That is something that is always overlooked. What about the mental health of the rest of the team who are expected to just smile when someone is obnoxiously rude to them over and over and over again? With no recourse to report it to HR?

Every “aspie” probably actively harms the mental health of a dozen ordinary people, but that’s invisible.

Is that really a thing that happens?

While I'm sure there are rude people with Asperger's out there, rude neurotypicals can potentially be damaging in a far more efficient manner by knowing how to twist the social norms to give the pretence of staying within their boundaries.

Replace "aspie" with "black man" and your entire response is blatantly prejudiced. In my experience this is a boogieman people fear will crawl out from under their bed at night. All but one of the autistic ("aspie" is outdated) people I know understand their shortcomings and adapt as best as they can. There will always be assholes in every group; if you're not prejudiced, you judge the asshole rather than stereotyping the entire group.

Nearly all autistic people know they act weird and would like to act normal but don't know how. You have to weigh the costs and benefits. What's worse: you are occasionally made uncomfortable, or an autistic person gets fired? Are you willing to make no compromise in this conflict with coworkers? If so, it would be hypocritical.

Not remotely comparable unless you are implying that black people “expect others to change behavior to adapt to themselves, but refuse to change their own behavior” which by the way is pretty racist.

How transparent you are in the fact that you are applying a completely anecdotal and personal experience to the largest possible generalization of ADD/Asperger's.

That is very unscientific, and to people like me who deal with ADHD and a few other mental illnesses, downright offensive and prejudiced.

Yes, it is unscientific. It's my own personal experience that Aspie/ADD people often can't understand how much pain they can cause other people.

It always seemed inherently weird and self-contradictory to me to accuse someone of lacking empathy. How can failure to understand another person's feelings be other than mutual?

Everybody ignores the feelings of others on occasion due to lack of understanding, but also when their own feelings are powerful enough to take precedence. I think it's best to assume that any time someone is causing pain, or even awkwardness, it's due to one of those situations or maybe a combination. I'm doubtful that there are really any other kinds of people.

It's my own personal experience that Aspie/ADD people often can't understand how much pain they can cause other people.

You listed your father and brother as evidence. Add maybe half a dozen more and that's your entire sample pool. It's amazing that you think this enough for your generalizations to be valid enough to share with others publicly before doing real research about these disorders.

If you feel you have data that counters my experience, it would be good to share. Then we can discuss both sides.

I don't need data to counter your "personal experience" a.k.a. anecdotal evidence, because it was never valid to submit as a claim in the first place. There is no "both sides", there is one side: the objective truth: ADHD is too complex for you to make ridiculous unbacked claims like that.

I have quite advanced ADHD, OCD and bipolar II disorder and I don't have problems with empathy; in fact, in my circles I'm known as an especially attentive listener. I'm a walking contradiction to your baseless claims.

So please, try again, this time without insulting an entire class of people by claiming we all fit your incomplete behavioral model.

Sharing personal experiences is how normal humans learn about each other.

You keep trying to twist this situation with carefully crafted language into something that it isn't.

I'm not offering you "personal experience", you are attempting to equate our statements here in order to maintain a level playing field. Unfortunately, you are trying to pass off as a generalized fact something which my very existence disproves. You can study me independently to reach this conclusion. I am a data point. It has nothing to do with my own experiences, but the very real and measurable phenomenon that is my actions in the world.

The fact is, you are literally talking to someone who could help you better understand what life with ADD is like, and instead of taking the chance to learn and grow, you're trying to convince someone who literally has ADD that everyone with ADD behaves a certain way, and trying to make the claim that I am not qualified to talk about my own disorder.

How prejudiced and narcissistic can you be that you ignore what is right in front of you? How can you not understand how insulting this is to me? What if your dad was black, would you go around saying all black people are unempathetic, too? No, you wouldn't, because someone would put you in your place reaaaaaal quick.

Sharing personal experiences is how normal humans learn about each other.

I like how you try to go further and insinuate that I am "not normal" because I am not accepting your anecdotal nonsense as evidence. Do you treat everyone whom you argue with this way? That's just sad.

>Are you claiming you are an exception or the rule?

This is a valid question to help me understand where you are coming from.

Honestly, this kind of self-victimizing behavior leads me to question whether you are entirely self-aware of the nature of your interactions with your father and brother and can even trust in your own interpretation of them. You and I are not even able to have a meaningful conversation because you are bent on framing me as incapable of reasoning with you while ignoring everything I'm saying.

I knew also aspies (two) that did their best to listen and once we adjusted to his communication (e.g. learned to be extremely direct), it was not like that at all.

At that point not just aspie failed to listen, but also neurotypical people around failed to protect whoever is victim of that abuse and set proper boundaries.

At the abuse level, improvement should not be dependent at the self reflection of the one doing the abuse.

Persistent small events over time can be abuse.

So it is pretty good analogy. When people both peraon with asperger and working with one having asperger can talk back, reorganize work tasks, move tables, prevent the one having asperger from doing juniors code reviews, torture don't have to happen.

It is when having asperger is treated as license to abuse or sign of "being the one that is more logical/technical and therefore right" when it becomes abuse acceptance. It is the "he has asperger therefore it is ok for him to do it and you have to be subjected to that" that makes it so.

Socially, having Asperger's is an uphill battle. When I'm around people, I spend about 75% of my cognitive ability trying to appear to not have Asperger's. I've gotten pretty good at it. Great! One problem: whenever I slip up, it comes across as unbelievably rude. Probably worse than if I were just a "weirdo."

The right answer is a combination of people who are forgiving, but also a work environment that doesn't require constant socializing. That way I can minimize the negative mental health impacts I have on my peers that are a natural byproduct of my existence.

But asking someone with Asperger's to be "less rude" is like watching a short guy struggle to reach a high shelf and then telling him to just be taller.

I would say the exact same thing applies to the neurotypicals but they are completely oblivious because it is "normal". I have no doubt that if proportions of population were reversed being neurotypical would have its own syndrome.

Do something that better coping autistic people do and apply empathy manually and look at it from their perspective.

They flip out at violations of the most trivial norms and exclude over irrelevancies without a thought to the feelings of others.

Accepting the abuse is the standard "desired outcome" for those with autism. They are often accused of lacking empathy by people who do things like depict an autistic child as a puppet and considered only a burden.

If 'difficult' is the cut off point for a working relationship for a person, team or business, then that is ok. There are plenty of working environments where difficult relationships can work. But certainly not all of them.