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Comment by robotnikman | Hacker News Reader

Glad to see them taking the initiative to make interviews more accommodating for people on the spectrum.

As someone on the spectrum myself, I always dreaded job interviews. I would try to get as much information on what the interview would entail as well as the atmosphere and other specifics so I could mentally prepare myself beforehand and give myself a better chance to show my best side. The example they provided of performing an interview in text through a google doc rather than over the phone really hits home for me, I feel like I am much better able to communicate my ideas through written mediums than verbally.

I feel overall there is a lot of untapped talent in the neurodiverse community that is passed over due to some of these barriers in effective communication, so I'm always glad to see companies take initiatives like this.

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> As someone on the spectrum myself, I always dreaded job interviews. I would try to get as much information on what the interview would entail as well as the atmosphere and other specifics so I could mentally prepare myself beforehand and give myself a better chance to show my best side

I’m on the spectrum as well and interviews are a bit of a mixed bag for me. I hate everything around it, going to a new, unknown location, not knowing exactly where you end up, meeting new people, etc.

The interviews themselves, however, are fine. I basically get to talk about my special interest with people who are presumably equally knowledgable about the subject as I am. I usually enjoy them.

As someone on the spectrum as well, I have a question, if you don't like meeting new people, how are you supposed to collaborate with others? At Google at least, we need to work with people across teams all the time. Or you are hoping for a forever-remote gig?

I choose to work for small companies/startups. Preferably around 10-15 people.

As small companies tend to grow, the trick is to get out in time. At a previous job the company grew to over 150 and that wasn’t healthy for me. I should have bailed at around 75.

Interestingly, 150 people is a natural size where most people can maintain cognitive and social relationships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (though it seems to vary in practice up to 500+, depending on the person)

Dunbar's number is meant to encompass everyone you know. If you've got friends and family outside your work then they're counted too.

CV: "serial growth hacker".

(no offence intended!)

I have to mentally prepare for “every” non-personal conversation I have. I speak in a controlled speech cadence so that I can think about what I’m about to say. I speak with confidence and authority because I’m acting. It’s also exhausting and can really burn you out.

I think a lot of people have to do that.

It’s common in neurodivergent people and people of different classes. It’s a defense mechanism to appear to be normal. I started doing it in middle school because I was tired of being bullied and getting into fights.

A friend once pinged me about how I'd handle a request from a candidate to do text-only interviewing. He was outraged. The candidate said it would be easier for them to do a better job text-only, and his first thought was "Clearly they're scamming us." I told him, my first task would be contacting HR to ask if they needed some form of accommodation, to more elegantly address the "Why are you asking us to do this" concern he had, but also that if the candidate needed a legitimate accommodation I thought it would be great of them to accommodate. My friend had never considered that there are people that might need accommodation, and that it was a good point.

The bummer is, I think, most companies just do not give a shit about accommodating anyone. If you cannot fit their mold, they'll just find someone who can. I'm hopeful that more companies will deploy interview processes to bring out the best in their candidates, rather than processes that will specifically weed out everyone but the specific archetype of person a given interview accommodates.

One of HR's principal responsibilities is risk mitigation, and different/novel situations present unknown risks, so it is rational to avoid those situations. Most people are not mean (or even inconsiderate, just wary.

I'm not totally understanding. I suggested HR only because I thought they would be better equipped to ask sensitive questions about interview accommodations than my dev-friend.

Person-to-person interaction is an important component of most jobs. If a candidate could not conduct a verbal conversation as part of an interview, I would have a lot of trouble fitting them on any of my teams. Siloing with independent projects is an option, but I think would only be sustainable in larger orgs.

I think your post (and unless I misunderstand, your intent) kind of assumes far far too much context to be helpful. A job interview is a very specific set of conversations, whereas the function of a job at a company can have a very wide array of responsibilities that may or may not be related. If a person has a speech impediment/stutter/something like tourettes syndrome, that problem may only impede one's ability during a high pressure, synchronous conversation. Those symptoms may be totally mitigated by lowered pressure or asynchronous communication. To categorically say that someone that has difficulty communicating in high pressure, synchronous communication situations is unfit for "most jobs" is, to me, a huge miss. Especially now, where remote work is such a big deal, and so many conversations are just-Slack or just-email. If you can have a disagreement over Slack without causing adversarialism or frustration, you're far more valuable to a remote employer than someone that can communicate well over Zoom but poorly in text (I think).

I would say, if a person is able to write clearly and thoughtfully, and is competent at their role, they're very well suited for lots of jobs that aren't sales related. The meritocracy that gets touted so frequently (but is actually never upheld) should reward those that are competent at their advertised skills, right? If you're a really good programmer you should be able to find employment as a programmer, right?

I was only speaking about my work environment, and was trying to avoid making broad generalizations, but it seems I didn't try hard enough. I'm sure there are other work environments where verbal collaboration isn't so important.

I think the "Most jobs require" comment was what made it seem to broad. There are lots of jobs that require interview-style communication, I totally agree. For my friend's specific case, it was a dev at a remote company that specifically prioritized working alone and not communicating with teammates 99% of the time, to which I thought it kind of a perfect fit for someone with verbal communication difficulties.

Thanks for clarifying!

Understandable. At the same time, if you have a deaf candidate apply, you and your coworkers have the opportunity to learn some of their non-verbal communication strategies for collaboration.

I think you mean face-to-face communication? Because written text is person-to-person communication. In my experience, and on the jobs I've worked, writing has been a much more important skill than talking.

I'd personally be more than fine with someone who didn't want to ever verbally communicate, as long as they had excellent written communication skills. Especially if it's a remote job. For example, I'm sure there are many deaf people that excel in software engineering roles.

I can see how it'd be a major challenge to be deaf or bad at speaking at an in-person job where everyone else is speaking, though.

I'm much better at writing than speaking, myself, and find it much easier to convey complex ideas in writing (real-time or asynchronously). Especially writing vs. speaking through a conference app like Teams, where the latency can sometimes make things awkward.

Last I checked a developer can update jira, upload patches, review code, deploy code, and chat to slack without verbal communication.

Might want to consider broadening your horizons a bit. I'm sure this is a good description of some software jobs (especially remote), but certainly not any that I've ever held or managed.

>there is a lot of untapped talent in the neurodiverse community

There is going to be a huge advantage for companies that realize this. Massive untapped demand for jobs that recognize different ways of getting work done.

I wrote a blog post (https://beta.wildcardpeople.com/what-is-a-wildcard-person) about how people with ADHD tend to do work, and I'm finding random people on LinkedIn putting it right in their bio.

I’ve never seen myself so accurately described. I love it. May I also LinkedIn this?

Yes please, share as much as you'd like. Glad you enjoyed it :)

Skimming the post this feels very horoscop-y, like this could fit most people who read it.

That goes for most things about ADHD - it's a collection of symptoms which everyone experiences to different extents (which is why so many people claim that ADHD doesn't exist and everyone has it)

The distinction comes when you experience those symptoms constantly and to such an extreme that it becomes debilitating - to such an extreme that in order to cope, you have to structure your whole life around it.

In the context of that blog post, it goes from "yes this sounds like me" to "I need almost everything on this list or I will burnout and quit within 6 months".

It is more that there are only positive points, very much like Myers-Briggs personality types or horoscopes. I get that this is basically a sales pitch, but since as you said everything here applies to everyone this feels just "oh, look at us Wildcards(tm) we are so good for your company!"

That's very fair. As you say it's a sales pitch, so they're downplaying the negatives. They do talk about them, but the downsides they list are just a lot more serious than they suggest. I'll talk about them though!

- Unlikely to finish things, especially to a high standard

- Unpredictable, jumping between being a 10x developer and a detriment to the team for unknown reasons

- Forgetful, won't follow through on things and won't even remember it was a thing they were meant to be doing

- Generally quite susceptible to mood swings

However, I will say that many of the things that those downsides will be far more prevalent in a traditional workplace than in one that read this post and took it on board. If you're providing varied work, consistent feedback, and low expectations (in terms of quality, not volume), then you won't really see those issues arise much.

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