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Comment by newnewpdro | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this strikes me as unbelievable. How things have changed since the industry was up in arms over Alex St. John's "Recruiting Giants" PDF [1] where he explicitly called out the "holy grail" employee:

  Be on the look out for the holy-grail... the undiscovered Asperger's engineer. (usually found on open source forums)

  * They have no social skills
  * They generally marry the first girl they date
  * Can't make eye contact
  * Resume and educational background is a mess... because they have no social skills
  * They work like machines, don't engage in politics, don't develop attitudes and never change jobs

[1] https://www.geek.com/news/developer-bro-alex-st-john-want-a-...

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People are generally more forgiving when you perceive your employees' disability in a positive light instead of viewing their disabilities as something to exploit.

It's a subtle difference, but the first one encourages/enables the employee to function in spite of their disability or perhaps one day overcome the shortcomings, or simply work in a way / environment where it becomes irrelevant. (Software development already gets us 90% of the way there)

The other, well, that one doesn't really give a shit as long as you're productive, i.e. it will probably still exclude a large portion of autists and never really help anything. Hell it probably expects to never give them upward mobility with that last remark either.

> People are generally more forgiving when you perceive your employees' disability in a positive light instead of viewing their disabilities as something to exploit.

Is that what this is?

I guess it's no more exploitative than employing anyone else.

> I guess it's no more exploitative than employing anyone else.

I think it’s way more exploitative because you’re not leveraging a person’s (by average definition) “strengths” to your/the company’s benefits, you’re using their weaknesses (and weaknesses are relative, but I’d say the list of traits above most people will probably think might complicate or hinder the persons long term success or happiness - in fact it could easily lead to one sided exploitation).

That list contained both weaknesses (no social skills) and strengths (doesn't engage in politics).

Doesn’t engage in politics (in that list) means that they will become a pawn for other people’s politics.

Show me an office without politics and I’ll show you one with unlimited vacation time

Not necessarily. Like anything it could be good or bad in certain situations. I interpret it as meaning the person will be driven to do what's right according to logic and merit as opposed to politics. It's another way of saying they are a disagreeable employee which are known to be very valuable to companies.

I also take it to mean that they will focus on what they enjoy and not scrabble to climb the corporate ladder.

> I also take it to mean that they will focus on what they enjoy and not scrabble to climb the corporate ladder.

Climbing the corporate ladder is something many employees seem to enjoy.

Yes, in order to climb the corporate ladder an employee must seem to enjoy it

"Office politics" is a euphemism for anti-social behavior as I see it.

And, an office "without politics" with more than two persons maybe doesn't exist, but there is certainly more "office politics" in Paradise Hotel than in my office, so it's not like anyone that stays out becomes a pawn in some scheme.

Weakness: No social skills

Strength: Gets trampled cause no social skills

Sounds pretty horrible.

Dell is exploiting autism here, but in a way that hopefully benefits both parties.

How could anyone stand to work for someone who so swiftly limits the breadth and depth of a person via their mannerisms such as this? it's dehumanizing, full stop.

His daughter disowned him.

it kinda came across as a tongue-in-cheek shitpost to me. is this guy known to be an unironically terrible individual or was he just taking the piss out of the semi-exploitative & work fetishising culture of the industry?

Here's the full context of that quote: http://web.archive.org/web/20170119234745/http://www.alexstj...

(spoiler alert, it's the first one)

Ironically shitposting about autists is a great idea. Theyre very good at recognizing irony.

I could understand saying something like this in private with an audience that understands the satire, but it strikes me as foolhardy to write/publish something like this as there’s no way of reading the room. If it’s a joke, it’s not smart in its delivery since anyone can assume it’s sincere.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” — Kurt Vonnegut [1]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/379912-we-are-what-we-prete...

Wow, I used to work with someone who ticked every one of those boxes. Incredibly knowledgeable and spent all of their free time reading spec documents and programming. Unfortunately they could be emotionally unstable at times which was had to work around.

Its not really relevant but the list seems to not actually describe Asbergers but some other collection of symptoms that results from being socially deprived. (However, this probably matches up with popular conception of Asbergers individuals.)

I think the "key" is finding people who deal with their problems by diving deep in to technical tasks and becoming absorbed in minutiae. An unnaturally small interest set combined with a lack of interest in people.

Are you deliberately misspelling Asperger's in the South Park vernacular [1] to be offensive or something, or is it just a mistake?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ass_Burgers

Wouldn't they have then spelled it as you've written it and not halfway between? Seems to be a typo to me

It's probably a mistake, but South Park has rendered that misspelling/mispronunciation into somewhat of a pejorative.

Sorry I was up all night and didn't even consider that I was spelling it wrong. My track pad is broken and so I can't right click to spell check. (I am waiting to start my new job to get a new laptop.)

:%s/Asbergers/Aspergers/g

Please don’t call autistic people as “they”, we are human and please remember if you met one autistic person, you met only one autistic person. We are as different as neurotypical persons are different.

Uhm. I usually call other humans “they”. How else I am supposed to call them?

Sorry I was not clear, please do not refer autistic people as “group”, autism is a spectrum and each autistic individual can be very different. Not all of us are emotionally unstable. This kind of generalisation is pretty harmful.

Seems to be a miscommunication. I use they as a gender neutral way of referring to individuals as the English language doesn't offer a better alternative.

Again, the OP was not using a collective noun to refer to autistic people as a group, their post was about a single individual with autism.

They (ndnshs) seem to just be referring to a single person here. Not a group.

I refer to everyone as they. I don't see why you have a problem with this. My comment doesn't need to contain details of gender.

Parent poster is using "singular they". This is a well established correct English usage, but it may be confusing to people speaking English as a second language.

This is about an employer making their employment process more accessible, the Alex St. John thing was mostly about the opposite and traded in (to put it charitably) dumb stereotypes. You're probably misreading something if you see this Dell program as a sign of some industry-wide adoption of Alex St. John's views.

well i hit 4 of 5 of those points (missing only no 2) so its not far wrong

This perfectly describes a few of my friends.

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