My experience as a 28 year old former heroin addict is equally as anecdotal but contradictory. As preteen and teenager I was a big pot smoker and later cocaine enthusiast. I medicated throughout those teenage years but never saw opioid pain medication or heroin even though I was fairly deep into the NYC drug scene. If you had asked then if I would ever inject heroin I would laugh at you.
Around my freshmen year of college (2007) pain pills started showing up. They were an instant hit and all my friends start doing them. I explicitly remember sniffing my first oxycodone in my dorm and thinking "this is what I've been missing my entire life". My life spiraled downhill quickly. As a lifelong programmer / math enthusiast I managed to get to my second semester junior year before my lifestyle really caught up. By then I was homeless, facing serious felony charges, OD countless times, doing whatever I could for my fix. Oxycodone was around for a few years before they reformulated and then you needed heroin to get high. I was shooting it only a week after first trying it. For the next several years I went from a middle class college student to a IV homeless heroin junkie. I caught very serious charges and took drug court. Violated drug court 3 years in and then spent a year in a bad NY jail where I leaserned to fight and throw urine on people. I learned to act like a fucking savage. I got out and finished drug court only to get addicted again.
I finally got on Suboxone about 4 years ago. I finished my degree and went from homeless to making 6 figures in those years.
I'm literally the only success story I know. For most of my peers they died or are doing long prison bids. We all started from pills, and I can honestly say I would never have started if it weren't for them. However I recognize the need for them and don't know if serious restriction is the right way either
I'm a proponent of whiteboard tests and am in charge of conducting for potential hires on my team.
However I don't see how they guard against an outdated skillset? My company employees five Infor Sys21 RPG programmers who thought the term "web service" was synonymous with SOAP until I ran a workshop.4 out of 5 worked most of their career for IBM and all have bachelor's or masters in CS, EE, or Math. With a weekend of refreshing they would definitely pass a whiteboard for me (although not necessarily with the most optimized solution). They are all over 50 btw. And work slow and steady (but efficient) with no burnout in site.
I can come up with a "good" solution for nearly every question related to algo on leetcode and have very in demand skills as well as been the top SO poster and core open source developer on a Java platform that is #1 in a Gartner magic quadrant. At 27 and am on the verge of burnout that as happened as a result of getting large Adderall / Vyvanse scripts (legally) and being on the computer for nearly 14 hours every day.
Additionally many institution's gaurd against this by having systems that hide the security question from the customer service representative and only authenticate on a correct answer. If they are showing the "secret questions" to their entire customer service department you don't even need to worry about outside attacks because your organization is ripe from the inside
I can just imagine my mother getting flustered after reading the words "certificate signing (sic?) Request" and stop reading at "client certificate". I can think of very elaborate security measures. The trick is to make them sound easy and relatable to a ranch hand and 1960s housewife. These people smart but they don't have the same life experiences
Around my freshmen year of college (2007) pain pills started showing up. They were an instant hit and all my friends start doing them. I explicitly remember sniffing my first oxycodone in my dorm and thinking "this is what I've been missing my entire life". My life spiraled downhill quickly. As a lifelong programmer / math enthusiast I managed to get to my second semester junior year before my lifestyle really caught up. By then I was homeless, facing serious felony charges, OD countless times, doing whatever I could for my fix. Oxycodone was around for a few years before they reformulated and then you needed heroin to get high. I was shooting it only a week after first trying it. For the next several years I went from a middle class college student to a IV homeless heroin junkie. I caught very serious charges and took drug court. Violated drug court 3 years in and then spent a year in a bad NY jail where I leaserned to fight and throw urine on people. I learned to act like a fucking savage. I got out and finished drug court only to get addicted again.
I finally got on Suboxone about 4 years ago. I finished my degree and went from homeless to making 6 figures in those years.
I'm literally the only success story I know. For most of my peers they died or are doing long prison bids. We all started from pills, and I can honestly say I would never have started if it weren't for them. However I recognize the need for them and don't know if serious restriction is the right way either