Microsoft seeks to recruit autistic workers

There is an obvious competitive advantage to any company that removes arbitrary and unnecessary barriers, aside from whats being discussed. If almost no jobs actually require that arbitrary barrier, the pool of applicants on the other side of the barrier will inherently have individuals better at the job than the pool who made it over the artificial meaningless barrier. Given a big pond, a small random sample of pond water will always have a smaller "biggest fish" than a larger random sample from the same pond, and if the sample size expands to the size of the whole pond, that fisherman will get the biggest possible fish.

The fact that this doesn't happen historically or currently despite the obvious financial advantage, shows that hiring and general office culture is obviously more influenced by primate dominance rituals than economic reasons. When you throw in some additional dominance rituals to compensate or rationalize away the reduced hazing rituals and membership rituals to "even things up", its going to be a hellish working environment for the folks who do get in.

Mix the above paragraph with the observation of corporate communication always indicates the opposite of what it explicitly claims. So a company that feels the need to say quality is job one actually prioritizes quality dead last after production goals and profit and pretty much everything else. Or a company that issues elaborate press releases about its diversity program invariably actually closes management ranks to all but old white men. You can handle an issue by "doing things" or you can dispose of it by "issue human interest press releases" so press releases mean it was decided nothing will actually be done. So you can assume a corporate communication of opening hiring to autistic people actually means it was completely and utterly closed to them and it'll remain that way but we'll talk nicely about it and issue press releases for the human interest spin on the news. We won't hire them but we'll talk really nicely about them instead.

So its kind of a "one step forward two steps back" story. Its actually signalling that autistic people would be better off working anywhere else. Which is a useful observation. And fitting in with the first paragraph, it means MS competitors have an inherent advantage over MS in having superior hiring policies instead of the MS strategy of instead talking about superior hiring policies.

It helps when the work environment understands explicitly. I experience heightened stress and chaotic thought patterns in overtly social situations that ripple across months when the situations only last days or hours, and I need to learn to engage in them very slowly at my own pace and be comfortable.

If my former school understood this instead of having my professors call me 'aspie', maybe I would have a PhD by now. The one thing I learned from this is that I should not be forced into any situation that makes me experience distress, and I do not care if you think it's ridiculous. I have spent far too much of my life in difficult mental places, and I do not want to live like that anymore, and I won't. I don't force people around me to do graduate level math simply so they can talk to me in a language I understand.

We are not always clever and eccentric, 100% of the time. It would help if people stopped looking at us like computers and started remembering we are human too.

This is a PR stunt, but I'm comfortable with it if it helps align people's optics to the idea that autistic traits can indeed be harnessed into a super valuable role in society. You'd be surprised how many people don't think that's the case.

It's insensitive sounding, but it's probably not that different from their hiring stance for all people. Using your numbers, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that only ~3% of neurotypical people could get a job at Microsoft, either.

Also, probably only ~3% (or less) of any other disadvantaged, disabled, or marginalized group.

But it feel like they're hiring "the right kind of <marginalized_group>", which has a repugnant history even decoupled from the severity of "common" autism.

So yeah, Microsoft should probably not have spun this as a PR opp.

Aside: there's probably a tasteless joke in there somewhere about socially-insensitive recruiting practices which target high-functioning autistic people.

As long as it doesn't negatively impact the bottom line obviously.

> "Many may have strengths such as accuracy, a good eye for detail and reliability, which can benefit all sorts of businesses, not just the technology industry...."

and

> "Each individual is different, some have an amazing ability to retain information, think at a level of detail and depth or excel in math or code."

None of that indicates that anyone at Microsoft thinks all autists are the same or even that the ones they're interested in are the same. So, perhaps you should work on attaining better reading comprehension before you work yourself up into having another fight with yourself.

Microsoft is already selective in their hiring process. It makes sense that they would be selective in regard to candidates with autism. What I find refreshing is their attempt to select on what matters and eliminate things like "what musical instrument do you play?" and "what is your favorite craft beer?" from their process.

Currently autistic people generally have to be good enough at social stuff to pass as "normal" in the interview. The more socially challenged don't get a chance to prove they could do the job.

You could maybe qualify it as positive discrimination, but nowhere it's said that autistic people will have a higher chance of a job so it's not even really that.