Asperger's: the IT industry's dark secret | Hacker News Reader

Asperger's: the IT industry's dark secret

computerworld.co.nz

23 pointsrlm28 comments

"What Jeremy is not good at is suffering fools in the workplace or dealing with the endless bureaucracy of the modern corporation. If someone is wrong — if their idea just plain won't work — he says so, simply states the fact. That frankness causes all manner of upset in the office, he's discovered. [...] Jeremy has high-functioning autism (HFA)."

Yes. Clearly. Jeremy has a mental illness.

The public school system repeatedly tried to "diagnose" my son with Aspergers. His handwriting is awful, and the only way they can secure OT to deal with it is to assign him an IEP, which is a formal assessment that something is "fundably" wrong with him. "Luckily" for him, my son is also shy and doesn't like loud noises. Shy? Issues with sensory overload? Bad handwriting? Autism!

What I've learned from this is that nobody has a fucking clue what any of this stuff means. There's an "epidemic" of autism being reported in the media, and, what do I know, maybe there really is something to it. But what there also is is a broad class of behaviors (not disorders --- BEHAVIORS) that will be diagnosed as "Autism Spectrum Disorders" when people don't know what else to do with them.

To play devil's advocate, why does the school system have to deal with your son? A teacher makes a very low salary and can barely handle an overloaded classroom the way it is. Handling a child with behavior issues is the last thing they need.

Now considering that my son has "sensory issues" and my nephew is autistic, I'm in a position to make that argument.

I have a problem with dumping my child on the state and saying "here you go, deal with him." I understand your frustration but to assign blame to the school is a bit over the top.

Get your family doctor to make a referral to a children's behavioral specialist (a medical doctor trained in the field). Find out if there really is a problem.

You may also benefit from some counseling. My wife works with children (early head start) and has had several with Asperger's and Autism disorders. The parent go through a grieving process and can be very hostile to suggestions that their child has a problem.

It's been very difficult for us but with therapy (OT and PT) things have improved greatly. It's too bad my nephew's parents waited so long to get him help. He's finally speaking at age 4.

I fully agree with you. We took care of the handwriting on our own. This stuff came to a head in 1st grade; he's going into 4th and doing great. He is, among other things, more social than I was when I was his age.

What I object to is the school's attempt to tag my son's record with a totally unscientific assessment of "autism" in order to make their system work better with my son.

Is there real autism out there? Of course there is. But there is also a lot of bullshit autism.

I can relate. My parents have always taken great pleasure in telling my girlfriends how I was "diagnosed" as mentally retarded in the first grade (I already knew how to read at a 4th grade level, and they mistook my boredom for something else).

But hey...someday you'll be able to take some pleasure from this. Whenever your son does something stupid as a teenager (and he will), you can just trot it out as evidence that "the teachers were right all along". Works like magic. ;-)

One fascinating thing about the psych field is that these diagnoses come in fads. It seems like autism/asperger is supplanting attention-deficit as the trendy thing. In the 80s/90s there was a wave of detecting sexual abuse everywhere. The fad thing goes way back, too: in Freud's early days there were huge numbers of hysterics, many of whom were manifesting pretty dramatic symptoms. Yet one never hears about that any more. Where did they all go?

Anyway, good for you, and lucky for your son, that you're not putting up with it in his case. I bet they couldn't wait to medicate him.

What I've learned from this is that nobody has a fucking clue what any of this stuff means.

You now have necessary and sufficient qualifications to be a patient advocate.

This is similar to my brother's experience. They had all these "ideas" of what was going on because he wasn't like the other kids (note that this was a private religious school).

They made him take an IQ test so that they would have an excuse to move him to some remedial classes.

After he got a 136 they ended up leaving him alone but he moved on to a better school.

I didn't know students could be forced to take an IQ test.

I suppose in a private school they can do anything they want?

I took an Asperger's test online and scored just below the threshold for the syndrome. I wonder how many other coders are in the same category.

Of course now I'm like Peter Griffin on Family Guy when he tested as "retarded" I have an excuse to blame all my quirks on, be they symptoms Asperger's or not. Walking down the hall with my fly open? If someone calls me on it I just say "Hey, get off of my case! I'm nearly autistic!"*

*Note: I don't actually do that. :-)

I took an Asperger's test online and scored just below the threshold for the syndrome. I wonder how many other coders are in the same category.

I just found the wired test and also scored just below the threshold. I had no idea.

OTOH, I dressed as Rainman at last year's 80's themed Haloween party. There were 3 Devo groups and 6 Palmer girls, but I was the only Rainman. I didn't even have to act. I should have known something was up.

Kmart sucks.

Definitely.

Is this really a "dark secret?" I feel like people have been going on about IT & Asperger's for years. Also, wasn't this exact same article published in a different paper about a year ago? edit - 2 months ago, i guess.

Yes, it was. And it was posted here as well. I remember reading it.

Also, I know that ESR mentioned Asperger's in IT at least a decade ago you are right about it being pretty old hat.

That said, it's still an interesting discussion.

This secret was already exposed twice: http://searchyc.com/submissions/dark+secret

My wife, who spent time around heaps of social workers, starting creating a list of vocations and which psychiatric disorders that might help them.

Asperger's: engineers/coders

Narcissism: politicians

Egotism: CEOs

Lawyers: OCD

others?

OCD also applies to coders - speaking from experience here. You haven't seen truly refactored code until you've seen somebody with OCD try to infinitely refine it :)

I disagree, people with OCD tend to write terrible code. They want their code to show all the details, but hiding details is what programming is all about. OCD people will make your project very late as they worry about all the special cases that aren't.

"Lawyers" is listed in the same column as the three mental disorders. Was that intentional?

Schizophrenia - Science fiction/cyberpunk author...

Online Asperger's test: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

Pressing "Calculate Score" though will show you the source code of the Perl script instead of calculating your results - however the code is easy to follow :)

My score: 24.

> will show you the source code of the Perl script instead of calculating your results

B-b-but Wired gets the web. 1998's web, judging by the tech they use.

will show you the source code of the Perl script instead of calculating your results

FinalScore = TempScore * AbilityToReadCode

so all posers evaluate to "0".

Also, the scoring system is shown below the test, so you don't even have to press the button or read the code.

The scoring system annoyed me, because it turned out that the time I'd spent soul-searching about whether I "strongly agreed" or only "somewhat agreed" with certain statements was a complete waste. Do I definitely agree that I'm not very good at remembering phone numbers, or only slightly agree?

An odd question: "I am fascinated by dates". Which kind of dates are we talking about here? It's possible that your interpretation of that question is an Asperger's test on its own.

Same here. 0 or 1? WTF!

But what do you mean by the dates reference? I understood that to mean "what happened on this day," spotting patterns in dates, knowing ahead of time what date things will happen, etc?

I saw this at least a month ago. Is this a reprint or am I losing it?

The date on the article is Monday, 23 June, 2008. However my super IT Aperger's power gives me total recall abilities so I know I saw this before.

I knew it: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...

The author must have gotten married she's now Tracy Mayor Framingham instead of Tracy Mayor. Apparently you can then reprint all of your old articles.

Nice catch!

People who are concerned this is a fad have some legitimate concerns.

But, they are at risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This diagnosis opens up an incredibly insightful way of understanding much of human culture, history, and art. It is pretty easy to link up certain archetypes to aspergers syndrome. The Romantic Hero, for example, or the Shaman both read like descriptions of Asperger's as manifested in a certain societal context. This could partly be because storytellers often are Aspergian themselves and the characteristic identity diffusion leads Aspergian people both create idolized versions of themselves, study their world intently, and project themselves (and their aspergian traits) onto the stories of their culture. The greek god Hermes often presents as Aspergian (in that he is concerned with information, started technology, in the form of music, as an infant, relates to travel, never stays in the same place, etc). The lack of concern for societal norms maps perfectly onto the trickster's taboo breaking. Jesus at twelve in the temple speaking to priests as an authority mirrors Dr. Hans Asperger's description of his patients as "little professors". It's fractally recursive throughout human history.

This concept also cast light deep into the edifice of academic philosophy, in that many philosophers had asperger's syndrome and changed philosophies about the same time in their lives. Kant developed transcendental Idealism. Wittgenstein abandoned his picture theory of words. Etc. This correlates with a change in Asperger's whereby around age 40 the Aspergian or autistic aspects soften, and some measure of reciprocity is added to the personality, and relates to observed changes in the brain. Understanding Wittgenstein's picture theory in light of the difficulties of aspergers illuminates both aspergers and the reasons Wittgenstein's theory was the way it was. At a meta level, one of the next tasks in at least AI and consciousness studies, will be to disentangle autistic and non autistic theories about consciousness. This could also shed light into AI, because Aspergian or Autistic people doing AI with an impaired theory of other minds won't succeed, and will make certain characteristic errors in their reasoning rooted in the way Asperger's projects onto their academic work.

Some people say that everyone is a unique little snowflake and so special and that these boxes can't be applied easily or posthumously and blah blah. Those people are idiots. You are not a unique little snowflake, and are not special. Without exception (for any 'you') You are an instantiation of the same patterns that millions of other people instantiate, with a few superficial differences you probably confuse for a unique and indescribable soul, and it's easy for the right person to put you in a box and label you (and manipulate the hell out of you if they want, eg, advertising and marketing). Asperger's and HFA present distinctly. You actually can make pretty valid diagnosis of something so characteristic even posthumously. We shouldn't avoid interpreting history this way because it destroys peoples pathetic illusion's that they are special and impossible to pin down.

This is the kind of thing where understanding it at the surface will be deceiving, but understanding deeply will be illuminating. The way most people understand this is wrong, but understanding Asperger's as it relates to human culture will enhance most people's understanding of the world deeply.

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