Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
Most companies favor hiring average programmers that fit the mold over "weird people" even if they are amazing at their work. If Microsoft is doing the opposite and targets autistic programmers, then good for them! I see no reason to complain about that.
And for the record, the "myth" he is dispelling is a common misunderstanding of statistics. I can say that almost all rapists are men. Obviously that doesn't mean that all men are rapists, it means that the probability that a given rapist is a man is very high. It also doesn't mean that females can't be rapists.
In the same way, I can say that a "genius programmer" likely is on the autistic spectrum, without saying that all autists are geniuses and without saying that you can't be a genius programmer without being an autist.
Do they? At my company we half-seriously joke when programmers are too socially well adjusted, that they won't fit in. We prefer a bit of spergy.
I don't have any idea what 'most' companies think, or if large companies even have consistent trends in their own thinking.
Large parts of the research book Moral Mazes talk about this and various pieces of evidence for it.
I have asked this question to people responsible for hiring and not one have answered that they would prefer the programmer doing double the amount of work. The "inconvenience" to the rest of the team that a peer is only working half as many hours is costlier than the benefit of doubled work. My conclusion: Fitting in >> Output. Maybe it is different in Silicon Valley. I don't know. :)
Also, your joke is an oxymoron. If someone is socially well adjusted then they will fit in. One key characteristic of Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that it is hard for them to fit in and they may not even want to. You write "we prefer a bit of spergy" which probably means that your workplace has preferences for how employees should behave. Which means that there is something in your workplace to fit into which means trouble for employees with ASD.
Given a person that does absolutely nothing but working. Like not communicating unless it is work related and necessary, not partaking in joking, not going to lunches, not talking, not chit-chatting... Would that person "fit in"?
I don't buy that latter claim either, and it's worth talking about how the "autistic programming genius" stereotype is harmful to everyone, autistic or not, but writing an article that's centered around committing the base rate fallacy doesn't mean much of anything.
Imagine a gaussian curve compared to the average (bi modal)
Autistic curve is somehow a little centered below the «average curve» when it comes to learning, because of the sociopathic trait making them tougher for them to enter the mold.
Then this curve will be more spread than the non autisitic one: those who fail will fail harder, whereas those who make it at the end will have learned either to compensate the lack of «empathy» with observations and/or working more the raw knowledge.
For every «gifted» autistic there is at least one that failed harder than average in academic field.
A handicap is like a marathon you are given to run with a distanced point of departure: it will be tougher for you in life and you may have to work more than the others to develop your raw running skills to make it to the finish line.
People able to make it, are both still handicaped (mold adaptation) but also they over-developed skills to compensate. But they often don't complain; they finally want to be seen as normal. So they silence their pain, and probably have met people like them that failed without deserving it. Plus, they have experienced bullying and may want to make a low profile to avoid it again.
HR in Tech industry at my opinion have developed an intuition of the profile of autistic coders and are taking advantages of them.
They are weak, they fear to unionize because they fear retaliation, and they don't like how they are represented.
Most of them who believed once that computer science would be the saving path, may now be disenchanted. But like people who turned the table once, maybe they don't care thinking of the next plan to finally achieve happiness for what remains of their life.
Overcoming a handicap gives you both confidence, and doubt.
Oh! By the way, a handicap does not come from your differences, but from the look the society is having on you.
I have no doubt, being black or a women... is not making you significantly different, the handicap comes from being treated differently... especially by Human Resources.
You can't determine the probability of an individual like that, at least without more data. I can say that almost all the people who contract HIV are african american or men who have sex with men, that does not mean that the probability of any given homosexual or black person having HIV is high (greater than 50%). The vast majority of men have never raped a woman and will never rape a woman.
It used to be that an employee needed to step up to the needs, expectations and social compatibilities of the company they're going into. Certainly that's still much of an expectation today; as you mention employers prefer average & expected, vs exceptional (including all meanings of the word), though there's a bit more two-way action mixed in especially with physical disabilities and discrimination.
But what actionable changes are mentioned in the article, and what are their tradeoffs? Dropping a degree requirement is obviously sensible that benefits pretty much everybody, and has been for a long time. But the biggest issues seem to be social and communicative processes with team development of large projects. How can things change there? Any great ideas need to be presented and gain traction and acceptance in order to be adopted in a larger team environment. So much of design and implementation is not just technical creation of stuff that works, but social championship of gaining consensus so that software works together.
In the high speed development environment of the larger commercial games industry, there's no real place for people to sit off by themselves and code some grand project solo to avoid those issues.
Recognizing the strengths of autistic coders is great. Doing it specifically and explicitly because you think they're easier to abuse is a big problem.
I have a friend who was recently hired under Microsoft's autism hiring program, and is still really excited about it. I'm trying to decide if I should show her this article or not. It would almost certainly sour her feelings on the whole deal, and I'm holding out hope that her direct managers are more humane than this "they work like machines" motherfucker.
Obviously a tangent, but this strongly depends on how you define rape. Recent CDC studies find that a huge number of men report being "made to penetrate" women against their will. Most normal people would classify this (sex against your will) as rape, but the CDC only classified it as "sexual assault". Unsurprisingly, if you define men being forced to have sex with women as "not rape", then tautologically almost all rapists are men.
I have the feeling that as society moves towards true gender equality, we'll realise this problem is much less gendered than people currently assume.
Having said that, the UK has some pretty clearly defined laws. They're written well, and are easy to understand and are not ambiguous. There are 3 laws relevant here. i) Rape ii) Assault by penetration iii) Sexual Assault. (I'm making the assumption that offences against children are different.)
Rape and Sexual Assault by Penetration are equally serious and are almost identically written, except rape requires the penetration to be done by a penis.
Women can't be rapists under UK law. Women can be perpetrators of the equally serious crime of assault by penetration. Men can be the victims of rape or assault by penetration. Men and women can be the perpetrators or victims of sexual assault.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/contents
All crimes of rape and assault by penetration are under reported by victims, and under-recorded by police. It's likely that these crimes with male victims are less reported (more under reported) (and less recorded) than these crimes with female victims.
The UK has 2 sets of crime data. The first is what police claim has been reported. (These are not seen as statistically robust because of variations in what police record). The second is the annual Crime Survey of England and Wales. These are seen as robust statistics.
Here's the reports for "Crime in England and Wales" for year ending March 2015 and year ending December 2015. Note that the sexual offences here also include offences against children. I think that's an unhelpful
http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandj...
http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandj...
The reliance on police recording, and the lack of reporting about sexual offences in CESW means that any stats the UK has for sexual offences are seen by government statisticians as being unreliable.
https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/archive/assessment/as...
From "year ending December 2015":
> Police recorded crime figures showed an increase of 29% in all sexual offences for the year ending December 2015 compared with the previous year (up from 80,265 to 103,614; Table 10a), reaching the highest volume recorded since the introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) in April 2002 and marking the first time that the total number of offences has exceeded 100,000 in a given year. The latest rise remains among the largest year-on-year increases since the introduction of the NCRS, although it is not as steep as those seen in the years ending March, June and September 2015 (36% to 41%).
> Police recorded rape increased by 30% (to 34,741 offences) compared with the previous year, while other sexual offences increased by 29% (to 68,873 offences). Offence categories that directly relate to sexual offences against children[2] contributed 44% to the total increase in sexual offences recorded by the police.
> [2] This includes "Rape of a male/female child under 16", "Rape of a male/female child under 13", "Sexual assault on a male/female child under 13", "Sexual activity involving a child under 13/under 16" and "Abuse of children through sexual exploitation".
The charity rapecrisis leans towards gender neutral language. http://rapecrisis.org.uk/statistics.php
> Approximately 85,000 women and 12,000 men are raped in England and Wales alone every year; that's roughly 11 rapes (of adults alone) every hour
> Nearly half a million adults are sexually assaulted in England and Wales each year
With all these caveats to say that we don't really know the picture around sexual offences in England and Wales I still think it's reasonable to say that sexual offences against adults tend to be committed by men, and that while anyone can be a victim of these crimes (and certainly it's not as overwhelmingly gendered as some people suggest) the victims tend to be female.
But the point being that a woman forcing a man to have sex counts as none of those things. It only ends up in that list if she sticks something in his butt.
Your use of "force" here is unhelpful. We know that juries don't convict because they feel that force is necessary for rape - thus women who don't fight back are not seen by juries to have been forced into sex.
It's much better for us to focus on consent, and to educate people that consent can't involve coercion.
That recognises the under-conviction of rape for women victims; and it also promotes the rights of men to not consent to sex and to have that recognized as the abusive crime that it is.
My aim here - just in case it's not clear - is to make it easier for men to report crimes committed against them, and to make law enforcement record those crimes, and to make juries convict those crimes. I also want to make those things happen for female victims. (And here where I use male / female I don't want to limit to a gender binary).
Put a narcissistic (or whatever you want to call this type of people - maybe sociopathic? I am not a psychologist) CEO or a manager in a room with autistic software developers and you will could have some great things churned out, but there are probably going to be a couple of heart attacks and maybe worse, if you are unlucky. For sure, there will be some very unhappy people.
It is an honest question. I really dont know. I am sure he had some great technical insights, but I haven't seen anything that would lead me to believe that he was actually a genius coder or engineer.
Dont get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. I just dont see this particular incident as anything special. Bill Gates didn't actually do anything except annotate the spec and throw some ideas out there.
Except you question his technical ability, ignore/excuse evidence of said ability, and call him a narcissist.
> In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou[3] gave an upper bound of (5/3)n. This was improved, thirty years later, to (18/11)n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough[4] (Chitturi et al., 2009).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting
Not easy to have significant algorithmic-complexity results that have stood as an upper bound for 30 years.
The Google Code Jam qualification round this year included the problem "write a function to report the minimum number of flips necessary to sort a stack of pancakes". I'm not too pleased to see this in the wikipedia page:
> The minimum number of flips required to sort any stack of n pancakes has been shown to lie between ~1.07n and 1.63n (exact boundaries: 15n/14 and 18n/11,) but the exact value is not known.
I guess for completeness, I should post the solution to the sortless burnt pancake (to me, "coin alignment") problem:
Consider a stack of coins, like top-HTTHHTTHTHTTTTTTH-bottom. The number of flips required to align it is equal to the number of transitions from tails to heads or heads to tails as you move through the stack. In the example, we can break the stack conceptually into runs of H TT HH TT H T H TTTTT H, which is 8 transitions.
1. (This number is necessary.) Two adjacent coins which differ in orientation can only be made not to differ by a flip at the position between them. A flip above or below that position in the stack reverses neither or both, which preserves their difference. Stated another way, no flip can reduce the number of transitions in the stack by more than 1.
2. (This number is sufficient.) If you move from the top of the stack down, flipping whenever a transition is encountered, you preserve the invariant that the prefix of the stack above the point you have reached is all aligned. This is one flip per transition, so one flip per transition suffices.
If the coins must be aligned to a particular direction, for example heads up, just suffix a coin of that alignment to the bottom of the stack.
Obviously, there are a bunch of other skills required too, and some skills get a lot more respect than others.
One reading of the story is that Bill Gates, despite being six layers of management away from 'the coal face' of actually making the date functions work, knew about the 1904 Date System and why it was there; and that he was able to ask harder and harder questions until the project manager looked unprepared because he had a lot of the specific skill of remembering lots of details and stumbling blocks.
Obviously, an alternative reading of the story is that Gates didn't know those specifics about date handling in Lotus 123, and he was going to ask about something else (or maybe nothing at all) and it was only by random chance that made it look like he knew about this complicated detail.
Make of that what you will.
Also, there is known story that Gates and Allen wrote BASIC compiler for some obscure microprocessor without having access to an actual thing, just paper spec. So they wrote emulator first, then compiler and guess what? when run on the real processor it worked like a charm from first try.
At least there are strong signs:
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=... "In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent."
According to https://www.quora.com/Who-beat-Bill-Gates-in-math-at-Harvard... "Christos Papadimitriou, one of the absolute top theoretical CS people in the world (almost certainly top 10 active researchers), told his girlfriend at the time that Bill Gates was the smartest person he had ever met.
Bill Gates, advised by Papadimitriou, found a bound on a problem that stood for 30 years."
It almost sounds like I am turning this into a "nerd lives matter" campaign or something like that. This is not my intention, but it is a real danger for autistic software developers, which may lead them to engage in some extremely unhealthy behaviour.
If you actually read an S. Jobs bio and are familiar with Aspy traits, he's a textbook case.
What confuses people (if they are confused) is that most people with Aspergers are not artistic, don't like speaking in front of crowds, or running teams.
However, it makes a ton of sense if you understand what the underlying brain differences are. People with Aspergers can be superior at artistic and group endeavors because they can easily ignore human quirks and are able to instead focus on the archetypal aspects. Certainly Jobs did.
A handful of extremely successful film writer/directors are also on the spectrum, and I suspect, for similar reasons. All, like Jobs, are considered to be "assholes" by some, and absolutely loved by others.
I work in film (in addition to tech) and know a lot of people on the spectrum that I think people who only meet autistic programmers would have difficulty recognizing.
Even in TFA, one of the descriptors is:
> They generally marry the first girl they date
Maybe, but in my experience, that's only one specific kind of person with Aspergers (who I agree definitely exists). However, at least in film and other artistic/people disciplines, that wouldn't describe the "typical" person on the spectrum—I think you mainly see that type in tech/engineering circles. (To be fair, that's what the article is focused on.)
In my experience, at least in the fields I work in, people with Aspergers are "sigmas" (to use PUA terminology for a moment) and have no difficulty whatsoever dating, meeting people, etc. Certainly they don't do it the "normal" way, but they're very successful.
UDPATE: Thinking about it further, most people on the spectrum are not intuitive feelers (in the Myers Briggs taxonomy), they're sensory thinkers. When you find an Aspie who is an intuitive feeler, like Jobs, it's certainly confusing to people: if he's an Aspie, how can he get up in front of crowds? Lead a team? Negotiate? Etc. Unpossible.
It's really just "normals" applying their own biases on what a normal person would/could do, without understanding what makes those on the spectrum—especially those that are more emotional/intuitive—tick.
I wanted to share this next bit because you seem like you might appreciate it. At least it took me awhile to figure it out. :)
In my experience, Myers Briggs is most helpful if you think of all eight attributes as independent capabilities each person can have, and then rate each on a scale, say, from 1-10. From each pairing, the one with the highest value determines their type, e.g. INFJ.
So, I would agree that Jobs is an INFJ (let's say that all are "10s"), but that doesn't mean that his ESTP traits are all pegged at zero. Instead, you might say Jobs has E=5, S=2, T=8, and P=6 in addition to I=10, N=10, F=10, J=11.
Mostly what the dominant Myers Briggs type gets you is a way to determine a person's typical problem solving pattern. NFs feel (and get excited) about a solution first, then convince (think) themselves why it's right.
OTOH My wife is an ENTP, and she thinks things through first and then gets excited—the opposite of me. If I wasn't aware of the underlying dynamics, I'd get super frustrated every time I brought her some exciting thing only to get calm analysis and no excitement (at least, at first).
If Jobs as aspie, there is no way he would have been up on that stage every WWDC to woe the crowd with superlatives.
Exactly...
I don't think Jobs was heavy on the nerdy side of the autism spectrum. More likely on the psychopathic side - I don't mean this in a bad way. Just trying to analyse things.
Jobs's bio was in fact a textbook case of psychopathy: his eyeballs "drilled into your soul with a Deadpan Stare"; he was highly manipulative (which proves he was socially adept); and he was so charismatic that colleagues say his presence was a Reality Distortion Field.
Meanwhile, most Aspies can't even maintain eye contact (let alone herd cats). Regarding the diagnosis for Asperger's/Autism, the trait clinicians test for is literally "social ineptitude".
And yet, on the Wikipedia page for Asperger Syndrome[0], the phrase "social ineptitude" is nowhere to be found. Strange.
From Wikipedia:
> Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's, is a developmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.
Jobs did have "significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication". Everyone who worked with him thought he was an asshole, he pissed off even his friends (e.g. Woz), and had an extremely difficult time in normal roles with his first wife and child, etc. In person, Jobs was a hot mess. Of course, this—by itself—is insufficient. Lots of normals are assholes, too.
The real tell for Jobs is the second requirement: restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. Jobs had that like crazy, right down to wearing the same clothes for—literally—decades. The history of Pixar actually has better information on Jobs (oddly enough), including a lot of his extremely non-normal behaviors that fall into this second category.
People who are just sociopaths don't have "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests". In fact, they appear normal (it's part of the game, in fact). Jobs couldn't even begin to fake "normal"—and didn't try.
People are confused about Jobs because he could manipulate groups, and was, generally, successful. The Aspie types you find in tech are usually of the variety you mention: won't look people in the eyes. Jobs was definitely not that.
FWIW It's easy to confuse a sociopath and a non-engineer Aspie, because both have less empathy for normal people than is typical. You can tell them apart easily though: sociopaths also have less empathy for archetypal people, whereas Aspies (like Jobs) have more empathy than is typical for people and situations matching archetypes. This can be extremely frustrating to those closest to them, who (legitimately) are upset that they care so deeply for archetypal things, but can seemingly ignore the very real hurting of, say, their daughter who is right in front of them.
Incidentally, the ability to strongly relate to archetypes, IMO, is why Jobs (and others like him in, say, film) are successful. It allowed him to focus on what is truly important to a huge swath of people and ignore small details that are only important to the few people near them. (This is Jobs legendary ability to "focus".) Normals, in my experience, have a very hard time doing that precisely because they can so easily empathize with anyone.
Let me tell you a little about the ADI-R [0]. The clinician reads your biography, makes small talk, asks you to make up stories, watches for any abnormal behavior, et al. The madeup story of a NeuroTypical will include the emotions of other people. E.g. "My friends and I went to the beach, but we were sad because it rained, and Alice got mad because it was her only day off, etc".
An aspie's story will show ZERO AWARENESS of other people's emotions. Their entire world consists of PvE. Not because they have no sympathy for others' emotions, but because deciphering non-verbal cues is as opaque as deciphering an enigma. It's like the opposite of clairvoyance. Does that sound like empathy to you?
I agree that Jobs must have had empathy. Otherwise he wouldn't have been so successful at manipulation. It's just that he was such an asshole that he abused his knowledge of others' emotional states to gain leverage over them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_Diagnostic_Interview
<digression>
In what world does "social ineptitude" not map to "significant difficulties in social interaction and non-verbal communication"? This feels like one of those bifurcation situations where someone is like "I'm not fat, I just have a BMI of 9000".
> sociopaths (...) appear normal (it's part of the game, in fact).
Psychopaths are the ones who blend in. Sociopaths are pretty conspicuous.
> "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests"
Also fits OCD. We agree that Jobs was highly neuroatypical. But whatever his quirk, it's not autism.
then you quote:
> > developmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction
Significant difficulties in social interaction sounds like social ineptitude to me.
You could easily say the same about Bill Gates. His rocking is a standard sign of Asperger's.
I think the results are appreciated by-and-large by the people who haven't worked with them. For people who have, they might add the "...but he is an asshole" postscript/disclaimer.
> In the ensuing outrage, a PowerPoint presentation written by St. John surfaced which included a slide in which he referred to engineers with Asperger syndrome as being "the holy grail" of hires. "They work like machines," he wrote, "don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs."
Someone needs to send all these people patio11's guides to salary negotiation, and maybe some drug to make them more aggressive and disagreeable. (Modafinil?)
Thus if you add the personality trait "aggressive and disagreeable" to a typical aspie, you'll get a termination of negotiation instead of a strongly suboptimal (for the aspie) negotiation result.
Link: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
As for "autistic programmers": for those of us with the skill to program, programming is a much better career choice than most, but even that is changing. Since the internet bubble of the mid-late 90s, allistic people have taken up programming in droves. The promise of easy money and prestige made programming a much more palatable career choice for allistics than it had been in the past, and now they've pretty much taken over. Programming is now a social activity. Cubicles are a luxury; the boss insists that seating everybody at long crowded tables with enough room for one laptop per seat, where everybody can hear everybody else's noisy conversations, makes the workplace more "collaborative". You are expected to be interruptible at any moment. Meetings are more frequent. ("Stand-up meetings" have had the effect of increasing the frequency of the weekly meeting to daily, while the original promise that they be short is falling by the wayside.) Some shops have enshrined the doctrine of Extreme Programming to such an extent that you are not permitted to get any work done without another person very close at hand, watching every move you make. Articles for employees state, in a very as-it-should-be manner, that the relevant criterion for determining who gets hired, commended, or promoted is not technical prowess but rather "soft skills", which bears out in reality as the number of tech startups founded by bros and hipsters who only hire "cultural fits" (autistics don't really fit in in any culture) increases. And books and seminars tell the boss that the person who prefers long stretches of working alone because that is how they get their best thinking done, is a danger and a threat to the organization and must be eliminated.
So in the modern workplace, hiring an autistic is indeed a very poor choice. Unless you can tailor the environment to their needs -- which approaches impossible unless you know them personally -- you're probably better off hiring the "cultural fit".
Oh, it's still doing its job because now it becomes a speed trap. Failure to pair program then becomes something to put on your pink slip when management fears the possible repercussions of "we just don't like you".
There's a difference between finding something completely pointless and stupid (an exaggerated "this is driving me mad!") and completely losing your ability to concentrate ("my productivity is 10% of what it was when I had a quiet room for myself"). I get so aggressive, hopeless and sad when overstimulated that I had to quit the job because open space was too much to handle.
> Can't ignore the daily standup though. It just means I will not be able to concentrate until 10:30 every day.
I purposely miss the standup meetings and just mail my report in instead. No one has complained, as my work still gets done and I still communicate with the team (although by Slack, not in person).
See e.g. http://crastina.se/autistic-traits-science-and-the-nerd-ster..., especially its message:
> Yet, it is good to be aware of the neurodiversity and that other people can have different styles of thinking than ours, with their pros and cons. It’s not a challenge – it’s an opportunity to see word through various lenses! (As long as we respect other’s right to be different.)
Some people with very real impairments are against being cured, while some people with mild ones want a cure. And yes, being able to have an opinion and not constantly wanting to rip your skin off means you've avoided some bad outcomes: they probably want a cure.
Likewise others things that you enjoy; other people enjoy other things. Having preferences isn't some kind of benefit of autism.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(14)70248-2/abstract
I've worked with two suicides, both of which would have scored as Asperger's (a diagnosis in retrospect) and two others that completely broke down from the stress of 80 hour a week software engineering jobs. They didn't need to be taken advantage of, they needed an environment that didn't demand they live under that kind of pressure, and an organization that was in tune to the consequences of applying this kind of pressure to non-neurotypical employees.
I wonder if program's like Microsofts deal with this. These are special needs employees - and its sick to read that business people want to exploit someone's disability to further their own careers.
The social skills issue is often not for want of social connection, but a frustrating inability to be able to participate. Again, this is a disability, not a choice. The social isolation can easily turn to depression and an unintentional withdrawal from society with co-morbid substance abuse problems. Someone else in this discussion mentioned the recent medical examiner findings about Ian Murdock's suicide.
It gets even worse. Once someone with Asperger's "clicks" into a specific routine, it becomes a pretty challenging endeavor to change it without some external influence. Same with bad eating/sleeping habits. I'm currently in the "works overtime out of habits" phase and it's extremely hard to snap out of it.
In my teenage years, it meant that I was a loner who went home at the end of a school days, played games by myself, and that was it. In my adult years, it's been much more difficult.
My background is a complete mess. I got a degree in Computer Networking because programming wasn't available, and then later went on to work retail for several years. In the meantime, I kept working on programming projects.
On the programming side, I have a 5 year project where I built everything myself, and a handful of 1 year projects, most of which the source code has been lost for.
Trying to get jobs in the industry is a joke. Take a look at the above, and you'll see someone who isn't normal, isn't average. I send resumes off and I get "We don't think you'll be a good fit" or ignored. That right there is what hurts the most. I could accept getting interviews and failing them, but being outright rejected before being given a chance, that flat hurts.
I've got a lot of traits that come from Aspergers too. I don't have an interest in much besides computers, so I often spend entire days at home and coding or thinking about coding problems. Doesn't bother me to spend 12+ hours in a day just coding.
Horrible at eye contact, and don't know why. Monotone voice? Check. Sometimes I'll mean to say one word and say another without realizing it, or focus on someone's meaning in one part and miss the others. I don't have that rage though. Used to when I was younger. But the computer doesn't care if you get mad, and it's better to just let logic take over.
I've still got my fingers crossed that I'll find a place that will give me a chance. But if I can't find that, then I'll shrug my shoulders and go back to working retail.
I know I should have more of a variety there, the trouble thus far has been the 'what'.
I see the "Alex St. John's infamous PowerPoint" image, pasted in the article, as more valuable than the entire article. St John is harsh an direct, and seems to contain more objective true than the entire article.
Maybe another trait related to high-IQ+autism is a profound disregard for political correctness. Is St.John diagnosed with autism?
Maybe the part of the brain dedicated to social-political "skills", in an Aspergers-diagnosed brain is really dedicated to abstraction processing or pattern recognition?
Of course that the lacking of social-political skill frees your mind to concentrate long hours on complex abstractions. You shun the "social" world, and then concentrate on the mathematical or algorithmic world, where the "entities" have interesting and also predictable behaviour.
Thanks for pointing me to the St.John article, it looks like a good read.
The vast majority of programmers are not autistic. The stereotype that they are is damaging both to programmers (by typecasting them) and to autistic people (by ignoring their real challenges).
The question is: How many out-of-the-ordinary programmers have some form of mild arperger's? 90%? 99%? none?
At best, autism is less of a disadvantage in programming than in other jobs. That's why it makes sense to focus on programming as a field for autistic individuals to move towards, though in practice my understanding that QA roles are actually often more suitable.
Unfortunately, what you end up with is individuals like Alex St. John taking someones disabilities as a reason to exploit them. That's ugly.
> How many out-of-the-ordinary programmers have some form of mild arperger's? 90%? 99%? none?
The fact that you're even throwing out numbers like 90% is ridiculous. There's no way that 90% of programmers have "mild Asperger's."
Read this interview of the creator of Nginx:
http://mindend.com/index.php/interview-with-the-creator-of-n...
Why not INTP?
Living in a constant state of interruptibility, observation, and distraction will not get good code out of me, and indeed many other devs. I, like many others, can make do, but why pay us so much money if you're going to put us in an environment guaranteed to make us produce sub-par code and products? Seems like a poor use of capital.
Does anyone find Belbin's team inventory of any use when setting up teams?
Do people tend to allow teams to form themselves? If so, will those teams tend to have people with complimentary characteristics?
Most developers would love to do some other jobs. But the amount of office politics, backstabbing etc is not possible to handle for some people.
Not all high functioning autistics become great programmers, just as not all introverts are necessarily great programmers. And saying that "all" programmers share one or more of those things just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you disenfranchise people who don't think they "fit".
I cannot for the life of me understand why I see "aspie" or "spergy" used as insults on both reddit and tumblr.
This is also a subtext in the upcoming 2016 Ghostbusters film: the villain is a queasy nerd who summons ghosts to Manhattan as revenge for getting the mockery and rejection he deserved; so it is up to the Empowered Womyn Ghostbusters to exorcise him so NYC can become a safe space again.
Oh, games industry, never change. I'm sure people will think this is satire - except the ones who worked in gamedev.
Also St John's attitude is quite telling of his manipulative tendencies. That's not someone I would want to work with.
But that doesn't mean there isn't an autistic savant who is a great programmer/computer scientist.
In the end this is a game for monkeys and typewriters.
Because in the end, it's about improving the quality of life.
I'm on the "eccentric" end of spectrum; for 27 years I've been told that nothing is wrong with me, that I'm just "too smart". I can tell you I was pretty close to joining the 27 club; the piling problems ended up being too much to handle. I came upon the description of Asperger's purely by accident; no mental health professional would even suspect it because I "seemed normal". Finally being able to understand why I'm losing my ability to speak once in a while or getting violent whenever overstimulated wasn't just a relief. It was a life-saver.
If I didn't realize it's ASD, ignorance and stereotypes could have killed me.
PS. Yes, some people will claim they are "a little bit autistic" out of ignorance or attention seeking. Others will lump clinical cases with weirdos. Both don't change the validity of a proper diagnosis.
Doesn't mean that being a real autist mean you are a good programmer.
Autism is a broad spectrum. I have hypersensitivity issues, even if loud noises don't make me fall down screaming. I tend towards obsessing over specific things, even if I don't block out all other stimuli for hours on end. I'm not naturally good at reading people, but I've been able to teach myself a fair bit over many years, so human emotions are no longer a closed book. I can look at a low-functioning autistic and understand what's going on in their head, as a magnification of what's going on in mine. And I've got a degree and a 13-year career as a coder.
I don't understand why so many people think that autism universally means needing help dressing yourself.
There are no family, job, or looks criteria in DSM-IV. I know ASD folks who hold jobs, have families and are more than successful in life. From the outside, they seem pretty normal, maybe a bit quirky or eccentric. From the inside? The way they arranged their lives to work around the social/sensory problems is something to applaud.
The important part? They don't "look" autistic, so most laypeople don't correlate autism with "a possibility for a successful life". Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
> Proceeds to turn institution that works for people with autism into a game development company staffed by people with autism
Not dispelling the myth about their existence or character traits, because we all work with at least one!
Hint: a mild form of autism, what casuals call Asperger, given that one survived childhood constant bullying and confusion about its causes, is actually good to have.
This interview seems to confirm St.Johns obervations
It is like Holden Caulfield or Travis the Taxi Driver, or the Deer Hunter, or Rocky the Bum.
> actually good to have
Something doesn't add up.
Not his always looking at the mirror roommate? Not all these silly girls? Not the snobs at clubs?
Come on.
But there are many niches for those who can't stand narcissistic cosplaying mediocrity in charge - craftsmanship of any kind, not necessarily digital. Making good sandwiches will do.
One could be a self-employed, paid open source contributor, a freelancer, a subcontractor, etc. Yes, one probably will never "succeed" in one of valleys sweatshops, but there are always other, less traveled pathways..
Again, Igor Sysoev, who have bootstrapped the project alone, according to his tastes and preferences, and then went back into shadow, leaving all the singing and dancing to those who liked it, is a classic example.
There is also Pirsig's book, Atlas, and a few other good ones.