Put someone not on a spectrum in a society of people on the spectrum, & you'd be labelling the person not on the spectrum as having a mental disorder. Who the hell asks questions they don't want the answers to?
It is my understanding that part of autism advocacy is to establish new social rituals among the neurotypical populace that allows the neurotypical human to learn empathy and acceptance for autistic behavior in the way a neurotypical human generally learns- social cues and hierarchy and peer enforcement.
People on the spectrum aren't less empathic, they're lacking rituals which help hide one's lack of empathy
If you define "empathy" as "care very much about the feelings of others", then, yes, my experience is that people on the spectrum have no shortage of empathy. My daughter is a very warm-hearted person who intensely wants the people around her to feel good.
But if you define it as "able to easily and correctly read the feelings of others", then, no, it really is a challenge for people on the spectrum.
It's not that they don't want to hear the music, it's just that their radio doesn't tune into it very well.
Just a FYI, I agree with your post and your parent, and I don't find them at odds; your post is complementary, and a nice addendum. Both of you describe an symptom of autism. It is important different symptoms of autism get described, and that the general public gets to understand these instead of tunneling on a few symptoms. No autistic person has the very same symptoms as severe in the very same way as the other.
It's not just that people on and off the spectrum have two different but equally effective communication styles and we have arbitrarily chosen one as "normal".
All humans, across all cultures, communicate rich sets of information at multiple levels using word choice, prosody, timing, tone, and body language. There is text and subtext and subsubtext. While different cultures have communicate different things, it's universally true that human interaction is high bandwidth. There is a lot of data coming off a person.
People on the autism spectrum struggle to both process the data they receive and to effectively broadcast that data on multiple levels without putting an intense, draining amount of energy into it. It's not just a stylistic difference, it's a more fundamental difference in quantity of information.
I think it has nothing to do with employee/manager or inside/outside spectrum, although those will probably exagerate the phenomenon, but it's just social dynamics in a stressful environment. I'm sure the manager is happy to have his high performing "techie" when things go right and the techie is happy to have his manager happy.
You could still argue that non-spectrum people are more "naturally" normal. Competition among societies has selected for groups where non-spectrum individuals are more numerous, possibly because this ratio leads to less conflict and more cooperation.
I wonder if groups are selected for a prevalence of 2 to 4 individuals per thousand [1] because these types of individuals have been responsible for technological progress in some way.
Though in either case, I agree that society today is probably better for having some autistic people around.
Human groups don't reproduce in pairs and undergo selection, but individual humans do. It's hard to find any examples of genetic material of a group being lost when that group was outcompeted by another group.
Under a sufficiently low population density, genes among splintered groups will diverge. Groups with genes that promote expansion and/or adaptation will eventually out-compete groups that don't. Does this process not occur?
>It's hard to find any examples of genetic material of a group being lost when that group was outcompeted by another group.
Isn't the extinction of other human species an example of this?
Yes, and this occurs.
> Groups with genes that promote expansion and/or adaptation will eventually out-compete groups that don't.
For some definition of "eventually". Selection over genes competes to determine outcomes with "selection" over culture and with chance.
> Isn't the extinction of other human species an example of this?
Yes. And that's a disputed hypothesis.
Granting that hypothesis, how many such gene-selection events occur per ten thousand years? Not many.
How much of observed gene distribution is best explained by selection pressure from these rare events rather than by individual selection operating continuously? Very little if any.
But that's not the meat of the difficulty. It's not "context-dependent logical processes" vs. "context-free logical processes." That's be trivial to address.
It's "context-dependent, often (mostly?) irrational responses to complex social dynamics", vs. "context free, often (mostly?) irrational responses to complex social dynamics which may get erroneously re-interpreted as logical processes."
So your switcheroo isn't just a twilight zone world for the person who isn't on the spectrum. It's a vastly different type of problem of coping with the stress of complex social dynamics for the entire population, plus a higher risk of depression for the one person who would seem to have an uncanny ability to notice, predict, and thread complex social dynamics (probably similar to the way people with Hyperthymesia go through life).
Then why ask it??? To fake empathy, perhaps? If a person doesn't want to hear my answer to a question, I suggest they just don't ask the question. Saves everyone a lot of time, and avoids plenty of confusion.
Otherwise I'm just going to continue answering questions in a logical, honest and forthcoming manner, perhaps appearing (to some) as lacking "functioning social skills".
The only people who ask me that question in that specific way are strangers, mostly during solicitation calls or any other calls where they have to read from a script.
As per your suggestion, next time I get a marketing call, I might just start delving into the details of my life for 10 minutes, explaining exactly just "how I am" :P
Speech is not merely a rational exchange of information. If you try to understand every speech act in terms of the information content being exchanged through the surface meaning of the words, you're going to be confused by a lot more than just greetings.
As to why it exists, the answer is the same for just about every other linguistic feature: nobody really knows.
Positive on the Z. Fight me.
In all seriousness though, nothing drives me more nuts than asking questions you don't actually want the answer to, or are just asking to fill the silence. It's gotten to the point I ask people if they are really interested in the answer, or are they just looking for small talk,
Generally, I'm happy to talk with people, but I am not a big "small talker", because I'm generally a "communicate to problem solve, otherwise do" type of person. Building a relationship with someone requires over time I consciously build and try to track conversational contexts to facilitate faster, more efficient communication.
The process of doing that requires a significant investment of time not just to speaking, but to listening, building and working through conjectures, and familiarizing myself with how they approach problems, and determining how differently they do so from me
All this information rides along in my head all the time. The friendships and working relationships you build through such a process are unmatched. However, it takes significant effort, and it can lead to some awkwardness when you start actually noticing where the rougher edges are on who you're talking to.
I'm not one to leave a rough edge unsmoothed, but committing to help someone smooth out a part of their character in a way you can actually productively help is also a non-trivial task.
Some level of all of what I've described goes on in every encounter.
This makes people who ask questions they're not really looking for a true and substantive answer to incredibly annoying. It paints the picture of a person using me as a means to soothe their own discomfort with doing whatever they need to do. It's...trying on the patience.
When someone says "How are you?", I simply have it difficult to just say "very well thank you", if I'm just anticipating a root canal treatment, or whatever.
We Finns can indeed appear a bit autistic; it's not meant to be rude, but may feel like it.
If one is in France and says "Ça va, Michel?" -- odds are one expects a little more diversity in the answer than "How are you?" expects in the US... but really, one still expects "Oui, ça va." or "Ça va bien" and not really "Ça va mal" or "Ça va pas."
Edit: I should add training to that, while I wouldn't claim to be a good manager I did have some 1-on-1 training that did make me a less bad manager (being videoed in meetings and my interactions with people analysed).
I've only taken on trivial leadership roles, so my default assumption is that I am not a good manager. For most other skills I can practice and gain proficiency on my own, but with management, trial and error comes at the cost of others' time. I assume there is some training you can take to give you basic skills, but I think real experience has to be gained through a gradual expansion of responsibilities, which requires mentorship and an environment that supports that kind of process.
so one easy way to be (viewed as) a bad manager is to forget that your focus should be people, not product. it is absolutely your job as a manager to ask about and know the motivations and constraints of those you manage, including probing no's like that.
A lot of people also have a strong anti manager bias.
They're predisposed to hate any manager they have, unless proven otherwise.
Ee can, at best, know from experience how to manage someone that is just like ourselves, and have an idea of what to say in public to people not like ourselves, but not what to say to them in private. And that's the best case, assuming we've had good managers (and thus have good examples to draw from). More likely, we've seen tolerable managers, plus plenty of bad ones.
To your point, how do we even recognize good management when we've seen it? How do we know what to emulate and what to avoid? We're the parents that say "well my parents beat me and I turned out just fine, so....".
Management is a skill (or collection of skills) It's not a skillset that most jobs actually train, nor is it one that they do a good job of recognizing. Most of the jobs people have growing up (and beyond) reward managers that push for short-term gains over such things like "morale" or "communication" - these are the managers that are "successful" for the vast majority of experience. Just look at how many places have techies shift into management as a career development path, but don't do anything to train them or say that people are managed any differently than code.
There are plenty of reasons for people to be biased against the person (their manager) that tells them what they don't want to hear (such as "take on this extra work" or "your time off request is denied" or "don't implement your idea"), there's also plenty of reasons to expect that most managers legitimately ARE poor managers.
Poor management will deal worse with increased overhead, but no matter what it has a cost. Not to mention just the emotional labor involved with your "Would you like to X?" being met with a hard "No."
Knowing the employee has autism and being taught some simple mitigation strategies (here, it appears "tell" not "ask" is a large part) has the prospect of partially mitigating a lot of these issues for everyone.
edit: edited the phrase in question based on what was actually said.
> The manager had asked him if he would like to complete a task that needed doing, and the young man simply said, “No.”
The point is, these kinds of soft asks -- "Would you?" "Could you?" "Would you like to ...?" -- are understood as firm requests based on the structure of the working relationship between neurotypical people. If an autistic person takes them literally it seeds problems, especially since the request is made in a deferential way-- a rejection of a request in this firm seems more personal and uncooperative by virtue of the context of the manager having made it in a deferential fashion.
One of my common challenges is the opposite: I ask a question intended literally and people “read into” what I ask and make assumptions about what i’m “getting at”. Then I need to follow up with “No, no, really, I am curious about (same question again)”. sometimes I need to ask 3-4 times.
Conversations with people who are “on the spectrum” can be a lot more productive
If you keep this idea in mind while reading ~political conversations on forums, you will see that this behavior is extremely common. In many cases, both sides of a disagreement seem to be fighting with a strawman version of their conversational counterpart. To me, this is a widespread mental illness in Western societies, and I think it's possible that it may be getting worse, and (based on my experiences) might even be spreading into more traditionally fact-based discussions (the workplace, etc).
When I'm asked for advice or how to do something, very often the literal answer is "wrong." It's always useful to try and consider why someone would ask a question and try to keep that context in mind in answering, but one should not overreact and completely disregard the original question.
In turn the useful things that the manager can do-- a good manager provides useful support to his subordinates and buffering of harmful organizational requests-- are reduced significantly.
This makes the "problem" employee more expensive than his peers.
This is generally why we have things like the ADA.
Also, if I received a firm "No" I wouldn't panic or read anything into it. I'd simply ask a follow up question or rephrase the request.
Saying flat "no" just wastes everyone's time, because the next few sentences would just be wasted on the manager trying to coax those reasons for "no" out of the engineer. It has nothing to do with politeness or social rituals or anything of that nature.
I view it just as wasteful as people messaging me on work Slack with "Hey" and waiting for the person to respond before the OP will post the reason for trying to reach out to you. [0]
The thing is, it's not really the "no" per se but the fact that the manager has asked in a gentle way and internally expects a gentle response with context.
"I'd really prefer not to-- isn't XX supposed to handle that?"
"I can't, because I just have too many other tasks"
Internally, there's a bit of a "hot stove" reaction to "I asked gently and he just bluntly refused!"
That is, if someone with authority meets their subordinate halfway, making a softer request in the form of a question, ... the other person is expected to in turn meet the manager halfway and not offer a firm rejection of the softer request.
I've had a lot of employees in the past, and a fair number who were likely somewhere on the spectrum. Most did great, sometimes with small adjustments to how I interacted with them.
I've also had nightmare employees that have been ineffective because of excessive literalism and that have had troublesome interactions with their peers.
(I've also had socially adept employees that have engaged in problematic behavior and expected to get away with it because of charisma. You can "go off the rails" in any direction. But if your peers become scared to ask you for things because they can't figure out how to communicate effectively with you and your answers sound rude, it's a problem).
There are some development tasks that take up more of my time then others but they are no less important. Not all tasks cost the same amount of time or money, such is life.
Similarly, I've had a team member make the rest of the team considerably less happy and take up most of my time on oversight and trying to fix these problems. There reaches a point, where if it cannot be improved, that you terminate the employee's employment.
I look at these cases as personal failures, BTW: always wondering if there was a better way to handle them that could have resulted in the employee being productive, the rest of the team being happy, and me being able to complete other important tasks. But at some point you have to make a decision to move on.
In the case of this post, however, my understanding was that the discussion revolved around the employee that had a full workload and refused additional work in a way that was, perhaps, too blunt for their supervisor. In this case, while the employee may be more work for their manager, they do not sound like so much work that they need to be replaced.
> In the case of this post, however, my understanding was that the discussion revolved around the employee that had a full workload and refused additional work in a way that was, perhaps, too blunt for their supervisor. In this case, while the employee may be more work for their manager, they do not sound like so much work that they need to be replaced.
Yes, but we rely upon our social reading of people to understand what is really happening in the work environment.
If Bob tells you "no" to what seems like a reasonable request-- you now have a puzzle to figure out: why not? is Bob just blunt? Is Bob defiant?
Repeat this interaction, and you can come to the wrong conclusion (Bob is uncooperative) or a somewhat wrong one (Bob is blunt and doesn't care about upholding the social contract), instead of the correct one (Bob has autism and is just answering me extremely literally without elaboration).
Understanding of autism helps us understand Bob, and be empathetic and compassionate. It also helps us give the right answer when Mary comes up and says "I tried to get something I needed from Bob, [who just literally answered the question and ignored the important subtext and was brusque in his response] and he just refused so I ended up having to recreate the whole thing myself" --- while if we don't understand that and our own personal emotional memory is of Bob tending to "refuse" our requests it becomes a lot more serious.
If you are trying to say that this minimal amount of effort these managers would need to spend to work with people on the spectrum is just too much work for us to expect, specifically someone like the person in this example who refused more tasks when asked because their schedule was full, then yeah, I guess we disagree. I have personally witnessed a painful amount of bending-over-backward on the part of management for so-called "heavy hitter" developers who, in my opinion, were far more work to get along with and far less an asset to the company. If managers can find time in their busy (and expensive) schedule to pander to these kind of high-cost employees then they can spend a little effort on people who happen to fall on the spectrum.
After all, the "heavy hitter" who chooses to be hard to get a long with because of their legendary awesomeness is making a choice. Many people on the spectrum are doing their best to fit in and deserve a little more effort from their supervisors and management. After all, that is the job for which managers have signed up.
Just like an engineer is paid to write code and review code of their teammates. However, a teammate that pushes unreadable mess for reviews and requires tons of code review comments and iterations to get it to anything even resembling something functional is a drag and overhead for the rest of the engineers.
In fact, nerd talk is many times efficient and to the point.