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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

A lot of places claim they want to hire extremely smart autists, and some do. But these types of employees are incredibly hard to manage. Imagine herding cats. So if you don't invest a lot of effort in building an environment to let this person cook, go down the right rabbit holes and not rub others the wrong way, a person like this is a huge liability to the org.

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A lot of companies who claim to want highly intelligent and autonomous engineers by revealed preference actually want glorified slightly above average ticket pushers.

At least by the looks of it, Jane Street appears to be an odd one to genuinely value competence.

There are a lot of incredibly smart non-autists. Or maybe slightly autistic, but enough awareness of the real world that they can be managed.

The strong affinity between autism and intelligence seems strongest in technical fields, and engineering and computer science in particular. Autism does not seem to be over-represented to anywhere near the same degree in many other domains that are full of intelligent people.

Is this just from your direct experience or do you have data to back that up? Are you talking about credentialed engineering like mechanical or civil engineering or just software developers?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9058071/ (if "strong affinity" means "bimodal distribution and I ignore the lower pole")

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38497251/ (if "engineering and computer science" means "IT")

I don't know if it's actually true but the idea is interesting.

There's plenty of data on the clustering of high-functioning autistic workers in engineering and computer science, and the massively disproportionate share of autistic children with fathers and grandfathers in those fields. I work across technical and non-technical academic fields and the difference is quite obvious. It also follows naturally from some of the common presentations of autism, e.g., the high co-occurrence of dyslexia.

There's this trend on the internet to attribute success at any remotely technically challenging problem to the glorious power of autism.

Good mentorship can make all the difference in the universe.

I can be a glorified slightly above average ticket pusher, where do I sign up for a million per year job?!

> A lot of companies who claim to want highly intelligent and autonomous engineers by revealed preference actually want glorified slightly above average ticket pushers.

No. FAANG companies and quant firms want people who are independent and self-directed, not people who need to be told what to do.

Please, explain how you determined this person was an "extremely smart autist".

I took it as a compliment!

I find it hard to believe that saying autistic people are "incredibly hard to manage", that managing them is like "herding cats" and their presence is a "huge liability to the org" is anywhere near complimentary. Autism presents in thousands of ways, and the portrayal is, at best, caricatural.

Okay dude, don't need to white knight autists. There's a particular archetype of extremely intelligent and technical yet socially unaware or prickly people that's not unfounded in reality. These are the people who do incredible feats. You need a degree of unagreeableness and arrogance to go against the grain and accomplish great things.

It's a thing, I assure you. And it's pretty common parlance in online / technical culture. We don't need to word police this thing.

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