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Comment by lucio | Hacker News Reader

What's the myth that's being "dispelled"?

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.

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The fact is that people who are actually autistic struggle to gain employment anywhere, including as software developers.

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).

Then it is good to consider autism an advantage in programming jobs, so people that are actually autistic have special treatment in the sector.

The question is: How many out-of-the-ordinary programmers have some form of mild arperger's? 90%? 99%? none?

We can't just "consider autism an advantage in programming jobs." It's not. The majority of programmers are not autistic and there are large parts of programming jobs which are very difficult for autistic people to cope with.

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."

please do not ignore the "out-of-the-ordinary" part. I'm not talking about "all programmers".

Read this interview of the creator of Nginx:

http://mindend.com/index.php/interview-with-the-creator-of-n...

Honestly I feel like having an Aspie Spectrum diagnosis is like a badge of honor to some people in Silicon Valley.

Absolutely feel the same way. Everyone's also conveniently ignoring that Asbergers isn't even in the DSM anymore.

Anywhere on the Internet. Plenty of people in online forums who claim to have Aspergers and thus smart and not care about socializing. Same thing as saying you're INTJ.

> Same thing as saying you're INTJ.

Why not INTP?

"Special treatment" that results in 80-hour work weeks?

St. John's perspective is, to be blunt, idiotic. I work in the game industry, and being effective as a programmer involves a lot of people skills and a lot of communication with other disciplines. It doesn't matter how technically brilliant you are if you can't sell people on your ideas or communicate effectively. If you were to go out of your way to hire emotionally stunted young people like St. John suggests you'd just end up with a miserable place to work.

The funny thing is, all of my friends with autism are fiercely political. If you asked me, I'd probably say people with autism were MORE political than those without. Of course, none of my friends with autism work in software.

Are we talking about the same kind of politics? Because, from my experience, autistics are more likely to hold strong views and discuss the "big" politics (as in, people ruling the country) while allistics are more into the practical "small" politics (like, say, typical office drama).

Uh... that kind of "politics". I can't speak to that, I stay out of office drama, so I don't know who's instigating xD

The concept of "fairness" is a big deal to people on the spectrum. I could see that leading to strongly held political ideologies.

St. John's point was that programmers with autism spectrum disorders are easier to take advantage of. Further, ASD's are not a superpower and don't rededicate parts of the brain to other useful tasks.

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