“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
the.scapegoat.dev
the.scapegoat.dev
I want to call it "ausplaining", this tendency to go "no no, YOU don't understand ME (because I'm special, not because I'm wrong)" whenever we get ourselves into situations like the exemplified.
I do this A LOT as well, and when people do stick with me for long enough, I often find that I'm either getting my point across by re-framing my explanation, or discover that what I'm pursuing as oh_so_important is in fact not important for the question at hand (then I feel even more stupid, because, not only did I find this of paramount importance, but everyone else didn't even consider it (because it so clearly didn't matter)).
> Because I value learning, I read about 50 technical books every year
If the author reads this, I'd congratulate them on finding the time to do that, but also advice them to maybe read 40 technical books every year, and then read 10 about the topics they clearly do struggle with (social interactions, politics, negotiation, psychology)..
The opinion reads as "I'm right and the world is wrong" to me, maybe because I can strongly relate (except the parts about reading tons of books and being really smart).
I think the author would benefit from realizing that these things they dismiss as irrelevant (mind games/politics) are actually important and beneficial to understand and master (I am not saying it should be that way, but merely point out that it is, in fact that way).
The author may also benefit from investing some of their mental capital (I'm not being sarcastic, they're obviously very intelligent) into learning how to play the games, to figure out neurotypicals enough to communicate with them on their level/terms.
Yes, workplaces need to be accommodating, but in the end, no matter who we are, it's our ultimate responsibility, to ourselves, to learn how to function in this world.
As for the situation where the other party is factually wrong.. Well, yes.. I always imagine this situation, where I have the right of way on my bicycle, and it's the semi-truck that must yield.. There are a fair number of times where being right does not matter.
I am not aware of any good systematic textbooks on this topic.
(of course not the author)
It can be a bit on the nose, though, larve, to use this book.
Best,
bigDinosaur
--
Seriously, it's very easy to go wrong with How to win friends. IMO a lot of its advice probably worked better back in the day when formality was somewhat more appreciated and knowing when to avoid it more of a skill.
But anything that gives me insight into how I differ from others, and how their mind works has helped me.
Even books like "The Intelligent Negotiator", "The Intelligent Conversationalist" which superficially seems to be mainly about manipulating and scamming people give interesting insights into how people work.
I've also read some books on pedagogy, a subject I hate due to how much childhood trauma its rigid application caused me..
Maybe because of it.. Those books, at least the old ones I read, define the boxes into which children will and must fit, the methods to make them fit, and the reasoning behind those methods..
Very interesting stuff to read for me, because it made it clear why it didn't work on me, and why it would have worked on my peers. They are almost lists of "behaviour X is due to situation Y" which may be true for neurotypical children, but were certainly not for me. I digress, they gave me good insights into how "the others" work.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Greene however just makes me feel icky.
I didn’t give much information about my life, but I am pretty adept at playing all these games. So much so that I thought there was no way I could be autistic because of how many friends and business relationships I had. Until it hit me that I spent my 20ies doing what you suggest, which is studying the heck out of these things.
But it stops at engineering, where I try to be very open-minded and learn as much as I can. I have to readily accept I am wrong on most of my assumptions because I just couldn’t be a good engineer otherwise. I can be perfectly suave and agreeable discussing anything else. That means I probably know how to play the “acquiesce when you should” game quite well.
But I’m at work because I am blessed to have a job where I get to do what I care about: good engineering. I deliver great value when people understand my way of thinking, and thankfully I have plenty of colleagues that get it.
I very much relate.. I've been so bitter as to keep a small list of "told you so's" that I'd update when my rejected ideas were finally proven to be the better path (though it may have been months or even years after the fact (most agonizing when someone else suggested exactly the same thing, but explained it in other terms,focusing on things I didn't find central to the point).
In the end I deleted the file. Some of the "told you so's" were petty things anyway, and.. Now I try and take it as part of my responsibility to work a bit harder at finding arguments against my point of view, as well as work a bit more politically to get it through when I'm ready to put my head on the line that I'm right and everyone else are wrong.
P.S. I'm closing in on the big 4-o and I'm still working on myself, still trying to learn politics, how to talk with nontechnical superiors and how to accept that sometimes, we go with the wrong solution because someone else tells so.
In a way, it's a way to do a team-wide "we told us so, so what now?"
If (for example) that one struggling colleague is shining in front of a superior and you are the guy who rains on his parade by nitpicking some detail he said, you might be technically right, but you end up being perceived as an asshole because you acted like one.
If if that example you strictly need to be right for some reason, you could also just talk to the guy afterwards etc.
And this is what all of it essentially boils down to: It is good to be right, as long as the way you communicate it is adequate for the situation.
If people have a low effort chit chat and don't want to go too deep into things, it might not be wise to get all excited and monologoue about how everything they know is wrong. If someone shows you something they have been working on for weeks, maybe it is wiser to aknowledge the good things first, before going into the bad things.
Generally it is better to have others discover facts themselves than spitting them out in front of them. Sure, if the boat is literally sinking and they claim punching more holes will help, this might be a good moment for a statement without nuance — but such statements have their time and place and should not be used everywhere.
Instead, it was an entire article that not once acknowledged that you could be wrong, nor what it looks like when you do acknowledge it. It detailed about how, actually, you're not usually wrong.
This article appears to underscore the accusation.
When I’m wrong I just say “oh you’re right, good point” and move on. It’s very easy to do.
Sadly I don't have much to share in the way of insight.
Have you considered that being comfortable admitting fault is a skill which some people never learned while growing up, regardless of gender? And can you imagine a world where men do the same thing, but you don't gripe about it because you're not in a relationship with them?
And, tbf, "the wife is never wrong" encodes some wisdom, same as does the saying "Happy wife means happy life" or, from White Men Can't Jump, "Always listen to the woman".
Let's take the React checkout example that you gave. Your self-illusion is that you were engaged in holistic thinking. And, in fact, you couldn't even see the whole for the first irrelevant detail that caught your attention. This is the opposite of holistic thinking!
First, it is not your job to make that kind of technology decision. You can offer advice, but it is your manager's job. Your job is to make sure that your manager is well-informed. You failed at that job.
If you believe otherwise, then you're wrong. You probably believe you are better equipped to make that decision than your manager. You may well be right about that. (Though, as a rule, we tend to think that we are smarter than we are, and our managers are stupider than they are. But that is a side point.) But you are still wrong about the important point. Which is that it is still your manager's responsibility to make that decision.
You wanted to frame the entire conversation around, "Does this checkout form have a concrete problem that needs fixing?" Your manager's thinking is going to be about very different looking questions. Such as:
- Will switching to React make hiring and training future developers easier?
- Do my existing programmers have the necessary skills to test this technology out?
- Will this technology choice make future projects faster to develop? (For example, do we get wins from a better toolchain, etc.)
- Will this be an interesting project that helps me keep existing employees motivated?
- Are the other claimed wins in the blog post actually going to work out that way?
Your manager needs to think about these things. You may dismiss them as bullshit, but they are not. Companies live and die on such considerations.
Your manager learned absolutely nothing about these things. Your manager may have come away with the impression that you have no idea if there is a problem with the checkout page. But by misunderstanding your role and responsibility, you failed to carry out your actual responsibility within the team. And wound up so upset about it that you wrote a blog post with a strong undertone of, "Here is the kind of stupid I have to deal with at work."
And that AGAIN puts you in the wrong. It literally takes under a minute to go from your blog to your name to where you work. Any coworker who recognizes the blog now knows you're unhappy. Which poisons your work atmosphere. And if this comes to your manager's attention, your manager has to now deal with the fallout from THAT.
Yes, yes. You consider it bullshit. But it is bullshit that can easily get you fired. For good cause. And the fact that you do this AGAIN puts you in the wrong. And your considering it bullshit DOESN'T STOP YOU FROM BEING WRONG. It just means you won't admit it was a mistake.
Err, no: "A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React [...]"
> You wanted to frame the entire conversation around, "Does this checkout form have a concrete problem that needs fixing?" Your manager's thinking is going to be about very different looking questions.
This is literally their first question: "Is our checkout page not performing well?". The manager should have simply said "the problem is not performance, but X" instead of assuming that the developer is rejecting their idea.
> You may dismiss them as bullshit, but they are not.
It is interesting that you, like the manager, assume that they dismissed the idea.
> And that AGAIN puts you in the wrong.
I disagree. If the manager is not able to clarify the specifics of their question (remember, it was a question of whether they should do X) they are in the wrong.
This in no way contradicts what I said. This is a normal way of asking for opinions on a decision that needs to be made. And organizationally the decision IS the manager's. In practice a wise manager will take (and usually follow) advice from their developers. But still it is the manager's call.
> This is literally their first question: "Is our checkout page not performing well?". The manager should have simply said "the problem is not performance, but X" instead of assuming that the developer is rejecting their idea.
Based on my personal experience of people on the spectrum, I doubt that things happened as described. My best guess is that it was exactly what dusted described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32410505.
Namely, early in the conversation, the person on the spectrum got caught up on some irrelevant point. That they couldn't let go of. Which they kept going back to explain how right they were. Eventually the conversation got derailed having gotten no further. And, rather than dropping it, the person went on the internet to explain to the whole world how right they were.
I've been part of such conversations. (Thankfully minus the whole world bit.) The first few times you can hope that a simple clarification will get the conversation back on track. After a while you learn otherwise.
As a parent, what I've found most useful is to set a rule that the person on the spectrum is not allowed to argue that they are right. Ever. Even attempting to make the argument gets shut down. If breaks are needed to finish the conversation, then OK. This resulted in a lot less arguments, and a lot more moments of, "Oh...."
> It is interesting that you, like the manager, assume that they dismissed the idea.
No. I was doing something rather different.
The thread to this point brought up the importance of learning how to play social games. With the poster saying that they had learned to do so, were good at it, and didn't bother any more.
My experience of people on the spectrum says that the poster didn't learn nearly as much about social rules as they think, and they discount the impact more than they should. Since the factors that I described did not occur to the poster, and several focused on social rules, there is a good chance that they seem like BS.
> I disagree. If the manager is not able to clarify the specifics of their question (remember, it was a question of whether they should do X) they are in the wrong.
It takes 2 to communicate. There clearly was a communication failure here. While that failure could be the manager's fault, the odds really are in favor of it being the fault of the person with a condition that makes communication hard (autism), rather than the person whose got promoted into a job that is all about communication skills (the manager).
And yes, it really sucks for autistic people that a failure to communicate by default gets blamed on them. What sucks even harder is that it is true. Which is why it is doubly important for them to work on their communication skills.
And guess what simple change most improves communication skills for most people on the spectrum?
Hopefully you figured it out. It is to stop arguing that they are right. Ever. Not because they are usually wrong. But because they tend to wind up arguing that they are right when they are missing something basic, and the fact that they are arguing makes it impossible to figure out what they are missing.
This is surprisingly hard advice to take. And it is harder for people on the spectrum than neurotypical people. But it makes a huge difference.
> The problem is that you come across as ...
> And the fact that you do this AGAIN ...
> My experience of people on the spectrum says that the poster ...
I do not know precisely when, but it seems that at some point you started ranting to your child.
However there is a long path from first getting the idea of a rewrite to actually undertaking it. And the conversation in question happened because the manager had just read an article about such a rewrite, so it was very early in that journey.
> - Will this technology choice make future projects faster to develop? (For example, do we get wins from a better toolchain, etc.)
> - Will this be an interesting project that helps me keep existing employees motivated?
> - Are the other claimed wins in the blog post actually going to work out that way?
But... These are (or can be framed as) concrete problems.
> - Do my existing programmers have the necessary skills to test this technology out?
If you can't produce a single concrete reason why to try a new framework, why should I discuss about testing it?
(this as someone who may be on the spectrum and for whom the original article hit a bit too close..)
As for not producing a single concrete reason to try the new framework, there is no reason to believe that the manager didn't. According to the article the manager had just read a blog post on it, that caught the manager's attention enough to spark a conversation. SURELY there was SOMETHING in that article about why it might be a good idea to try React?
We aren't told what points were made, likely because they seemed irrelevant. But I'd bet good money that some were made.
The second question is quite literally just a "Have you experience with React?" which doesn't require additional questions for clarification. The manager would be expecting a "yes/no, but ..." type of answer. Honestly your questions would be asked in a meeting with as many developers and even non developers as possible to save time, not in a one to one conversation.
Honestly this whole topic is way too similar to the Dilbert comic where Dilber asks his boss what colour he wants his database in, to test whether he understands what a database is.
That said, I have a coach that helps me with this, and I work on my writing a lot. I am currently at a job where I never run into this particular problem, yet I have thorny discussions with lots of "disagreements" all the time. This really helped me understand that it's not just me.
I did take a few autism tests here and there, but always thought "oh they're just meant to make you feel special when you score high, that doesn't mean anything. plus i make good friends everywhere I go". When I told my wife she was like "who thinks that scoring high on an autism test is something people want", and we both took some of these tests. On one of the more widespread one (https://embrace-autism.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/ ), I scored 43, while she scored something like 12. My mind was absolutely blown. I started reading a few books and joining a few autism communities, and it might sound trite, but it's the first time in my life that I felt like I joined "my" community. So many of the stories and anecdotes I would read were like "finally I read something I can relate to".
I am looking for an official diagnosis (not simple) without too much effort, because I find most of the value in now being able to articulate so many of the things that puzzle me, or the conflicts I might have with my wife, or behaviours of mine, and mostly not being ashamed anymore. It's been extremely liberating, and it provides me with better words and verbs to tackle difficult situations.
I have similar memories of my 20s trying to learn how to behave in a social setting. But I also remember things clicking at some point and that part of the world stopped requiring so much effort.
Thank you for sharing. I hope you're able to get your diagnosis.
I like to akin your choice as choosing to assume the role of seeker. its lonely, its challenging, and everyone else seems to not care to play THAT game (some may say is a metaphor for divinity). But the reward is YOU WIN THE GAME. significantly better payout.
I share the metaphor to say that A) I understand you, B) I share your feelings and choice on the matter of identifying and managing Real Politik and C) congratulate you for identifying your true north star and having the strength to pursue in in spite of it not being rhe standard for others.
One can have asperger's and still be nice to people. These things are not mutually exclusive. I see too many people who find it convenient to be a toxic, rude bully, and don't know that they are, and use their condition as an excuse to be a jerk.
From my experience, it's usually not a problem to be pretty forward with people on the spectrum, if you are meaning well. My wife told me there is absolutely no problem with telling me to stop going on about a topic bluntly, and it is something I quite often do with my friends too. Same for pointing out that a certain way of phrasing something didn't come across well, in fact I really appreciate receiving these pieces of advice. What hurts is the "NT" way of communicating these things, hoping that I'd catch up on them. I don't.
> In 2013, the DSM-5 replaced Autistic Disorder, Asperger’s Disorder and other pervasive developmental disorders with the umbrella diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
why are you assuming they are talking to people IRL like they would write a blog post? Very few people talk in person like they type or behave differently in professional environments vs casual. Seems like a weird critique.
I would have written something like, "Allistic people communicate in a way that causes friction in understanding by autistic people, and vice versa, and this leads to a slowdown in the workplace for everyone."
I like the form it currently has too, but it requires taking every word at face value, and not assuming any subtext. For example, I don’t blame anybody, thus I really mean I am not blaming anybody. This is an examination of how things have played out and why they might have played out the way they did. Nothing more.
For what it’s worth, I think your assessment and advice are both spot-on.
I know the original author is far into his career as well but I think especially as we get more senior that humility and valuing other’s perspectives become as important as the technology. Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career were from dismissing the ideas of peers.
Humility is great, but automatically accepting the blame for somebody's failure to communicate something to you just because they are allistic ... that is not so great.
I wrote this article because despite being as humble as I can, these situations still arise. You can get very far doing so, but my biggest mistakes were to not realize that I sometimes actually right.
I don’t doubt the veracity of what the author wrote, but I would guess that if we spoke to the counter-parties, their recollection of certain things would be very different.
How people perceive the world and express themselves vary, and some people don’t jive well. I have a developer on my team who is very literal person, if I say “I could kill that guy”, he doesn’t capture the nuance. But he is brilliant, a friend and trusted colleague. A good leader should get that and adjust.
Yes, there's some ego in that. Author won't back down.
But clearly, the author isn't the ultimate arbiter of truth. Some things are objectively true.
You can't appreciate that this person have spent 10h per day for last 23 years at dealing with computer issues. Instead you think it would be better spent learning some office politics. I'm not even sure how to comment on that.
Those are not hard skills to learn, like patiently responding to questions before jumping to conclusions about what the person you are talking to thinks about this and that.
In the meantime, it's not a bad idea for an individual person to improve their soft skills, just to make their own life easier. For the individual neurodivergent person, learning how to effectively communicate with neurotypical people is a more effective short-term strategy than waiting for all of society to adapt.
But I think you underestimate how much effort autistic people put into improving our soft skills in order to survive. In fact, I learned to be so good at social occasions that I never thought I could be autistic, given how many colleagues value me and how many friends I have and make. I reflect here upon situations where all these improved soft skills didn’t help however, and try to understand what might be going on.
Nah, it's more "improve society & improve yourself". ND people realize being "vs" and wiring their brains differently is not achievable, so NDs try to "soften the blow" to their own mental health by trying to make allistic people know how they work. Sharing is the first step towards understanding.
Thing is, programming computers and solving technical problems is fun to me, I enjoy it, and it's a perfectly spent time for me, as I believe it is to them.. I don't enjoy office politics, I hate them, I don't like a lot of how society is structured with regards to social convention and politics in general..
But the universe does not care about my opinion that technical problems are worthier pursuits than learning how to handle people, especially people with vastly different (and/or inferior by whatever standard you need) skills, because at the end of the day, the cost is going to be greater to me than to the multinational megacorp.
A lot of challenges with autism can be about not being able to see others’ perspectives
In fact, it's possible to be highly egocentric and altruistic at the same time. You see this with parents who might deeply love their children but can't understand how their child's perspective might differ from their own. They might think their kids have the same likes and dislikes as they do.
I also find "allistic" feels like a dismissive or slightly derogatory alternative to neurotypical. (To be clear, I do not thing the author was using it that way at all, it is just the reaction the word engenders in me.)
I've learned the hard way that caring too much about work related topics doesn't contribute to your happiness.
Company men will replace you if they can do their business math for justification, because they cannot see the technical complexities of the things they are "wanting to be built" for the company.
Even when you can see dependencies of complexities that will break the plan a year ahead of time, and you were right in complaining about it, it doesn't effectively help you as a person.
Being stuck in the past is just the same waste of energy as being angry about it. Hate and anger are infiltration techniques and should be treated as such.
People will always react based upon their own experiences and understanding, and if you actively try to fight the statistics (aka you vs your team) you will just hurt your perception.
Being seen as rude by other people gives you a strategival disadvantage for negotiation, and that will hurt the rate of adaption of your own suggestions. The ironic part is that people are even more petty than the "I told you so list" that you mentioned, only that they think subconcious pettiness of system1 isn't "petty" but only "a feeling" even though the mechanics and dynamics of it in a rational context are the same.
Work is work, and it will always be "just work". As an autist you have to learn that other people don't care about things as much as you would do (in a utopian star trek world). As a hu-man (literally meaning being that forgets) you have a very limited capacity of memory, computation power and energy.
And your efforts are far more efficiently spent outside the world of company politics, where most people are just busy 90% of the time with sidelining or attacking other departments for their own egomaniac benefits. Playing this game is a huge drain on energy (at least for me) and I therefore decided not to play it.
I thought at first you had invented a clever new word combining strategy and survival. Then I realized that v is just very close to c on a qwerty keyboard. Oh well.
Yeah I was typing on mobile and didn't catch it while proofreading. The textarea is so annoyingly small :(
That's certainly a message I have encountered in some places, and in the first few sentences of this article I thought that's what I might find here.
But unlike you, I quickly concluded that that was not at all the article I was reading. Rather than argue that they were special because of their autism, this author listed highly specific, clearly explained ways in which other people they interact with fail to understand them.
> If the author reads this, I'd congratulate them on finding the time to do that, but also advice them to maybe read 40 technical books every year, and then read 10 about the topics they clearly do struggle with (social interactions, politics, negotiation, psychology).
Did you read the part of the article where the author explained that they do this reading because they find it enjoyable, rather than simply to get ahead?
They’re just part of the game. If you want to do well in any position you cannot neglect them.
> There is more to life: I am an engineer; I like solving problems. I embrace fairness and open intellectual exchange. This matters to me a whole lot more than getting promoted. Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic.
OK, yes, but, how about: "I am still not convinced, BUT I realize neither of us are going to convince the other one right now, and I've been wrong before, let's try it your way this time."
This is not appeasing bullies and making the workplace toxic. Sometimes insisting on arguing everything out forever every time you think you are right is what is in fact accidentally being a bully and making the workplace toxic. (And I have definitely been that person; I am not to my knowledge autistic, although some people have wondered sometimes).
I think people can mean either one by "giving in", I am wondering whether the OP, in rejecting "pretending I agree when I don't" is accidentally being the person who "always insists on getting their way every time".
And one of the big things that tech people often don't ask themselves is: "Does arguing over this really matter?"
"Winning" an argument almost always costs you some social capital, so save your arguments for the things that are genuinely important.
If you've said the "right" answer, people still want to argue, but it doesn't affect you then sit down and shut up. Sometimes you have to let people make a mistake so they can learn.
If they're really smart, not only will they learn they were wrong but they will remember that you were right but didn't beat them up about it.
I've never understood why people go along with things they disagree about. It seems people often beat a good argument with the threat of retribution if we dont play along. Doesnt sound like a recipe for well thought out actions or incentives.
And because I know I might be wrong even though I don't think I am, I've been mistaken about that before, that's literally what being wrong is. Sometimes when I'm wrong I am not going to realize it for days/weeks/months. So why fight it to the death? Only when the consequences seem especially vital, not every damn time!
I am still not advocating pretending to think something you don't. You do not have to pretend you agree with the other person or lie about what you think. But I am advocating some humility. (I definitely do not always exhibit it myself, for anyone reading this who knows me; I do consider it one of my faults; I am writing here as a reminder for myself too).
I actually think it's important to set up a culture where everyone doesn't have to agree -- we all acknowledge we will sometimes embark on a course of affairs that everyone doesn't agree with, and you don't need to pretend you agree. People will disagree, and sometimes we still need to move forward. I actually fully agree that a culture where people have to pretend to agree in order to move forward is dishonest and harmful. And that's generally the real-world outcome of expecting nobody ever to "go along" with something they disagree with.
I like this angle, I'll try to observe if it's actually happening in my context :)
Sometimes the worst case outcome isn’t very bad and will be quickly uncovered.
Sometimes you acknowledge that though you’re sure you’re right, there’s the possibility that you are not.
People also understand that "correctness" is often subjective and not boolean in nature, so insisting their opinion is in all ways the most correct would be silly.
One thing I dont understand is why American culture is such that it's better to play nice to the group detriment than to work hard to everyone's benefit? It's like people would rather smile on a sinking ship than suffer the journey to excellence.
[1]: for example I've warned my employer once that an implementation was brutally inefficient and will cost both opex and velocity, but they told me "what's your solution" to which I could only reply "give me a week to design it like you gave the principal engineer and I'll give you a better solution". They laughed and said they dont have a month. The choice has cost the business >$1M in excess PaaS fees and has had multiple subsequent major projects to attempt to remediate the costs (granted the opex costs have come down significantly since multiple rounds of refinement). But the point still stands -- I roughly knew a better path to not need 6+ months of refinement, and save >$1M in opex overspend, but they wouldn't spare the time and disparaged me for not being a team player.
When you know you know better it's best not to submit. Perhaps it's worth realizing it's a bad culture though.
The cost of choosing washing machine A is that it breaks at some distant time. The cost of arguing about washing machines is wasting an hour every week driving to a laundromat and paying $10 a wash, plus the hard-to-quantify strain on your relationship, for an argument you might not even win. In this situation, the hidden third option of dragging out a conflict that you might not even win could end up more costly than choosing a bad option, even if you're right.
In software this happens a lot. You burn opportunity cost trying to argue for a perfect solution instead of aligning behind a flawed solution.
If only they were all that way.
If someone tells me their blender is the best washing machine, this may turn into a painful conversation. A long one. Possibly an embarrassing one. But I’m here for it. That’s a fucking blender, and I’m not going to call it a washing machine even if that’s the last decision I make here.
It would be great if all of these situations were as sane as picking between two valid options. Sometimes there’s a valid one, and, well, pick your expletives for the other one.
In software this happens a lot. Entire teams spinning plates because someone confused authority with experience.
I fully agree that in a romantic relationship there is far more at stake than any single choice.
But I've found the professional world to work far differently. For starters people only stick around jobs an average of 18 months (whereas marriages get about 7 yrs). And there is far more at stake to having your choice selected in an argument at work -- promotions and subsequent pay increases are worth 10s-100s of thousand. Submissive people are frequently looked over for promotion and may miss >5 years of promoted working years.
perfection was never in the discussion, but good (ie high quality) is. When I see someone arguing for a bad solution (ie both high risk & total cost of ownership expensive) it's there's actually a lot on the line. This risk factor scales with the size/brand of the business. Look at the pie in the face one company wears[1] for a security breach, whereas another gets to demonstrate their security forward posture[2]. The former likely has lost millions to a ~million dollar choice[3]. Whereas the latter has increased their brand value to the same choice.
But the person who argues without end for what they think is right is often ostracized and disparaged. This is something very broken in American culture.
[1]: https://www.twilio.com/blog/august-2022-social-engineering-a...
[2]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cloudflare-em...
[3]: 8k workers by $125 -- yubikey + cost of training ~$1M .
It especially works better when there's too much ambiguity to proceed aggressively in any direction no matter how confident you are.
It usually more accurately reflects the group's appetite for risk, creates psychological safety, and reduces the social costs of failure.
Yes, it's possible that the OP is accidentally being a bully by insisting on getting their way every time. But it's also possible that everything the OP is saying is true, and the other party really is objectively wrong. Do you agree it's possible the OP is right?
I personally have encountered a situation where a tech lead repeatedly doubled down on idea that was objectively deeply flawed, but they had a lot of political capital, so management told me I just needed to "give in". Other engineers agreed with my assessment in private, but weren't willing to say so publicly.
That that point you need to choose, which you value more highly: correctness and finding the best technical solution, or maintaining as much team cohesion and not "stirring the water" too much.
So, if it's not your head on the chopping block, but a public decision about how to do things (ideally documented in an ADR - architecture decision record, with an author attached), just roll with it and indeed "give in". Ideally with some of your concerns documented, as well as a few prepared suggestions for how to deal with the eventual fallout and how to fix some of the things that might go wrong.
That's not what my point was about, however. I am not going to state "python is better than C++" just because someone wants me to say it, or back down from something I know is a fact, like "writing a file to disk is a complicated process." And I'm ready to quit over that.
You shouldn't, quite the opposite - you should be able to express your concerns freely or at least make them known in whatever form of a "paper trail" is available. Better yet, if you are able to provide examples of what might go wrong with a particular technical choice and how to address it.
> ...or back down from something I know is a fact, like "writing a file to disk is a complicated process."
This is where things get a bit more complicated, though.
If you disagree with an approach that the team or certain members might pick, to the point where it blocks progress and they're not intent on budging their own views either, then clearly work cannot continue.
In those situations, there are just a few ways how things might go:
- neither you, nor them concede, work cannot continue until an external intervention
- one of you concedes, work continues, good decisions are made and there are no problems down the road
- one of you concedes, work continues, bad decisions are made and there are problems down the road
> And I'm ready to quit over that.
This is also a valid choice, though it also probably reflects how hot the job market is in your country, how important having a job is at the present moment, as well as your tolerance or emotional involvement in the project.
Some might jump around various companies until they may or may not find the environment that they're looking for, others might have to temporarily tolerate some bad engineering until another project comes along, others end up feeling miserable when the culture is all bad. I guess it varies quite a bit.
We can go ahead writing your file-based persistence layer, and I"m fine supporting and maintaining it too. But I won't say that "it's simple".
You know, even MongoDB GridFS or binary blobs in RDBMSes could be less problematic options, rather than dealing with inodes, maximum file path lengths, file name constraints, storing metadata, maximum files in a directory and eventually having to build a system for having a tree of nested folders to work around those (a bit like what Ruby on Rails ActiveStorage does with uploaded files out of the box, for example).
That's what I meant with . I am happy to write `fwrite(foobar)` and get the project going, but it's not simple, and there might be very valid reasons to not do just `fwrite(foobar)`. If you don't want me to even mention these, then I'm out.
Otherwise, I will fully engage. I'm really a pragmatist when it comes to getting stuff done. Anything getting shipped is better than nothing getting shipped, and I will maintain it for as long as it needs to.
On an individual level, yes, that's the choice I had.
But on an organizational level, it's possible to do much better! In a healthy organization, tech leads listen to feedback and evaluate it with an open mind, and are willing to acknowledge that they're wrong. If they don't do that, then a healthy organization removes them from their position. In my case, this particular tech lead had a long history of being toxic, but the manager refused to fix the problem; this was a case of organizational dysfunction.
I don't know the details of the OP's situation, but I think it's possible they're running into something similar: Their coworkers aren't listening to valid points, and management isn't holding them accountable for being open-minded. If the org considers this behavior normal, I'd consider that a form of org dysfunction.
My point is that both of these things can be true. By insisting you always get your way in any dispute, you can be a bully even if you are always "objectively right".
How do we know who is "objectively right"? Both sides believe they are, right? Have you never realized later you were wrong about something?
> I personally have encountered a situation where a tech lead repeatedly doubled down on idea that was objectively deeply flawed, but they had a lot of political capital, so management told me I just needed to "give in". Other engineers agreed with my assessment in private, but weren't willing to say so publicly.
I will say again that I am not suggesting that anyone lie about what they think, or say one thing publicly or another privately, or not share their true assessments publicly, or that this is a good culture where people think they need to.
I don't think we have enough information about OP's situation to say for sure. I agree that many disputes are highly subjective, and there's no way to say who's objectively right. But I also think there are cases where, after listening and understanding both sides, it's pretty clear which side has a better argument.
Objective reality does exist! People are sometimes bad at judging what's objective, especially when emotions run high; but it's not impossible. And, if the question is important, then finding the objectively correct answer is better for the success of the project.
It is though. It's a way of saying "maybe I'm wrong, and we're going to act this out by pretending that I am". This means that whoever put pressure on you gets their way, which motivates them to do it again. That is toxic.
While I don't think this is a ridiculous take, it is a rather uncharitable one. I'd think the only reasonable time this should be believed is after it has shown itself to be a pattern.
What one person considers arguing is not always considered arguing from another's perspective. (I don't want to label the sides here because I think definition varies neurodivergent or not)
From the examples given it sounds like the author views the conversation as a beginning middle and end before they can make a judgement, but the person asking them the question is only expecting the end part so theres a misunderstanding.
Generalising here body language is different in autistic people, tone of voice, social cues and manner of speaking, depending on how well that person can mask might affect how their attempt to understand the problem is perceived.
I hope it's just worded poorly or I am reading too much into it.
Edit: I'm not saying that invalidates the article's content (in fact I recognize the situations from personal experience), but it doesn't really put a positive spin on it.
Interestingly, as I’ve grown more experienced, it has become much easier to realize that I don’t know jack about anything really, and that it is so easy to go out and look for answers with the resources we have nowadays.
These are my thoughts on why differences of opinions get phrased as “autistic people just can’t admit when they are wrong”, when myself and most autistic people I know in fact readily admit when we are wrong and move on all the time. I don’t think of blaming anybody here, that is you reading things into it. I just need explanations and strategies to handle these situations.
Alright, thanks for responding directly to that.
In my personal experience, people don't typically conclude that I would refuse to admit I'm wrong. The only conclusion drawn in my experience (usually) is that we're unable to get our points across, in both ways, and we should probably try to come back to the same topic again later and maybe prepare a little bit better.
We need to be careful, though, to not adopt black and white thinking even around "facts." Often, multiple contradictory factual things can be true at the same time and all pass verification.
Illusions are a lighthearted example of this that helped me appreciate this point. For example, the Yanni/Laurel audio illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) where people on both sides argue, in good faith, that the sound is one or the other. And even if you analyze the underlying audio in depth, neither side is factually wrong because that is how they experience it and isn't merely based around an opinion :-)
This example does not add much. If it is how people experience, then the only fact they can derive is, that they personally experienced it that way. There is no point in fighting about "what it really is", when all you have is a personal exerience. Anyone saying it objectively is this one or that one, only based on personal experience, is not accounting for the fact, that others can experience differently, which is silly.
In this light I assume, that you put quotes around "facts" as a means of saying, that they are not really facts, because if they were, then there would truly only be black and white.
I think this sharing of my perspective may help the conversation to move forward in a more productive manner.
Thank you for putting this information out there! I hope it helps other people understand autistic communication and intentions a little bit better.
What follows is not really directed at you but rather reflecting on this whole comment section, I hope you forgive me :)
IN the article, the only case where I insist on being right is in scenario #4, where I can actually demonstrate that a fact is true. In fact, it's not me being right, it's the result of the experiments I propose. Otherwise, I'm either asking questions, trying to actually state my opinion in the first place, or not willing to say something I don't agree with because it goes against my values.
Agreeing or defusing the situation is necessary for personal relationships, but this is the workplace, and while it's good to be nice, it has to go both ways. The easiest way to deal with conflicting opinions in personal relationships is just to be curious, a good listener, and not (or rarely) state any opinions of your own. That might sound a bit sad, but I have plenty of fun debating opinions on my own, no need to involve other people.
However, I'm not at work to read your mind and guess how you might interpret my words. I am at work to be an engineer and produce results, and I am an engineer because I love technology, not to make money and have a career. I also really don't want to antagonize people or prove my superiority or brag or retaliate, I legitimately just like solving problems to the best of the team's capabilities.
Because I don't have an intuitive sense of how to react in a given situation, extending some empathy my way helps a lot. And for that, it's worth communicating my point of view: that I am not being patronizing; I am just asking questions I think are necessary.
It's like asking a blind person to navigate around potholes. They might be able to do it, but it's also nice to understand they're not tripping on them on purpose.
Your post reads extremely arrogantly. It's a "I am very smart" type of communication style.
None of the points you bring up are specific to autistic individuals. I'm allistic (as you put it) and, realistically, not that intelligent, but I experience the first two of your points on a regular basis. But I've learned to modify my handling of these types of situations so that, most of the time, I get a positive/productive response.
Now I obviously can't know how you communicate outside your blog posts. But it may be prudent to think about it – if you come across as arrogant or a "know it all", then the "you don't acknowledge when you're wrong" is just a nicer way of saying it.
And when people get a “vibe” of arrogance/know-it-all-ness from a person, they will be much less willing to accept, well, anything. And for good reason. This especially applies to corrections, "let's play 20 questions" and long-winded explanations of context (especially if you explain something they already know, even partially).
The question is, when and how do I communicate that best without coming across as arrogant.
If you start from your own set of priors and are getting nowhere, you probably want to consider there might be a more relevant fact (for that person, opinion alert!) that you don't know about and aren't considering.
Ended up that he told manager we could do it, manager was nuts and so signed us up, I left the team, they missed it by about two years. But he had fun, apparently.
This attitude is exactly what [neurotypical] people generally mean when they say "[some] autistic people can't acknowledge when they're wrong".
Not that autistic people are so convinced of their own rightness that they stare at the compiler saying "my code is flawless, the compiler must be bugged" because there is literally no circumstance in which they will ever update their worldview. But that when it comes to cases where [multiple] people suggest that the question they asked or the tone they asked it in might have been suboptimal for the situation, they are likely to rationalise it as just unverifiable opinion or status games which can't be learned from (but nevertheless, the difference of opinion probably results from misreading by the other party)
I mean, that judgment is literally a matter of opinion. If they had behaved the same in an office full of autistic people like them, or with people of another culture, the outcome would have been totally different. That said, sometimes opinions matter, like say, the legal rights of fetuses when it comes to abortion, to pick a recent example.
So concluding something is a "difference of opinions" is not the end of the story, sometimes such differences need to be resolved.
Alternative, one can avoid that reasoning and rationalise not discarding consistently failing conversational stratagems because the cause of the failed outcome of a conversation is a person's opinion which lacks the same consistency as mathematics (and therefore more effective conversational stratagems can - at best - only be supported evidentially by inductive reasoning). But that just leads to the wrong outcome more often.
At the moment it feels like it takes for granted that you're good at resolving situations where you're objectively wrong, so it's only addressing situations where there was a difference of opinions.
I'm not implying that you're bad at the former, of course. However, it's entirely possible for people to have trouble engaging you when there's a difference of opinion and for you not to be able to acknowledge when you're objectively wrong - i.e. that all of the issues you've identified in the article are happening, but that the title quote is still actually true.
I don't think an article providing a couple examples of how one individual was willing to admit they were wrong is providing much in terms of discussion or new perspectives. "See, I can admit I'm wrong!" would be a pretty shallow way of addressing what could often be a misunderstanding. Instead, the post is attempting to offer some insight into the different opinions people might have about interactions with an autistic and explanations for what is going on behind the scenes.
For every “you can’t admit you are wrong” discussion, I must have a 1000 discussions where I just go “oh you’re right” and move on. My default operating mode is being wrong and knowing I am, or knowing that alternative approaches are just as valid, or sometimes less valid but still bring value to the table. This was not easily learnt, but it just leads to better engineering so it’s a no brainer. I brush over it in a single sentence, and this is not enough, as evidenced in some comments here.
I had a much longer first draft, much less focused, and edited it down to crystalline precision. The next article I write about the topic, I will chose the other approach, and see how that resonates.
Thanks!
To give an example, if someone who is less technical asks you a question that does not give enough background information to give a precise technical answer on, the wrong thing to do is respond by first simply asking questions back at them. Particularly if the questions could be difficult for them to immediately see how it relates to answering their initial question. It doesn't matter that it's because you think holistically or they don't have as deep an understanding, or anything else. The right thing to do is try to stay with people in conversation. Explain your thinking, make sure they understand why you need to ask these questions before you can answer, or give them a range of possibilities that are dependent on these unknowns.
And asking somebody to explain their reasoning and justification for their question before you begin to answer it is very rude, so that's wrong too. It's reasonable to expect more justification as requests become more time-intensive, but an initial response to a question should have some degree of good faith and politeness. Clearly they don't understand all the implications, which is why they asked for your opinion. So asking whether they understand all the implications of what they are asking is a rhetorical question and is basically calling them a moron.
"Should we rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React?"
This question might sound like your manager is expecting a yes or no answer, but they aren't. They want some "conversation". They want your opinion, some explanation for it, an opening to continue the conversation. Even if you could answer with an unqualified "no" without further clarification and be correct on a technical basis, that response is wrong in this social interaction.
"It's possible react could help with performance but it would be quite a lot of work. I don't think we should at this point unless we're seeing performance problems."
Something like that would be a better answer.
If it is a question: "Should we do X?" They are asking for an opinion about if it should be done or at least some sort of conversation. Not asking for you to make a decision. Just state an opinion based on what you know and follow up. "I doubt it, it would be a large investment of resources that may not lead to noticeable improvements. Why?"
Is it rude to ask why someone is asking though? Understanding context can be good. It might be fine to ask something like "Why do you ask?" to get it started, before answering. Then, if relevant, follow up with those in depth questions. But just jumping into technical details feels like they are meant to shut the initiator down.
If they come to you and say: "I think we should do X." Then those questions make more sense. "Why?" is still probably enough though. Let them elaborate on their thought process. And if it really is just they say something about it in a blog. You can explain the trade offs and guide them with your knowledge.
I know this sounds blind, but it literally goes against my values. To say something I just made up without clarifying is not honest: it is playing a game. Because if I decide to play a game, where do I stop? What are the rules? I can't rely on my intuition and gut feeling, as we already established.
I thought writing things would be a better avenue, and in many ways, it is. But a document that shows "I engaged with your question for hours, for days, and these are my conclusions, along with backing-up research" is often perceived as even more dismissive or passive-aggressive, while it is literally the opposite.
You are wrong about that though. In the way you are asking, anyway.
> I can't just make up an answer (say, that performance is what they are thinking about) and then riff on that.
It wasn't making up an answer or presupposing his intention. He asked whether you should switch, giving an answer that's essentially "no" but colored with a possible reason for switching is not making anything up.
I do think this is a strategy to try, although I'm pretty sure it's really not about the words, but about body language, timing, whatever... But it is really puzzling to me that you shouldn't ask questions because people will think you are asserting something, while making random assertions in order to probe for answers is the accepted way. I know it's probably how it works, but it will never really make sense to me, and I wish these games were just a little bit easier to play if people did see things from the other side more often, instead of throwing words like "asshole" around (as you can see in comments around here).
This remains true even if allistics are generally better at such guessing.
I can definitely imagine a manager who might (unhelpfully) say "Should we rewrite in React?" to mean "I want the team to move to React for reasons I can't [or don't feel I have to] rigorously justify, I expect you to defer to me here, and now is your chance to alert me of big gotchas that we'll have to handle in the process".
Such a manager has failed to communicate what they actually want, and unless they can "correct" the listener to the desired interpretation, they're going to be frustrated when said listener takes their surface level meaning seriously. It sounds like that's what the OP was doing here (as the listener).
In contrast, the manager just seems to be flailing around, unable to clarify. That is not correctable.
Only one of these people was ruining the interaction and thus needed advice.
And that's what I was responding to. I'm not going to respond to the manager because he's not reading this.
> your advice was that he should have replied to one "correct" interpretation that was not explicit.
No that was not my advice. I gave an example of a response which acknowledges the question, provides an answer "no", and gives the opportunity for the manager to come back with something if they really did have some valid case it might help. All in fewer words flailing about with a bunch of questions that still didn't answer the original.
My example remains valid even if the interpretation of the question and whether it matched the manager's intention was wrong, it still works.
The correctness I'm talking about is not in the answer to the technical question, it is how to go about having a polite interaction with others, which is what the author's stated goal was and what they got wrong.
> In contrast, the manager just seems to be flailing around, unable to clarify. That is not correctable.
I don't know what you mean by "not correctable". Correcting the behavior corrects it.
> Only one of these people was ruining the interaction and thus needed advice.
No, both do, and the manager isn't here, hence my comment.
What doesn't come across in your article is that you can be wrong about factual things. It is unclear or unmentioned that you actually can be wrong sometimes.
These communication patterns make sense with what I know about people. I don't doubt that they happen relatively frequently, and can result in a situation where it seems like you can't accept the wrong answer. But I would ask you to re-read the piece and find a single part where you admit that you can be wrong. I can only find one, and it's in the first paragraph. It also barely qualifies as admitting you can be wrong.
None of this is to detract from the content of the piece. I just wish that it had been framed differently so that people could appreciate the insight without it coming across as egotistical.
Your remark is something I have been thinking about. For me, it’s patently evident that I’m wrong about 90% of the time when discussing facts. In fact, “truth” is one of my core values, and the only way I can honor that (and be a good engineer) is to question my every statement. That’s why I write unit tests, run experiments, read so many books, etc…
When I know something is true, I tend to only state it once, because why would I need to repeat it. I am starting to realize this doesn’t work out that well :)
These articles are in themselves a series of experiments to see how I can convey these thoughts.
The point I'm making is that you didn't state this once. You kind of stated it in the first paragraph, but not in a way that implies that you can be wrong for reasons that aren't miscommunications.
>For me, it’s patently evident that I’m wrong about 90% of the time when discussing facts.
I think that's the part that wasn't clear from the article. When you title an article "Autistic people can't acknowledge when they're wrong," then spend an article talking about how this is due to misunderstandings, it comes across like the exact rationalizations that your article strikes back against.
Answers to this question might be "No, we already use Angular which provides similar benefits to React", "Yes, switching to React from MooTools (I'm old) would simplify the design, increasing our velocity and probably resolve some annoying rendering bugs", or even "I'm not sure. Perhaps we should meet and discuss the weaknesses of that page and figure out if React is the right tool to resolve them".
Instead they got back the questions they were hoping you'd answer for them.
Many long years ago the CIO at a company I worked for asked if we could use machine learning to improve our data analytics. I responded with "I don't know, what kinds of questions are you hoping to answer?". We went back and forth on this several times, with me insisting you couldn't just throw machine learning at data without some idea of what your hoping to get back. This wasn't resolved until they brought in a vendor claiming to provide turnkey machine learning solutions, they ran it against our data and came up with the stunning insight that the biggest predictor of dollars sold was.... units sold. To be fair they did provide other data points, but it was all things we either already knew, or didn't care about and if we ever did could find out quickly.
I failed to recognize that the question I was asking was a big part of what I was being asked. If I had realized this and provided some insight into the kinds of questions machine learning could answer, and why we didn't need sophisticated machine learning algorithms for the ones the business cared about I could have saved everyone some time. Instead I kept rephrasing the question back at him, with neither of us having the insight to realize we were actually asking the same question.
What do they think the weaknesses of the page are? Do they think rewriting the checkout will solve these problems? How much of the technical tradeoffs do they understand or care about?
To recap:
Is our checkout page not performing well?
Will a new checkout solve our problem?
Why do they think a technology change is a solution?
Do they understand the implications of such a switch?
I understand there is a communication problem, but I'm most definitely not refusing to accept I am wrong.
I haven't even stated anything that could be wrong. And because I have fully put the blame on myself, after this particular interaction, the fact that I am able to work perfectly fine at a very strategic level with other stakeholders in my new job shows me that it's not just about me.
From my interpretation of the conversation, you thought the question was: "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React, yes or no?" And responded with "Why do you want to rewrite it in React?" (paraphrasing)
Meanwhile the manager thought they were asking: "Please discuss the reasons why we should and should not rewrite the checkout page in React, including your recommendation on a course of action" And you responded with "Why do you want to rewrite it in React?"
Spelled out like that it's hopefully a little clearer that the "why React" was part of the question. They don't know if the page is performing "well" or whatever that means (even from an engineering standpoint it's hard to define, render time? bandwidth? server CPU?). They might know if users are complaining about checkout being slow, but even then users tend to leave rather than complain. If you were to tell them that the checkout page was performing "poorly" and React could fix it, that's the kind of information they were hoping to obtain from this conversation.
Similarly in my machine learning question, my CIO was actually asking me "how do you think machine learning can benefit this business?" And I responded with "how do you think machine learning can benefit the business?" He didn't know, he was asking me. He had just heard about the wonders of machine learning and was fishing for how it could benefit this business. Just like your manager had heard about React and was fishing for how it could benefit the business.
If your manager were here replying to comments I'd advise them to remember that engineers in general (spectrum or not), tend to be the literal sort, and if you aren't getting the answers your looking for it's often useful to examine the words you used and ask if you are actually asking the question your hoping to get answered or relying on subtext. But for the engineer's side of this conversation, it's important to ask if the question your answering is actually what they are asking, or if you failed to parse their intentions.
I think my point in the article is to say:
I am autistic, and I might not communicate the way you are expecting. If I am asking questions, it is for what I think is a good reason. What I am not doing is rejecting your question and not acknowledging I am wrong. If I wanted to reject your opinion, I would reject it, not mess around asking oblique questions.
It's great that everybody seems to think this is my problem alone to solve, and I'm somehow doing this on purpose. I am not, I am trying very hard to get better, part of which is to share my experiences. Yet, that also seems to be criticized ("who puts so much effort into analyzing these situations?").
I have very productive relationships with other engineers and product managers and business owners, so clearly this can work out just well, but that's not what I wanted to cover here. I will in the future however, and I covered a tiny aspect of "digging deep into business questions, as an engineer" here: https://dev.to/wesen/worse-ux-for-a-better-product-how-to-th...
TL;DR Autism is what you've got, not who you are.
It's just a semantic game that is only making communication more verbose for no meaningful gain, as if everyone didn't already understand "autistic" to mean "person with autism".
"How can this make our checkout page better?" "What benefits do other companies get from using React?" "Is it feasible to change technology at this time?" "There might be implications if we switch, like..."
You are not understanding why they should consider it; you are subtly asking them to justify why they are bothering you.
Respectfully, I disagree: _to you_, the "questions instead sound like you are doubting him".
Maybe it even sounds that way to most people. It doesn't to me.
I have been in very similar situations, and having experienced the frustration of communications failure, I've tried to take other approaches.
A few times I've prefaced my questions with something along the lines of: "In order to answer your question I'm going to have to ask some questions; a few of them may not make sense to you, but it's just the way I function".
It has not helped. One time it was met with a kind of "gee, here you go again, giving a lecture on how special you are."
The crux of the matter is that I _need_ to do that if I am going to give a helpful answer to the question that I was asked. Either the manager's question is important and warrants a thoughtful reply, or it's unimportant, in which case almost any kind of reply is ok.
I think the problem, in a nutshell, is neurotypical people's absolute refusal to acknowledge when they're wrong -- for example about what a normal way for an employee to respond to the question: "should we switch to React?" is.
There _is_ no normal way. But neurotypical people, stereotypically, labor under the incorrect assupmtion that there is one. And the discussion in this thread has, in my opionion, made that extremely evident.
Also, something that's normal (in the sense of 'most common') in, say, the US is not necessarily normal in, say Norway or Thailand or Zambia.
To the engineer, they've been asked a specific question "should we rewrite in React?". They assume the manager's has a specific motivation for asking, because the engineer would have a specific motivation for asking, and are asking questions to try to get at that motivation and determine if React will fill the manager's needs. The engineer is having a reasonable conversation.
To the manager, they've asked an open ended question "should we rewrite int React? What are the reasons why and why not? What issues could it address? What are the drawbacks? Any guess on time-frame? Cost?". The question "what issues is the site having that React could address?" is contained in the manager's question. The manager is also having a reasonable conversation.
The breakdown happened when both sides fail to realize that the other person is having a completely different conversation than they are. To the manager turning around and asking them "what issues are you hoping to address with React?" is the same as if someone asked "does this truck have a lot of horsepower?" and I replied "I don't know, how much horsepower does this truck have?" I'm echoing the question back at them. It's confusing and they don't understand why I'm doing it, and it's naturally going to make them feel uncomfortable and agitated. Meanwhile the engineer doesn't understand why they someone is getting agitated over their reasonable fact-finding questions and start getting... well confused and agitated.
In general, I actually blame the manager more for this breakdown in communication, and that's where I'd put the majority of my coaching efforts. After all, probably 95% of a manager's job is communication, and I view understanding how to change your communication to establish a rapport with other people working outside your framework to be part of the job (this kind of breakdown can happen a hundred different ways, it's not just neurotypical vs non). Sadly, most managers never getting any kind of training on this, and many (most?) are abysmal at it.
But the fact is both sides of this conversation failed to understand the conversation the other person was having. No one is "wrong" or everyone is.
I brought this example up because clearly there is a problem here. But, no one is wrong, and shutting down the conversation as "you just can't admit when you are wrong" is not productive for anyone (since no one is wrong). Maybe the conversation will go nowhere, and because I might be completely oblivious to that fact (I try to be, but it's a lot of work), it helps if the manager, whose job it is to facilitate communication, becomes aware of what is going on, and says "I know you are trying to establish context, but it sounds like you are just echoing my questions back at me. I actually want a list of reasons why YOU think it is a good or bad idea. I won't mind if you assume things; we can clarify that later". I have absolutely no problem being interrupted that way; that makes a lot of sense and helps everybody. Once I know people won't mind me riffing without making absolutely sure we are talking about the same thing, I can go with that just fine.
This assumes good faith and open-mindedness on both sides. Assuming I am being arrogant, dismissive, know-it-all, won't back off, can't admit I am wrong, when I am trying not to, helps nobody.
"The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying."
"I care more about doing good work than office politics."
"The person underestimates how much I know about the topic."
These are statements that, when read on their face, seem to apply to disagreements that you have had with individuals. None of them seem to complain about (or even address) the ways clusters of people behave as a group.
I don't think this blog post is actually about autistic people, or allistic people, at all. I think this post is about one person, and some other people that the person had conflict with. If the author is reading this, I think it would do you well to slightly reframe things in that light.
The first is, "Can autistic people admit they are wrong when they themselves know deep down that they are?"
The second is, "Can autistic people be easily convinced that they are wrong?"
I'd say most commenters are expressing a "no" to #2, but your replies retreat to #1. I.e. you say that once you know you are wrong, you find it easy to admit it. However, given the content of your article, I'd speculate that it is very difficult to actually convince you that you are wrong in the first place.
If anything, the ratio of “you can’t acknowledge you’re wrong” to “oh i’m wrong” situations is about 1:1000. In future articles, I will spread and repeat things out a bit more, instead of editing an article like I would a strategy document.
I hate repeating myself. But I had to learn to write in such a way to do so because if I don't I end up with 4 sentences when a person further off the spectrum will write an entire page on the subject... or maybe that's my subjective opinion.
You can make all the personal inferences you want but I don't agree; I repeat myself because if I don't I received lower grades and downvotes.
There's nothing else in my comment. You are reading too much into my comment.
I don't need it repeated over and over. That's overkill, not concise, and adds nothing of value to the conversation. Based on the comments I've seen in this thread, it seems clear that this point never made it across, or barely made it across.
This is unfortunate because the actual content of the piece is great. It highlights the ways that people with autism and people without autism can miscommunicate.
You are telling me I shouldn't miscommunicate in an article where I try to explain what it feels like when you have a disability that leads people to think you miscommunicate. I understand that I probably should have somehow expanded on the "I am wrong daily" part, but to me, I wrote a clear sentence: "I am wrong daily, it's absolutely no big deal, in fact, I enjoy it and seek it out."
This is the problem I am trying to highlight. I think I state something as clearly as I can, then people think I am lying, or wrong, or deceiving, or arrogant, or not clear enough, or overexplaining, or not explaining enough, and frame the rest of the article in that light. If i say "I am not trying to be arrogant", people will take that as even more evidence, so I don't even try. This is literally what I try to explain in this article.
So many people in this comment section apparently being blessed with the infinite power of nuance, mind theory, social grace, empathy and linguistic intuition could maybe try to be charitable in light of this.
Or maybe the specific scenario presented in the article triggers some sort of a "it's not me, it's them autists!" reflex in people who visualized themselves on the other side of these interactions; I honestly don't know any more. I'm not (diagnosed to be) autistic, but fucking hell, I'm having a ridiculously hard time empathizing with these reactions, so maybe I should get that checked out...
Is the rudeness excusable? I guess. Especially if I understand where it's coming from. Otherwise it's just rudeness.
And I guess that the point of the article, but you need to get to know people before you can make the judgement of why someone is how they are. That takes time.
Very often in software engineering, people use abstract words that have been overloaded with meanings in many different ways, and it can be easy to think the other person is suggesting something completely different. I love using diagrams because they remove a lot of the “words”.
An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1]
The comments in this blog post don't just apply to autistic people, but apply equally to people that are simply less wrong than average.
An observation I made is that some people make correct statements approximately 90% of the time. This is waaaay above the typical, which is more like 30-40%.
Typical people assume that everyone else is typical, because that's what typical means. Average people are average, and the Bell curve is the tallest in the middle. So when they encounter someone who isn't typical (not just autistic), they assume that their behaviour is arrogant, because someone who is right 35% of the time and talks like they're right 90% of the time must be arrogant!
Someone who is right 90% of the time faces an endless series of accusations of being overbearing, arrogant, self-important, not-a-team-player, or not "giving in" as in the blog post. Being contrary, argumentative, or not taking the blame to a sufficient degree are commonly said as well.
Speaking of giving in, most people follow the ten-thousand-year-old[2] tradition of doing whatever the grey-haired tribe leader says. Authority over correctness. Toe the line. Know your place. Keep your head down. Don't rock the boat. Part of the team.
The thing is, being old doesn't mean much, especially in a time of exponential change. In fact, the older you are, the more wrong your rules-of-thumb are, often exponentially wrong. This leads to endless fun conflicts of opinion where the young inexperienced buck is actually entirely correct in disregarding decades of experience[3]. But that leads to ostracism and exclusion, because we're all human, which is to say that we're basically strategically shaved gorillas in suits.
[1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in.
[2] Did I say ten kiloyears? I meant megayears. Sorry. This is what we've been doing since before we were human. It's wired into us deep.
[3] A random example from very recently is that I had to explain with pictures to senior management that upgrading the WAN links for one hundred sites from 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps and locking in that telco contract for 5 years is a mistake three zeroes in size.
I guess I'm in the bottom half, then; I thought the average was that quantity for which half are below, and half are above.
Mean, median and mode. Though it's true that people usually mean 'mean' when they say 'average'.
That said, the GP is just being obtuse. I'm not sure if he meant intelligence is non bell-shaped or some other reasons and I'm dumb too :-).
A distribution which is biased towards high-side outliers (such as wealth or income) will generally have more than half of the population below the mean.
It's not at all obvious to me that general intelligence has such a distribution (and I can think of plenty of physical mechanisms [injury, disease, malnutrition during development] by which the opposite could easily be true).
I wouldn't say that. Most population statistics--think "average" wages and the like--tend to use median. And when we're talking about intelligence, this isn't something that is readily quantifiable with a number. IQ is explicitly normalized so that 100 is median, and 110 is one standard deviation above median. "mean IQ" isn't a meaningful concept. Given that we can't even measure "mean intelligence", average intelligence tends to mean median intelligence in practice.
While reading the article, I had the distinct feeling the author was not, in fact, autistic, but merely had a lack of social practice.
It was... fun to watch him take university lecturers down a peg or two.
The linked article is by someone who is clearly very knowledgeable about specific topics in the same way.
How many IT people do you know who attend conferences?
I dont think I was being dismissive of anyone, but is it really necessary to call all of life's difficulties some kind of disorder? Does making it a disorder some how legitimize someone's struggles? I don't think so.
I think doubting someone is Autistic based on virtually no information would be considered pretty dismissive
You tell me, when I grew up being called autistic I tried to hide the disorder and get my teachers to not know I had it. It was everybody else who insisted on the names disorder, and it did legitimize it in their eyes. It meant a LOT of funding money, an extra teacher in the classroom, overall favourable treatment relative to other students. It was alternatively used as a pretence to discriminate against me. It was used to guarantee me accommodations. It was used as a means of getting a poor family money.
Lots of people have lots of different motivations for using that word. What I do know is there isn’t really any scientific basis for the idea that only severe autism is somehow real though.
The word autism does legitimize one’s struggles though, and people recognize that legitimacy. It’s pretty sick.
Asperger's was removed from the DSM for somewhat opaque reasons, and then, contemporary Discourse being what it is, some people decided the term was offensive, and we no longer use it.
Which is good for the people [citation needed] who are autistic and find the string "Asperger's" offensive, but bad for discourse, since one must either specify "high functioning autism" or "autism as highly-intelligent nerds are likely to encounter it in a professional context", and if you leave it out, someone will be along to point out that this condition shares a name with adults who wear helmets when they leave the house.
If it were me, I wouldn't categorize my peers in the same category as adults who wear helmets and diapers. It just doesn't seem like the same thing. But, fortunately, categorizing mental diversity and pathology is not my job.
The reason "Spectrum" is in the name is because there is a wide range of ways it can manifest - from very severe on one end to less impactful (and in some ways beneficial depending on context) on the other. People who used to be referred to as having Asperger Syndrome for example are normally highly intelligent and capable individuals, many of whom you'd have no idea had Autism if you met them.
Please do not continue to spread this kind of thinking - it is very antiquated. I also don't know why you would doubt someone is Autistic based on a single blog post.
This is not to diminish anyone's suffering. There's also a danger of taking false refuge in a syndrome that can be equally demoralizing and even paralyzing. No one should be defined by their diseases or medical conditions.
>> [1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in.
I don't know why more than half. Can you explain?
You can't be stupider than a rock, but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence.
Hence the IQ curve isn't a Gaussian. It isn't symmetric. The average is dragged upwards by very-high-IQ people, above the median.
This is like a billionaire moving to some tiny country town. The average income suddenly becomes much higher, but the typical (median) income doesn't budge.
Rich people is a useful analogy to the point I'm trying to make.
When I was on holidays in Vietnam, my chauffeur was horrified to hear that I was too tired and that I wanted to skip a pre-paid dinner reservation at a "fancy" restaurant and that I preferred to simply go to my hotel and crash. That fancy dinner was something like $20. To him that's a lot of money. To me it's nothing. Meanwhile I hear about rich Saudis abandoning italian supercars because they're "broken" in the same way my kid throws away broken toys.
Intelligence and wealth are vaguely similar. People used to a certain level just can't wrap their heads around how people at different levels do things.
I assure you this does not seem to be the case.
There is an observed, and inexact, upper limit on human intelligence, just as there is with human height, and for broadly similar reasons: gravity, in the case of height, and for intelligence some much more hand-wavey limit to the amount of neurons and dendritic links a human body can construct inside a skull which has to fit through hips which are capable of bipedal motion.
(Some of you are curious, and yes, there is a real correlation between skull volume and measured intelligence, but let's not bust out the calipers because it's a bad proxy for something we can measure more accurately with tests).
Hence the IQ curve is, in fact, Gaussian, just as human height is, despite the fact that you can't be shorter than a mushroom, and the Empire State Building is an existence proof of very tall things.
But to conclude from this that most are below average, wouldn't you have to know that the high IQs pull the average up more than the low IQs pull it down? I don't see how the mere assumption that there's no upper limit gets you there (not to mention that this assumption is bound to be wrong anyway). But as you say, maybe there's a reason I'm in the big half...
Even better idea: use your neural plasticity and get some empathy.
Furthermore everyone has to adjust to the people around them, often causing untold stress for everyone. This is one of the aspects of the neurodivergency movement I am less impressed by because I feel it's just handwaving away any issues as "suck it up, not my problem, deal with it". I've worked with a few people like this over the years, which also caused untold stress for the entire team.
To give an example from this post, "is our checkout page not performing well?" to the React rewrite manager comes off as a rather dismissive "why would you want to do that?" While certainly a valid question – and I wasn't there and I don't know if it was phrased like that exactly – but I'm sure those questions could have been asked in a way that came off as less challenging and dismissive, resulting in a more constructive conversation. You really can learn these things.
Or, maybe the manager was just an asshole/idiot and the unconstructive interaction is all completely unrelated to the author's autism. Could be too.
The first point – "the non-autistic person is not hearing what I'm saying" – sounds like the author might benefit from trying to understand why that is, and adjusting the way they say things. Sometimes small changes can make large differences, and it really doesn't need to cause untold stress. Effective communication is hard and also something everyone has to learn.
Autists cannot just learn to act more like an NT in the exact same way that a blind person cannot just learn to see better. Your rejection of this extremely basic fact is an all-too-common combination of ignorance and/or bigotry.
In fact, I would have thought that asking them clarifying details about exactly the topic they are asking about is the good thing to do. I think I know the checkout pretty well, and it doesn't seem to be causing trouble, so clearly there is a piece of information I am missing. While I would think that asking "what are you looking to achieve" is the impolite thing to do, since they just told me what they are looking to achieve, i.e. "making the checkout perform better by rewriting it in react."
I think a good topic for another article is showing what "learn some social skills" and "you need to be aware of the context and you come across" looks like for me.
Because I don't have the mental setup to intuit all the myriads of things that can make a question ok or not ok (words? silence? rhythm of speech? voice level? eye contact? clothes? past interactions? tone of voice? posture? mood of the other person? my mood? temperature? background noise? eyebrows?), and because no social situation ever repeats, the best I can do is figure out some very rigid scripts and then practice them. Why one question is ok and another is not is never going to be intuitive for me. Often, learning to do something better will result in even more awkwardness at first.
For example, my script for speaking to people at conferences is something like:
- say hi - ask where they come from and what they do - say "oh that's cool, tell me more about X" - listen and ask follow-up questions - try to regularly establish eye contact, but not more than a few seconds - mimic their posture - when the first pause comes up, say one or two sentences about what you do - then continue asking questions about them and listen - go for a 20% talk / 80% listen ratio. people like to talk about themselves. - don't talk about any of your real interests because you might lose track of the rules and start going on forever - don't forget to mimic their posture - and eye contact! - don't rock on your chair! - rinse repeat until there is a longer pause, or they look away, or 20 minutes have elapsed.
That's about the level of complexity I can manage. I practiced this and other scripts so much that I don't have to think about them most of the time, but when I am tired, I do have to execute it like a little robot.
Of course not everyone is the same, and things are different for other people; everyone is different. Some people may struggle more, or may have a hard time learning some things. But a blanket "you can never learn anything, full stop" is just not true.
Could you explain why? I don't see it that way and would like to learn your perspective.
Note that I wouldn't mind such a question at all myself, but others can be more sensitive to such things. Actually, I think "Why? Is the current code not working?" is a perfectly valid engineering question for rewriting or refactoring anything, but not everyone has this kind of engineering mindset.
I would phrase it more open-ended, such as "Okay! What goals would you like to achieve?"
I understand from the comments and my life experience that there is something there, I learned to smile, be engaging, mirror body posture, ask questions instead of going into statements too quickly, but what are you describing just makes no sense to me. How is "what goals would you like to achieve?" not dismissive, but "do you think our checkout is not performing well?" is?
One is a pretty vague question about something they already stated (they want to ask me my opinion about rewriting the checkout in react because company X improved their checkout), the other one is something I need input on to be able to do that. It's literally the most efficient question I can think of so that I can avoid wasting their time.
I described in another comment how it never "really" occurred to me that a question could be perceived as dismissive. If I wanted to dismissive I would... just say so?
The thing is, saying it is dismissive, getting upset, and shutting me down helps exactly no one here. What could help is to realize I am not actually trying to be dismissive, point out that my question might be interpreted as such, and then move on. Trust me that I don't let this kind of advice go to waste.
Even if it's completely learned scripted behaviour that you don't really understand, that's still a win for everyone involved. But I think that with time and effort a sizeable part (not everyone) of autistic/neurodivergent folk can understand these things at least to some degree too. At least, I was able to and I know some other folks who were too.
> What could help is to realize I am not actually trying to be dismissive, point out that my question might be interpreted as such, and then move on.
Yes, I fully agree; I try hard to look past people's failings in general and not to get upset too quickly at things that don't really matter. But ... people have emotional responses that aren't really rational, and not everyone has that kind of attitude.
And the end of the day – and this really applies to a lot of things – I can't really control other people's behaviour, feelings, or attitudes. The only thing I am in control of is me. So I focus on that, rather than saying "other people need to adjust", because you will have very limited success with that at best.
(This of course doesn't mean we should accept wildly inappropriate or harmful behaviour like, say, racism or other forms of blatant discrimination, just that vague "emotional feelings" like a response to a well-intentioned question are not likely to get "fixed" any time soon across all of society, as these kind of emotions are part of "the human condition").
The query "Do you think..." can sometimes backfire if the other party is feeling defensive or vulnerable. It can imply that you've already decided to frame the conversation as exploring their problematic beliefs rather than objective facts.
The negative phrasing "not performing well" unfortunately echoes another idiom where the non-negated statement is assumed to be true and the negated question bears a tone of incredulity. These questions all probe the same fact but carry different emotional baggage: "Should we try to improve the performance of X?" "Does X perform well?" "Does X have performance problems?" "Is X not performing well?" Slight differences in vocal tone or emphasis can dramatically increase these differences too.
Then, by jumping to specifics (about performance), it can also imply that you are assuming that this is the only reasonable motivation for the work in question, rejecting other avenues. A safe way to avoid this type of interpretation would be to start off more broadly and neutrally to establish common ground before diving into such details. That's why "What are the goals?" types of question are seen as positive and cooperative. That you would like to engage in dialog and explore ideas together.
You put all those elements together in one question, and I can easily see how the other party would feel that they are being blocked. It's almost like some martial arts move where a precise combination of movement and posture is turning the conversational momentum against itself.
I'd also like to point out an ironic twist in your closing lament that "getting upset and shutting me down helps exactly no one here". Unfortunately, such implied tone and emotional content is decoded subconsciously and immediately. The emotion hits concurrently or even before the denoted factual information is fully understood. It can be just as difficult for an NT person to _not_ perceive some of these signals as it is for you to recognize they are being sent. Frustratingly, the same experience between two NTs, if chronic, might be seen as abusive or where the idea of "gaslighting" would come up to describe the perverse torture where the one feeling hurt is told they are mistaken in their feelings.
Neurodivergency isn't a movement, in the same way that blindness isn't a movement. Or deafness isn't a movement. It's not a choice. It's an invisible difference, one that society finds it hard to understand. I avoid "disability" because that suggests that neurotypical society is the only right way and anyone else that doesn't fit into it is just wrong somehow. They can't help it any more than a blind person can.
The way their brains are wired aren't their fault and yes, the rest of society is going to have to change. Autistic people exist, so it's up to the rest of us to learn how to deal with it.
Properly understanding the difficulties faced by the neurodiverse is a journey I thoroughly recommend. It's coming, get ahead of the curve and maybe you can be part of the team's stress relief.
It absolutely is, it's a particular view and outlook on things. Blind or Deaf people have different takes and "movements" too. Deaf people in particular where some consider deafness to be core part of their identity and and a culture, rather than a disability to be "fixed", whereas others do merely see it as a disability they would like to see "fixed". Cochlear implants are something of a controversial issue among deaf people for example.
> Properly understanding the difficulties faced by the neurodiverse is a journey I thoroughly recommend.
I understand them because I face them myself too.
They happen to me too.
Understanding the nature of the miscommunication is the first step towards averting it in the future.
And me. I'm not autistic. I don't think I have any kind of Asperger's either.
I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism; it just sounded like a normie, perhaps with an autism diagnosis, who is fretting about communication with their boss.
There seems to be quite a few commenters here making critical comments, as if author is failing to communicate effectively. I wonder if they'd have been so critical, if author hadn't self-identified as autistic. I wonder if some of these commenters have a bad attitude to self-identified autistics.
I've never known an autistic person well; but I worked closely in an office with an autistic developer. I found his code over-complex and hard to follow. Pair-coding with this guy was a waste of time; he couldn't explain what he was doing. Author, however, seems to be able to explain himself fine.
> one person you knew?
I've only known one person who was diagnosed autistic. It's a rare condition; I've known a dozen people with bipolar, and half-a-dozen diagnosed schizophrenics (either I'm attracted to psychotics, or they're attracted to me!)
My point was simply that author's account could be anyone's account, apart from the author's self-identification as autistic. Without that, this entire thread would just be about how to deal with a crap boss.
>>I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism
You very much are dismissing someone's something.
Worse, I don't think the author explicitly stated they were autistic in the piece...So, you're assuming someone's something just so you can dismiss it?
"I have read similar experiences by other autistic people" suggests that the author considers themself to be autistic.
> You very much are dismissing someone's something.
...And that's that, I guess. Can you please clarify what I am dismissing, and how? I don't want to dismiss anyone's anything.
It's an interesting thought experiment, and at least to me it feels like you're the one who is reading dismissal into it for no good reason.
Self-diagnosis is widely accepted in the autistic community for a number of reasons, I am also in the process of pursuing a more "traditional" diagnosis.
It's great that you think this post applies to everybody, it however is very much in response to someone stigmatizing autistic people.
DSoes the spectrum run from ultra-violet to infra-red? Is this a spectrum for which every behaviour pattern has a slot? Does that mean we're all "on the spectrum"?
If that's what it means, then that seems like dismissing Autism as just being one extreme of being an awkward person.
I think a lot of devs wind up working with people who are awkward. They don't like it (who would?) Some of those awkward people self-identify as autistic. So the devs decide they don't care much for autistic people. I think that's a kind of bigotry; they should really dislike working with awkward people, whatever the reason for their awkwardness.
[Awkward: apparently this is related to upward, downward, northward, etc. "Awk-" signifies "at an unusual angle". I know of no other word that starts with "awk-"]
This is explicitly what happened. The DSM-V explicitly automatically gives you an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis if you had an Asperger’s diagnosis. I think it’s hilariously how blatantly political this criteria is.
As for the legitimacy of spectrum disorders, the only thing I have to say about the subject is the parable of Chesterson’s fence. Think about the problems people were trying to solve with the concept of autism spectrum disorder.
>is this a spectrum for which every behaviour pattern has a slot
You aren’t far off but are missing th forest for the trees. It’s part of a diagnostic system where every disorder is meant to be discrete and non-overlapping and you either have it or you don’t and other good traits you would want in a diagnostic nosology. The spectrum is an artifact of it having to bend to describe what are actually several distinct similarly presenting conditions. It doesn’t have to describe EVERYTHING, it has to fit a hole in the nosology. Asperger’s was depreciated in large part because of the overlap with autism.
If you want something to criticize take a few steps back and look at mental health and psychiatry as a whole. A lot of the assumptions underpinning autism underpin more of mental health.
Indeed.
Consider, for example, the diagnostic criteria for bipolar. There seems to be half-a-dozen conditions wrapped up in that term, not all of which have poles. Not all people with bipolar are psychotic (that is really important; if you're dealing with someone with bipolar, it makes a huge difference if they are subject to delusions or paranoia).
I believe (might be wrong) that "schizophrenia" is now a discredited diagnosis. Even depression is a fuzzy target. How do you distinguish ordinary sadness from depressive illness? Anti-depressant pills seem to work on both. And there's no "chemical imbalance" theory of depression that hasn't been discredited.
My sense is that we haven't progressed much in understanding mental illness since Victorian times, with their diagnoses of "melancholy".
Is it not exactly what allistic people are doing?
Autistic people communicate just fine with other autistic people. It's allistic people that don't fit in and want to change everybody around them because they can't suffer a bit of diversity in thinking and communication.
If you claim to be a complex thinker, you also consider people in your analysis, then that should also apply first hand, not just as a part of the solutions you propose. If you are unable to do that: fine, nobody is expected to be perfect. But don't claim to be perfect.
Who is saying this? The article provides a perspective that is not discussed very often as a way of helping people understand these situations from a vantage point they might not have considered. Nobody is demanding anything.
That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal.
In other words, they weren't saying that the checkout page was bad, they were asking the author's professional opinion as to whether it could be better.
Famous last words.
OP, if you're still reading, please don't take anything I wrote here as an attack on you. Instead, it was meant to be a reflection on your situation from someone who struggles with many of the same communication issues, in many of the same ways.
They would be more effective in every facet of their life if they spent some time reading history, philosophy, and psychology... or just talking to people. No one exists on an island, and the issue is almost always that they don't find things external to the self "interesting" because they are self-centered. Notice that all three subjects I mentioned above are about other people.
Some people want OP to have proven that he knows how to take criticism in his article - a strange ask, given that many seem to not even have finished reading the article in the first place.
It looks like many people here dont know what makes them tick - the things they accuse the OP of, are things they can see themselves do, and so see it in the OPs behavior.
Maybe it is simply that people cant imagine the world OP inhabits.
Then why didn't the manager ask that instead of mentioning some article some other company?
AFAICT, the OP identified a minimal set of questions he thought needed to be asked to give a good answer, and tried to ask them.
Are you taking exception to how he sought that information, or something else?
> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it
All questions can be reflected easily.
> Is our checkout page not performing well? > Will a new checkout solve our problem? Will React make our checkout page performing better / improve checkout ?
> Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Can technology change (to React) improve our situation in anyway?
Do they understand the implications of such a switch? > What would be the implications if we switch to React?
Now those questions OP can answer. Manager read a blog post, he obviously don't have answer to this questions, that's why he is asking OP if they should rewrite.
Asking "Why do they think a technology change is a solution?" is making wrong assumption that, manager thinks "technology change is a solution"
If me asking what the goal is is perceived as patronising, when I’m just trying to do my best, then sure I can work on that. But that requires good faith on the side of the manager. It’s not my decision to shut things down.
As for motivation, it is of course very hard to understand one’s own motivations, and even more so other people’s motivations. It took me (please don’t laugh) 30 years to realize that I could get paid being an engineer (because I just assumed I would never be worth anything seeing how much I didn’t know about software). And only at age 40 did it dawn on me that most people are not motivated by building the best product they can, but instead do care about money, career, social prestige.
It’s ironic that this is then framed as a one-sided “can’t understand other people”, when really many people don’t understand my motivations either. And seeing how carelessly dismissive some of the comments here are, don’t even care to.
Asking questions as "in what way do you hope to improve it?" will help the manager understand. Just giving the explanation will sound rude.
However, that isn't quite what you say in the article: instead you relay that you appear to have shut down the discussion immediately by getting stuck at "this isn't broken and I don't understand why you're asking me to fix it." That is the part that I perceive as patronising, becuase it contains the implicit assumption that your knowledge of the business/tech crossover is superior to your manager's.
I legitimately do not know what patronizing is. I have an abstract understanding of it, and it baffles me why anybody would do something like that. Yet it is an abstract force with very real consequences I have to deal with.
Is that not an invitation to explain the business goal? What is so patronizing about a direct statement of need?
This might be the core of article.
Some things are knowable and don't need to be assumptions. In these cases, the author expects to have conversations that probe into what is true and what is false.
But some managers are offended by questions that challenge their assumptions. They feel their position gives them authority to overrule the deductive reasoning of their reports.
"Allistic" people sense this, and "up-manage" the egos and sensibilities of managers, without being aware they do it.
I think you have answered your own conscience.
You say you don't care about the goals. The only thing you care about is whether the tech is interesting to you or not, which is purely subjective.
Your manager probably already knows this. He knows you are asking a question to which you completely don't care about the answer. It's just that you're not interested.
There is a clear difference between asking questions to learn — and trolling. This is easily visible to any human.
I'll be honest: If you are expecting 100% fulfillment, then it most likely means you have an impossibly high opinion of yourself. If you really wish that, become a freelancer, then go ahead and reject everything you hear. At work, nobody needs to convince your heart and soul for every single thing. Deal with it.
There is something missing in your story. For example, how long is too long for continuing your questioning, how you deal with rest of your obligations if you don't agree with the answers, how you collaborate with others, whether others in your team agree with you or not, etc.
We programmers are so privileged that we are blind to our privilege.
Edit: grammar
Narcissists love to deflect blame and assume the world is against them because they believe that the world should revolve around them.
(1) Unfortunately that would be challenging for us because X.
(2) We've been talking about that for ages, because X, Y, and Z. I'd love it if we could make time for a rewrite next quarter.
(3) Hmm, interesting. Can you share the blog post? (Buys me time to think and follow up later).
What neither of us have time for is for me to walk him through my thought process via the Socratic method.
Hilarious.
Now, if I come across as patronizing and this leads to a negative outcome (as in, no progress is made in advancing the company’s goals), two things can happen:
- I can work at getting better at communication. The last 2 years, better writing has been my main focus, and this article is part of that. Writing good documents has been tremendously effective. It also only goes so far if someone doesn’t want to engage. In this particular situation, I spent the next week studying React (it wasn’t React in the actual situation) reading 3 books on the chapter and building a toy React prototype, and then wrote up what I thought was a concise report on what was good about it, and what was not so good. I don’t think this document was read.
- The manager can actually put some effort into hearing me out, and understand that I am trying my best here. Maybe I don’t know intuitively what words they want me to use for the questions, but it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext.
If anything, it is easy because I really don’t care about subtext, or patronizing people. Where is the fun in that, compared to the fun of solving problems.
Has it occurred to you that just as it is difficult for you to adapt to the communication styles and thought patterns of allistic people, your manager experiences the same difficulty adapting to those of autistic people?
While I believe organizations and managers should try to accommodate neurodiversity and help all types of people be successful in the workplace, it's not unreasonable to expect you to expend some effort adapting as well.
In all your follow-up comments you seem to have some excuse or clarification for why you don't need to adjust your behavior and the problem is obviously that your manager isn't trying hard enough.
When your manager asks a casual question, he is not asking for a formal document describing pros, cons. He's looking for you to make a judgment call, express an opinion, or for you to say "hmmm, I might spend some time this week looking in to that."
Reacting to a two-sentence exchange by spending a week working on a doc is a communication anti-pattern.
Yes, this is more likely. But autistics expect communication to be true and relevant. When it is not, it sounds like incompetence and dishonesty to an autistic.
If anything, allistic people allow a certain benefit of doubt in communications before assuming incompetence/dishonesty. And then they generally play along with incompetent/dishonest people if the social context requires it.
The author perceives only two possible outcomes, one where things go Right (correct according to his perceptions) and where they go Wrong (correct according to the other party's perceptions).
There's so much missing from this view of the world it's hard to know where to begin.
- The author could be missing some key facts.
- The author could be unaware of other priorities.
- The author could actually be wrong. It happens to the best of us.
- The author may have a history of being Right, getting others to go along with it, and then changing his mind to a different Right. That burns social capital really fast.
There are some algorithms for convincing others in a way that allows them to save face. Nemawashi is a good one to start with. "Disagree and commit" is another.
Best of luck to the author in developing some workplace skills. Once you're out of school, collaboration is more important than getting things Right all the time.
This causes the allistic person to perceive pushback. Neurotypicals expect tribemates to follow along, few questions asked. Every question an autistic mind asks to understand the scenario when the other party is looking for political alliance is a reminder to that other party: the autistic person is OTHER -- or at least more OTHER than Fred in Shipping & Receiving.
I often feel like saying: "normal people don't want to think about the details of a question." They grab for the quickest way to stop thinking and label it right or wrong depending on how much they like it.
This is of course an oversimplification.
If your boss (anyone, really!) comes to you with an idea and he misunderstands the first thing out of your mouth as a rejection, then you probably should work on how you communicate that thing. Or just surround yourself with smarter people.
Also if your boss doesn't know anything about technology and comes to you and says "I heard about someone doing this on a podcast, what if we made this arbitrary tech choice that doesn't apparently add any value?" then consider shopping for a new boss. Autism really is orthogonal to that situation sucking.
The boss is doing absolutely the right thing here! Asking a trusted domain expert for an opinion about whether some technical investment would benefit the business.
The alternatives are a) the boss hears the podcast and the next day "rewrite it all in React" is at the top of the backlog, or b) the boss never polls the team about the technical state of things and everyone grumbles there's never enough time for paying down technical debt or experimenting with new ideas.
Sure, that's good management - ask the expert.
But this manager didn't want to clarify the question, so that the expert could give a considered answer.
Perhaps the manager already knew what answer he wanted?
There's this estimating technique: it's called "Guess the number the manager wants you to give". It's much less career-limiting than giving an honest answer.
Conversely, if I ask a colleague, however smart, a question but their response is "first I need a 10min infodump on things many of which I should already be aware of", I'm just going to say "nevermind then, thanks" and go ask the colleague who can communicate in a more focused and proactive way. (It's not a very charitable reading of the author's position either. I'd prefer to believe both were acting in good faith but with completely misaligned goals.)
I have fielded plenty of similar questions from technical EMs, and even CTOs, when it's way outside their area of expertise.
I've also seen ICs give similar answers to the author to the mild shock of the manager, who then has to gently respond with something like "well, John mentioned in the standup today that he noticed 10s p99 spikes on the cart page, while investigating what Paula from the BI team reported in the planning meeting yesterday, that abandoned items are up 30% in the past month..."
My react frontend is made up, but my actual example is the CTO (no background in software) suggesting we move our embedded product from linux to android because "our updater is broken and i read that android has a great updater," while the issue was faulty flash chips where the brownout protection bit could not be set.
(Moving from linux to android for an embedded product means you basically have to rewrite absolutely everything since the userland is different, for a stack that is under the control of a single company, and is rarely used outside of mobile devices and automotive. And it still won't fix broken flash chips).
This is an order of magnitude more egregious than the react example I transformed it into, and also why I left the company. If I can't present my expertise and get listened to for such an important decision, there really is nowhere for me to go.
You seem to be very dismissive of people when they opine outside of where you think they are qualified to have opinions, and yet you give opinions where you might not have sufficient perspective.
Moving from linux to android for an embedded product means you basically have to rewrite absolutely everything... Great, that is information the CTO needs to know.
for a stack that is under the control of a single company, and is rarely used outside of mobile devices and automotive.
Here the CTO has more perspective then you do. Is the company about to sign a partnership with an Android shop? Is the company contemplating moving into a new product area? Yes, the ultimate problem would not have been fixed by moving to Android, but that does not make your opinion somehow factually right. Before reacting, try assuming the person making suggestions has valid reasons for making them and try to figure out what those reasons are.
Its poor communication from the person who should be good at communicating.
The alternatives you’ve outlined are simply worse management - a threat that things could be worse, therefore the least is sufficient.
There is no right or wrong here. Asking the engineer to "think logically" in terms of how what they're saying might be interpreted is stupid. They are autistic, and you cannot reasonably expect them to do the exact thing autism prevents them from doing.
Asking the manager to try to understand is probably more efficient, but the manager might be geared to think the engineer is adversarial already, possibly because of demeanor, or past experiences getting similarly confused. In this case the manager is probably more able to reason logically that their counterpart is autistic and is probably genuinely asking, but that is not a default, and probably requires some diversity training.
Isn't that exactly what the author did, at least in the React discussion? They tried to establish what potential benefits the manager hoped to get from the React rewrite. It was the manager who immediately gave up on the discussion, not the author.
There are different ways of asking the same question, with different subtext. He could had started, for example, by saying "We should analyze how our checkout page's performance could improve if we switch to React". This way he would be able to ask essentially the same questions he intended to, but without accidentally implying that the switch is undesirable and unnecessary.
Now, someone working with someone with autism should understand they have trouble with this kind of subtext, and give them more leeway. But most people don't know how to do this, as they're not used to such interactions.
If anything, and I probably glossed over it too quickly, I do spend a lot of effort being very candid and open and agreeable when having these discussions, because it is so hard to make sure our intents and definitions are aligned. We can be talking about checkout and react and then after 2 h realize that we actually both care about better conversion of mobile users, and now we are talking and can put the react decision into context.
I wrote this article about these situations: when my approach breaks down and I get blamed for not accepting being wrong, yet I’m actually trying my best to avoid exactly that.
I can totally understand why his manager got frustrated by this.
I didn't read them as "gotcha" questions. They looked like straightforward and sensible questions. I wonder if the manager was expecting some kind of kickback, and was braced to be adversarial. Perhaps there's some history here, between author and his manager.
Again, I fully acknowledge that a React rewrite could very well be a complete waste of time and effort in this scenario. But his manager obviously thought it could be worthwhile, or he wouldn't have asked about it.
"A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React... in order to make an informed decision, I needed to understand a few things: ... Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Do they understand the implications of such a switch?"
What problems such a switch might solve and what the implications are is what the manager is asking you. Why would you direct exactly those questions back to them?
The author only got to ask one question before he was shut-down: why do you want to do this?
That's not a criticism, it's a completely reasonable question, given that rewriting something using React is going to be expensive, and might introduce major new risks. Maybe author asked the wrong way, or in the wrong tone of voice.
If it were my manager, and he was proposing that I rewrite something that works fine in a new language, and I had real work to do, then I think my question "Why do you want to do that?" might come across as angry - because I'd be angry.
I am curious how these are gotcha questions? To me they are the proper questions to ask, as a manager, they probably don’t care about react or vue or any other framework, they care about conversions and revenue and other metrics. That’s exactly what I want to understand, so that I can contextualize and see if React might or might not make sense.
Reasons why React might actually make sense, to show I didn’t just cherry-pick this as a “well duh obviously it’s stupid”:
- we use shopify as a backend, and they published a nifty new react checkout widget that we could replace our convoluted checkout with - all our web developers are actually coming from react, and hate the current jquery mess, and really want to change. It would be time-intensive, but team morale would skyrocket, - another department is planning to move to react as well
After a long time in tech, I really have learnt to not really care about technology that much (as you might see in my article about PHP and JS :).
Obviously there are also drawbacks, but you immediately started off from an adversarial position as if it was just a completely off the wall idea. Clearly that's not the case.
The more I read through OP's comments the more I see this as a compensation for the inherent inferiority complex he/she struggles with. Trying to pin this on autism spectrum is just another method of deflecting blame or removing any real or perceived risk.
I suspect some type of trauma where OP felt inferior to others in some way, usually intelligence, especially if they've been brought up in a highly academia focused family environment and were often held in comparison to others.
Ever since that popular Korean drama took off "Weird Attorney Woo Yong Woo" everyone is self diagnosing or trying to use superficial tidbits they picked up to deflect social mishaps.
"It cant be my fault because im on the spectrum" is a trend I am seeing more and more online and this article did a good job of demonstrating but far too many words and irrelevant points.
The problem I think is that you think me asking a question is adversarial, while I'm just... asking a question in good faith. I'm not considering it a completely off the wall idea at all, I want to know why they think it's a good idea, because I don't understand. This is where the autism comes in, I think. You think I'm being adversarial and dismissive, I think I am open and engaged.
I put a tremendous amount of effort into being socially pleasant, but there still are situations where I think I am doing my best to fully engage with the other person, yet there is a whole game of subtext I am not getting. This is very different from me not accepting I am wrong.
I would love to get the subtext, trust me, and I work hard at it. But it's playing a game that I don't have the rules to. Hopefully what I'm writing will help someone just maybe pause, and think, "did they actually ask this question to be dismissive? or do they just ask because they want to help you solve your problem?." Social grace and empathy goes both ways.
For someone having autism, this may be impossible. If they are open about their autism, one could argue that the manager should be the one trying to see the topic from two sides.
One may also need to come up with a shared understanding where the manager has a way to inform the autistic person more explicitly what to do than they would another person (who would get the subtle hints).
This can be pitched as a way for the company to accommodate for having an autistic person on the team (as opposed to firing or not hiring them), in other words that the manager would do this as a way to support the employee, not to be abusive.
But in this case an obvious solution might be to do what your manager suggests simply because he is your manager.
As a non-autistic person I don’t find it difficult to voice my concerns about a particular course of action and then do it anyway if that’s what the boss wants. (I realize the sticking point is “voice my concerns” — doing that in a manner that doesn’t come off as confrontational or undermining can be hard.)
That is career suicide (unless you make sure to get it in writing every single time).
As a knowledge worker you are paid to not just be a yes man automaton, you are paid to evaluate and push back as needed.
Why would you ever expect your managers to trust us if you don't trust them?
Like changing a framework for an already fully working product, just to have done it.
You don't want to end up holding the bag for that choice when they claim you said it would work when it invariably overruns.
But in an interaction between an engineer and a manager, anything less than voicing your concerns is an abdication of responsibility. If the manager switches off at the first expression of concern from an engineer, then I imagine that's a team that's bound to failure.
Jump ship.
I hope more Autistic and non-Autistic people don't put up with this kind of argument. I'm sure most people have an example of a manager making a technical decision (many times due to ego) and being wrong and then the engineering team has to clean up the mess. There should at least be room for discussion which in the example given, the manager does not seem to be interested in.
I'm sure most people have an example of making a technical decision (many times due to ego) and being wrong
And then, there is a lot of difficulty for the non-neurotypical to see anything beyond their "literal place on the totem pole", or their title. They lean on their experience to say what is right or wrong, even though they have far less context and the IC is trying not to ruffle feathers or hurt people's feelings.
If someone is hired into a manager position they cannot perform well for such reasons, a healthy organization should either modify their role or let them find another job.
People with such conditions MAY also be able to learn about their own limitations, and avoid seeing such positions in the first place.
Then there are those who can be quite successful as managers, despite such challenges, either due to side-effects of their systems-oriented thinking or for unrelated reasons. Such people may be difficult to be around, and may require some quite robust people as direct reports, but if the value they generate is sufficient, it may still be good for the company.
The whole point of the article is to provide the perspective of the Autistic. Why are you assuming "There is no attempt to see the other person's perspective"? Why are you demanding the subject of the article be about what you want it to be or for it to cover the other side of the interaction? There are certainly interactions where there is a misunderstanding on the side of the non-autistic and that is what this article is attempting to provide insight into.
Autistic people have what seems like a much higher tolerance for bullshit both in the context of wanting to argue a point to finality or to obsess over a particularly detail until they’ve reached a shared plateau of understanding. Many times this is actually a very satisfying method of conversation, at least for me. Other times it can feel like talking to a wall.
Your mileage may vary.
That, right there, is one of the least helpful things that can ever be said in these kinds of circumstances. It's understandable, and it's common, so this doesn't lay blame on you, but on the underlying cultural assumption.
"Aren't we all?"
Those who have truly neuro-atypical behaviours, to where it can be assessed as placing them somewhere else on the spectrum, will receive less helpful responses when people think along those lines. Their concerns are more easily pushed aside, and the things that can help bridge the gap are less easily implemented.
It may sound accepting, but it's a trivialising statement. It makes things harder, for everyone.
I think less division and more inclusivity in spite of differences is a good place to be, while still acknowledging the struggles / addressing problems of minorities without making them “special” aka outcasts.
Ultimately, you choose how you react to something. You can choose to be offended and look at the surface level of what a person is saying, or you can dig into the essence of the essence and determine the nature, intention, and purpose of a statement.
Most people barely have their own lives in order, and I mean that in a neurological sense. Expecting others to also simultaneously keep track of nuanced triggers which are also not universally applicable, more individual situations, when they are operating in good faith is more counterproductive for everyone.
It's called a spectrum because there's a range. Some people are further out on the spectrum than others. Some people are autistic in one way but not another. One form of autism might be absolute pitch (distinct from perfect pitch in that you can hear semi-tones; Jacob Collier has this but might not choose to describe it as autism). It is a spectrum.
My point was that we are all somewhere on the spectrum. I don't pretend to be able to identify with anyone else's mental state, all I can narrate are my projections and the projections I receive back from others.
I'm sorry that you feel that I have done so, that wasn't my intention. I haven't commented directly on you, but on a common statement that is used in many places around the world. It's something said by the many, which is why I have commented on it within that context - as a cultural norm.
That common statement produces harm, by trivialising the experiences of some, which makes it harder for them to seek or gain accommodations. It produces an assumption of comprehension in some, where they realistically have none. People like those in HR, or team managers, can surreptitiously begin to believe that they fully understand, and so feel justified in denying more things.
That is all that I have sought to point out. Everyone may be on the spectrum, in the same manner that everyone is human, but that's not a helpful distinction.
there are useful distinctions, and this is not one of them.
there are socially inept people that miss a requisite threshold of social cues.
The example that stuck out to me was “should we migrate our website to React”. The questions the author wanted to ask seemed like very normal questions to ask, and good questions that any good engineer would ask before answering a question like that (unless they already have a lot of context about the website in question).
I don’t have autism, but I’ve worked with people with autism, and at my job I think they were treated more respectfully than what the author describes. It’s possible that they’re being mistreated but I’m just not seeing it though.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that although I can’t directly relate to the author’s experience, I would still recommend that they try to find a new job with a less toxic workplace culture.
What I got: an article lecturing neurotypicals about how, whenever they think an autistic person may be wrong, it's actually just because autistic people are more holistic thinkers and know more than them.
I think that's pretty important. This is not an article that says "I'm always right, people are just too stupid to notice that, here are mistakes they're making."
It says, or at least it reads to me as, "People often think I'm stubborn and can't acknowledge when I make a mistake. Sometimes, not always, that is a result of miscommunication, because my brain works differently from many others. Here are some of the ways it does that, and how it leads to that wrong perception."
"When these conflicts arise, here are some things that might be happening"
SOME and MIGHT are being completely ignored and replaced with absolutes by many commenters. At no point does it claim to be an exhaustive list of every possible single interaction, nor does it say that there are no other explanations.
If anything, these kinds of reactions are proving the point that the Autistic are being misinterpreted (or in this case completely misrepresented).
2. That quote also is not saying "everyone needs to change". It's says they are not going to lie about being wrong just because someone else knows less than them (see the title of example #4). Why should anyone be expected to do this? Why should experts in their field pretend to not know something because of the ignorance of someone else? What does that get us?
If anything, I admit I am wrong daily (if not hourly), and I pretty much never blame anybody, because I don’t really understand what that means anyway. Someone could have done something better, sure, but who and how? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
The real value I hope is that it resonates with people and it makes them feel less alone / allows them to reframe past interactions. A trait I have heard about often in autistic communities is how hard it is to let go of something if you can't explain it. That is definitely very true of myself. Being able to contextualize and reframe a problem from incomprehension to "here is a path forward" is so helpful.
The fact that so many comments here are evidence of a "problem" thus is a great opportunity in disguise.
> The fact that so many comments here are evidence of a "problem" thus is a great opportunity in disguise.
This is the kind of self-reflection and maturity which makes the comments about you actually not able to admit when your wrong so much more absurd
> A trait I have heard about often in autistic communities is how hard it is to let go of something if you can't explain it. That is definitely very true of myself.
Seems to track with my experience as my wife is on the spectrum. She can find it hard to have someone not understand her or some truth about reality and she feels a strong desire to keep engaging until they do. Can be both a blessing or a curse - the latter moreso when she doesn't realize she is dealing with someone who is bad faith - but she is getting better at recognizing that.
Refusing to change is not the same thing as demanding others change. If you can't live in a world where someone does not change their behavior to protect your ego, that's a you problem.
It's possible that they're not smart enough, literally. I find ease of communication is uncorrelated with whether they're on the spectrum or otherwise. It's their raw intelligence level. Somehow the bandwidth between our brains is really high. They often know what I'm saying before I've finished my sentence, because they've already figured it out and have predicted what I'm going to say. But if you're talking to someone with 110-120 IQ, you really have to slow down and spell things out for them, and some things they will actually just never grok unless you have 30 minutes to explain the abstract foundational concepts behind what you're saying.
I imagine the difference in standard deviations is a good metric for cognitive distance. Mentally retarded people (-2) to ordinary people (0) are like normal people to gifted people (+2). And if hackerlight is more intelligent than that (3+), _smart_ people are dumb to him. Some studies show that mutual communication suffers on specific topics after about a standard deviation of difference.
There are people too dumb for addition; why shouldn’t there be a lot of people too dumb to understand hackerlight’s point about computer science?
If you discover your self-perception is wrong, the next step might be thinking about how you can change your behavior and clarify your own judgement. If you determine that others misperceive you, the next step might be thinking about how to change that.
The author didn't get far into a next step, but the first step is critical and valuable as far as it goes, IMO.
And a fundamental requirement to admit to being wrong is, well, actually being wrong. If you analyze a situation and find that you're factually correct, you haven't failed to admit to being wrong.
I wonder if Author is in fact autistic. It seems (not sure if I've got this right) that author wasn't diagnosed until his forties. I'd have expected a diagnosis of autism to occur pre-teen.
How could one tell how common undiagnosed autism is? All you can do, surely, is divide the number of autism diagnoses by the number of - autism diagnoses.
OK, so you can presume that an autism diagnosis represents some undiagnosed history of autism. But that's presumption. Or I suppose you can make other presumptions - like, this guy's diagnosed autistic, and he functions well; so many other people who function well are probably also autistic. But that's also presumption.
The DSM diagnostic criteria for autism look pretty shaky to me. I'm not saying I don't think autism exists; I think it does exist. But if you want to chuck around statistics about autism, then you have to stick to some strict definition. "Undiagnosed autism" isn't strict, on any criteria. The DSM doesn't define undiagnosed anything.
[Edit] I'm not at all surprised that some people are diagnosed in their middle age; 40 years ago, autism was a pretty exotic diagnosis, few doctors knew much about it or were experienced with it.
As a relatively famous example, take Bill Gross, aka the "Bond King". He only realized he had Asperger's in his seventies when it was randomly the topic of a psychiatrist he was having dinner with. And why would he seek out some kind of diagnosis? He's happily married and running fantastically successful bond funds.
It's been suggested to me that I might have Asperger's (I believe the suggestion was hostile; it was my ex-wife, who is a trained psychotherapist). If I have Asperger's, it's only in the sense that everyone has a little bit of Asperger's. But I worried about it for several years. Vague psychological diagnoses are harmful.
I feel like the author might lie somewhere on the spectrum but I was pretty sure being actually autistic was a separate and vastly more serious diagnosis.
Ah, but here's the thing: if your interlocutor has some motive other than truth-seeking then they will demand you admit error regardless of whether you are actually in error. This means to them you can fail to admit error even when no error occurred.
It's circumstances like this that the author is analyzing by taking "I was right" as a hypothesis - the article doesn't claim this is always the case but wants to make some particular conclusions about cases where no error was made.
> In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question. Is our checkout page not performing well?
> However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.
If this is what actually happened, the manager is terrible and unprofessional. I feel I run into situations like this as well, where I ask a simple question and because the person asking is treating me like an NPC in a game they're playing but not telling me, I don't get the question answered and furthermore I get something attributed to me (e.g. refusal, uncooperativeness, etc.) that isn't true at all.
I wish there was some way to easily communicate universally that "I mean the literal meaning of these words, nothing more, nothing less."
I've made the mistake hundreds of times in my life where I put a lot of effort into a project, only to discover that I missed something obvious at the start that invalidated the whole approach. Like selecting the architecture-defining processor for an electronics design, completing the design around it, and then discovering weeks later that it's obsolete.
It's not about ego. I've tried to explain that I want to be sure I am moving forward on the basis of correct information and reasoning. It's a desire to not risk wasting time & effort.
As I wrote in another comment, I think it's very helpful to notice the mismatch between how I understand myself and how others perceive me. It's also worthwhile to find ways to bridge the gap. E.g., in the "rewrite the checkout in React?" scenario, OP might be perceived as more open to the question if they offered, "That's not a small project, but we could definitely do it" before asking questions or if they started with an open question like "What might motivate us to rewrite the checkout in React?" instead of a closed (yes/no) question.
Learning to speak in a way that helps people understand your intentions doesn't require compromising your truth-seeking values: it lets you enjoy the journey more with more companions.
I'm specially annoyed when the interlocutor puts the burden of his own lack of understanding in you when you're trying to make a point across. If they secretly declared war on your idea, they can pick the least generous interpretation of anything you're saying and pretend you are an ignorant and pose as dismissive because you or your idea are not worthy of their consideration.
Short term they might be appearing smart but you know it was like trying to teach how to play chess to a pigeon that only bumped all the pieces of the board and look you in the eye wondering why you are so stupid.
Plot twist: you might be a little bit stupid in a twisted way: you were too generous with the wrong person. Giving too much attention to the wrong toxic interlocutor.
Not at all.
I'm also with you in that communication is hard and people high in industriousness and analytical can easily have a hard time with communication. Specialist have to pay attention to not forget how is it to communicate with "normal people" and speak more languages than nerdese.
Said that, I really don't think that evil has to be underestimated one bit. Ill intentions do exist.
Also, political agendas and ideological possession are brutally strong motivators for "secretly declaring war on your idea". Cancel culture is an obvious expression of that once you remove the secretive part of it and becomes overt instead of covert.
That said, a business is neither a democracy nor a meritocracy. Other than hitting some baseline of required performance, your actually work performance on the job does not matter much for career success. It is all about whether the right people like you or not.
You absolutely should be honest and direct when communicating anything that is in your immediate circle of concern. If you estimate the task will take you x time, never give in to pressure to lower it. Be clear what you can do and can't do and how long things might take you. Basically be reliable.
Everything else, well you can be right or you can be liked. Yeah, the company might make a mistake but does it effect you personally? If not, why bother arguing? Just go with the flow and enjoy the ride.
> 2. I need to ask questions before forming an opinion.
I'm not considered as being on the spectrum (except when "everyone is on the spectrum" for inclusivity reasons of not alienating a socially inept person) and I've had an experience distinct with workers at big tech firms
when I offer a perspective they say I'm being defensive and impossible to help. I think I'm having a conversation, and they think I'm being defensive.
does anybody else have this experience? like, I'm presented with a unilateral view/criticism of something I did, and I'm still forming an opinion of it gathering more information and open to correcting myself or the perception, but any response is seen as defensiveness
given who this comes from, it makes me think that conversations within these firms go this way
I think you've just met some people from that flavor of assholes.
Is it wrong to say that a person with autism can't really help themselves?
I can't speak for every autistic person, but at least in my experience when people do point out our mistakes it often tends to be lacking context. Indeed we don't see ourselves the way others do, but what is sometimes flaw in communication with a neurotypical person is exactly what I would want to do with another autistic person. Pointing out mistakes of this nature in a blunt way is unpleasant, and I've often been expected to be able to intuit the feelings of neurotypical people in these situations even though I literally think and feel differently.
It can be quite frustrating, and I've found that many autistic people will become defensive about personal qualities because of past poor experiences in giving/receiving feedback.
I wish neurotypical folks could see the other side and experience what it's like to be around mostly autistic people. I have no doubt many would become defensive when they've been told again and again that they're being too loud, that they're not discussing they're ideas in enough depth, that they're not being calm enough, or whatever autistic predisposition they'd end up accidentally bumping up against. Thinking and feeling differently from the majority of folks is difficult, but it's even more difficult when folks expect you to know and understand where there mind is at.
Personally I suspect (without too much evidence) that what would happen if such an experiment were honestly tried is that the autists would "route around" the NT socially rather than trying to change them. The game of trying to squash individuality isn't terribly appealing to autists for obvious reasons, albeit historically contingent ones.
"Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic."
I would have to disagree here. Authority structure is useful and sometimes there are multiple good options. Not "giving in" every now and then can lead to analysis paralysis.
I am fine shipping the most horrible code if we all agree that we discussed the pros and cons. This also makes it easy to avoid the “I told you so”-trap which further degrades work climate. Instead, we can go back to the original design document, see that a con we expected has happened, and pick the discussion up from there.
“giving in” without forming a compromise and making sure everybody agrees on what the compromise is however is just appeasing a bully (say “we do it this way because I’m the manager and you’re not” or “we do it this way because I have 10 years of experience and you don’t”).
I should probably have given it a bit more context.
I do recognize that we are only getting one side of the story here, but giving the author the benefit of the doubt, that is what I see in this post.
This doesn’t sound right. You are not going to agree with 100% of someone else’s decisions. No matter how much you discuss something, no matter if you understand all the ramifications, everything there could possibly be. Sometimes you’re just not going to agree with the direction someone else is taking, and you’re going to have to accept it.
And that’s okay. It’s not toxic to disagree with someone, or to accept that even though you might disagree, they’re going to do X their way (or that you’re going to have to do X their way because that’s what they want). That’s not office politics, that’s life.
Usually we can work backwards and discover that we have different starting assumptions or work forwards and discover that we have different goals. Those pieces tend to be more ambiguous and much easier to “agree to disagree”. And it’s why both people can be 100% that they are correct - because in each of their frames of reference they are.
You want to keep the bikes dry, and what color you paint the shed, or whether you call the paint “tan” or “beige,” matters not at all. Labeling people who disagree with you about the paint color as “bullies,” and fighting them to the death, is profoundly useless. Just ask yourself what really matters, and let the rest go.
If not agreeing means "I need to pretend I agree even when I have good reason to disagreee because this person needs to be appeased" that is not healthy and contributes to a toxic workplace.
This post is talking about the latter scenario.
Other people are good at arguing and they often win debates, but in this hypothetical instance they are wrong.
I see this happen all the time, but I don't see anyone talk about it. Like your ability to think logically and express logical arguments doesn't 100% correlate with your knowledge, experience and intelligence, and just because you win every argument doesn't mean you're right every time.
That's why it's important to back down in arguments, we're all human and we all make mistakes.
I get this a lot (relatively speaking), or I used to, especially when I was more active on places like reddit. Don't think I'm autistic, but it baffles me nonetheless. I mean, of course that a on-point and very focused discussion may be of value, in many cases it actually may be quite interesting, but imo the point of a internet forum (or of a general discussion, more largely speaking) is to try and reason exactly about these "holistic" approaches, no matter how bad or good the respective takes may be.
If it matters I find that people here on HN are a lot more open to that type of holistic/"let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture" discussions, without necessarily resorting to accusations of "you're not getting it" or "you're changing the subject" (which is partially true, of course).
It's easy to decipher that nothing is wrong with the checkout page as it exists from performance. What's really being proposed here is an attempt to get ahead of it before it becomes a problem. Keeping the growth needs of an engineering team in mind you have to remember nobody wants to work on a technical stack that uses ancient technology and hasn't been updated because "it's not broken". The evaluation just seems like it's too narrow of a focus the way it's worded here. Just my 2 cents though.
Exactly this. You asked one question that you summarized dismissively as "...because they had read a blog post about another company doing it."
You could have stroked their ego a little by saying that you don't have the breadth of perspective that they do, before asking questions about what they perceive as the advantages of switching to React. Would it help get the team more visibility or credibility? Would it help advance their work goals?
What they should have asked you is: How long will it take to switch? What is your technical opinion of making a switch? They are not asking for push back about what concrete problems need to be solved. There are infinite ways to implement a solution, for some reason a manager focused on this way to create a solution, they want to know how long it will take and if you are interested in doing it, or would hate doing it.
Is our checkout page not performing well? Will a new checkout solve our problem? Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Do they understand the implications of such a switch? In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question. I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.”
I have this problem which is that I don’t really understand what autism is supposed to be. Because the example of autism described above just seems like sound decision making. The person who wants to rewrite some software because they read a blog post about some programming language is just a person who doesn’t have a good understanding of what engineering and software development are.
1. If someone isn't listening, stop talking. Nobody is benefiting from that, and it's a waste of your time and energy. I get significantly better engagement with people when they can interact with me for information rather than getting an information dump. On rare occasions they ask me something that does have a long and complicated answer, I lead with that fact and ask if they want the full details or as brief of a summary as I can make (-vvv or -q).
2. Let people into your thought process. The way we associative thinkers work is completely different from what linear thinkers are doing. By walking them through your thought process (which is infuriatingly slow this way) they actually can vaguely follow why you're asking what you're asking. It also allows you to give early feedback. "There are lots of concerns that should be considered before re-writing any already working software..." Over time people will begin to understand _why_ they should ask you about certain things and they can be more understanding on what's going on under the covers.
3. I have expressed my concerns and don't believe this is the best strategy, however I will document these and will observe your orders. If it's something that keeps happening, I'm more likely to move jobs than I am to move mountains in an organizational structure. I also think it's worth at least being aware of the game, as someone who's had it played against them to significant detriment before.
4. Honestly, #1 and #2 solve this problem. It's not concincing to most NTs to recite information but allowing them to interact with you to discover the information themselves allows them to realize that you do understand the information at a deep level. We tend to recite things because a scripted response is a lot easier for us to provide, but it's not actually all that useful in the context of conveying information.
It's something I realized when I started tutoring, if a student fails to understand you, it's not their fault for not understanding. It's on you, as the tutor, to communicate in a way that gets through to them. The ability to communicate your ideas easily and concisely is something you can learn.
Here's a good list of books, although I have not personally read all of them. https://socialself.com/blog/books-improve-social-skills/#6 At the end of the day though, real world experience is the easiest. Volunteering has been my favorite thing to do to get to know new people and practice my social skills.
I do not agree with the generalization of the author about all allistic people having the exact weakness outlined in the post. Effective communication is skill non-neurodivergent people work on to master too. What I'd argue is that allistic people learn more easily because they have a feedback loop they can rely on to self correct and autistic people need more clear examples to learn from.
"I don't care much for saying false things to appease someone's ego. In cases like this, I'm not the one who can't acknowledge being wrong." is just a very cold approach to social interactions. There's a time and place for when that kind of clinical approach is necessary, but it's not appropriate for every social interaction.
You're blaming someone for their disability - this is basically the equivalent of blaming a paraplegic for not being able to walk. Social skills are almost entirely an intellectual process (as opposed to an instinctual process) for many autistic people. It's not like learning to ride a bike (as it is for neurotypical people), it's like learning algebra.
Here are some resources on accepting neurological differences, as opposed to trying to fix them: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/autism/neurodivers...
I don't this it's fair to argue that difficulty understanding other perspectives/lack of empathy is something you should accept the same way you do a disability. It's not the same at all.
Knowing how your words will be understood from someone else's perspective is something that can be learned. I had to learn it when I started tutoring. Students with poor performance struggle due to the consequence of failure to teach, much more than a failure to learn. I didn't say it would be easy. Intellectual or instinctual doesn't make a difference as it can still be learned. Autism is very diverse in presentation so I know there are limits to the generalizations I am making.
Just because something is not visible does not make it less real. This is one of the largest hurdles for experiencing acceptance for many people who have a mental disability. Your perspective is also perfectly typical, expected, and human. Neurodiversity gets almost no attention, and it easily follow that innocent ignorance is rampant.
And it's not that we don't try, and shouldn't try, it's that we get put into several buckets (as-per the scare quotes in the title) when we inevitably fail. We will never master social skills like a neurotypical person can.
Many of us also don't categorize it as a strict disability (depending on the nature and severity of our particular case), there are immense upsides to the condition (depending, again, on the individual). That certainly doesn't mean that we should be expected to (anagolously) grow appendages that we weren't born with.
But I still have values that I hold on to. If someone adamantly states they are right about something, and turn it into a “social skill showdown” where one has to feign agreement and cave in to some sort of authority, then count me out. I know other people do it, I kind of understand why, but it’s not for me. I don’t think it’s cold at all, it’s just me prioritizing my values.
What I’m realizing as I write these articles and am more open about my introspection is that a lot of allistic people, for all their talk about empathy and theory of mind, really don’t try very hard to see things from the other side. Maybe I can’t intuitively chose just the right words to make my question not sound patronizing, maybe I don’t even understand what “sounding patronizing” is. At that point it’s really on that person to put in a bit of effort and skip over the jab and realize the question is probably not meant to patronize.
Otherwise it’s like asking a blind person to just look where they’re going when they’re walking into a wall.
People like other people that make them laugh, so I don't know how helpful this will be but I would say try your hand at incorporating some humor into your speech, if you don't already. Focus mainly on humor that punches up, lean towards the humor of Hasan Minaj and not towards the humor of The Big Bang Theory.
It's also not about feigning agreement or caving in to authority. You have to let other people be wrong. It's more nuanced than I can go into here via comments, but I imagine you understand. Letting other people be wrong shouldn't be about prioritizing your values, it's about respecting their learning process as well. If you want to prioritize your values despite understanding that it comes at the cost of respecting other people's learning process, that's a choice you can make. Intent doesn't negate the consequences of how words might affect someone else. I am trying my best to be respectful, I hope I didn't offend with anything I said because that's not my intent. I apologize if I did already at some point.
Thank you for the healthy discourse with me, I appreciate it.
As many other things you may never actually do it, but it’s good to have that option.
I can see where the essay goes partial. The author focuses on explaining self, but neglect in analyzing why others are having issues understanding the author. And I think I understand the reason -- the author is simply (much) more interested in solving the engineering problems than the political problems. The author probably understand the importance of politics, but simply not interested.
I can relate to that. I don't even think that is a problem. If you are happy focusing on technical problems and want to avoid the political side, so be it. However, I am concerned that the author mentions burnout. If you are having risk of burning out, then apparently there is an issue and the author is stubbornly avoid addressing the issue.
The answer may not be -- you need learn and play politics. It could be -- you need learn to balance yourself. It depends on individuals, but refusing to address it is wrong.
What I don't enjoy is when politics turns into bullying, where one has to give in to someone without proper reasons. This is for example a manager pushing through a technical decision the team doesn't agree with "because they're the manager", or a senior engineer dismissing a junior engineer "because you're just a kid". Expecting people to go along with that is what I would just walk away from.
For the "I know a lot" part, deep knowledge is open not recognized simply because people do not sense it. Unfortunately being recognized often means doing self promotion.
For the "I need to ask questions" part - I do too. And every serious engineer did too.
So far it looks tout are in a company that is not a great fit.
As for the rest, I am affraid that your may need to study people interactions me. It is not always politics, sometimes the way you engage other people.
I know that this is easier said than done, especially in your case but I would take it as a challenge. It cups make your like and intentions much easier.
I am acutely aware that studying people interactions help me. I've lived in 3 countries and passed as native in each. I've come so much further than I ever thought possible because I studied interactions extensively, and practiced them even more. All that "talk to a 100 strangers every week", "learn public speaking," "learn to listen," "watch every possible show in the original language?" "immerse yourself in the culture." I've done it and then some, for years.
The treacherous effect of this is that the better you get, the fewer people believe you when you say that you are autistic / have trouble with reading people (I didn't believe it myself), and thus the more it is held against you when you actually make a mistake. "There is no possible way you couldn't know acting like X comes across as arrogant." In fact, it won't even be chalked up to cultural differences because no one realizes I'm french / german. They just think I have a slight speech impediment.
There is so much bronze-tier advice in this thread that shows that people have actually never tried or practiced what they are preaching here. There is so much rewording and "have you tried asking the question this way" or "you should do X," when really the words seem to matter the least. It's so much more about posture, demeanor, tone of voice, facial expressions than what you actually say. The irony of people immediately making the boldest assumptions and dishing out advice—all the while having no way of knowing if any of what they say is true (they don't know me)—is quite striking.
I tried not to engage on that topic, or bring up how many books about behaviour, workplace dynamics, politics, body language I have gone through because I don't like being combative.
> 3. I care more about doing good work than office politics.
This whole section illustrates the uncrossable chasm of not “getting” people, while at the same time believing in your own smartness
You should strive for general I, not just logical I
People are not computers, they don’t share your logic and your own logic is fallible as it runs on top of unreliable wet-ware
Let's be honest, that's what happened here. There are many reasons to overhaul a frontend, and performance is just one of them. Maybe the existing checkout is a mess that only OP understands how to maintain. Maybe engineers and designers want to find better common ground to work together and this change could facilitate that. I'm sure you can think of other reasons.
The narrow thinking is on OPs side here. They straight up assumed that this change was just chasing shiny new things (and, well, React isn't that shiny anymore), that all changes had to serve the user and not also organizational goals and then shut it down with the nearest plausible excuse.
(The biggest other thing this can be is a complaint that the victim doesn't let the complainant win enough arguments, and that the audience should consider more of the arguments won without the victim conceding and with an extra penalty of being seen as a sore loser.)
Now before you dismiss me, consider that autistic people are generally speaking… awful at recognizing situations that are actively hostile to them. And yes, Neurotypicals are sometime quite hostile to autisic people. I’ve been a victim of discrimination and outright campaigns to isolate and harass me. It happens. Sometimes it’s on purpose, sometimes it is a natural result of repeated conflict.
Now, let’s say for example that you had a co-worker who actually had it out for you; would actively undermine your work, sabotage your efforts… for whatever reason. As a nuerotypical you would recognize this behavior quite quickly and develop a strategy around it. Perhaps that strategy involves talking to the right people, executing some kind of trap, confront the behavior head on, or simply walking away. Since an autisic person has difficulty detecting negative intent, they would instead try to puzzle out why the “clearly wrong” person just won’t listen to them. From that they draw these conclusions about themselves and the world around them about their behavior because they cannot understand the behavior of Nuerotypicals (to be fair here NTs don’t understand our behavior either). Trust me, I’ve drawn some pretty wild conclusions myself at times.
To illustrate, I recently worked with a very Narcissistic and toxic personality. By all outside observers this was 100% dark triad kind of behavior in this person (I verified it with multiple independent opinions). Anyway, this person was so difficult to work with, so directly hostile, and so stressful to work with that I re-entered therapy where I, at 36 years of age finally learned two very important things.
1. Some people will want to fuck you up, just because they don’t like you. Not everyone is good or does good things. This is “irrational” but it is real.
2. Not everyone had the same capacity as you do… and you don’t have the same capacity as others. For those without your capacity you must teach, and for those that have capacity that you lack, you must learn.
These two “rules” have finally demystified some aspects of office realpolitik for me.
I suspect that the author, my fellow autistic, has yet to also understand this about people. Their intent might purposefully be to oppose you and undermine you. Ignore it, work around it, or leave. They will never be an ally to you. Stop trying.
Thank god I didn't have to encounter an actively hostile person yet, but my big discovery last year was indeed that not everyone at work is motivated by doing a good job. It obviously sounds obvious when put like this, but it is something I wasn't able to put together in my own life. I have since left this job (my immediate colleagues and most people I worked with were great, it takes just a few individuals to really disrupt and dismantle good engineering), and am now in a place where I slowly had to discover how amazingly efficient and productive things can be when I am given trust and enough autonomy. I think I have 2. pretty well figured out. What I don't know how to handle (as evidenced by some comments here) is when to divulge how much I study / what fields I have a lot of experience in. I never understood where the boundary is between people thinking you are a know-it-all and arrogant, and thinking you are an idiot.
I think the thing to understand, is that non-autistics are very, very particular about the difference between what's inside their own mind, and what's inside your mind. Even on a topic that you may know "everything" about, you still know nothing about what the other person knows about the same subject. Everything on the right side of the below drawing (assuming that you're the one on the left) is in the dark to you, or close to it. And, likewise, everything on your side is in the dark to the other person.
| O O |
| ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
| | | |
| / \ / \ |
| O O |
| ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
| | | |
| / \ / \ |
What non-autistic persons react to, usually, is the blurring of the line between what's inside their mind, and what's inside your mind. When you see it as if you're just communicating the objective facts of the situation, and "divulging how much you've studied the topic", they view it as a transgression, and as a side-stepping of the natural process of "alignment of minds".
Finally, since your user name has a sort of Nordic ring to it, I will disclose a related poem by the Norwegian poet Haldis Moren Vesaas (if you're not Nordic, just disregard it):
ORD OVER GRIND
Du går fram til mi inste grind
og eg går òg fram til di.
Innanfor den er kvar av oss einsam,
og det skal vi alltid bli.
Aldri trenge seg lenger fram,
var lova som gjaldt oss to.
Anten vi møttest titt eller sjeldan
var møtet tillit og ro.
Står du der ikkje ein dag eg kjem
fell det meg lett å snu
når eg har stått litt og sett mot huset
og tenkt på at der bur du.
Så lenge eg veit du vil kome iblant
som no over knastrande grus
og smile glad når du ser meg stå her,
skal eg ha ein heim i mitt hus.If anything, I am a pretty good software engineer because I can "literally" see how people think about software when reading source code and pull requests (I say literally because these things are... objects I can manipulate in my mind? it's hard to describe, and it took me a while to realize not everybody sees it this way).
There are many different ways of thinking, and they are right there in front of me, and some people are aware of certain patterns, certain people tend to consistently not realize this approach exists, others just can't back down from rewriting everything in a functional style, when others in the team don't do well with it. When I see programmers argue about style or programming language or framework I am often confused because I don't understand why they can't see that other people don't think like them :)
This same kind of behaviour can be observed all around us every day. I never understood how people get upset at staff at a restaurant, or get angry when someone bumps into them. Don't they realize that the other person didn't do it on purpose, and didn't mean harm? Why do people argue about politics so much? Don't they realize that other people have different values, and that we have a government in place to channel disagreement about them? Why yell at each other on facebook, don't you realize none of this is going to change the other person's mind?
I think you're right.
The impression I get when I talk to an autistic person, or when I cooperate with him on a problem, is that he sees my thoughts and my ideas as "entities" within his own mind. This rhymes with what you say, that you perceive it as if other people's thought patterns are "objects that you can manipulate in your mind".
My subjective experience is that the autistic person will "dive into himself" to find the answer to who I am, in a given situation, while the non-autistic person will look outwards. It's as if the non-autistic person processes me in real time, using a massive parallel social GPU in his head, while the autistic person, instead, consults massive internal lookup tables to try and derive the same information.
I think the difference is fundamental. It has to do with the very "shelf system" in our brains; the way that we have stored information about the world, and made sense of it, since we were small kids. It's not something that we can change as adults, I think.
> A typical piece of advice I receive is that there comes the point where you need to "give in," especially to people in authority. This preserves peace in the workplace and helps with promotions. However, "giving in" is not the same as acknowledging when you are wrong: it is simply playing mind games—games I am not interested in playing.
> There is more to life: I am an engineer; I like solving problems. I embrace fairness and open intellectual exchange. This matters to me a whole lot more than getting promoted. Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic.
I've repeatedly been in situations where a person in authority proposed a bad idea, and I tried to push for a better alternative, but I was told I should "give in" to preserve the peace. So I believe the OP.
In these comments, a lot of people are advising the OP to learn better soft skills. The implied reason boils down to "Most people are allistic, so allistic people make the world's implicit rules. If an autistic person doesn't learn to play by those rules, they're going to lose." For example, allistic people tend to respect hierarchies, so there's a "rule" that OP should "give in" to the person in authority.
I think this advice is correct for the individual; learning better soft skills is the only thing OP can personally do.
But, it makes the organization as a whole more dysfunctional. If a person in authority is wrong, then if the "rule" is that OP should give in, then the person in authority will continue to be wrong, and that's bad for the organization! I believe the organization can do better. The "rules" are not set in stone; although they arise from human nature, they are shaped by an organization's culture. For example, many small organizations are less hierarchical, so the "rules" would tend to put more pressure on the person in authority to listen to what OP was saying. If OP was actually right, that would lead to a better result for the organization than if OP gave in.
I learned from watching her and thinking about what she should be doing. For example, I had a altercation with a guy over a parking spot we both wanted. I was alone but he had his girlfriend in the car. I looked at it from his point of view and realized there was no way he was going to back down in front of his girlfriend, so I let him have the space in a friendly way and went about my day.
A phrase I've noticed zoomers using recently is "let me land!" if you interrupt them. It's probably not zoomer specific but that's where I've heard it.
It conveys that you still have more to say, mildly points out the rudeness of being interrupted, and people seem to understand exactly what you mean without further explanation so you can get back to your thought.
Whether it works in the workplace I'm not sure, probably depends on the tone of voice. I would throw a please in there too.
We are often hearing a lot of unspecific waffle at great expense. The author goes on to say they are spending a few minutes setting the context. I have to deal with this a lot, and in reality, without cutting you off, it often goes on for 30 minutes to answer a simple question poorly.
How this looks in reality. The worker wants to move some cables to another switch to install a server but prefers to waffle for 30 minutes instead of drawing a diagram. Typically this consumes the whole team meeting and nobody gets to discuss their items.
I work pretty hard at it. Yet still, especially when someone is not conversant in my domain of expertise (real-time embedded systems, data engineering), I do need to give context. I am not talking 30 minutes here, I am talking 5 minutes at most, in the most complicated cases.
In fact, this article is me trying to boil down things, and I realized I might have gone too far into conciseness :)
I'd venture that the majority of mid+ engineers ask these questions out of habit. That is, if such a proposition even makes it to them. A good product manager would ask these questions well before the proposal even made it to engineering.
> In the future, I will look for a professional environment that understands and accommodates divergent ways of thinking.
but the above mentioned section would offer insight into how the author reached that solution and what other potential solutions were considered.
>>>impatient and cut me off or interject with a snap interpretation of what I have said so far.
So... this sounds like you have already entered into defensiveness by this point, one way or another. Defensiveness tends to be mutual, so perhaps you are also feeling/presenting defensiveness.
For example, in your manager meeting... "I simply need you to answer these questions" can easily seem prosecutorial. It is framed in a way that makes you seem good, and him (or his ideas) seem bad. He is making whimsical decisions based on blog posts. You are focusing on real, important issues like usability.
This is a frame, a somewhat combative frame... probably/probably loaded with non complimentary assumptions on your part. Whether these assumptions are true, false, exaggerated or whatnot... It creates a passive aggressive frame. These tend to be stubborn frames. It sounds like you are throwing out questions in an attempt to derail/dismiss the idea, not collaborate.
Imagine the tables turned around. Next meeting on the subject. This time, your manager "needs to ask questions before forming an opinion:"
(1) What is your objection to the react framework? (2) Why is performance selectively concerning only in this context, but not others?...etc.
You can see where I am going. These are loaded questions, passive aggressive. Such questions will almost always elicit a a defensive riposte.
This is a technical discussion we're talking about. In technical discussions, I don't want to faff around with euphemisms, circumlocutions, or fancy pronouns. It's hard enough to be clear in technical discourse, even if you aren't carrying those burdens.
I expect people to speak directly, even if on the face of it their utterances might seem rude if spoken in a social context. If a colleague goes in with both fists and feet in a technical discussion, and wins, that doesn't mean they're no longer my friend - it just means I was wrong, and I learned something. Drawing blood in a technical discussion is just part of the life of a technician.
Assuming a "I am the objective one" is often just a blindspot. Everyone is subjective to some extent, and admitting that you are a person with a perspective (as opposed to a neutral observer) is useful for avoiding such tensions.
Just admit that you have opinions, and present them as such.
"I am concerned that we are taking on a risky project, without understanding the implications. I would like to analytically discuss performance, and plan this product to these performance goals. I prefer an approach based on..."
Place yourself into the narrative. Not just other people.
I think I know what that means; it's kind of pretending to be non-aggressive, while aggressing. I hope that, in a technical discussion, my adversary won't hold back. If they're angry, it's best for me if they tell me. Same if they're strongly opposed to my view.
I don't want to have to guess where my adversary is coming from. We're not talking about dating, or getting on with the mother-in-law; it's about technical discussions. There's no reason you shouldn't be aggressive when presenting your view, and then get on fine with your adversary after the discussion's over.
The thing is, I’m absolutely not passive aggressive when asking these questions. On the contrary, I am engaged, asking them for their point of view and expertise, and actively trying to work in the same direction.
I would have zero problems answering the questions you bring up as a hypothetical. In fact these sound like great and interesting questions.
Autism is a disability (but it's only a disability because our society is disabled) —— the individual isn't disabled.
Obviously, many people don't believe "reasonable accommodations" are to be made and that our society is to be improved and resolve to neologisms such as "ausplaining" which I find deeply inappropriate in our times.
Using the React example, you do not need several minutes to explain why large software projects are a waste of money unless they're pursuing business objectives. It's trivially obvious, just say a slightly more diplomatic version of the previous sentence. The reason I'm not hearing what you're saying is because the question needed a simple two sentence answer, but you turned it into a two-minute rambling monologue involving several anecdotes and then began explaining what Chesterton's Fence is and how the sunk cost fallacy doesn't apply. At that point any reasonable listener would cut into what you're saying with "okay, but back to our shopping cart," and it would be 100% your fault.
Another thing my father is awful at is understanding when something is about general fact-finding vs a specific suggestion. If a manager comes up to you in the kitchenette and says "I've been reading about the new React checkout system at Dunder Mifflin and they say it increased ARR by $200k, do you think we should rewrite?" it's probably not a project proposal. It's a fact-finding question. You don't need to go into attack mode and protect your checkout flow from an unnecessary rewrite. Say "Well, React is a great technology for building really big web apps, but our checkout page is pretty small and not a web app, so we'd have to make sure we were solving real business problems."
I've worked with autistic people who managed not to do either of these things, I don't think it's inherent to the condition, and I have no idea if this is an accurate description of what the author's talking about. They pattern match very closely to experiences I've had before, though.
He would get really frustrated when he would get vague specs to implement.
He and I however, got along fine, because I'm also a developer.
I see the author of the article is here on HN, so here is my advice: try to set yourself up in an environment where you mainly communicate with technical people, and receive proper specs. You can let the other developers work more closely with functional and business people. I would guess try to program something that interfaces not with users, but with other systems.
The "hey I read a blog post that we should use this" would also frustrates me a lot :D. That is the kind of person that should be made clear about where the boundaries are of their and your expertise.
I've also met a very autistic/aspergers person who would listen and consider (and there may be more than one, I just can't think of them ATM).
I've also met non-autistic people who simply can't listen or accept any kind of 'challenge' (as they perceive it). Not a few of the buggers either.
I've come to wonder if bloody-minded utter certitude is in fact a distinct and separate trait that has some positive, but not absolute, correlation with autism. Given the way my exposure to the autistic and the non-autistic-but-bull-headed run parallel sometimes but at others it diverges, perhaps that's a better description of what's going on. Maybe.
All of the questions listed in 2 are things that an allistic person might (should) ask. Plenty of allistic people care more about doing their work than politics. Plenty of allistic people have their knowledge underestimated in the situation presented.
Even #1 happens plenty with allistic people, but I do understand that this is more likely to occur when an allistic and autistic person are interacting.
In my personal experience, I find it is difficult for people to admit when they are wrong. I've never found it to be particularly correlated with being neurotypical or neurodivergent, however.
I have some ruminations on this. My ruminations may be completely wrong.
Double empathy problems start from a young age. Those with ASD figure out from a young age that there's a layer of social communication that they are not getting. They are often overtly teased for the faux pas' that inevitably occur. I wonder if this, plus a stronger penchant for black and white thinking does enforce a stronger aversion to "being wrong" then your average person.
Possibly even a stress reaction to previous trauma for some (I definitely think I'm on shaky ground there).
Wrong on a social thing, agree. Anything with fluid changing rules and subtle context clues will drive them insane
Hopefully this will bring you peace.
Interacting well with other people (what the derisive “office politics” actually is) is good work.
The wizard has worked much harder than you for many many years. He just doesn't frame it and hang it on his office wall.
I think the difference is that an autistic person will see reality like this:
| O O |
| ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
| | | |
| / \ / \ |
| O O |
| ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
| | | |
| / \ / \ |
The autistic person will, instead, view it as if there is one big unified shared reality between him and the other person, and one true fact, in any given situation. He will also assume that the other person sees it in the same way as himself.
The "double empathy problem" is that neither of them can see how the other person views the world. The non-autistic person cannot comprehend that the autistic person sees a single shared reality, and a single fact. Likewise, the autistic person cannot comprehend that the non-autistic person sees two different realities and two sets of facts.
I also note that the author of the original post describes himself as being more "holistic" in his approach to problem solving, than his non-autistic co-workers. He has the belief that he "sees the whole picture", while the other non-autistic person "sees only half of it".
What autistic people fail to recognize, in my mind, is that it does not matter if you've read 50 books about a topic. Even if you have, you still only own "half of the reality" in a meeting with another person about a topic. You still have to take his world view into account, even if you've read 50 books. You cannot "own" or "control" the reality, or the facts, of a situation, no matter how much you know about it. In a meeting with another person you always own only half of the reality.
In all of the straw men he presents, it’s curious that none of them entertain the possibility that he ever is actually wrong. The issue isn’t that he is autistic it’s more likely he's simply insufferable.
The only acknowledgement made in the article is internally: I read more, I investigate things I don't know.
Other than this, the person seems to fail to acknowledge the possibility of ever being wrong to us readers. Indurectltly justifying the presumed prejudice of allistics.
I have to stop myself and mentally translate every time.
I'm not autistic; but I often just walk away from arguments. I'm an argumentative person, so it runs against the grain; but I don't actually enjoy arguing.
confusing lack of subtlety with logical clarity is precisely the issue
I'm also a person that has "I don't know" in the ready, in my vocabulary, which I've found is somewhat rare in the professional world, especially as education level increases.
> But yes Person X / Fund Y is wrong size for us. (11:52 AM)
So based on a sample size of one, they acknowledged they were wrong about 90 minutes ago.
I feel like it may be a good place to consolidate strategies.
My daughter (22) and son (20) are both ASD. My email is in my profile if you want to reach out. E.
Take this example:
> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it.
> [...]
> In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question.
My reaction to this is, yes obviously an engineer should be asking these questions, and it's a huge red flag that the manager didn't entertain even the first one. Obviously we don't have that managers side of the story, so I take it with a small grain of salt, but on the other hand the issue is articulated very clearly, and it is decidedly not personal or egocentric. In fact the questions are exactly what I as an EM expect my senior ICs to be asking. This demonstrates ownership and good thinking about the overall cost and impact of resourcing decisions. Good systems can not be built by managers dictating things without buy in from the expert ICs who actually build and maintain them. Therefore I think it's completely bass-ackwards that we would ding the IC for a communication gap (regardless of neurotype)—I've seen far too many cases of teams just doing what they're told and driving off a cliff because everyone prioritized agreeability and had a very narrow view of their own responsibilities. When the shit hit the fan everyone just throws their hands in the air and says "not my job".
So let me first say, kudos to you larve, you are the type of engineer I want on my team.
Now that said, some feedback. Describing office politics as "playing mind games" does you no favors in terms of being understood. I know what you mean—office politics often involved bending over backwards and dancing around issues to avoid offending people. This is not my idea of fun either. That said, morale matters, and this song and dance is a big part of how morale is managed for allistic people. Furthermore, there is a fundamentally difficult issue which is if you have 100 smart people, building consensus through complete understanding is impossible. At some point owners need to be identified, decisions made, and progress begun. Some people will need to "disagree and commit" with partial understanding. Given your experience I don't expect you would disagree with that in any way, but when folks are short with you, consider the difficulty of reaching such consensus. I don't think it's an excuse for shortcuts, but this is the art of technical management, and it requires hard work and a commitment to building trust and understanding from all parties to have any hope of realizing large scale technical achievements.
I actually love "office politics" when people engage in it in good faith. I love crossing team boundaries, figuring out who is not talking to whom, who works well with certain kind of people. I love running good meetings and making sure everybody is heard. I love writing and editing documents, cleaning up meeting notes, I am happy writing whatever shitty glue I need to to make other people's work smoother.
I think office politics is just a derisive name for the very important work of having lots of people of different backgrounds work with each other towards a same goal. I've come to understand that my biggest technical capability as an engineer is to play office politics well. Organizing a single meeting between two people (or conversely, making sure two people never have to code review each other) can be the difference between a dead project and a successful one.
The "mind games" is specifically about getting me to say something I can't stand behind. I am fine doing things I can't stand behind, because I'd rather get something janky shipped than nothing at all, and I will do so without complaining, in fact I enjoy it. But don't expect me to say something I don't mean, I'd rather say nothing at all. I have two anecdotes come to mind. One is a colleague not wanting to use the API I provided to store configuration files (an API I provided so they wouldn't have to deal with the versioning, saving to flash safely, validation and encryption), instead repeatedly bringing up in the public slack channel how I should KISS and that writing a file is really not a complicated thing (it kind of is, especially in an embedded system). I don't really care too much about engaging with people calling me stupid in public, and I'm certainly not going to say that writing a file is simple.
I also care very much about other more junior engineers not getting bullied by older engineers. Junior engineers might not be very nuanced in their opinions, or might need to learn a few lessons the hard way, but that is not done by playing the authority card, that is done by providing a safe space for them to discover these things on their own (be it by mentoring, by watching more experienced people do it, or by giving them enough ownership to be able to make a few mistakes without impacting the business).
Thanks again for your comment.
Cool, that's a great clarification. I agree with that characterization of "mind games", and its obviously 100% legitimate to stand your ground in those cases.
One reason I think these things happen is because people go straight from school to the corporate world where they expect to be told what to do and never develop their own agency and feedback loops for higher level goals. In a big org it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. Silicon Valley youth worship doesn't help either as it takes time to get enough experience to learn the myriad different ways things can succeed and fail. Young managers often feel they need to have all the answers and control everything rather than realizing the job is really about understanding individual strengths and giving everyone the right incentives and well-defined goals (appropriate to their competence level) to work together and produce output greater than the sum of the parts.
In the case of a disagreement, basically start out trying to figure out where the other person's head is at with open ended, exploratory questions (stuff like "what are you looking to achieve?" or "why do you feel this is the case?"). Avoid accusatory questions like "what makes you think that?" or "do you think X is bad?" Expressing humility by, for example, stating that you don't understand something before asking them to explain their view of it helps.
Once you know their starting position, instead of simply speaking at them, instead guide them to reach the conclusion for themselves. Repeat information they've already accepted as true frequently ask them what these givens imply.
Always maintain an off ramp. If someone initially disagreed with you, odds are at some point you're going to find a sticking point where one of you is either factually incorrect or you have fundamentally different judgements. This normally is where discussion turns into argument. Give people an opportunity to save face - something like "you know I only very recently learned myself that this isn't actually true" or "you would think that's the case but there's this unintuitive gotcha in this instance" allows a person to change their position without calling their general intelligence or expertise into question. In the case of a judgement disagreement, something like "let's pretend for a moment that you desire this" let's them move forward without having to actually confront the disconnect. If someone is fatigued or aggravated, make sure there's a way for them to blow off steam, for example something like "you're making some good points, I'd like to double check my info, can we revisit this later" let's them walk away feeling good and makes you look humble while also giving them leeway to be more agreeable when you do eventually bring it back up.
At the same time, always be responsive to the other person. If they are interjecting, let them speak and take note of what they say. Again it's more important that they feel they've explained their reasoning than that you lay the groundwork for yours. When they legitimately bring up good points, acknowledge them; when it seems like they are holding something back, probe a bit; if their train of thought goes off on a tangent, explore it. While this might sound a bit tedious, especially if you already have a pretty good idea of what specific points you need to convey, a lot of people care more about being heard than the particulars of what they are saying. Ultimately, reel them back in after they've made their point and modify the logic path you're taking them along accordingly.
After guiding them through the thought process, then confirm that you have communicated your point by having them repeat back to you their current understanding. If your message was successfully communicated, it should be readily apparent. If not, it should still be evident where the miscommunication is occurring. Recursively repeat the process until the message is completely communicated. You may still not agree in the end, but both of you should be well aware as to why you disagree.
7000 years after the first pound, we are ending the planet ... and no one agreed that human is wrong ()
OMG You must be very smart!
You must be very angry.
I don't think autism prevents a person from appreciating the importance of these questions. It might affect your ability to answer them quickly or correctly, but it doesn't render you incapable of posing them and acknowledging them as important influences on the situation. A person who is blind from birth can understand that their clothes have color and that color-coordination affects how other people perceive them.
So why do those questions get left out? I think the answer is that some autistic people, including me when I was younger, cling to a very strict idea of what it means to communicate in good faith. I used to assume that if people were speaking in good faith, they would appreciate me taking their arguments at face value and directly addressing the objectives we had in common. They would be rigorous about admitting their motivations and, in general, be willing to be explicit about every factor they were taking into account. I also felt that if they weren't speaking in good faith, I was pretty much screwed and helpless. I didn't have an answer for that. So I handled every situation by striving to speak in good faith, owning my deficiencies in that regard, and hiding any suspicion that the other person wasn't speaking in good faith because 1) I didn't have a game plan for it, and 2) being aware of it made me feel guilty and scared.
Over time it dawned on me that this "good faith"/"bad faith" dichotomy, whatever its merits might be in a society that embraced it, wasn't useful in this reality, because most people don't think in those terms. There are a lot of people of basically good will, who aren't overly selfish, who go through life being mostly nice to people, who also violate the rules of good faith argumentation (as I understood them) virtually every time they open their mouths, and are completely un-self-conscious about it. I had to learn that even though they were good nice people, it was okay for me to be aware of "impure" aspects of communication with them. I didn't have to feel dirty about seeing into the mix of motivations of the person I was talking to, even if I liked them and thought they were a good person.
That didn't make me immediately better at dealing with people, but it was one of those "oh now I can start learning" turning points.
It also led to a big improvement in my personal life. Understanding something about somebody and making use of it without explicitly acknowledging it used to feel dirty to me, but other people want and need you to do it, especially when you're first getting to know them. You need to be able to understand and accommodate people's quirks long before you become close enough to talk about them.
That rule turns out to be just as true in business. When it comes to dealing with people's flaws, what's best for the business is usually what's best for them. It's very bad for someone if their flaws cause problems for the company. They need their coworkers to be aware of their weaknesses and adjust for them, but they probably don't like hearing them mentioned unless you have a very close personal rapport with them (and maybe not even then.)
Anyway, before I accepted all that, I used to obsess about improving my adherence to the rules of good faith argumentation, assuming that anything outside that scope would be scary if not morally wrong. Really, most of the mistakes I was making were caused by me intentionally ignoring everything I knew about the social context of a discussion because I thought it would be insulting to other people if I did anything that reflected an awareness that they might be influenced by factors that they weren't explicitly acknowledging.
How exactly autism or other factors might have got me into that mental cul-de-sac in the first place isn't clear to me. I might have some deficiency in my ability to instinctively read other people's minds and emotions, but in this case, the problem was not lack of insight but a deeply engrained taboo against using the insight that I had. One explanation is that when I was little I wasn't good at observing the taboos around what motivations can and can't be acknowledged, and to protect myself against repeated failures to observe those taboos, I created a blanket taboo against acknowledging people's internal lives. Or maybe my parents instilled some weird stuff in me and I was too autistic to learn different rules for home and school. Who knows.
For people on the spectrum fuzzy, hypothetical, conjectured, and underspecified statements are physically painful. Bad when uttered by others, hence the need to correct them, unbearable when forced to reason with or produce them oneself.
I'm aware that people on the spectrum have a really hard time doing this, but viewing the points from the others viewpoint is still illustrative.
1. The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying.
They are hearing, but they didn't come for a perfect lecture/monologue with the beauty of a mathematical proof, they came for a conversation where truth crystallises from the exchange of half truths and fuzzy concepts.
When they come to you with a question on X, they don't come for your train of thought about X, every fact you've accumulated on X and every bit of reasoning tangential to X, showing the full validity and self consistency of X.
They need a conversation where they pose a vague question, get a vague reply with follow-up questions, to which they provide more information, and so on and so forth, until the concepts are crips and bivalent truth can be attained.
Because they do a top down breadth first fuzzy search their brain starts filtering out the very information that your brain deems essential to bottom up depth first process of establishing truth. So while you create "context" they are just zoning out, making affirmative noises and nods for you to continue, and hope that you'll eventually divulge information relevant to what they came for.
2. I need to ask questions before forming an opinion.
The issue is very similar to 1. People don't come to you in need of a solution, with all conclusions laid out and wrapped up. They might have their own half-finished ideas and opinions that they are in the process of forming, and they are coming to you asking a question to form that opinion. You then attempting to form the same opinion by asking more questions just creates a deadlock.
The conversation could have gone like this:
"No, that would be way to expensive." - "Ok thanks, then nevermind."
"We could, but isn't our current website fast enough?" - "Yeah, but we were hoping to attract some additional talent by incorporating interesting technology into our product."
"I guess, but why?" - "I've heard a lot of things about React lately and am not sure what to think of it, but if it's potentially usable for us I should look up on it a bit more."
But that requires acceptance that no opinion or truth might be formed at all.
3. I care more about doing good work than office politics.
Heres the bummer for people on the spectrum, the world is not made of platonic logic, there are sometimes no rights or wrongs, even with Bayesian reasoning given two different priors the same observation can move those priors in contradictory directions. The world is fuzzy, half truths are everywhere and sometimes a tiebreaker is needed, or the answer to a question is not worth exploring. Giving in acknowledges these simple property of math and the universe, but for a person on the spectrum this is like acknowledging a Lovecraftian horror:
“The piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
4. The person underestimates how much I know about the topic.
While people in IT have a general tendency to underestimate others, I'm certain that a lot of them do know. It's just a combination of 1. and 3. They don't require the convex knowledge hull of the topic, because either they know already, because it's not relevant, or because there is no clear cut answer. Sometimes they know that their position is a gross oversimplification, or that their metaphor is actually contradictory, but it helps them think in the context of their self inconsistent reasoning process which, unlike classical logic, might actually come to valid conclusions from inconsistent assumptions.
The take away from this is that I can probably help myself and my spectrum colleagues by writing questions and requests more appropriate to them, with clearer mental paths, more crisp concepts, preferably by e-mail with a very explicit description of what response I need. Maybe I should also use the phrase "humor me" a lot more to acknowledge that what I'm asking is inconsistent and doesn't necessarily make sense from their perspective.
I'd hope that the author would take away from this, that they don't have to be factually wrong in order to respond in the wrong way. Sometimes giving in and kindness just means having the same non-judgmental understanding for the needs and thought patterns of others, that they expect for themselves.
Edit:
There's actually research that quantifies this https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00283...
I agree with quite a bit of it, but also would like to present a few nuances.
1. The problem is here that they will cut me off short (not a problem) and then say something that is not what I want to say. What can I do? Push back? Give in? Leave?
My strategy was to just leave, because if you don't want to hear me out, and misinterpret what I want to say, we might as well save ourselves all some time. I have learned over time not to infodump (for example, by regularly asking if this is all stuff that is well known). I don't mind being reminded rather abruptly that I should get to the point, if my point is understood correctly.
2. How do I know what aspect of the question I should answer. Sure I can focus on costs, or performance, or memory usage of react, or state handling, or framework adoption. The fact is that I can't provide an opinion, because of all these have different answers. I have plenty of similar discussions that work out well enough, and it is something I think I am good at (hearing out the concerns of the other party, and then focusing on that). In fact, I think being product-minded and listening to the concerns of the business/manager/stakeholder is the most impactful skill an engineer can have.
But it is also the kind of discussion that can lead to the "You just can't admit you are wrong," even though... I haven't said anything wrong. I am very much aware that there is a communication problem, and thus provide my side of the discussion.
3. This is very much about my values, and the choices I make depending on those values. I am not saying the world needs to be a perfect world of engineering, it just means that I am not going to say something I can't back up. That might sound backwards to people, because they have other values (say, acquiescing because you might otherwise lose your job), but that's me making a choice. I'm not pretending to acknowledge I am wrong, and I'm not expecting the person to either. If you really want me to say that rewriting everything in elm, when we are a react shop, is a good choice, then I will state that not pretend to say that elm is a good choice. It doesn't mean that we can't rewrite things in elm, experiments are great if we can afford them. Engineering is about compromise.
But don't make me state an opinion I don't hold.
I am not sure if the nuance is clear here. I know full well that both opinions (elm is a good choice, elm is not a good choice) can hold true at the same time. In fact, none of us really can know which is right!
The business can be just as successful with react than it would with elm, who knows? Maybe in 2 years it will become clear that moving away from react was great, maybe it will become clear that staying with react was the thing to do. But currently, my opinion is that it is a bad choice, and I can argue why I think so.
4. I realize I should have just left this section out of the article and kept it for another day.
It is the first time I mention how much effort I put into learning things publicly, previously only my wife would know. I often come across as boyish and people very often assume I'm the intern, when I actually have 10 years on the most senior person after me. I don't like stating that I've done X for 15+ years, and when I do, some people just straight out don't believe me.
---
As for your take away, I fully approve. I think that writing is a way to avoid these confrontations. Being explicit, and indeed indulging a bit into "humor me" or giving me just a few minutes to get comfortable would help us. None of us benefits from misunderstandings or snap judgments. If I don't seem to be choosing the right words or making the right facial expressions, you can't just dismiss me by saying to get better at choosing the right words. Obviously, I tried. It would be like telling a blind person to just look more closely, and that "they just don't want to see".
You will also of course never realize how often we actually successfully adapted. In fact, it was very easy for me to forget just how much effort I put into these little social dances everyday, and how exhausting it is. The pandemic and working from home and mostly communicating by email has been life-changing.
1. I feel like this is often a miss-understanding between neurotypicals and many neuroatypicals (not limited to autism, but also including disorders with emotional dysregulation, anxiety and others). Neurotypicals often finish each others sentences to signal understanding and engagement, or as a means of implicitly checking if they are still on the same page.
It's a bit like a checksum, a heartbeat package, or a TCP Ack.
"So we should make the cache at least..." - "Three times as large!" - "Yeah or four times for good measure."
For somebody who has trouble reading the intentions of others (as with autism), or who have a tendency to feel judged and controlled (as with anxiety or BPD), this often comes across as a rude interjection.
2. You can't know the aspect. Sometimes it's apparent from context, but most of the time neurotypicals just do a wild guess, and provide some answer. It is up to the other party to clarify, and given that they are the ones with the request, they will probably do so until they receive a satisfying answer.
3. Of course. Nobody expects you to just make stuff up, or have unfounded opinions. But I've noticed a certain tendency of people on the spectrum to vastly prefer forward chaining over backward chaining reasoning, whereas it's the other way around for neurotypicals. The truth I was trying to get at is that often there is no clear answer even if you had all the information available, and even worse often times it doesn't matter. Your company will probably be equally successful with react or elm, because it's other factors that are much more influential for success. With forward chaining reasoning that's a bit of a problem, because you can reach a point where there's no real path forwards. With backwards chaining you can just presume that some missing piece of information will eventually pop up or not matter that much and continue.
It's akin to Goedels first incompleteness theorem paraphrased very roughly: You can either have a system of reasoning that's consistent or one that's complete, but not both. Forward chaining gives you a consistent system, but you will have cases where you can't proceed, whereas backwards chaining allows you to sometimes just assume missing facts to be true, allowing you to take "a leap of faith". Those facts might actually be (unprovably) true or they might lead you to mistakes/inconsistencies.
That's not to say that backwards chaining is superior, forward chaining will allow you to more thoroughly explore the search space for which you _have_ all the facts, and it's a lot less likely to bring you to wrong conclusions.
4. Yeah maybe that is actually a problem that the industry has as a whole, and not specific to neuro(a)typicality. Sadly it's often, strong opinions, strongly held.
---
Text based mediums for the win!
Well, it was "outright rejecting their idea".
Whatever the phrasing used, the actual question wasn't "Would it be technological better and improve the user experience if we use React for our checkout UI?".
It was rather "I read about this React thing. Sounds cool. Cool companies use it. Should we use it ourselves too and be cool like them?"