I generally gravitate towards the most autistic market niches imaginable. Usually areas which combine multiple autistic topics together that attract the weirdest people imaginable.
If your language skills are as advanced and analytical as you claim, then you should apply that innate skill to the problem of finding ways to communicate without making people feel threatened. For instance, tailor (limit) your vocabulary for your audience and don't correct other people's inconsequential errors. And of course refrain from telling people about how brilliant you are.
If you can't manage the above, then maybe you should recognize that you're not actually as brilliant as you think. This realization could give you a bit more humility and that in turn could help you interact with other people.
I don’t have it.
Also:
I have worked with quantum physicists with multiple degrees from Harvard / Stanford / Yale etc and realized I am in the same room as and same conversations as them.
These are the upper .01% of the talent pool and my intelligence has got me to that level.
You can’t pull that off by being a complete dumb ass. I have done it over and over and over.
It also takes emotional regulation to refrain from correcting someone's factual errors. While someone with higher intelligence may be better at understanding and analysing emotions theoretically, this doesn't always translate into practical emotional management skills.
This is a big one I feel. My best friend has Asperger’s and does this from time to time. A recent example is I was telling him about a Thule roof rack I got for my car. I pronounced it Thool, and he interrupted me and said “actually you should know it’s pronounced Tooly”.
It didn’t bother me, but we have a pact that I point out gently when he does things like that. It’s an inconsequential error because it doesn’t really matter how it is pronounced. And some people may find it rude or “know it all” to be corrected like that over something like that.
Sure, but it can get exhausting over time.
Me: I read "How To Win Friends And Influence People" by Dale Carnegie when I was a teen, and it changed my life.
Other: (laughs) It obviously didn't work because you're terrible at social graces!
Me: Yeah, but you didn't know me before I read that book!
So there is hope, but reading a book won't work miracles. It's a lifelong struggle with me to learn social graces.
A nice side effect of being "on the spectrum" myself is I enjoy working with people like that, including Aspergers, because I understand where their lack of social graces comes from and it doesn't bother me in the least.
The best book I ever read was “stealing the corner office.”
I know people who are naturally intuitive and empathetic. They look at another person and go: “oh she is angry because her cat is sick.”
And I go “how the fuxk did you know that?”
More normal people have a sense sort of like this. I do not have this at all. The behavior and emotions of people are this continuous mystery.
If some VP is super angry, I can’t understand why.
Someone with more normal understand goes: yeah he is under a lot of pressure so that is normal just be more relaxed etc.
Corporations are confusing.
Beautiful people have certain things easier but others harder. Highly intelligent people are the same way. I think it’s like playing the game on easy mode but has some random side quest every so often.
I’d surely not wish the ending of Flowers for Algernon on myself just in order to avoid the quests.
I only learned about Aspergers way later in life due to YouTube and realized it explained everything about my problems and alienation.
From some of the coaches on YouTube, they talk about how this is a pattern that shows up a lot with Aspergers - At some point people get so fed up with everything about life, relationships, work and schools not working specifically for YOU.
Aspergers individuals have a particularly hard time with jobs, it is very common for them to have employment challenges.
I hope you succeed in finding a place where others compliment you, and you them and are in a team with a lead who supports you. I've been in, asked let a few such teams and we did amazing things.
I am extremely empathetic and honest. Most middle management at most companies optimizes for non-creative yet industrious which turns highly competitive over pettiness.
I just can’t see myself doing it anymore. Especially after what happened to me at my last role.
I had my naïveté taken advantage of.
If it's any consolation, that happens to everybody.
> From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual. Not so much on the mathematical side. I almost have a disability with mathematics.
I feel this. “Rough draft? LOL why? I can write a perfectly-structured paper beginning-to-end without having to re-arrange so much as a paragraph, and I don’t make grammatical errors or spelling mistakes that I don’t catch instantly. What’s the point of all these ‘writing steps’?”
Around age 35 I started occasionally making errors in typed text, and not noticing until re-reading it. Leaving out words. I started substituting homophones! I never, ever did that at all, before! Aging sucks.
[edit] I feel, specifically, the brilliant-at-language and hindered-at-math thing, that is. The rest of this, I’d say you’re a fair bit brighter than me. I just took to language naturally very early and have crazy-good spatial reasoning. I feel dyslexic trying to read math, though. I do OK as long as things are algorithm-focused, which is why I can have a career as a programmer, but when it’s equations and proofs, forget about it.
Word engineer.
It’s less respected and talked about in tech but a very real capability.
I had perfect grammar and spelling until ~30. Then it went downhill.
It coincided with dating more illiterate women. So I always attributed this development to letting go of an attention to detail that went unnoticed: What's the point of writing or speaking correctly when nobody around you can tell the difference?
It might be age rather than environment, although I doubt it. I also don't really mind.
My code hasn't become less type-safe.
If you mean this in a way where your saying hard truths or telling it like it is, then yeah, its annoying to listen to. Especially without it being asked for.
If you are X, you are not allowed to ask about Y topic etc.
People with Aspergers do not perceive these boundaries and open topics they are not supposed to or are “above their pay grade.”
Status blindness and career limiting.
Easy and logical for more tribalistic folks that live in terror of becoming outcasts, but not remotely reasonable for people who don't/can't live in this restrictive setup.
So I would say I agree with many people in power need to be "the smartest person in the room" and will do their best to derail or ignore you, which limits your success.
But to your comment about isolation and no one wanting to interact with you, TBH that's most probably Asperger's or your personality, not that you are some genius that people are jealous of.
I have absolutely nothing in common with most people and it feels like very little to talk about, and I am extremely impatient with them.
Isolating and ruminating is the alternative I guess.
This is very familiar to me. There are things nobody talks much about because they are obvious and everybody knows them already. There are also things that nobody talks about because everyone is lying to themselves about it and actually believe are not true (though some part of their brain unconsciously knows it). If you aren't one for the lies, you can mistake one of the latter for the former, and you will think that you are just stating the obvious, but really you just stepped on a landmine. Has happened to me many times.
I was really excited by it and was rattling off a list of ideas and tactics and strategies for how we could open the account.
His face turned bright red and he started SCREAMING at me.
At that point I was like “oooohk I did the thing again.” And backed off and didn’t interact with him.
After that he was a total asshole to me and started spreading rumors about me.
He felt extremely threatened I gather that he had been running this account for years and I could walk in and imagine a number of new approaches.
If I did it now I wouldn’t be so direct.
I have ideas all the time and most like do not want to have discussions like this because … they don’t have ideas themselves.
Corporate middle management are generally non creative and “brainstorming” just pisses them off.
Ok, I backed off and then watched.
The guy moved that truck around like a ballerina. It was a pleasure watching him handle it, a true pro.
The lesson for me was to not tell someone you just met how to do their job. It's a lesson I've had to learn many times.
Have those people actually told you this, or is it a conclusion you came to on your own? I ask because your comment pattern-matches quite strongly for me to "mildly autistic person who doesn't realize they're constantly making failed status plays". Here are a few lines that stood out
---
> I can write dozens of pages of highly analytical and technical text without making mistakes in real time. I can speed read complex texts and memorize them with a high degree of precision. From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual.
"I'm highly gifted and unusual" is much stronger than "I'm a good technical writer."
> It’s like being Usain Bolt except your sprinting lane has an obstacle course in it while everyone else gets to run in a normal lane.
As before, but even worse. Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world. He's quite literally one in eight billion. You are not.
> I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees. Worked at the top companies in the world with PhDs and others.
Having worked with PhDs is not impressive in itself. There are thousands of college sophomores who can say the same.
There are workplaces that carry some serious cachet (though bringing them up unprompted will burn most of it), but vague references to "top companies" won't cut it, and makes me think it's less "fellow at Microsoft Research" and more "software engineer at Microsoft". Which is a fine thing to be - but also a perfectly normal thing to be.
---
If your coworkers are getting the same vibe I am, then they're treating you like you're stupider than you really are because you come off as someone who wants to be seen as smarter than they really are. They're annoyed, not threatened.
And also my output is 20x higher than theirs.
Did you stop to think that maybe that was his point?
> s before, but even worse. Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world. He's quite literally one in eight billion. You are not.
Or that he didn't mean that literally he is the best in the world?
> I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees
This is legitimately impressive and obviously requires intelligence in the top 1% at minimum. Does it really not occur to you that smart people know they are smart just like people who are good at anything else know they are good at it, and not just trying to make themselves sound smarter than they are?
Obviously not, but I think OP does sincerely think he's smart enough that he should stand out as exceptional to most of the people he meets - and I think he's probably wrong. Most educated professionals will know dozens of people as talented as him. The people OP is hanging around will know far more, assuming he's describing them accurately: in a room full of
> quantum physicists with multiple degrees from Harvard / Stanford / Yale
having a 1-in-100 intellect is less than table stakes. There are millions of people that smart in the US alone, and most of them do not share OP's difficulties.
However, my ability to tap into the social zeitgeist is pretty close to zero.
The end result is that I get along fantastically with most people because I can anticipate what they want. But I get along terribly with people who want me to fit in with the social rules that they are playing by. What they want is for me to act normal. And I don't know what that is.
It manifests very similar to what you're describing. After a relatively short period of time certain people get very tuned off by me and they become easily frustrated by my actions.
My theory is that they're diligently playing by the social rules and then I come in, break all of the rules right in front of them, and then I get a mostly positive reception because it's what most of the room wanted anyway (just done in kind of a funny way).
I don't really have a solution.
[At least for me things get really interesting whenever I interact with sales people. As far as I can tell like 90% of that profession runs on everyone following the appropriate social scripts. I barely understand them so thus far I've not encountered a sales tactic that actually works on me. Occasionally they get really desperate as their best plays get met with awkward silence or declining their bad deal. The flip side is that they don't understand me either so asking for what I want doesn't seem to work. I just have to hope I'm able to find something that makes do. ]
The last few jobs in a row I entered with a specific, singular objective: “I vow I am not going to get into conflicts with people again.”
I try my hardest, and it doesn’t work.
A big problem is I hyper produce and hyper focus. I am juggling 18 balls and the “get along with people” ball eventually drops and when it does, it’s game over.
I have extreme capabilities for work but it also exhausts and overwhelms me.
I get extremely exhausted from thinking all the time, I am highly obsessive and always running my engine chewing over things mentally.
So I never rest.
And what inevitably happens is that I make social mistakes, and when I do - That’s the start of the end.
The third thing was: it turns out that people don't like different. Moved? Got a different accent than the rest of the children. But also? Don't be smart. Fit in. You can act bright, bright enough to help with another kid's homework, but you have to hide the rest of it, as it induces a mixture of envy and fear. Having a grown person in medical school say "You're terrifying" because you casually let slip your immediate apprehension of something which had baffled them means that kind of reaction never leaves. So as much as people mouth litanies like "Being different is okay!" the differences they mean are surface things like the coloration of your eyes or your skin, differences as the Mr. Potato Head model. And so that "helps with homework" turns with age into someone who ends up doing some very dull work, often of inappropriate import. Inappropriate, because you can see further down the line at what would be more important or impactful rather than this task you've been handed, as mindless as another sheet of multiplication problems of decades prior.
One of the equilibrium states is quietness, uttering little of surprise, imitation as protective camouflage. People will still figure out that you're smarter than the average bear, but you get fewer monkey gang-ups and reaping of the tall poppies. Fewer, but not none. Even my oldest friend has muttered "I hate you" three-quarters in jest -- but one-quarter not -- when I casually pick up some skill at which he has been slaving away over years. I've often wondered what the other paths look like and if they are more rewarding in some fashion, but more importantly, if they are any less fantastically lonely, the loneliness of the mutant.
It’s like an open faucet with words and stuff spilling out, and ideas, strategies, facts etc.
Elon Musk has talked about having a similar experience of just raw ideation to a degree that it is unpleasant.
My ideation cannot be shut off.
I walk multiple hours today just thinking obsessively and planning, iterating, ideating.
I can’t sit still, the activity of my brain is unpleasant I am just ruminating all the time.
Doesn’t happen to normal people - I think their brains are usually calmer - more in a neutral mode.
The end result is that when I do get engaged, and get into work, I tend to get extremely burned out. You can’t have this level of super output without burning out.
This is autistic melt downs / burn out I only learned about from YouTube.
This is where it's easy to get into trouble. You can either accept the task, which leaves you unfulfilled (and eventually burned out), or you can question the usefulness of the task, which superiors often view as insubordination or otherwise threatening.
It seems like working for yourself is the only way out of this, except perhaps working on a particularly well-managed team.
I haven't had this experience. In any group dynamic that lasts long enough, there's usually at least a few folks making self-deprecating jokes about their intelligence in comparison, or someone explicitly asking for advice "from the big brain" or something similar.
Humor is usually involved, but I'm assuming that's just a way to make a potentially socially risky observation in a more acceptable manner.
Recruiters / management are sometimes more comfortable making blunt assessments of intelligence / talent than peers. To an extent, that's part of their job, so never having gotten that feedback professionally would seem odd.
My experience is most people in highly competitive environments are peer competitors in some form . The VP above you doesn’t want you to rise and take their job. Your peers don’t want to be surpassed.
Everyone wants to keep you in a certain box.
If you are able to jump completely out of the box ahead of everyone by 10 miles, no one is going to want that.
You will only get negative feedback and told to stop. Or worse.
Don't self diagnose, really please just get a proper assessment by a good neuropsychologist. I had a suspicion that I had ASD, and I found out I had ADHD instead which surprised me. And part of ADHD is ignoring social cues subconsciously. If you end up having ADHD, OCD and anxiety for example, there are medications for that can change your life.
Even if the diagnosis ends up being some sort of ASD, ASD is a diverse condition with many subparts, so understanding how the machine of you works will be helpful. You also get an IQ test so you know what kind of gifted you are and there are books and therapy programs that can help you manage all of the diagnoses. Instead of giving up on the world and going full NEET, understand yourself first.
I can write dozens of pages of highly analytical and technical text without making mistakes in real time. I can speed read complex texts and memorize them with a high degree of precision.
From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual. Not so much on the mathematical side. I almost have a disability with mathematics.
I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees. Worked at the top companies in the world with PhDs and others.
However. I feel constantly discriminated against and treated like I am stupider than I am. And when people listen to me talk, they get incredibly threatened.
It has taken me years to understand that being around me and listening to me talk, reason and analyze is THREATENING to people.
I have had situations where, even after a few meetings where I felt I was just “talking about how things are” the other person left HATING me.
The way I express myself is perceived almost like being hit with a physical object. I believe I have Aspergers (have tested very highly for it).
I will tell you - it is INCREDIBLY CAREER LIMITING.
I have given up trying to work in the normal world. It just doesn’t work for me. The pattern always repeats - I join a company, I get targeted and singled out and ganged up on.
If you are like me it is like being incredibly advantaged while being incredibly disadvantaged at the same time.
It’s like being Usain Bolt except your sprinting lane has an obstacle course in it while everyone else gets to run in a normal lane.
The obstacle course is DELIBERATELY put there. It is human nature to instantly identify existential threats: People who are unusually more talented than them and take them out.
I have learned, and am adapting.
Unfortunately, if you want to succeed in this world you have to play a set of games, these are games that I really don’t want to play.
If I have to play them, I am going to try to play outside the system.
I have realized that all the advice which most people follow that works for them does not work for me.
I do things completely differently and have to come up with my own strategies about how to operate.
Here is the other reality: If you are very talented and gifted, NO ONE WILL NOTICE AND TELL YOU.
That sounds completely weird but it is true.
No one in my entire life, aside from a few offhand comments, took me aside and went: “uhhh…you are in a completely other category than these people and do not belong here. Do this instead.”
Instead it is the isolation - I do not understand why no one wants to interact or include me, and it happens very fast. Most people get a whiff and go “I have no idea what to do with this and don’t want to be around it.”