This reads almost identical to the rationales against hiring women from past decades. Women did not fit in with the male teams; ingrained misogyny was so common. And yes, they didn't behave the same, and had special needs (they were still expected to be mothers, needed separate toilets installed, customs like having the boss over for dinner prepared by wife didn't work, weekend golf and the bloke talk was unthinkable with women along), and required coworkers to adapt and change, as acceptable behavior around the work place was not acceptable around women at the time.

Team fit shouldn't be the only criteria, and shouldn't be a criteria at all if you have a cultural problem. A company that has decided it needs to hire more women or fewer arseholes or has a staff burnout issue or high staff turnover does not want to keep hiring the same type of people, and that is what you get when you are hiring on team fit. Beyond ethical issues, a company can decide on purely economic grounds that it wants to be hiring neurodiverse workers, and that might mean losing people who are unable to adapt. And you probably want to lose them, given that there is more acceptance of the neurodiverse elsewhere and your team members will need to deal with them, even if you don't hire them yourself.

> ingrained misogyny was so common

Was? I wouldn't call it misogyny, because it isn't out of hate but out of the unique social dynamics between genders, but absolutely nothing has changed except one thing: it's now politically incorrect and against the rules to actually say what you think/feel, so everyone hides it.

Men and women still don't work well together. The attraction dynamics between them still overpower any attempts at keeping things professional. The social differences are still all there.

As a proud owner of an ADHD brain, I don't understand the victimhood narrative at all. If someone doesn't want to work with me because I feel "weird" to them, why would I want to work with them? Why should they be forced to work with me? Who says I'm entitled to a job? Who says they owe me anything?

And most importantly, I would need to be sickeningly entitled and delusional to assume that society has to adapt to fit me rather than vice-versa. That's the kind of reasoning children use when throwing irrational tantrums.

I've never had trouble socializing, but ADHD does produce all sorts of strange behavioral patterns. It's 100% my responsibility, as a human being with personal agency, to read the room and adapt my behavior to the society in which I'm participating, not for the entire rest of the world to cater to me.

> Men and women still don't work well together. The attraction dynamics between them still overpower any attempts at keeping things professional. The social differences are still all there.

This sentiment is very strange to me, coming from an IT company with lots of both men and women co-workers. Of course there is sometimes sexual attraction at work, as there probably is for any gay colleagues. Maybe it sometimes even causes tensions. But it is in no way 'overpowering' the ability to work well together, as team members, as managers or as subordinates.

There are many social dynamics that complicate pure professionalism. Feelings of attraction are nothing compared to ego or to the desire of climbing the ladder at any price, in my experience.

Later edit:

> As a proud owner of an ADHD brain, I don't understand the victimhood narrative at all. If someone doesn't want to work with me because I feel "weird" to them, why would I want to work with them? Why should they be forced to work with me? Who says I'm entitled to a job? Who says they owe me anything?

In our society, work is essentially the only possibility of leading a decent life (assuming you're not born rich, of course). As such, the right to work for any group must be protected by the state. Historically, blocking the right to work has been a favorite tactic against hated groups - black people, gay people, trans people are the most recent examples.

> Men and women still don't work well together

Citations needed. I've never had any issues working with women, nor have I heard any coworkers or friends express this belief, or raise issues about working with members of the opposite gender. I don't think people aren't talking about this because it's "politically incorrect", but rather because most people (at least in Canada) simply don't have any issues working with members of the opposite gender.

Being unable to view female coworkers as you do any other coworker is misogynistic, whether it's intentional or not.

>>>Citations needed

Women in the infantry -- The Effect on the Moral Domain.[1] Covers a lot of ground, with pro/con data points across multiple nations and several decades.

[2] Is about the Navy's struggle with the costs and effectiveness impacts of pregnancies.

Can gender-integrated work forces produce (whatever the metric is for "productivity" in a particular domain). Yes. Will management/leadership responsibilities be inherently more complicated? Yes. Does gender diversity inherently guarantee an objectively superior output? No. I think that it is domain/problem-set specific. Human intelligence (HUMINT)[3] and civ-mil ops[4] absolutely benefit from female integration in order to fully access 50% of the population. Especially important in a counter-insurgency context.

[1]https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a262478.pdf

[2]https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/12/pregnant-na...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_intelligence_(intelligen...

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil-military_operations

Do you have citations outside of the military context? I don't mean to be nitpicky, but what makes the military efficient and what makes civilian life efficient tend to be at extreme odds quite often.

I don't, sorry. I'd be interested in such results as well, mostly because I'm curious about what sort of metrics the studies would be using for productivity.

> Being unable to view female coworkers as you do any other coworker is misogynistic, whether it's intentional or not.

Indeed: gender quotas and "positive" discrimination is both misogynistic.

> have I heard any coworkers or friends express this belief.

You don't seem to value diversity of opinion that high, and expressing such opinions can be disastrous for one's career.

> Being unable to view female coworkers as you do any other coworker is misogynistic.

Sure, now what? There exists misogynistic people in the world, a lot of them in the workforce. That would imply that comment saying "men and women still don't work together" is at least worth consideration. You can't solve social issues by assigning a label.

Not at all, it would imply, perhaps, that mysogynistic people don't work well with others. And that certainly isn't a surprising conclusion.

The fact that there are so many issues in the workplace in the news / personal accounts and the fact that men and women have only been working together for a relatively short time clearly indicate to me that the jury is still out on whether men and women can truly work together and that it's best that way.

Aspies have some advantages and disadvantages. Not hiring an Aspie because, say, we need a person who is comfortable with a lot of noise and distractions, is a skill-based decision. I understand no willingness to adapt (though, if it were about other aspects of a person, there will be a lot of rants; and possibly lawsuits).

However, when there is a Resume, interview or recommendation letter stage that implicitly uses skills NOT RELEVANT for the job that people on the autism spectrum lack, it is a different story. It is a firewall, often not related to the actual workplace.

Moreover, if it is not a procedure of a single company, but a universal standard (especially in the US), it creates a system that is unfavorable for people on the autism spectrum. Most neurotypicals get when "optional" means "required" and "required" means "optional". Or, as in the comment above, that the meaning of "truth" is different for neurotypicals (usually meaning: no outright lies, but drop things that are not favorable for you, and simplify story with the favorable ones).

So, the interview process (in its very common form) is a firewall very effective against many neurodiverse people.

To the ADHD and autistic people, the definition of truth is fairly strict: no lies, no omissions, no simplification, no made-up stories.

> Not hiring an Aspie because, say, we need a person who is comfortable with a lot of noise and distractions, is a skill-based decision.

No, it isn't. It is a workplace environment problem, and if a workplace is not willing to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate the needs of a worker, or allows such unwillingness to affect the hiring decisions, then they are breaking the law.

There are some circumstances where it might make sense, like a construction site. No tech company should be one.

>Not hiring an Aspie because, say, we need a person who is comfortable with a lot of noise and distractions, is a skill-based decision

No, that's discrimination. Autism is a disability and companies are required to make reasonable accommodations. A hipster startup wouldn't get away with being wheelchair-inaccessible because that would be discriminating against the disabled. Unless you're running a restaurant or factory or operation like that you have no reasonable excuse to discriminate against the disabled.

> Let's face it: for neurotypical people, a lot of autists are very hard to get along with. Their behaviour is not always predictable in the way that we need behaviour to be in a workplace; and when more pronounced, their specific needs are not something that we want to have to address in our coworkers.

They say if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. As the term 'neurodiversity' implies, it is not restricted to any particular phenotype, but speaks of a plurality of diverse behavior types.

> It's good that small companies are often able to accomodate folks like yourself

Their are many high-functioning autistic people all through-out the start-up scene and across the tech industry. I'm certain it isn't just small companies that employ people on the spectrum. Some mask so well, you can't even tell - and the distinction between neurodiverse and neurotypical is not as binary as you might imagine.

You might want to give pause for thought.

You're discussing from a position that puts team efficiency (and company efficiency) above any other value. You may in fact be right that certain kinds of diversity can hurt team efficiency (for an obvious example, if you already have a team of white power types, hiring a black man on that mteam will lead to morale issues).

However, in practice, and especially for large companies, optimizing only for efficiency is simply not acceptable behavior. Since the ability to find a place to work is so important for any individual in our society to have a chance at a decent life, companies' social responsibilities must have them potentially sacrifice some efficiency to prevent discrimination of large groups.

Note: I am not in any way claiming that disadvantaged groups are less efficient at work, there is absolutely not evidence of that. I am claiming that sometimes, to accept disadvantaged groups in a workplace may create some discomfort to the people who were already in that workplace, since statistically they were likely to hold biases against that discriminated group.

> Since the ability to find a place to work is so important for any individual in our society to have a chance at a decent life, companies' social responsibilities must have them potentially sacrifice some efficiency to prevent discrimination of large groups.

I think about this often, so let me try to play the devil’s advocate: (1) why are we (the society) allowed (even encouraged) to discriminate for intelligence at almost every point in our lives (school, job, marriage)? (2) sure, companies are forbidden from discriminating because of certain characteristics, let’s take pregnancy; but why should companies be expected to shoulder that burden all by themselves? It’s more than reasonable for the society to cover the costs, as a sort of insurance policy - it probably doesn’t matter that much for big companies that can just statistically assume that a certain percentage of employees will be sick / pregnant / etc. but for a small company 1 missing employee is a big burden (even if the government covers parental leave salary)

edit: could also include "assholeness" in (1), could even blame it on neurodiversity

For (1) I think the 'intelligence' that we discriminate for in all those cases is such a vague term that it essentially means 'being good at X'.

If that is the case, obviously we discriminate by it, because we try to choose people who are better at X when trying to find people for X. Tether there is a single underlying characteristic that makes you better at X (a pre-determined IQ) that is discriminated for is perhaps harder to know. I certainly don't think that school for example advances students based purely on intelligence - discipline, even obedience, like-ability, sometimes teamwork, are all at least as important to what makes most good students successful.

Related to 2,my answer is very simple: companies don't take the full burden, at least in most countries. In general, there is a shared burden - the employee has reduced pay, the state is paying for some or most of that, and the company is forced to keep the position open for the employee when they decide to return. In my country at least, they are also free to hire a temp to fill that position for the 1 or 2 years of maternal leave.

I’m genuinely curious, why is it a company’s responsibility (in a capitalist society) to hire someone less efficient? I agree that work is fundamentally important, but how is this not the government’s responsibility like any other welfare effort? Also, are you claiming that employment is an undeniable human right like free speech or protection from harm? And if so, what happens if there’s something like another Great Depression? (For the record, I agree that neurodiverse groups should be protected like other disadvantaged groups. I also think that they have less spotlight and protections than other disadvantaged groups despite having what’s arguably more disadvantage)

Well, there are many ways to look at this. The most utilitarian is simply this: you could have a society in which people can live a decent life without having a job and without being born rich. In this society, companies could be allowed to only hire for maximal efficiency, since the state could e sure the livihood of those who don't get chosen for jobs by other means. However, such a society would be vastly different from our own - for example, it would be essentially impossible to hire for menial labor, since without the threat of starvation few people would choose to become garbage workers or maids. For another, you would necessarily have high taxes on the employed to be able to support the unemployed, which would lead to political problems and would likely be an unstable equilibrium.

In our society we have chosen a different solution, pretty much all over the world: your ability to have food and shelter is conditioned on having a job (or being born rich), but in exchange, the state tries its best to guarantee you a job. We don't generally allow the state to operate companies, so the only way for the state to guarantee jobs is to incentivize and even force companies to employ people without discrimination, to at least some extent.

Now, my personal belief is that the justification should come the other way around - why do we allow society to judge your right to a basic livelihood by any criteria at all? But I'm guessing that would not be a compelling argument, and I can't claim to have a working picture of how such a society could look like.

The society you are thinking of is UBI of some sort

You can see it as a sort of tax. For certain categories it certainly makes sense, like young women (that will likely get pregnant and take time off) because society absolutely needs people to have children. For people with various mental issues it is less clear that the burden should be put on each individual company. Perhaps better to have programs that help them find work that fits them?

I'll be happy to disagree with this post for reasons other than claims of "systemic discrimination". It celebrates behaviors that are linked with hypocrisy and arbitrary bias. The problem isn't that you're weeding out people who don't fit in with the team. The problem is that you're weeding out people as a result of invalid, inaccurate, arbitrary biases that are more likely to stem from animal-brain genetic instincts, rather than modern evidence-based research and training. It's simply another form of low mediocrity, and you're doing yourself no favors for it. Any attempt to defend using gut instinct as a target for hiring decisions (even though some bias is unavoidable due to human nature) is going to sound obnoxiously ignorant to those who know better.

> animal-brain genetic instincts

You're discounting intuition with this dismissive label. Trusting the instincts of your team to make decisions on who they can work with is critical to maintaining cohesion on that team and keeping people happy, which is a critical competitive advantage (especially during any kind of downturn). We're not talking about "low mediocre", "animal-brain" people, we're talking about professionals who may have hired / worked with hundreds of different people.

But then, you're just using ad hominems, and not actually providing any kind of evidence, or really an argument of any kind other than "you're obnoxiously ignorant", which ironically enough is _your_ intuition about _me_. Delightful! Thanks for this crass exchange.

> and not actually providing any kind of evidence

You might want to live up to your own standards. Looking at your posts so far, you point to no evidence that hiring 'based on intuition' (for whatever that means) ends in positive outcomes for either group cohesion, or even that fuzzy end-goal: productivity.

You're going full circle here. He's not the one advocating for "modern evidence-based research and training", so it's not in his standards. And I'm not blaming him. Not everything is measurable, or at least measurable in ways that would enable researchers to extract meaningful answers or techniques. You said it yourself, productivity is a fuzzy end-goal.

If you do not believe it is possible to empirically derive a way to interview properly, then rationalism is your best choice, i.e. Intuition/Deduction. And contrary to common belief, rationalism is not a prison. It's just a decision process, in which you're perfectly allowed to question yourself using available empiric data.

I was validly pointing out the hypocrisy of core-questions.

In defense of GP, you know why we haven't replaced all hiring interviews with standardized tests and statistical models? Gut instinct. People can make a good guess about how they'll get along with an interviewee. Machines can't just yet. And this is important, because while a mediocre person that fits in well with a team is only a minor positive contribution, a bad team fit is a negative contribution even if they're exceptional in hard skills.

> modern evidence-based research and training.

Interviewing process is hard, social-sciences-style hard. Completely bullshit theories and "standard practices". This doesn't rise anywhere near "evidence-based".

Some of my interview is giving them an underspecified problem and seeing whether they can formulate questions (and dare to ask them!) that lead to solving the important part. I don't know how to standardize that, but we definitely need it.

I'm not arguing against gut instinct being a necessary factor. My point is that when it's the only factor, and when people rationalize it as being the only factor, without any quantification, then that's the problem.

How do you define "bad team fit"? Can you make a checklist of things that are associated with "good team fit" and "bad team fit", and aim to assess for those items individually, before coming to a conclusion? You don't need artificial general intelligence to make a spreadsheet and a checklist. If you don't do at least this, how do you even know in your own mind what a good team fit really is? You don't need to have perfect accuracy with this list of criteria, but not having a list at all will be less accurate than any list you come up with in good faith.

How is "team fit" different from "culture fit" which basically means acts/talks/works "like me" and without explicitness can produce a discriminatory monoculture?

In my view, companies are inherently discriminatory (they choose who to hire, that's who makes up the company) regardless of any policy that is implemented. A monoculture is often the goal! Whether that's good or not depends very heavily on what that culture ends up being in practice, of course.

Selecting for culture fit isn’t always bad. You could be selecting for good cultural values the company has.

"Team fit" mostly means social skills.

> Of course, I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who vehemently disagree with me ... and will make you a protected class soon enough.

Not asking for special privileges or protections.

Asking for the same privileges and protections afforded to everyone else.

My understanding is that the protected classes are the only ones afforded protections related to these things.

Protected classes as a legal concept in the US is two lists, one federal and then state law. In that context you are either on either of them or you are not, and depending on the answer you get certain protections.

In EU there is no such list. Anti-discrimination law is quite a bit broader here, but so is also the exceptions.

Please enhance your understanding, your world will be richer for it:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Privilege#Privilege_blindness

Please go back and re-read what I said.

I was talking about protections, not privileges. The protected classes are the only ones that are actually protected by law. The fact that other groups (white, male, etc) benefit from privileges are a reason for there being protected classes, but they are not the same thing at all.

That backfired. Hopefully, your world is richer because he corrected your misunderstanding.

>No, that's a misnomer. Systematic discrimination implies the system itself codifies this behaviour

I hate to point this out when you've written a substantial comment like this, but the comment you're replying to said "systemic," not "systematic," and the difference between them isn't just a semantic quibble.

> Let's face it: for neurotypical people, a lot of autists are very hard to get along with. Their behaviour is not always predictable in the way that we need behaviour to be in a workplace; and when more pronounced, their specific needs are not something that we want to have to address in our coworkers.

Or try it like this and see how it feels:

"Let's face it: for white people, a lot of black people are very hard to get along with ..."

Hey, if you want to make it a racial thing, that's your problem. I find people "go to the well" for this sort of argument when they can't actually argue with the real premise.

You mistake my intent.

I'm not trying to "go to the wall" because I want to win an argument with you.

What I'm trying to do is use an example of another kind of discriminatory behaviour which is socially unacceptable to demonstrate to you that many people will find your words to be obnoxious and judge you harshly for them.

But hey, if you don't care about that kind of thing then it's not your problem I guess.

GP pointed out a real, existing problem, and trying to deny it by pattern-matching into a racial problem isn't helping either of them.

> that many people will find your words to be obnoxious and judge you harshly for them.

That probably speaks more about those people than about GP.

Having worked and being friends with people who most definitely fall into the spectrum (didn't get confirmed diagnosis, though), it does present very unique challenges in terms of teamwork and workplace organization, challenges that gender or ethnic differences don't bring in. It takes special company architecture and open-minded people to make it work; your typical 9 to 5, crank out code and kill tickets off Jira software company won't.

Race has very little influence on behavior. By definition, autism has a significant affect on behavior. You are comparing pears to grapefruit.

There is a big difference between prejudging a person and their possible behavior from a known trait of their appearance, and judging a person from their observed behavior (often without any knowledge that the person is neuroatypical).

> "Let's face it: for white people, a lot of black people are very hard to get along with ..."

I thought this was a silly comparison at first, but if you ask why is racial/sexual/other discrimination wrong (and not just illegal) in in hiring then it makes sense. When hiring you're judging an individual and not the group as a whole, if that person isn't at the peak of the bell curve of whatever group you're discriminating against/for then you're probably making a sub optimal decision.

Women are weaker than men but in an interview the only question you need to ask is if this women is strong enough to do the job. To various degrees over various times black people had much worse k-12 education, but in an interview you only needed to know if the person in front of you has the appropriate education level. If you avoid someone neurotypical because "a lot of autists are very hard to get along with" then you're doing the same thing a racist person is doing, just with different prejudices.