Back to Blogging (and rambling)

Well, I'm back after being on break for a couple of weeks. Anyway, starting next week I'll resume blogging about recruiting, interviewing, and management issues.

In the meantime, I realized something the other day. Among my circle of friends I do not know of a single smoker. Not a one. Of course some of those people might have smoked back in the day, but none of them do now. And I don’t think I’m a statistical oddity in this, either, at least here in California.

And yet, at my last company I saw a lot of our engineers hanging out in front of our building and puffing on cigarettes. Many of them were people I never expected would be smokers – not that there is really a smoker profile, of course. Still, in my experience most engineers I have met do not smoke, as far as I'm aware. So it was a bit surprising to me that so many of my colleagues liked to take a drag every few hours. And not only that, they were some of the brightest people at the company!

You might ask, what does this have to do with recruiting? Well, very little, actually. Except that once I ran across a company that required candidates to sign a statement that they were not smokers. I think it had to do with getting a discounted group rate on health insurance. Now INAL, and I don’t know if this is legal. It’s entirely possible someone might claim that a smoking habit is a disability and is federally protected. Still, the company seemed to be not so subtly discouraging smokers from applying.

Anyway, I began to wonder why people smoke nowadays, especially engineers. It should be abundantly clear to everyone by now that smoking can cause serious medical harm; even the tobacco companies have admitted it. And I expect that engineers are pretty smart people as a whole. So I asked myself why they would make a conscious, rational decision to continue smoking in the face of all the evidence that smoking is bad for them.

Then I finally realized (after someone bluntly pointed it out to me) that there might be an upside to the smoking habit. Our smokers regularly gathered outside the building and spent time not just smoking, but also shooting the breeze about what was going on in their respective parts of the organization. And in a large(r) company, current information about what was going on organizationally was like gold. And perhaps this information, and the relationships built with their fellow outcasts, was in some small part a contributor to their success within the organization.

Now of course I'm not suggesting that anyone should take up smoking just to build connections and improve their knowledge acquisition process. But this example points out how social networks (the in-person kind) can form under perverse conditions and create bonds that might not have existed otherwise. And it also shows that trying to screen out smokers in the recruiting process may be a bit counterproductive.