I am very dyslexic, the other day I misspelled the word TAB as TAP when implementing an event listener in a codebase +100K lines. It took me half a day just to find this bug.
At LastCo I heard the project manager and scrum master joke behind my back "we'll just have the autist with OCD do the programming" while referring to me. In their mind lacking a "theory of mind" also includes not having any peripheral hearing.
We always have cheeky banter in our office, but never behind one's back or on account of their difficulties.
As an example, my first hire was an immigrant from Africa. He can speak English, but his spelling is not ideal - and because English is not his first language his naming structure for things like variable and classes needs improvement. To help with this I implemented specific standards for how naming should work and gave him a ton of concrete examples of how I would name something in a number of scenarios. Now that he’s been working for me for a while, I only actually have to give feedback on naming conventions maybe once a week.
Edit: spelling.
Also, I am sorry you have to work in an environment like that.
It was maddening and took at least a day to notice. I started questioning my sanity. I never thought to just do a diff...
It's great, because you don't have to read the var name, you just have to see if there's any var in a function that doesn't have the same color as anything else and they tend to stick out like a sore thumb.
Not sure if that's the best explanation, but if you're using any JetBrains IDE you can try it by going to Settings and searching for Semantic Proximity and hitting the check mark. Easier to show than explain.
When I have to work with large JavaScript codebases I always move for TypeScript for that very reason.
It won’t compile if I’ve done something like that and will happily shout the line at me that (paraphrased example):
545: someArray.srt((a: number, b: number) => a-b) - ‘srt’ does not exist on type Array
And good integration with an editor or IDE will produce these errors without needing to run the compile step which saves a lot of time and frustration.
I don't have to worry if I've spelled the variable incorrectly or (more frequently) used a synonym instead of the word I first used; autocomplete catches it.
At my old school, the worst of managers had just no clue how to dive in and help. Sometimes they'd try and it would make things worse. Their mortgage payments and continued relevance began relying on control, not capability.
This would have been okay of we were the appropriate size for so many manager types but we really needed engineers who could lead.
This whole discussion is in the context of people with autism being sought out by an employer because they are very good at certain skills. The fact you would take “autist” as a negative term about a person suggests some prejudice on your part against autism, rather than being someone who celebrates people’s differences