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Tobacco Free Hiring Practice
Today I saw a job description for a remote developer/analyst position that had the following statement:

"Where permitted by applicable state law, [company name] will not hire any candidate who uses tobacco or any nicotine product."

I don't know what to say except that minutes ago I was wavering in my decision to leave IT.

I wonder if the company funds the insurance for employees and this is part of a cost reduction effort.

My company doesn’t forbid smoking, but smokers have to pay an extra fee each month as a smoker.

Of course the logical next question would be, “why just smoking?” Why not charge extra for being obese, excessive alcohol consumption, or any number of other lifestyle based factors which could increase medical costs? Not that I’d want to give them any ideas.

This is the real question our society should be struggling with. How pedantic and prejudiced should we get about what people have to pay for their freedoms? If it's legal, should people be financially discriminated against? Is a statistical basis really reasonable to use as the basis for individual discrimination? It seems the courts have decided it is not when it comes to things like predictive policing (at leaning that way). But it seems in civil issues, if you can show a correlation, you can legally say "fuck you". Of course that only works if is not a protected class, which perhaps increases the illustration of the irony.
Have you ever been around cigarette smoker when you have a cold? I don't think you quite understand how much smoking/vaping is saying fuck you to those around you.
There are plenty of activities that are as bad or worse than simply being around a smoker (while they are not smoking).

What I'm getting is that you don't like something and think it should be fine to discriminate against those individuals. If this is the paradigm we're going for, then let us also discriminate on politics, clothing choices, speech accents, etc. Why should we employ people who we don't agree with?

> Of course the logical next question would be, “why just smoking?”

This is not a logical question because anybody w/ half a brain knows the answer: It’s just smoking because decades of legislation, media coverage, cultural change, demonization, ostracization, etc.

The next logical question is how they define smoker, and how they enforce it.
It’s self reported. We have to check a checkbox during open enrollment.

I assume there is a heavy penalty if they find out a person lied, but I don’t smoke, so I never paid much attention to it.

There might be blurry lines at the margins, but it's a simple enough concept.

A person that puts one end of something in their mouth and while the other end is on fire.

This random company job ad was your tipping point of leaving IT? I think I can point out far worse things large corporations are doing in this industry.
>I think I can point out far worse things large corporations are doing in this industry

For me it's like a pointer to all those "far worse things" I've seen and heard about during the last few decades, that popped up at the exact moment I decided to check out a particular opening.

That seems to depend on US state. Would be strange to enforce that for a remote position.

https://www.quora.com/Can-an-employer-exclude-you-from-hire-...

"Thirty U.S. states have enacted “lifestyle discrimination” statutes that prohibit employers from refusing to hire tobacco smokers, as long as their smoking is limited to times when they are off duty and away from the workplace."

"The other twenty states permit employers to refuse to hire smokers."

  • smt88
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  • 4 months ago
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Everyone at the company can pay less for health insurance if the company has one of these policies.

If it upsets anyone, the issue is that health care is tied to employment in this country.

Age is the biggest factor. Not having a spouse or kids is a factor. Not hiring someone recovering from cancer or other health conditions could save on insurance.

This policy is in other countries without employer health insurance. For example Rebel.com has that policy in Canada. Health insurance costs as the only reason is not true for every company doing this.

  • smt88
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  • 4 months ago
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> Age is the biggest factor. Not having a spouse or kids is a factor. Not hiring someone recovering from cancer or other health conditions could save on insurance.

It's impractical to refuse to hire single people and illegal to refuse to hire people based on their age or health conditions. You can't even ask about age.

> Health insurance costs as the only reason is not true for every company doing this.

Smokers get sick more and miss more work[1].

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598486/

Same could be said about being overweight or having health preconditions.
  • smt88
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  • 4 months ago
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It's illegal for the company to ask people about their health preconditions and illegal to hire based on them.

40% of the US is overweight, so no company is going to have a policy that they won't hire overweight people.

Replace "tobacco and nicotine" with another addictive substance your environment has taught you to dislike and suddenly it becomes an understandable policy.
  • sph
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  • 4 months ago
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Understandable as in "these people have no life experience, empathy and have no idea how humans outside their minuscule, homogeneous bubble operate, do they?"

Would you like to be managed by someone that doesn't understand people and has not lived through any major life milestone, but have the social maturity of a 16 years old high schooler?

"Where permitted by applicable state law, [company name] will not hire any candidate who uses coffee or any caffeine product."
"Where permitted by applicable state law, [company name] will not hire any candidate who uses rust or any borrow-checker product."
Name drop this company so I can immediately short them.
If the company can save health insurance for non-smoking employees it sounds pretty logical. Smoking is a important health factor but sure as the other comments say, what about alc, overweight...
Good to do your part fighting the expansion of WrongThink.
25 years ago, when smoking was still accepted and ubiquitous in Europe[1], I studied engineering physics with a focus on semiconductor engineering. Naturally I spent some time in clean rooms and visited companies with clean rooms. They said they had the right to discriminate against smokers when hiring. They also said it was useless to lie, because they could immediately see on their monitoring when a smoker entered the clean room.

Not necessarily the reason in OPs case, just saying there can be valid reasons to discriminate against smokers.

[1] We once had a visit from a former student of our faculty who went to the USA for his masters. He gave a lecture about his experiences and when asked what the biggest differences were he said, he was shocked to see people smoking in our university hallways. If it wasn't for that event I would have completely forgotten how prevalent smoking still was at the end of the 90s.

Not as plausible for a remote software engineering position.
Still doesn't seem valid to me. A smoker could shower and stuff before work and only use a nicotine patch until they're off-duty again.
You can't shower your lungs. Have you seen the pictures of smoker lungs? They look completely different from healthy lungs.
Are the lungs causing contamination, especially if wearing a non-vented N95?
The clean room work environments I saw didn't have people wear masks. They had special suits though, that made them look a bit like people in the old Star Trek movies. The reason that was explain to us was that working several hours every day in an environment with high volume vertical air flow was uncomfortable without padding in the shoulder parts.
  • sph
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  • 4 months ago
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I use nicotine patches for my ADHD, would I be excluded?

But seriously, name this company so they can be laughed at and shamed for idiotic discrimination practices. And so that one doesn't risk interviewing and working for silly people.

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