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Comment by vovavili | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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