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.
Even better idea: use your neural plasticity and get some empathy.