You might be a bit autistic, common enough in the software world. Lookup something called “autistic masking”.
Source: All the autistic people in my life. I really like autistic people! Find your people and you won’t have to pretend around them.
Source: All the autistic people in my life. I really like autistic people! Find your people and you won’t have to pretend around them.
Autism is a disorder, diagnosed in DSM V. Very few people in your life are likely to be autistic. As with many such things, it's a spectrum. Unless those cross a pathological threshold, it's not autism. Few SWEs are over that threshold.
We used to call people "nerdy," "quirky," or other things (and it was okay to be that). That's in the natural spread of human personalities. If you're 5% of the way towards dyslexia, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or whatever else, it's in the range of human personalities, not disorders.
It's helpful to understand how different people work. Most SWEs and introverts share some characteristics with people with autism, and reading about autism can help understand oneself by interpolation. However, the label is not fair either people with actual autism, or to people without autism who believe they have it.
Footnote: My experience is that extrovert versus introvert is mostly a function of whether you're invigorated by interacting with people or tired by it, and especially by people you don't know well. Yes, social skills are helpful, a skill one can develop, and important to one's career, but so are math or medicine. A good strategy for an introvert is to partner with an extrovert.
There is a natural category in the world that shares many members with those-who-meet-diagnostic-criteria-for-"autism", completely unrelated to any "pathological threshold". It absolutely makes sense to describe people as "autistic" whose lives are not suffering.
Beyond that, you really shouldn't be treating the DSM as some kind of authority: that's like treating a particularly unreliable dictionary written by a non-native speaker as an authority on a different language. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_the_DSM for more information.
The idea that the APA's claims are any kind of authoritative is quite insulting. They're systematically wrong, in quite horrible ways, and probably always will be. The DSM-V is a tool for coordination among (American) practitioners, and should not be considered anything more than that: it certainly shouldn't be consulted or quoted by the laity, who do not know the caveats.
The autistic people in my life are all diagnosed autistic, do not presume to lecture me on my own situation. Autism has a strong genetic component, as you should be aware if you’ve taken more than a cursory glance at the topic. I am not, but I’m close enough to the “diagnosis” criteria to understand and empathise with people who are.
To suggest that all autistic people are “introverted” shows me your complete ignorance on this topic. Many autistic people are extroverted, just bad at social interactions (bad at reading social cues, body language and a host of other things). The two spheres do not overlap in the way you imply.
Also, yes autism is classed as a “disorder” and it comes with many challenges; however the way you are categorising it is demeaning and incorrect! It also comes with many strengths. I think of it more as the world was setup to make life easy for the neurotypical, and hence hard for the neurodiverse. Using words like “pathological threshold” are, regardless of clinical meaning (are you a clinician?), demeaning. I much prefer the framing of “differently wired”.
Software Engineering has a much higher than average number of autistic people. It’s welcoming to such, and most larger companies go out of their way to be accommodating. My own company has a proud autistic contingent.
It frustrates me to see such a comment as yours, reinforcing bad stereotypes and implying I am insulting someone by talking about autistic masking.
Identifying things such that they become their labels and are defined by those labels is really, really harmful. You see this in BPD, too (borderline personality disorder, which the person I mentioned has also been formally diagnosed with): if someone is "good" today then they can do nothing wrong, or if they are "bad" today, then they can do nothing right... independent of the actions themselves. The same behavior, in the same context, can be received in completely different ways depending on the label the BPD person feels like assigning today. That's not healthy.
What I was getting at above is that this style of interpretation of labels seems to be somewhat common among neurodivergent people, and it's a fallacy that doesn't do anyone any good. Labels as guides or to help set priors are fine. Labels as definitions are not, and when people get upset, it's worth checking in and seeing if there's a map-territory / label-definition mistake being made.
All models are wrong, some are useful.
I don't think OP is neccesarily saying the poster has autism, just that the thing they are describing is similar to something a lot of autistic people describe, so maybe reading about it would be helpful. That can be true for everyone. We can all learn from the experiences of others.
In my experience, that depends on the people. Even if I don't know them well, sometimes the interaction starts great, and sometimes it is exhausting.
From my perspective, some people are loud and annoying, and their communication seems mostly about establishing a dominance hierarchy. Other people are nice and calm, and they... discuss things, without necessarily making it about them being better than everyone else.
But I would probably call myself an introvert, because when there is a larger group of people, there is usually someone who makes it a battle for dominance, so from my perspective almost all larger groups suck. But I have also seen groups where no one was like this, and they were okay. They are just very rare.
This, the whole x is/isn't a disease because how the DSM describes it debate is basically worthless. I get that it's helpful for some people to finally have a diagnosis that's recognized, but ultimately it's a spectrum of symptoms and behaviors and needing a label isn't strictly necessary for treatment and can often come with additional baggage that is less helpful.
I supposed the "find your people" recommendation above is apt
I found their post helpful, and not an attempt to diagnose.
Depending on the person having it, autism isn't all bad, especially not high functioning autism. Some high functioning autistic people actually excel in society, but compared to other autistic people, they seem to be in the minority. The same seems true for high functioning ADHD (again a small minority).
So I don't really see the stigma when someone on HN is called autistic. Given that they are undiagnosed, the likelihood of them falling into the small minority is really high as their problems are mild enough (also, one could be subclinical). At the level of being high functioning, it simply suggests that they process things in a different way.
> In order to become more likable I’ve had to adopt an extremely perceptive and self critical mental framework to analyze every thing I could be doing wrong to annoy or offend people. It has worked, and people seem to like me more, but the mental exhaustion it induces has led to me often yearning for alone time.
I get why he stated that he might be autistic. When I look at the autistic people I know that are socially well-liked, most of them would say a similar thing. The other route I know that some autistic people have taken is mindfulness meditation.
If OP is autistic, I personally would recommend mindfulness meditation as there's a chance his insula is smaller [1]. And mindfulness meditation targets it [2].
Background: did a bachelor in psychology, have studied it informally way before that and I happen to know many autistic people. It's a biased sample, but it paints a picture nonetheless. I'm subclinical myself, according to my therapist I don't hit all the criteria but I have some of them. The biggest one I'm missing is that my life actually goes quite well (friends, married, healthy, I have a job, etc.). If it didn't, there'd probably enough reason to classify me as autistic (e.g. no friends or severe difficulties in finding a partner).
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02785...
[2] There are scientific sources of it, but I find the comment that Cheetah House has made to be more insightful. They research the adverse side effects of meditation and help people with it.
They said: Britton explained to me that it’s likely that my meditation practice, specifically the constant attention directed toward the sensations of the body, may have increased the activation and size of a part of the brain called the insula cortex. “Activation of the insula cortex is related to systemic arousal,” she said. “If you keep amping up your body awareness, there is a point where it becomes too much and the body tries to limit excessive arousal by shutting down the limbic system. That’s why you have an oscillation between intense fear and dissociation.” - See also: https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad
I used to think I was very autistic until I underwent a thorough diagnostic process and learned that while I am indeed autistic, most of what I had been experiencing was actually crippling ADHD I was committing most of my mental capacity to compensate.
I'm honestly surprised more people with ADHD and similar don't push to be considered as part of the autistic spectrum, it's seems somewhat obvious that there it too much overlap to pretend otherwise.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy
Myself I learned to outperform extroverts at their own game temporarily (can do cold calls all day with zero fear) although I use a lot of tricks based on dissociation (I have a fox that comes out when I need it, in fact it just told me I have to get in better physical shape to be a better host.)