I didn’t give much information about my life, but I am pretty adept at playing all these games. So much so that I thought there was no way I could be autistic because of how many friends and business relationships I had. Until it hit me that I spent my 20ies doing what you suggest, which is studying the heck out of these things.
But it stops at engineering, where I try to be very open-minded and learn as much as I can. I have to readily accept I am wrong on most of my assumptions because I just couldn’t be a good engineer otherwise. I can be perfectly suave and agreeable discussing anything else. That means I probably know how to play the “acquiesce when you should” game quite well.
But I’m at work because I am blessed to have a job where I get to do what I care about: good engineering. I deliver great value when people understand my way of thinking, and thankfully I have plenty of colleagues that get it.
Instead, it was an entire article that not once acknowledged that you could be wrong, nor what it looks like when you do acknowledge it. It detailed about how, actually, you're not usually wrong.
This article appears to underscore the accusation.
When I’m wrong I just say “oh you’re right, good point” and move on. It’s very easy to do.
Sadly I don't have much to share in the way of insight.
Have you considered that being comfortable admitting fault is a skill which some people never learned while growing up, regardless of gender? And can you imagine a world where men do the same thing, but you don't gripe about it because you're not in a relationship with them?
And, tbf, "the wife is never wrong" encodes some wisdom, same as does the saying "Happy wife means happy life" or, from White Men Can't Jump, "Always listen to the woman".
Let's take the React checkout example that you gave. Your self-illusion is that you were engaged in holistic thinking. And, in fact, you couldn't even see the whole for the first irrelevant detail that caught your attention. This is the opposite of holistic thinking!
First, it is not your job to make that kind of technology decision. You can offer advice, but it is your manager's job. Your job is to make sure that your manager is well-informed. You failed at that job.
If you believe otherwise, then you're wrong. You probably believe you are better equipped to make that decision than your manager. You may well be right about that. (Though, as a rule, we tend to think that we are smarter than we are, and our managers are stupider than they are. But that is a side point.) But you are still wrong about the important point. Which is that it is still your manager's responsibility to make that decision.
You wanted to frame the entire conversation around, "Does this checkout form have a concrete problem that needs fixing?" Your manager's thinking is going to be about very different looking questions. Such as:
- Will switching to React make hiring and training future developers easier?
- Do my existing programmers have the necessary skills to test this technology out?
- Will this technology choice make future projects faster to develop? (For example, do we get wins from a better toolchain, etc.)
- Will this be an interesting project that helps me keep existing employees motivated?
- Are the other claimed wins in the blog post actually going to work out that way?
Your manager needs to think about these things. You may dismiss them as bullshit, but they are not. Companies live and die on such considerations.
Your manager learned absolutely nothing about these things. Your manager may have come away with the impression that you have no idea if there is a problem with the checkout page. But by misunderstanding your role and responsibility, you failed to carry out your actual responsibility within the team. And wound up so upset about it that you wrote a blog post with a strong undertone of, "Here is the kind of stupid I have to deal with at work."
And that AGAIN puts you in the wrong. It literally takes under a minute to go from your blog to your name to where you work. Any coworker who recognizes the blog now knows you're unhappy. Which poisons your work atmosphere. And if this comes to your manager's attention, your manager has to now deal with the fallout from THAT.
Yes, yes. You consider it bullshit. But it is bullshit that can easily get you fired. For good cause. And the fact that you do this AGAIN puts you in the wrong. And your considering it bullshit DOESN'T STOP YOU FROM BEING WRONG. It just means you won't admit it was a mistake.
Err, no: "A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React [...]"
> You wanted to frame the entire conversation around, "Does this checkout form have a concrete problem that needs fixing?" Your manager's thinking is going to be about very different looking questions.
This is literally their first question: "Is our checkout page not performing well?". The manager should have simply said "the problem is not performance, but X" instead of assuming that the developer is rejecting their idea.
> You may dismiss them as bullshit, but they are not.
It is interesting that you, like the manager, assume that they dismissed the idea.
> And that AGAIN puts you in the wrong.
I disagree. If the manager is not able to clarify the specifics of their question (remember, it was a question of whether they should do X) they are in the wrong.
This in no way contradicts what I said. This is a normal way of asking for opinions on a decision that needs to be made. And organizationally the decision IS the manager's. In practice a wise manager will take (and usually follow) advice from their developers. But still it is the manager's call.
> This is literally their first question: "Is our checkout page not performing well?". The manager should have simply said "the problem is not performance, but X" instead of assuming that the developer is rejecting their idea.
Based on my personal experience of people on the spectrum, I doubt that things happened as described. My best guess is that it was exactly what dusted described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32410505.
Namely, early in the conversation, the person on the spectrum got caught up on some irrelevant point. That they couldn't let go of. Which they kept going back to explain how right they were. Eventually the conversation got derailed having gotten no further. And, rather than dropping it, the person went on the internet to explain to the whole world how right they were.
I've been part of such conversations. (Thankfully minus the whole world bit.) The first few times you can hope that a simple clarification will get the conversation back on track. After a while you learn otherwise.
As a parent, what I've found most useful is to set a rule that the person on the spectrum is not allowed to argue that they are right. Ever. Even attempting to make the argument gets shut down. If breaks are needed to finish the conversation, then OK. This resulted in a lot less arguments, and a lot more moments of, "Oh...."
> It is interesting that you, like the manager, assume that they dismissed the idea.
No. I was doing something rather different.
The thread to this point brought up the importance of learning how to play social games. With the poster saying that they had learned to do so, were good at it, and didn't bother any more.
My experience of people on the spectrum says that the poster didn't learn nearly as much about social rules as they think, and they discount the impact more than they should. Since the factors that I described did not occur to the poster, and several focused on social rules, there is a good chance that they seem like BS.
> I disagree. If the manager is not able to clarify the specifics of their question (remember, it was a question of whether they should do X) they are in the wrong.
It takes 2 to communicate. There clearly was a communication failure here. While that failure could be the manager's fault, the odds really are in favor of it being the fault of the person with a condition that makes communication hard (autism), rather than the person whose got promoted into a job that is all about communication skills (the manager).
And yes, it really sucks for autistic people that a failure to communicate by default gets blamed on them. What sucks even harder is that it is true. Which is why it is doubly important for them to work on their communication skills.
And guess what simple change most improves communication skills for most people on the spectrum?
Hopefully you figured it out. It is to stop arguing that they are right. Ever. Not because they are usually wrong. But because they tend to wind up arguing that they are right when they are missing something basic, and the fact that they are arguing makes it impossible to figure out what they are missing.
This is surprisingly hard advice to take. And it is harder for people on the spectrum than neurotypical people. But it makes a huge difference.
> The problem is that you come across as ...
> And the fact that you do this AGAIN ...
> My experience of people on the spectrum says that the poster ...
I do not know precisely when, but it seems that at some point you started ranting to your child.
However there is a long path from first getting the idea of a rewrite to actually undertaking it. And the conversation in question happened because the manager had just read an article about such a rewrite, so it was very early in that journey.
> - Will this technology choice make future projects faster to develop? (For example, do we get wins from a better toolchain, etc.)
> - Will this be an interesting project that helps me keep existing employees motivated?
> - Are the other claimed wins in the blog post actually going to work out that way?
But... These are (or can be framed as) concrete problems.
> - Do my existing programmers have the necessary skills to test this technology out?
If you can't produce a single concrete reason why to try a new framework, why should I discuss about testing it?
(this as someone who may be on the spectrum and for whom the original article hit a bit too close..)
As for not producing a single concrete reason to try the new framework, there is no reason to believe that the manager didn't. According to the article the manager had just read a blog post on it, that caught the manager's attention enough to spark a conversation. SURELY there was SOMETHING in that article about why it might be a good idea to try React?
We aren't told what points were made, likely because they seemed irrelevant. But I'd bet good money that some were made.
The second question is quite literally just a "Have you experience with React?" which doesn't require additional questions for clarification. The manager would be expecting a "yes/no, but ..." type of answer. Honestly your questions would be asked in a meeting with as many developers and even non developers as possible to save time, not in a one to one conversation.
Honestly this whole topic is way too similar to the Dilbert comic where Dilber asks his boss what colour he wants his database in, to test whether he understands what a database is.
If (for example) that one struggling colleague is shining in front of a superior and you are the guy who rains on his parade by nitpicking some detail he said, you might be technically right, but you end up being perceived as an asshole because you acted like one.
If if that example you strictly need to be right for some reason, you could also just talk to the guy afterwards etc.
And this is what all of it essentially boils down to: It is good to be right, as long as the way you communicate it is adequate for the situation.
If people have a low effort chit chat and don't want to go too deep into things, it might not be wise to get all excited and monologoue about how everything they know is wrong. If someone shows you something they have been working on for weeks, maybe it is wiser to aknowledge the good things first, before going into the bad things.
Generally it is better to have others discover facts themselves than spitting them out in front of them. Sure, if the boat is literally sinking and they claim punching more holes will help, this might be a good moment for a statement without nuance — but such statements have their time and place and should not be used everywhere.
I very much relate.. I've been so bitter as to keep a small list of "told you so's" that I'd update when my rejected ideas were finally proven to be the better path (though it may have been months or even years after the fact (most agonizing when someone else suggested exactly the same thing, but explained it in other terms,focusing on things I didn't find central to the point).
In the end I deleted the file. Some of the "told you so's" were petty things anyway, and.. Now I try and take it as part of my responsibility to work a bit harder at finding arguments against my point of view, as well as work a bit more politically to get it through when I'm ready to put my head on the line that I'm right and everyone else are wrong.
P.S. I'm closing in on the big 4-o and I'm still working on myself, still trying to learn politics, how to talk with nontechnical superiors and how to accept that sometimes, we go with the wrong solution because someone else tells so.
In a way, it's a way to do a team-wide "we told us so, so what now?"
I like to akin your choice as choosing to assume the role of seeker. its lonely, its challenging, and everyone else seems to not care to play THAT game (some may say is a metaphor for divinity). But the reward is YOU WIN THE GAME. significantly better payout.
I share the metaphor to say that A) I understand you, B) I share your feelings and choice on the matter of identifying and managing Real Politik and C) congratulate you for identifying your true north star and having the strength to pursue in in spite of it not being rhe standard for others.
One can have asperger's and still be nice to people. These things are not mutually exclusive. I see too many people who find it convenient to be a toxic, rude bully, and don't know that they are, and use their condition as an excuse to be a jerk.
From my experience, it's usually not a problem to be pretty forward with people on the spectrum, if you are meaning well. My wife told me there is absolutely no problem with telling me to stop going on about a topic bluntly, and it is something I quite often do with my friends too. Same for pointing out that a certain way of phrasing something didn't come across well, in fact I really appreciate receiving these pieces of advice. What hurts is the "NT" way of communicating these things, hoping that I'd catch up on them. I don't.
> In 2013, the DSM-5 replaced Autistic Disorder, Asperger’s Disorder and other pervasive developmental disorders with the umbrella diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
I did take a few autism tests here and there, but always thought "oh they're just meant to make you feel special when you score high, that doesn't mean anything. plus i make good friends everywhere I go". When I told my wife she was like "who thinks that scoring high on an autism test is something people want", and we both took some of these tests. On one of the more widespread one (https://embrace-autism.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/ ), I scored 43, while she scored something like 12. My mind was absolutely blown. I started reading a few books and joining a few autism communities, and it might sound trite, but it's the first time in my life that I felt like I joined "my" community. So many of the stories and anecdotes I would read were like "finally I read something I can relate to".
I am looking for an official diagnosis (not simple) without too much effort, because I find most of the value in now being able to articulate so many of the things that puzzle me, or the conflicts I might have with my wife, or behaviours of mine, and mostly not being ashamed anymore. It's been extremely liberating, and it provides me with better words and verbs to tackle difficult situations.
I have similar memories of my 20s trying to learn how to behave in a social setting. But I also remember things clicking at some point and that part of the world stopped requiring so much effort.
Thank you for sharing. I hope you're able to get your diagnosis.
That said, I have a coach that helps me with this, and I work on my writing a lot. I am currently at a job where I never run into this particular problem, yet I have thorny discussions with lots of "disagreements" all the time. This really helped me understand that it's not just me.
That's certainly a message I have encountered in some places, and in the first few sentences of this article I thought that's what I might find here.
But unlike you, I quickly concluded that that was not at all the article I was reading. Rather than argue that they were special because of their autism, this author listed highly specific, clearly explained ways in which other people they interact with fail to understand them.
> If the author reads this, I'd congratulate them on finding the time to do that, but also advice them to maybe read 40 technical books every year, and then read 10 about the topics they clearly do struggle with (social interactions, politics, negotiation, psychology).
Did you read the part of the article where the author explained that they do this reading because they find it enjoyable, rather than simply to get ahead?
I don’t doubt the veracity of what the author wrote, but I would guess that if we spoke to the counter-parties, their recollection of certain things would be very different.
How people perceive the world and express themselves vary, and some people don’t jive well. I have a developer on my team who is very literal person, if I say “I could kill that guy”, he doesn’t capture the nuance. But he is brilliant, a friend and trusted colleague. A good leader should get that and adjust.
Yes, there's some ego in that. Author won't back down.
But clearly, the author isn't the ultimate arbiter of truth. Some things are objectively true.
For what it’s worth, I think your assessment and advice are both spot-on.
I know the original author is far into his career as well but I think especially as we get more senior that humility and valuing other’s perspectives become as important as the technology. Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career were from dismissing the ideas of peers.
I wrote this article because despite being as humble as I can, these situations still arise. You can get very far doing so, but my biggest mistakes were to not realize that I sometimes actually right.
Humility is great, but automatically accepting the blame for somebody's failure to communicate something to you just because they are allistic ... that is not so great.
I also find "allistic" feels like a dismissive or slightly derogatory alternative to neurotypical. (To be clear, I do not thing the author was using it that way at all, it is just the reaction the word engenders in me.)
I am not aware of any good systematic textbooks on this topic.
(of course not the author)
It can be a bit on the nose, though, larve, to use this book.
Best,
bigDinosaur
--
Seriously, it's very easy to go wrong with How to win friends. IMO a lot of its advice probably worked better back in the day when formality was somewhat more appreciated and knowing when to avoid it more of a skill.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Greene however just makes me feel icky.
But anything that gives me insight into how I differ from others, and how their mind works has helped me.
Even books like "The Intelligent Negotiator", "The Intelligent Conversationalist" which superficially seems to be mainly about manipulating and scamming people give interesting insights into how people work.
I've also read some books on pedagogy, a subject I hate due to how much childhood trauma its rigid application caused me..
Maybe because of it.. Those books, at least the old ones I read, define the boxes into which children will and must fit, the methods to make them fit, and the reasoning behind those methods..
Very interesting stuff to read for me, because it made it clear why it didn't work on me, and why it would have worked on my peers. They are almost lists of "behaviour X is due to situation Y" which may be true for neurotypical children, but were certainly not for me. I digress, they gave me good insights into how "the others" work.
I've learned the hard way that caring too much about work related topics doesn't contribute to your happiness.
Company men will replace you if they can do their business math for justification, because they cannot see the technical complexities of the things they are "wanting to be built" for the company.
Even when you can see dependencies of complexities that will break the plan a year ahead of time, and you were right in complaining about it, it doesn't effectively help you as a person.
Being stuck in the past is just the same waste of energy as being angry about it. Hate and anger are infiltration techniques and should be treated as such.
People will always react based upon their own experiences and understanding, and if you actively try to fight the statistics (aka you vs your team) you will just hurt your perception.
Being seen as rude by other people gives you a strategival disadvantage for negotiation, and that will hurt the rate of adaption of your own suggestions. The ironic part is that people are even more petty than the "I told you so list" that you mentioned, only that they think subconcious pettiness of system1 isn't "petty" but only "a feeling" even though the mechanics and dynamics of it in a rational context are the same.
Work is work, and it will always be "just work". As an autist you have to learn that other people don't care about things as much as you would do (in a utopian star trek world). As a hu-man (literally meaning being that forgets) you have a very limited capacity of memory, computation power and energy.
And your efforts are far more efficiently spent outside the world of company politics, where most people are just busy 90% of the time with sidelining or attacking other departments for their own egomaniac benefits. Playing this game is a huge drain on energy (at least for me) and I therefore decided not to play it.
I thought at first you had invented a clever new word combining strategy and survival. Then I realized that v is just very close to c on a qwerty keyboard. Oh well.
Yeah I was typing on mobile and didn't catch it while proofreading. The textarea is so annoyingly small :(
why are you assuming they are talking to people IRL like they would write a blog post? Very few people talk in person like they type or behave differently in professional environments vs casual. Seems like a weird critique.
I would have written something like, "Allistic people communicate in a way that causes friction in understanding by autistic people, and vice versa, and this leads to a slowdown in the workplace for everyone."
I like the form it currently has too, but it requires taking every word at face value, and not assuming any subtext. For example, I don’t blame anybody, thus I really mean I am not blaming anybody. This is an examination of how things have played out and why they might have played out the way they did. Nothing more.
They’re just part of the game. If you want to do well in any position you cannot neglect them.
A lot of challenges with autism can be about not being able to see others’ perspectives
In fact, it's possible to be highly egocentric and altruistic at the same time. You see this with parents who might deeply love their children but can't understand how their child's perspective might differ from their own. They might think their kids have the same likes and dislikes as they do.
You can't appreciate that this person have spent 10h per day for last 23 years at dealing with computer issues. Instead you think it would be better spent learning some office politics. I'm not even sure how to comment on that.
Those are not hard skills to learn, like patiently responding to questions before jumping to conclusions about what the person you are talking to thinks about this and that.
In the meantime, it's not a bad idea for an individual person to improve their soft skills, just to make their own life easier. For the individual neurodivergent person, learning how to effectively communicate with neurotypical people is a more effective short-term strategy than waiting for all of society to adapt.
But I think you underestimate how much effort autistic people put into improving our soft skills in order to survive. In fact, I learned to be so good at social occasions that I never thought I could be autistic, given how many colleagues value me and how many friends I have and make. I reflect here upon situations where all these improved soft skills didn’t help however, and try to understand what might be going on.
Nah, it's more "improve society & improve yourself". ND people realize being "vs" and wiring their brains differently is not achievable, so NDs try to "soften the blow" to their own mental health by trying to make allistic people know how they work. Sharing is the first step towards understanding.
Thing is, programming computers and solving technical problems is fun to me, I enjoy it, and it's a perfectly spent time for me, as I believe it is to them.. I don't enjoy office politics, I hate them, I don't like a lot of how society is structured with regards to social convention and politics in general..
But the universe does not care about my opinion that technical problems are worthier pursuits than learning how to handle people, especially people with vastly different (and/or inferior by whatever standard you need) skills, because at the end of the day, the cost is going to be greater to me than to the multinational megacorp.
I want to call it "ausplaining", this tendency to go "no no, YOU don't understand ME (because I'm special, not because I'm wrong)" whenever we get ourselves into situations like the exemplified.
I do this A LOT as well, and when people do stick with me for long enough, I often find that I'm either getting my point across by re-framing my explanation, or discover that what I'm pursuing as oh_so_important is in fact not important for the question at hand (then I feel even more stupid, because, not only did I find this of paramount importance, but everyone else didn't even consider it (because it so clearly didn't matter)).
> Because I value learning, I read about 50 technical books every year
If the author reads this, I'd congratulate them on finding the time to do that, but also advice them to maybe read 40 technical books every year, and then read 10 about the topics they clearly do struggle with (social interactions, politics, negotiation, psychology)..
The opinion reads as "I'm right and the world is wrong" to me, maybe because I can strongly relate (except the parts about reading tons of books and being really smart).
I think the author would benefit from realizing that these things they dismiss as irrelevant (mind games/politics) are actually important and beneficial to understand and master (I am not saying it should be that way, but merely point out that it is, in fact that way).
The author may also benefit from investing some of their mental capital (I'm not being sarcastic, they're obviously very intelligent) into learning how to play the games, to figure out neurotypicals enough to communicate with them on their level/terms.
Yes, workplaces need to be accommodating, but in the end, no matter who we are, it's our ultimate responsibility, to ourselves, to learn how to function in this world.
As for the situation where the other party is factually wrong.. Well, yes.. I always imagine this situation, where I have the right of way on my bicycle, and it's the semi-truck that must yield.. There are a fair number of times where being right does not matter.