep an open mind about it and let those people who are getting real results out of it keep doing their thing. And yes these people do exist. They are not going to be too open about it because of how taboo it is. It’s well known that many of the greatest rock bands, highly productive mathematicians like Paul Erdos and comedians…

> highly productive mathematicians like Paul Erdos

I think Paul Erdos' stimulant usage has been blown out of proportion. According to his biography, he took "10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin" ( https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/ho... ) which is, believe it or not, lower than a lot of people's commonly prescribed ADHD doses today. Erdos also published a lot of his best works before taking up non-caffeine stimulants, so it wasn't exactly the driving force behind his productivity.

Anyone using Erdos to justify an excessive or non-prescribed/non-medical stimulant habit has misunderstood the history.

> Steve Jobs swore that it changed him.

Steve Jobs was also famously terrible to everyone around him and died prematurely because he firmly believed he could cure pancreatic cancer with an all-fruit diet. Which of his properties are we to ascribe to the mind-altering drugs and which are we to overlook?

Again, using Steve Jobs to justify drug consumption (or anything, really) is missing the point that he was a unique person.

Re: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

#135

Post by neveradmitmyid »

I've been a heavy, 1 oz. of Indica a week smoker for decades, while being an extremely productive lead and principal software engineer on dozens of highly visible tech products. I am part of a heavy smoking, high tech collective of startup and career research individuals from companies people use everyday. I start my day with a combination of THC and caffeine, which folds into a deep work and research focus lasting the entire day. Over time, fellow high tech heavy smokers have identified one another, forming a moderately secret heavy smokers network that support one another in non-legal places, sometimes meet at big conventions, or we realize a number of us are at an airport at the same time and all meet in the smoker's den.

Re: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

#136

Post by frank_nitti »

ineptech wrote: post #100
flatiron wrote: post #15

I got my three kids desks for christmas. Put them down to bed for the night and smoke a little weed. I was shocked how I couldn’t follow ikea desk instructions. Got frustrated and decided to try again sober. I was super shocked the next day how easy it was to follow when sober.

From my experience and some of the comments, it seems like a common thread is that weed is good for "clean the garage" tasks - not cognitively challenging but tedious, something you'd like to be distracted from - and not good for reading and retaining new information. In programming terms, I think it's great for refactoring, or let's say working through a bunch of corner cases on some weird business data you have to…

Generally agree with this, with one specific addition:

Spend some sober hours wrapping my head around some new concept (e.g. programming pattern/paradigm or theory topic) or just reading a large codebase for the first time. At a certain point, my brain is just “done”. Then a small toke of some good weed with the intention of checking out and relaxing. More often than not, the effect is the opposite: the complex material i had spent the previous hours analyzing starts to piece itself together in new ways and my energy and interest in the task is restored to 100%.

While it may not be the right time to hammer out a complete implementation, it has often assisted in that crucial step of “getting it”. This happened for me often with topics that require a new perspective e.g. vector calculus and functional programming patterns

Edit: for reference, I am a heavy user (typically on 2+ doses/day), with occasional long breaks of weeks/months. I believe “tolerance” plays the dominant role in programmers’ experience with this. After a month long break, there is NO way I’m able or interested to work with complex systems of any sort when under the influence.

Re: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

#137

Post by netizen-936824 »

TrippinTraveler wrote: post #58

Anecdotal but I'm a "programmer" at BigTech™ and smoke all day every day, and at this point I can't tell if it helps me or hinders me, but when you smoke all the time, most of these stories you are hearing about in the comments don't happen. At this point in my life, it's just a little "pick me up". It's by no means a micro dose as I probably smoke a gram or 2 a day. But when you live high it's a different kind of be…

I'm in a similar situation where I use cannabinoids basically 24/7. But for me I don't like inhalation anymore because it spikes the blood concentration too far and too fast for my liking. Edibles not only provide a more consistent and long lasting effect, but also saves money if you make your own from the flower you would have smoked. Part of this is because a similar inhaled dose compare to eaten, the eaten dose will last longer and be slightly more efficacious due to first pass metabolism.

Re: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

#138

Post by beiller »

stareblinkstare wrote: post #93
honkycat wrote: post #90

I love smoking weed. I smoke pretty much every day. Just a little bit, a puff on the vape pen to get my groove going after work. I find it USELESS for problem solving or productivity, but hey: I don't need to be productive 24 hours a day. I just want something to take the edge off while I play a strategy game or fart around on a game prototype. I NEVER do it during work or when I have to drive. I started smoking weed…

> not funding drug lords. I avoid illegal drugs for this reason. I hate to break it to you... [Edit: it's best if I expand this comment. The people who currently sell "legal" weed whitewashed illegal operations and coordinated it with lawmakers to put them at the top. Chinese, oddly enough, play a big part at this, since we're on an anti-China bend right now it might be useful to know. This whole legal drug thing...…

In Canada it's not so much how that works especially Ontario where I am at. Yes some illegal sales got rolled up into the legal market, but very little. It's very strict to be legit here. All the illegal money for rolled up into real estate instead looks like. :)

Re: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

#139

Post by sheepybloke »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #116

> Such cannabis usage, however, is in conflict with anti-drug poli- cies currently enacted for many software engineering jobs: 29% of our sample reported they had taken a drug test for a programming- related job, a hiring practice that may limit developer application pools. What? 29% ... seriously? That's outrageous.

I've had to take one for a job because it was a government contractor position. I wonder if that's related to why the response is higher?

Re: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

#140

Post by ineptech »

vlovich123 wrote: post #108
ineptech wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience and some of the comments, it seems like a common thread is that weed is good for "clean the garage" tasks - not cognitively challenging but tedious, something you'd like to be distracted from - and not good for reading and retaining new information. In programming terms, I think it's great for refactoring, or let's say working through a bunch of corner cases on some weird business data you have to…

Hard disagree, at least for me. I’ve tried doing lots of different programming tasks and they all take longer. Now it might not be as annoying to do the refactor but it takes more time since I lose track or get distracted. Not sure about the quality of the code either since it’s hard to measure objectively when you’re making mistakes in the moment. Maybe creative technical problem solving it has a benefit. However, f…

I'm not surprised, I think it's just extremely subjective. I mean, I find it extremely hard to focus on a programming task if there's music playing, but I know people who listen to music all day while they work.
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