gemstones

    These people tell me HR knows it but everyone is afraid of getting sued or something so it's a don't ask don't tell situation. People simply ignored him.

This doesn’t require soft skills to logic out that there is reasonable trouble.

Coworkers, with a preexisting work history with this employee, know that HR is afraid of getting sued.

Why would an HR department be afraid of being sued by an employee?

The most likely explanation is that they want to fire them for performance and are trying to limit the likelihood of a lawsuit.

Why would a coworker be able to speak to HR’s internal assessment of an employee’s ability to be fired?

The most likely explanation is that they’ve gone to HR, or a manager, with problems, and the manager has asked HR if they could fire the employee for cause before.

“People simply ignored him” is more ambiguous, but in the context above, I take it to mean - other coworkers want him fired, but given HR’s inaction, they are taking their own action by ignoring the coworker and working around them rather than trying to include them.

From the description, it sounds like the team has started excluding him based on similar communication gaps as the manager is seeing.

That’s a material deficiency, that even an autistic employee is expected to fix.

It’s hard; no doubt. But if you had a person for whom coding didn’t come naturally, they would still be expected to fix it even if working on the issue is harder for them than for someone else. Similarly, even though soft skills are harder for autistic people than for others, there is still a minimum standard you must meet.

Alienating your entire team would count as falling below a minimum standard on teams I’ve worked on, especially if they were being avoided for work as in the OP’s example.

Document. Clearly state your goals for them, and have them written down in a 1:1 document.

Communication style and tone are important, and autistic people do not get a pass on trying to understand them, even if you may want to give them more grace when they slip up.

With that in mind, a goal should be something like “coworkers report improvement in communication style and tone.” It should be something that other people assess, not a checklist of things for the employee to self-report progress towards. (You never want to give people who don’t correctly see how they’re perceived by others the option of grading themselves. First, their lack of self-awareness means that they aren’t the best judge of improvement, and second, treating things a a checklist to complete will give the impression that you wanted some line items addressed, rather than a holistic improvement in a vague problem area.)

When you document, pay special attention to times when their misunderstanding caused rework. Use those as examples to help them improve. It can be tough for autistic people to take a vague problem and figure out a plan to tackle it, so the more specific examples of problem, outcome, and desired change you can make for them, the clearer it will be what is expected of them. It is better for you and for them - they have a better chance to improve, and you have documented instances of business impact if a turnaround doesn’t happen and you need HR to sign off on moving on.

For accommodation - they have not told you that they have a disability, you’ve heard it secondhand. It’s their choice to make you aware of their autism, and also their responsibility to request accommodations since they have not told you yet. However, you can make informal accommodations, but I would treat it the same way you accommodate employees’ individual personalities and strengths/weaknesses. They, like everyone else, should not be below a certain standard of behavior, but within that standard there will be differences in what each individual needs. You employee sounds like they need direct coaching and clear examples of what is or is not working. Try to give them tasks with high clarity and limited communication requirements, if you can. However, if you find they need more clarity than a reasonable person would expect, again I would have a goal of “the PM reports a decrease in the amount of back-and-forth on tickets you pick up, without a drop in velocity” or something similar. If they find they need more formal accommodations than that, well, now is the time for them to tell you about their autism diagnosis.

Best of luck! This is a challenging managerial task.

    He won't respect you simply because you're a manager. You have to earn his respect.

This is good practice even for non-autistic employees, but… it’s reasonable to expect that an autistic person knows that there is a hierarchy to their job. Depends on what you mean by “respect” here of course, but mild autism that still allows you to work in a professional setting is not a blanket excuse for being disrespectful to coworkers or managers.

Imagine a doctor 100 years post-Galen "considering the waning days of medicine". We are a young, young discipline.

Read it and misinterpreted it! I will amend my comment since it seems I'm wrong.

Edited - this was just flat out incorrect given the paper. Thanks for pointing out my error!

Not according to my morals!

That applies to backends equally, but you don’t get thinkpieces on how that makes it a great idea for frontend devs to avoid all those silly DTOs and design patterns that complicate the server code.

I get real confused by these.

Imagine if an iOS developer posted a blog about the specifics of files backing UIViews and how the XML configuration language was underutilized.

Wouldn’t that be kind of a weird blog post? The declarative syntax of various UI frameworks is an implementation detail. The hard part is in CSS on the web, or style properties in native frameworks. Business logic as well. Presumably encapsulated in a component, which React does well and web technologies are catching up to.

Why should I care about this, any more than I should care about XML config files on Android? It’s a markup language that is an artifact of the runtime we’re using. I don’t care about that in other contexts, and it’s the least interesting thing in a web development setting too.

I’ve met enough people that aren’t like you that your lived experience, real as it may be, doesn’t really change my opinion much.

For every one of you who isn’t scared of CSS there are like 40 people into HTMX that make bad UXs even by the standards of internal company tooling.

Can the people that want this HTML-first world style it to look the ways they want themselves?

My experience has been that proponents of HTMX and the like skew heavily backend and never feel comfortable with CSS.

Why listen to UX thoughts from a population who are scared of UX?

I’m happy for these researchers on finding happiness. To the first example, in all seriousness - of course industry does DEI better than academia!

Academia is 1. costly, 2. long, and 3. weighted to favor people from backgrounds that can afford tutors or finishing schools. You want Ph.D.s from non-elite backgrounds with the financial means to handle 10 years of college at a poverty wage (or for the first 4 years, who can pay large sums rather than earn anything.) Plus, when they finish, they’ll be expected to have picked up the habits that will impress other faculty, who are disproportionately likely to come from families where Ivy League colleges are realistic options. How big can that pool possibly be? And the timeline to increase the pool is decades long.

Industry can be similar, but at least there you have the option for a smart kid to go through a bootcamp and move their way up on merit, while making a competitive wage. The pool of DEI candidates is just bigger for companies, and it’ obvious that it would be.

Unethical according to your system of ethics. I never claimed that was part of my ethical system.

Unless you’re religious or something and believe in a global definition of ethics that applies to everyone, there’s no real point in telling everyone what’s unethical. Is it unethical to you? Great! Then you don’t do it. I will do what I want.

This shows how woefully unprepared I am to have wealth. It is crazy that at some level of wealth, you will run into someone like Masa Son, who has the ability to talk his way out of destroying generational wealth. What do you even do to prepare for people with skills like that?

The town didn’t protect its young economically when it had the chance, and how there are no young people left to take care of the elderly.

    Raising the money was the “easy part,” Mosbrucker says. “Staffing is going to be the hard part.” Covid-19 exacerbated an existing labor shortage in rural North Dakota, which had been losing population for decades as small farms merged and mechanization displaced workers, scattering young people to Bismarck, Fargo, Minneapolis and other cities.

    Mott lost more than a third of its population between 1990 and 2020, leaving it with a median age of 49. (The median in Fargo, the state’s most populous city, is just above 31.) Reopening the nursing home will be key to stanching the flow of families out of the area, says Charlotte Aldinger, who grew up on a farm nearby and moved back from Bismarck with her family in 2012.

ORMs are worth it for `includes` and wrapping up nested objects. SQL support for associations in a result set could use some work.

I feel like I hear "best practice" used in one of two ways:

- By well meaning people describing that they're using a tool or practice because it's a community standard

- By juniors using it as a weapon

An example of the second is when people insist on DRYing up a class that is only superficially similar to something that already exists, but that is virtually certain to diverge over time given our business model. Or addressing tech debt without considering what tech debt is high-impact, and focusing on efforts that don't make much of a dent in day-to-day operations.

I don't really mind the first; only the second.

I'm familiar with Fable, it's a very conscious choice not to use it in any web applications. Debugging its JS output is not fun.

My favorite FTX fact is in the Going Infinite book, on the informal org chart drawn up by the psychiatrist to help him keep straight who worked with who.

There’s a biggish department of game devs that takes up almost the same amount of vertical space as the actual dev team of FTX. It’s the game studio behind Storybook Brawl. SBF purchased the studio because he liked the game, and it was rolled into FTX.

Google is making the smart bet that there will be juniors who will learn Rust and can contribute to Binder 10 years from now, while their experienced C++ devs will only shrink and need to be reserved for more critical projects.

Isn’t rule 1 of trading that it doesn’t matter if you’re right if the timing is wrong?

I think every datacenter I've ever worked with, across ~4 jobs, has had an incident report like "generator failed right as we had an outage."

Am I unlucky, or is there something I miss about datacenter administration that makes it really hard to maintain a generator? I guess you don't hear about times the generator worked, but it feels like a high rate of failure to me.

No, they don't need fixing. But computer jobs are not an inherent right to them, despite the field being uniquely suited to them in its infancy.

You should be hesitant.

(Educationally)

For real. It's telling that the kids don't jump in here to defend the practice, hardly ever (also homeschooled, education was great, socialization was absolutely problematic despite doing all the homeschool group things.)

The best critique of HTMX is the same critique of Rails + partials + a bit of helper JS for inserts (the popular stack that predates modern SPAs.)

Say you’re writing a true web app. You’re making a mobile view, and the user has scrolled down and loaded some items (and partially inserted them as the scroll bar has moved down.) They add a card representing a few items to a cart, which 1. changes the look of the card and 2. the number that floats above the cart icon in the header.

Do you

1. Return the updated card and insert it as normal, then pass the HTML to figure out the number to change the cart icon with and call JS to change that icon?

2. Trigger a full page reload, meaning that both items update at the cost of losing the scroll position?

3. Break convention with HTMX and call a JSON API that will let you return the updates primitive values, and maintain the display logic changes in JS?

4. Have a weird hybrid JSON + HTML API that return multiple responses for each part of the DOM tree that needs changing and rely on some custom JS to do both updates?

I think it's realistic to expect this to be the work of decades! Great talk by Bjarne.

Will attrition make a decades-long timeline viable? I'd never touch C++ myself, I'm too scared there will be a long period of time where I'd be actively dangerous and introduce security holes. I am learning Rust, because that type of low-level systems programming seems like a valuable thing to have.

Are there young devs who aspire to go through the C++ learning curve? I'd love to hear about your experience!

True - I expect this to be outweighed by other concerns, like the incentive for HP to shrink labor costs among its more expensive employees.