“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong” | Hacker News Reader

“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

the.scapegoat.dev

249 pointslarve496 comments

I read this as being strongly opinionated and egocentric..

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.

Author here, thanks for reading.

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.

Given the headline, I thought it would be an article about what it looks like when you acknowledge that you are wrong and why people might not understand that you are, in fact, acknowledging when you are wrong.

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.

A thing to consider is that it is often not just about the facts. Often it is also about social convention and other things.

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.

Thank you for answering.

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.

I’m pretty sure I’m autistic on some level, I can look back on my life and point at the many clear signs (which go well beyond socially awkward behaviour). What I do try to do though is not let that be a part of my identity. I hate identity politics in general, and the title rubbed me the wrong way. Firstly, who even says that? You? Like one person you met, or an article you read somewhere? It’s a pretty outlandish thing to say regardless of who is saying it, so the article feels like you’re basically teeing up and easy ball to hit. Just my thoughts, take them for what you will

there is an interesting theory put forth that Quidditch is a metaphor for life. Harry is a seeker that ignores the entire game say for hyperfocusing on catching that little golden ball thingy (sorry, not a potterhead). The rest if the players play the game by all these rules, but each player has 1 seeker ignoring everything but that one Northstar, that super fast gold annoying thingy.

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.

You sound like the "asperger's" person who we are in the process of offboarding from our team.

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.

How did you learn you were autistic? I've always thought I might be but I've not invested the time in finding out.

Would you even want to know if other people thought you read these situations incorrectly?

> 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)"

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 didn’t read it as egocentric. The author cares a lot about correctness and delivering high quality work, but the definition of quality or good is very limited in scope.

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.

I believe it is unintentionally egocentric to assume a single individual's perspective is enough to guarantee correctness. I imagine most of the time that individual makes the best call, but that's not less egocentric. It's easy for an individual to qualify the correctness of technical material, but not easy to do the same for soft skills like communication. As a senior developer or leader, you need some egocentricity in order to have a focused project and clear goals.

I cringed reading the article because of how much it reminded me of my younger self in my software engineering career 30 years ago.

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.

Thanks for reading. I don’t go very much into my day to day workflow, but I actively seek out ideas of my peers and trusting them to do their own mistakes, being at the ready to help out only when things go very wrong.

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.

Great. You learned to mask better. But younger people and some older ones are really not keen on doing that anymore.

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 like the term "ausplaining" as you've defined it, but I don't think I would ever start using it. If feels like it would end up being used dismissively.

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.)

> 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

I am not aware of any good systematic textbooks on this topic.

(of course not the author)

This is a classic for good reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...

Ribbonfarm is better than anything else for non-neurotypical people. The examples are real and accurate although it does kind of spiral into odd places at the end.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

The entire field of business and professional communications - there is an entire college for the topic, with multiple disciplines. A College of Communications is not just where the radio, film and journalist majors go, the college has courses that go into professional career depth the nature of communicating ideas to audiences that are not necessarily receptive. I know several communications graduates, my wife was a cinematography major. The communications and language tools taught in a communications program are comprehensive, which makes a lot of sense when one considers how many of the communications careers require complex ideas and complex collaboration to create the delivery of these ideas as audio, motion picture, and prose compositions - the collaborators have to be great communicators or these projects will never deliver.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene is a good place to start. Even if you don't want to turn to the dark side, this book will at least reveal to you how some of your competition is thinking and maneuvering.

I am also not.

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.

Re: ausplaining

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.

"... strategival disadvantage... "

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.

He openly admits his default way of dealing with the miscommunication was to quietly walk out of the room. Looks like he could consider some of his own advice. Also, referring to "allistic communication patterns" might also be another impediment here. Normal people don't talk like that. It's like talking to a robot.

> Also, referring to "allistic communication patterns" might also be another impediment here. Normal people don't talk like that. It's like talking to a robot.

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 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

They’re just part of the game. If you want to do well in any position you cannot neglect them.

Egocentric: thinking only of oneself, without regard for the feelings or desires of others

A lot of challenges with autism can be about not being able to see others’ perspectives

Egocentrism is definitely not the same as selfishness. It's just an inability to understand that other people differ from you.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egocentrism

Wow. The sheer level of disrespect in this comment...

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.

There’s a difference between engaging in petty office politics and endeavoring to grow your soft skills. And everyone, including hard core techies, can benefit from learning how to better interact with other people.

I didn't intended to signal disrespect the author, and I don't disrespect them, I think the article they wrote is very interesting and insightful, and a great topic for discussion indeed. I also feel that I have had much the same experience through my life, both personally and especially, professionally.

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.

> However, "giving in" is not the same as acknowledging when you are wrong: it is simply playing mind games—games I am not interested in playing.

> There is more to life: I am an engineer; I like solving problems. I embrace fairness and open intellectual exchange. This matters to me a whole lot more than getting promoted. Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic.

OK, yes, but, how about: "I am still not convinced, BUT I realize neither of us are going to convince the other one right now, and I've been wrong before, let's try it your way this time."

This is not appeasing bullies and making the workplace toxic. Sometimes insisting on arguing everything out forever every time you think you are right is what is in fact accidentally being a bully and making the workplace toxic. (And I have definitely been that person; I am not to my knowledge autistic, although some people have wondered sometimes).

I think people can mean either one by "giving in", I am wondering whether the OP, in rejecting "pretending I agree when I don't" is accidentally being the person who "always insists on getting their way every time".

> OK, yes, but, how about: "I am still not convinced, BUT I realize neither of us are going to convince the other one right now, and I've been wrong before, let's try it your way this time."

And one of the big things that tech people often don't ask themselves is: "Does arguing over this really matter?"

"Winning" an argument almost always costs you some social capital, so save your arguments for the things that are genuinely important.

If you've said the "right" answer, people still want to argue, but it doesn't affect you then sit down and shut up. Sometimes you have to let people make a mistake so they can learn.

If they're really smart, not only will they learn they were wrong but they will remember that you were right but didn't beat them up about it.

> I think people can mean either one by "giving in", I am wondering whether the OP, in rejecting "pretending I agree when I don't" is accidentally being the person who "always insists on getting their way every time".

Yes, it's possible that the OP is accidentally being a bully by insisting on getting their way every time. But it's also possible that everything the OP is saying is true, and the other party really is objectively wrong. Do you agree it's possible the OP is right?

I personally have encountered a situation where a tech lead repeatedly doubled down on idea that was objectively deeply flawed, but they had a lot of political capital, so management told me I just needed to "give in". Other engineers agreed with my assessment in private, but weren't willing to say so publicly.

> Yes, it's possible that the OP is accidentally being a bully by insisting on getting their way every time. But it's also possible that everything the OP is saying is true, and the other party really is objectively wrong.

My point is that both of these things can be true. By insisting you always get your way in any dispute, you can be a bully even if you are always "objectively right".

How do we know who is "objectively right"? Both sides believe they are, right? Have you never realized later you were wrong about something?

> I personally have encountered a situation where a tech lead repeatedly doubled down on idea that was objectively deeply flawed, but they had a lot of political capital, so management told me I just needed to "give in". Other engineers agreed with my assessment in private, but weren't willing to say so publicly.

I will say again that I am not suggesting that anyone lie about what they think, or say one thing publicly or another privately, or not share their true assessments publicly, or that this is a good culture where people think they need to.

That that point you need to choose, which you value more highly: correctness and finding the best technical solution, or maintaining as much team cohesion and not "stirring the water" too much.

So, if it's not your head on the chopping block, but a public decision about how to do things (ideally documented in an ADR - architecture decision record, with an author attached), just roll with it and indeed "give in". Ideally with some of your concerns documented, as well as a few prepared suggestions for how to deal with the eventual fallout and how to fix some of the things that might go wrong.

> Sometimes insisting on arguing everything out forever every time you think you are right is what is in fact accidentally being a bully and making the workplace toxic.

What one person considers arguing is not always considered arguing from another's perspective. (I don't want to label the sides here because I think definition varies neurodivergent or not)

From the examples given it sounds like the author views the conversation as a beginning middle and end before they can make a judgement, but the person asking them the question is only expecting the end part so theres a misunderstanding.

Generalising here body language is different in autistic people, tone of voice, social cues and manner of speaking, depending on how well that person can mask might affect how their attempt to understand the problem is perceived.

In work environment, "trying things your way" is seldom harmless to success of the product or one's personal ethics, career, reputation, work life balance... Who will fix things if they go wrong and how much effort is such a fix going to require? How is my performance going to be evaluated if I accept a bad call? If the answers are clear and acceptable to me, I have no problem being flexible. Making things clear often involves talking to our common manager, although I might also decide that I am willing to put in the extra effort to fix things if needed if the other person is not being obnoxious.

If you can't convince the other person through evidence or logic, atleast in technical matters, what are the odds you are actually right?

There are thousands of things engineers bikeshed about that have no objective answer but still end up being a major source of discussion. So I would say the odds are good, given that in a bikesheddable argument both sides are correct.

> let's try it your way this time

I've never understood why people go along with things they disagree about. It seems people often beat a good argument with the threat of retribution if we dont play along. Doesnt sound like a recipe for well thought out actions or incentives.

Because sometimes people aren't going to agree. Now what? somebody's going to have to go along, aren't they? The person who is the most bull-headed about not giving in isn't actually more likely to turn out to be right.

And because I know I might be wrong even though I don't think I am, I've been mistaken about that before, that's literally what being wrong is. Sometimes when I'm wrong I am not going to realize it for days/weeks/months. So why fight it to the death? Only when the consequences seem especially vital, not every damn time!

I am still not advocating pretending to think something you don't. You do not have to pretend you agree with the other person or lie about what you think. But I am advocating some humility. (I definitely do not always exhibit it myself, for anyone reading this who knows me; I do consider it one of my faults; I am writing here as a reminder for myself too).

I actually think it's important to set up a culture where everyone doesn't have to agree -- we all acknowledge we will sometimes embark on a course of affairs that everyone doesn't agree with, and you don't need to pretend you agree. People will disagree, and sometimes we still need to move forward. I actually fully agree that a culture where people have to pretend to agree in order to move forward is dishonest and harmful. And that's generally the real-world outcome of expecting nobody ever to "go along" with something they disagree with.

The interesting thing about your argument is that the most bull headed person is the least likely to participate in the suggested manner. The attitude seems it will only exacerbate the number of times the Bull headed win for their bull headedness and the number of times the submissive people submit.

Let's say you're deciding on a washing machine. You're arguing about washing machine A ($500) vs B ($600), and you think B will last twice as long as A. Your partner would prefer to save $100 now even if the machine breaks later on, and doesn't want to back down either.

The cost of choosing washing machine A is that it breaks at some distant time. The cost of arguing about washing machines is wasting an hour every week driving to a laundromat and paying $10 a wash, plus the hard-to-quantify strain on your relationship, for an argument you might not even win. In this situation, the hidden third option of dragging out a conflict that you might not even win could end up more costly than choosing a bad option, even if you're right.

In software this happens a lot. You burn opportunity cost trying to argue for a perfect solution instead of aligning behind a flawed solution.

> Your partner would prefer to save $100

I fully agree that in a romantic relationship there is far more at stake than any single choice.

But I've found the professional world to work far differently. For starters people only stick around jobs an average of 18 months (whereas marriages get about 7 yrs). And there is far more at stake to having your choice selected in an argument at work -- promotions and subsequent pay increases are worth 10s-100s of thousand. Submissive people are frequently looked over for promotion and may miss >5 years of promoted working years.

perfection was never in the discussion, but good (ie high quality) is. When I see someone arguing for a bad solution (ie both high risk & total cost of ownership expensive) it's there's actually a lot on the line. This risk factor scales with the size/brand of the business. Look at the pie in the face one company wears[1] for a security breach, whereas another gets to demonstrate their security forward posture[2]. The former likely has lost millions to a ~million dollar choice[3]. Whereas the latter has increased their brand value to the same choice.

But the person who argues without end for what they think is right is often ostracized and disparaged. This is something very broken in American culture.

[1]: https://www.twilio.com/blog/august-2022-social-engineering-a...

[2]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cloudflare-em...

[3]: 8k workers by $125 -- yubikey + cost of training ~$1M .

Sometimes you want to preserve or build a relationship and the cost of going along with a bad idea is outweighed by the value of the relationship.

Sometimes the worst case outcome isn’t very bad and will be quickly uncovered.

Sometimes you acknowledge that though you’re sure you’re right, there’s the possibility that you are not.

Sometimes it's also better to lose a battle in order to win a war. For example, I once thought a certain feature was useless and not worth the effort to implement. I knew however that if I chose that hill to die on, it would lead to a lot of resentment -- "if only we had built that feature, we would have X". I decided to concede as this was not a big feature but, like I predicted, the feature was useless. This now put me in a better position for the future where I could draw on this as a lesson for when it truly mattered. Whenever we would be at risk of getting distracted by some much bigger useless feature, I was able to point back to that experience to bolster my dissent with more credibility in a way I might not have been able to if I didn't pick my battles.

Because sometimes I'm the one who's wrong, and if I allow myself to realize that I can learn from it. A bit of humility is necessary for healthy teamwork.

> I've never understood why people go along with things they disagree about. As an Engineering manager this happens to me a lot. The first (perhaps most important reason) is that I realise that I might have things wrong and welcome the opportunity to grown and learning. Second, I want to show my appreciation to my report by supporting her/his idea. And third, I always take to opportunity to keep my ego out of the game. I might need to manage the risk and interests, but that's just part of the job.

Consensus based decisionmaking has its place.

It especially works better when there's too much ambiguity to proceed aggressively in any direction no matter how confident you are.

It usually more accurately reflects the group's appetite for risk, creates psychological safety, and reduces the social costs of failure.

Because people understand that their perspective might be incomplete or wrong, and/or the consequences of failure are reversible.

People also understand that "correctness" is often subjective and not boolean in nature, so insisting their opinion is in all ways the most correct would be silly.

> This is not appeasing bullies [...]

It is though. It's a way of saying "maybe I'm wrong, and we're going to act this out by pretending that I am". This means that whoever put pressure on you gets their way, which motivates them to do it again. That is toxic.

> This means that whoever put pressure on you gets their way, which motivates them to do it again.

While I don't think this is a ridiculous take, it is a rather uncharitable one. I'd think the only reasonable time this should be believed is after it has shown itself to be a pattern.

It's interesting to me that all four examples put the blame with the other party.

I hope it's just worded poorly or I am reading too much into it.

Edit: I'm not saying that invalidates the article's content (in fact I recognize the situations from personal experience), but it doesn't really put a positive spin on it.

thanks for reading, author here! the article is very much a response to a blame already expressed. People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions.

These are my thoughts on why differences of opinions get phrased as “autistic people just can’t admit when they are wrong”, when myself and most autistic people I know in fact readily admit when we are wrong and move on all the time. I don’t think of blaming anybody here, that is you reading things into it. I just need explanations and strategies to handle these situations.

> People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions.

This attitude is exactly what [neurotypical] people generally mean when they say "[some] autistic people can't acknowledge when they're wrong".

Not that autistic people are so convinced of their own rightness that they stare at the compiler saying "my code is flawless, the compiler must be bugged" because there is literally no circumstance in which they will ever update their worldview. But that when it comes to cases where [multiple] people suggest that the question they asked or the tone they asked it in might have been suboptimal for the situation, they are likely to rationalise it as just unverifiable opinion or status games which can't be learned from (but nevertheless, the difference of opinion probably results from misreading by the other party)

People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified.

We need to be careful, though, to not adopt black and white thinking even around "facts." Often, multiple contradictory factual things can be true at the same time and all pass verification.

Illusions are a lighthearted example of this that helped me appreciate this point. For example, the Yanni/Laurel audio illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) where people on both sides argue, in good faith, that the sound is one or the other. And even if you analyze the underlying audio in depth, neither side is factually wrong because that is how they experience it and isn't merely based around an opinion :-)

The biggest insight I have had in my personal life is that relationships are more important than facts. Building and keeping long-term relationships at work and in my family is, by far, more important than being right every time (even if I can verify being right). Verifying it just makes the abrasion to the relationship worse.

The tricky piece of this is that people can be right about the facts and still be wrong, or at least in complete disagreement with each other. This is because there is a latent opinion in each fact, which is that the fact matters and is relevant for the conversation at hand.

If you start from your own set of priors and are getting nowhere, you probably want to consider there might be a more relevant fact (for that person, opinion alert!) that you don't know about and aren't considering.

I feel like the article isn't actually directly addressing its title. It could be stronger with some situations to when you were wrong, with examples of how that was swiftly resolved, as you mentioned in the intro paragraph.

At the moment it feels like it takes for granted that you're good at resolving situations where you're objectively wrong, so it's only addressing situations where there was a difference of opinions.

I'm not implying that you're bad at the former, of course. However, it's entirely possible for people to have trouble engaging you when there's a difference of opinion and for you not to be able to acknowledge when you're objectively wrong - i.e. that all of the issues you've identified in the article are happening, but that the title quote is still actually true.

I've run into the same issues constantly throughout my life, especially when it comes to asking clarifying questions to get a grip on the situation. Something I'm going to do moving forward is first stating that I have a few questions that I need to ask to better understand the other's statement or question.

I think this sharing of my perspective may help the conversation to move forward in a more productive manner.

Thank you for putting this information out there! I hope it helps other people understand autistic communication and intentions a little bit better.

> I don’t think of blaming anybody here, that is you reading things into it.

Alright, thanks for responding directly to that.

In my personal experience, people don't typically conclude that I would refuse to admit I'm wrong. The only conclusion drawn in my experience (usually) is that we're unable to get our points across, in both ways, and we should probably try to come back to the same topic again later and maybe prepare a little bit better.

There are two different things being discussed here, and it's creating a disconnect.

The first is, "Can autistic people admit they are wrong when they themselves know deep down that they are?"

The second is, "Can autistic people be easily convinced that they are wrong?"

I'd say most commenters are expressing a "no" to #2, but your replies retreat to #1. I.e. you say that once you know you are wrong, you find it easy to admit it. However, given the content of your article, I'd speculate that it is very difficult to actually convince you that you are wrong in the first place.

The thing is, at least in the first example, the way I read it isn't "autistic people can't admit when they are wrong". From your own telling of the story it seems like a manager asked you "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React?", and you responded with "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React?". You failed to realize that all of the questions you asked them are the question they were asking YOU. They've been reading articles about technical teams gaining things they don't really understand from switching to React. Maybe increased velocity (they know what velocity is but don't know how React increases it), reduced bundle sizes (what's a bundle? why do I care?), faster rendering times (faster is a good thing, right?), etc. But they don't have the knowledge to judge if React will do this for them.

Answers to this question might be "No, we already use Angular which provides similar benefits to React", "Yes, switching to React from MooTools (I'm old) would simplify the design, increasing our velocity and probably resolve some annoying rendering bugs", or even "I'm not sure. Perhaps we should meet and discuss the weaknesses of that page and figure out if React is the right tool to resolve them".

Instead they got back the questions they were hoping you'd answer for them.

Many long years ago the CIO at a company I worked for asked if we could use machine learning to improve our data analytics. I responded with "I don't know, what kinds of questions are you hoping to answer?". We went back and forth on this several times, with me insisting you couldn't just throw machine learning at data without some idea of what your hoping to get back. This wasn't resolved until they brought in a vendor claiming to provide turnkey machine learning solutions, they ran it against our data and came up with the stunning insight that the biggest predictor of dollars sold was.... units sold. To be fair they did provide other data points, but it was all things we either already knew, or didn't care about and if we ever did could find out quickly.

I failed to recognize that the question I was asking was a big part of what I was being asked. If I had realized this and provided some insight into the kinds of questions machine learning could answer, and why we didn't need sophisticated machine learning algorithms for the ones the business cared about I could have saved everyone some time. Instead I kept rephrasing the question back at him, with neither of us having the insight to realize we were actually asking the same question.

I hope you take this as constructive criticism, as it's not intended to offend:

Your post reads extremely arrogantly. It's a "I am very smart" type of communication style.

None of the points you bring up are specific to autistic individuals. I'm allistic (as you put it) and, realistically, not that intelligent, but I experience the first two of your points on a regular basis. But I've learned to modify my handling of these types of situations so that, most of the time, I get a positive/productive response.

Now I obviously can't know how you communicate outside your blog posts. But it may be prudent to think about it – if you come across as arrogant or a "know it all", then the "you don't acknowledge when you're wrong" is just a nicer way of saying it.

And when people get a “vibe” of arrogance/know-it-all-ness from a person, they will be much less willing to accept, well, anything. And for good reason. This especially applies to corrections, "let's play 20 questions" and long-winded explanations of context (especially if you explain something they already know, even partially).

It looks like you are overfitting a couple cases of individuals mistreating you into a set of rules which are not true to reality. The reality of sociology and group psychology is a rich, vast tapestry of anthropological progression that numbers over 7B individuals today and countless others of their ancestors over the past 500M years; from when we began as apes and progressed into hominids and then sapiens.

"The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying."

"I care more about doing good work than office politics."

"The person underestimates how much I know about the topic."

These are statements that, when read on their face, seem to apply to disagreements that you have had with individuals. None of them seem to complain about (or even address) the ways clusters of people behave as a group.

I don't think this blog post is actually about autistic people, or allistic people, at all. I think this post is about one person, and some other people that the person had conflict with. If the author is reading this, I think it would do you well to slightly reframe things in that light.

Seems like autistic people won’t let go of being right on factual things and others can disagree, at least that’s how I feel sometimes.

People can also be objectively wrong when it comes to social interactions as well though.

To give an example, if someone who is less technical asks you a question that does not give enough background information to give a precise technical answer on, the wrong thing to do is respond by first simply asking questions back at them. Particularly if the questions could be difficult for them to immediately see how it relates to answering their initial question. It doesn't matter that it's because you think holistically or they don't have as deep an understanding, or anything else. The right thing to do is try to stay with people in conversation. Explain your thinking, make sure they understand why you need to ask these questions before you can answer, or give them a range of possibilities that are dependent on these unknowns.

And asking somebody to explain their reasoning and justification for their question before you begin to answer it is very rude, so that's wrong too. It's reasonable to expect more justification as requests become more time-intensive, but an initial response to a question should have some degree of good faith and politeness. Clearly they don't understand all the implications, which is why they asked for your opinion. So asking whether they understand all the implications of what they are asking is a rhetorical question and is basically calling them a moron.

"Should we rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React?"

This question might sound like your manager is expecting a yes or no answer, but they aren't. They want some "conversation". They want your opinion, some explanation for it, an opening to continue the conversation. Even if you could answer with an unqualified "no" without further clarification and be correct on a technical basis, that response is wrong in this social interaction.

"It's possible react could help with performance but it would be quite a lot of work. I don't think we should at this point unless we're seeing performance problems."

Something like that would be a better answer.

>People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions.

What doesn't come across in your article is that you can be wrong about factual things. It is unclear or unmentioned that you actually can be wrong sometimes.

These communication patterns make sense with what I know about people. I don't doubt that they happen relatively frequently, and can result in a situation where it seems like you can't accept the wrong answer. But I would ask you to re-read the piece and find a single part where you admit that you can be wrong. I can only find one, and it's in the first paragraph. It also barely qualifies as admitting you can be wrong.

None of this is to detract from the content of the piece. I just wish that it had been framed differently so that people could appreciate the insight without it coming across as egotistical.

So you want them to prepend every paragraph with "I know I'm wrong sometimes"? What does that achieve? The article is nice, concise, and gets the point across beautifully. Everybody's wrong sometimes, but some people are genuinely very rarely wrong in their area of expertise, and I'm willing to believe this guy is one of them. I'm glad he doesn't give in to the petty workplace politics, and I wish more people would.

The frustrating part was that this was framed as "any time I'm wrong, it's simply a miscommunication." The author barely acknowledges that they can be wrong in the first paragraph, and it's phrased in a way that makes it seem like a legal disclaimer. It's not phrased in a way that implies the author ever believes that they're wrong. Because of this, the entire article is colored by the attitude that any time an autistic person is wrong, it's miscommunication.

I don't need it repeated over and over. That's overkill, not concise, and adds nothing of value to the conversation. Based on the comments I've seen in this thread, it seems clear that this point never made it across, or barely made it across.

This is unfortunate because the actual content of the piece is great. It highlights the ways that people with autism and people without autism can miscommunicate.

It makes the allistic reader feel better to have it repeated, even though its stated in the first paragraph.

I didn't ask for any of that. I'm explaining why the article came off badly to me. I'm assuming that was not the author's intention. I provided this feedback in my comment so that they may reflect on why this is so.

There's nothing else in my comment. You are reading too much into my comment.

This was my take too. The break-down in communication might not be WHAT is being said but HOW it's being said. This is certainly my experience of being a dev and a manager, sometimes people just seem a bit rude and it's hard to get past.

Is the rudeness excusable? I guess. Especially if I understand where it's coming from. Otherwise it's just rudeness.

And I guess that the point of the article, but you need to get to know people before you can make the judgement of why someone is how they are. That takes time.

This reminds me of a time, many years ago now, another engineer and myself ended up in a debate with one of the executives. We seemed to be in a very strong disagreement with them. After well over an hour of getting nowhere we ended up going back and essentially starting over breaking everything down into little pieces and ensuring our definitions of everything lined up. Turns out we agreed the whole time, but how each side was saying it made us think we did not. I believe it provided me a valuable lesson in this but it was so frustrating at the time and that certainly didn't help the cause. Sometimes I have to remember back to it and to take that step back take a breath and reframe things. How things are being said can really affect the conversation.

Not the author but the framing in the article implies that the author would have zero issue acknowledging if they actually were wrong.

And yet none of the hypothetical examples seem to entertain that possibility.

And the OP is never actually wrong, he just couldn't explain himself

That could be your ego talking? Always re-interpreting reality to put yourself on a pedestal? It is a bit silly talking in circles with people that have theory of mind deficits. You just have to avoid the "correctness conversation" and try to point them in the right direction, but it's honestly like pulling teeth.

Sometimes the blame is with the other party.

An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1]

The comments in this blog post don't just apply to autistic people, but apply equally to people that are simply less wrong than average.

An observation I made is that some people make correct statements approximately 90% of the time. This is waaaay above the typical, which is more like 30-40%.

Typical people assume that everyone else is typical, because that's what typical means. Average people are average, and the Bell curve is the tallest in the middle. So when they encounter someone who isn't typical (not just autistic), they assume that their behaviour is arrogant, because someone who is right 35% of the time and talks like they're right 90% of the time must be arrogant!

Someone who is right 90% of the time faces an endless series of accusations of being overbearing, arrogant, self-important, not-a-team-player, or not "giving in" as in the blog post. Being contrary, argumentative, or not taking the blame to a sufficient degree are commonly said as well.

Speaking of giving in, most people follow the ten-thousand-year-old[2] tradition of doing whatever the grey-haired tribe leader says. Authority over correctness. Toe the line. Know your place. Keep your head down. Don't rock the boat. Part of the team.

The thing is, being old doesn't mean much, especially in a time of exponential change. In fact, the older you are, the more wrong your rules-of-thumb are, often exponentially wrong. This leads to endless fun conflicts of opinion where the young inexperienced buck is actually entirely correct in disregarding decades of experience[3]. But that leads to ostracism and exclusion, because we're all human, which is to say that we're basically strategically shaved gorillas in suits.

[1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in.

[2] Did I say ten kiloyears? I meant megayears. Sorry. This is what we've been doing since before we were human. It's wired into us deep.

[3] A random example from very recently is that I had to explain with pictures to senior management that upgrading the WAN links for one hundred sites from 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps and locking in that telco contract for 5 years is a mistake three zeroes in size.

It is arrogance though. For example, let's say you're smarter than someone who has authority over you, i.e. their social status is higher than yours. In that case it wouldn't be smart to make that person feel inferior. Since if you were truly smart you'd think of a way to be right in a way that makes people like you.

>> An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1]

>> [1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in.

I don't know why more than half. Can you explain?

> more than half the population is below average intelligence.

I guess I'm in the bottom half, then; I thought the average was that quantity for which half are below, and half are above.

I think you might be confusing autistism with high intelligence. The two are very different. I'm not sure it's even remotely comparable. Most autistic truly autistic people have a severe deficit to the point they have a problem with basic navigation of the world. Not just inconvencies. There's a tendency to turn every difficulty into a syndrome.

While reading the article, I had the distinct feeling the author was not, in fact, autistic, but merely had a lack of social practice.

On [1], you are assuming there is no such thing as negative intelligence!

The site is called 'scapegoat'

I think it pretty much invalidates it and just enforces the stereotype. "There must be another explanation than me being wrong".

the blog domain is called scapegoat.dev after all

Yeah it is either a fantastic bit of art or hilarious lack of awareness of the irony. The guy actually reminds me of a coworker that I like a lot who is on the spectrum. Once in a meeting a manager was describing why we needed to do some task. Autistic coworker: “oh so we need to do it for political reasons”. and manager starts to freak out and backpedal trying to say its more than just political reasons. Autistic coworker, calmly: “oh no its ok, political reasons is fine!”

How is that demonstrative of autism? Does not tolerating bullshit make a person autistic?

It's called narcissistic entitlement to expect the whole world to change their behaviour because of ones own inability to fit in. I'm not saying it is fair. Life is never fair. The only one who has the ability to influence those situations is oneself. You can't rely on other to change - it won't work anyways. You have to be the one that improves those interactions. For your own good.

> It's called narcissistic entitlement to expect the whole world to change their behaviour because of ones own inability to fit in.

Is it not exactly what allistic people are doing?

Autistic people communicate just fine with other autistic people. It's allistic people that don't fit in and want to change everybody around them because they can't suffer a bit of diversity in thinking and communication.

I think in the end people who are different (no matter if autistic, bipolar, whatever) need to learn to get along with each other. Whenever one side says: "I am right, I don't move a bit to accomodate anyone else", he is doing the opposite. This piece reads exactly like that. It calls people who communicate and think differently indistinctly bullies.

If you claim to be a complex thinker, you also consider people in your analysis, then that should also apply first hand, not just as a part of the solutions you propose. If you are unable to do that: fine, nobody is expected to be perfect. But don't claim to be perfect.

Neuro diverse people can't necessarily change their behaviour because it's how their brain is wired. It's like asking a visually impaired person to just see better. Many neuro diverse people have to force themselves to "fit in" causing untold stress and trauma. That's not for their own good, it's forcing their brains to work in a way that they don't.

That is essentially saying that autistic people can't learn. That's not really the case.

Furthermore everyone has to adjust to the people around them, often causing untold stress for everyone. This is one of the aspects of the neurodivergency movement I am less impressed by because I feel it's just handwaving away any issues as "suck it up, not my problem, deal with it". I've worked with a few people like this over the years, which also caused untold stress for the entire team.

To give an example from this post, "is our checkout page not performing well?" to the React rewrite manager comes off as a rather dismissive "why would you want to do that?" While certainly a valid question – and I wasn't there and I don't know if it was phrased like that exactly – but I'm sure those questions could have been asked in a way that came off as less challenging and dismissive, resulting in a more constructive conversation. You really can learn these things.

Or, maybe the manager was just an asshole/idiot and the unconstructive interaction is all completely unrelated to the author's autism. Could be too.

The first point – "the non-autistic person is not hearing what I'm saying" – sounds like the author might benefit from trying to understand why that is, and adjusting the way they say things. Sometimes small changes can make large differences, and it really doesn't need to cause untold stress. Effective communication is hard and also something everyone has to learn.

I'm fairly sure everyone alive has a neural plasticity above zero.

The thing about the autistic masking causing trauma thing is that I haven’t really seen high quality evidence for the theory. It just sounds intuitively correct.

You're reading more into this piece than is there. The author never advocates that the rest of the world should change. This post only claims that these miscommunication scenarios between experts on the autistic spectrum and allistic people HAPPEN.

They happen to me too.

Understanding the nature of the miscommunication is the first step towards averting it in the future.

> They happen to me too.

And me. I'm not autistic. I don't think I have any kind of Asperger's either.

I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism; it just sounded like a normie, perhaps with an autism diagnosis, who is fretting about communication with their boss.

There seems to be quite a few commenters here making critical comments, as if author is failing to communicate effectively. I wonder if they'd have been so critical, if author hadn't self-identified as autistic. I wonder if some of these commenters have a bad attitude to self-identified autistics.

I've never known an autistic person well; but I worked closely in an office with an autistic developer. I found his code over-complex and hard to follow. Pair-coding with this guy was a waste of time; he couldn't explain what he was doing. Author, however, seems to be able to explain himself fine.

> expect the whole world to change their behaviour

Who is saying this? The article provides a perspective that is not discussed very often as a way of helping people understand these situations from a vantage point they might not have considered. Nobody is demanding anything.

> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.

That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal.

In other words, they weren't saying that the checkout page was bad, they were asking the author's professional opinion as to whether it could be better.

Author here, thanks for reading. That is exactly the first question I would ask. If you ask me to make something better, I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges) and then discuss strategy (amongst which there is technology).

If me asking what the goal is is perceived as patronising, when I’m just trying to do my best, then sure I can work on that. But that requires good faith on the side of the manager. It’s not my decision to shut things down.

I think that this approach limits leadership. Often people are asked to solve both technical and nontechnical problems. People can reasonably ask you both to define "better" and to achieve it. If you expect requirements for everything then you'll place a limit on your influence.

This is what I was going to say but phrased better. The issue isn't autistic vs. allistic, the issue is that you've decided you don't want to devote any brainpower to questions which are not directly technical. Sometimes that's fine, but it also means you are probably at the apex of your professional development. So do it, but also realize it means you're unlikely to get promoted further, and your opinion about technical topics will (rightly!) get ignored because you weren't in the rooms necessary to see any bigger picture.

In fairness, the author's response is demonstrating a better understanding of goals and tradeoffs than the manager.

Asking questions as "in what way do you hope to improve it?" will help the manager understand. Just giving the explanation will sound rude.

Sorry but I don't think this is an issue of autism spectrum, but an issue of how much you hold yourself above others, narcissism to be frank.

Narcissists love to deflect blame and assume the world is against them because they believe that the world should revolve around them.

Well, if you actually asked what the goals of the manager's proposed evaluation/comparison were, great! If you had probed around the context of the discussion a little bit by asking some open questions like "So why did this article pique your interest in relation to our company?" or "That's interesting, I wonder how their approach compares to ours. What do you think?", then even better.

However, that isn't quite what you say in the article: instead you relay that you appear to have shut down the discussion immediately by getting stuck at "this isn't broken and I don't understand why you're asking me to fix it." That is the part that I perceive as patronising, becuase it contains the implicit assumption that your knowledge of the business/tech crossover is superior to your manager's.

Perhaps the developer shouldn't have the entire burden of interpreting everything way more charitably and coming up with far fetched questions. Perhaps some of that "social lubricant" burden should be on the manager as well. I think it was a perfectly acceptable question. The manager could have easily said "well, it's not underperforming per se, I'm just evaluating our current tech stack vs newer tech stacks"

> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved

Is that not an invitation to explain the business goal? What is so patronizing about a direct statement of need?

> it contains the implicit assumption that your knowledge of the business/tech crossover is superior to your manager's.

This might be the core of article.

Some things are knowable and don't need to be assumptions. In these cases, the author expects to have conversations that probe into what is true and what is false.

But some managers are offended by questions that challenge their assumptions. They feel their position gives them authority to overrule the deductive reasoning of their reports.

"Allistic" people sense this, and "up-manage" the egos and sensibilities of managers, without being aware they do it.

I agree. I am pretty good at being social and suave in the workplace (so well I never would have thought I was autistic until age 40), but of course I can be in a bad mood or phrase something wrong. But even if that is the case, shutting down a business conversation because you think your engineer sounds patronizing is just… not great business/tech crossover, to be honest.

> I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges

I think you have answered your own conscience.

You say you don't care about the goals. The only thing you care about is whether the tech is interesting to you or not, which is purely subjective.

Your manager probably already knows this. He knows you are asking a question to which you completely don't care about the answer. It's just that you're not interested.

There is a clear difference between asking questions to learn — and trolling. This is easily visible to any human.

I'll be honest: If you are expecting 100% fulfillment, then it most likely means you have an impossibly high opinion of yourself. If you really wish that, become a freelancer, then go ahead and reject everything you hear. At work, nobody needs to convince your heart and soul for every single thing. Deal with it.

I am not sure why you are so aggressive, nor reading my words charitably. I do care about solving the technical challenges to fulfill the goals in the best way possible. I don't care what the goal is "about," if the business wants to target a specific vertical or wants to grow internationally or wants to prioritize backend tooling. I care about knowing the goal and then doing the best work possible. This is the opposite of trolling.

Heh. "The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already".

Famous last words.

Also a common trope, playing out the "manager" or "business person" as an idiot when in fact often times there are bigger things at play. Looking down on people who aren't like you is not generally a positive. Understanding them is the source of empathy.

Could you expand on why you see the OP's position as patronizing?

AFAICT, the OP identified a minimal set of questions he thought needed to be asked to give a good answer, and tried to ask them.

Are you taking exception to how he sought that information, or something else?

Problem is communication there.

> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it

All questions can be reflected easily.

> Is our checkout page not performing well? > Will a new checkout solve our problem? Will React make our checkout page performing better / improve checkout ?

> Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Can technology change (to React) improve our situation in anyway?

Do they understand the implications of such a switch? > What would be the implications if we switch to React?

Now those questions OP can answer. Manager read a blog post, he obviously don't have answer to this questions, that's why he is asking OP if they should rewrite.

Asking "Why do they think a technology change is a solution?" is making wrong assumption that, manager thinks "technology change is a solution"

If the manager has no clue then why are they bringing the ideas? They could spend all day long pitching dog shit that engineering has to bat away, is that the managers job to be the ideas guy?

Yep. If my manager asks a question like that, there are three appropriate responses:

(1) Unfortunately that would be challenging for us because X.

(2) We've been talking about that for ages, because X, Y, and Z. I'd love it if we could make time for a rewrite next quarter.

(3) Hmm, interesting. Can you share the blog post? (Buys me time to think and follow up later).

What neither of us have time for is for me to walk him through my thought process via the Socratic method.

> What neither of us have time for is for me to walk him through my thought process via the Socratic method.

Hilarious.

Thank you for reading. Of course, this is a highly edited hypothetical situation, and not what happened. I try very hard to understand how I can phrase differently so that we can answer these questions and work together. I think in other comments it became clear that the intent of the questions are not the problem. In fact, I am asking them because I trust the manager to have good answers.

Now, if I come across as patronizing and this leads to a negative outcome (as in, no progress is made in advancing the company’s goals), two things can happen:

- I can work at getting better at communication. The last 2 years, better writing has been my main focus, and this article is part of that. Writing good documents has been tremendously effective. It also only goes so far if someone doesn’t want to engage. In this particular situation, I spent the next week studying React (it wasn’t React in the actual situation) reading 3 books on the chapter and building a toy React prototype, and then wrote up what I thought was a concise report on what was good about it, and what was not so good. I don’t think this document was read.

- The manager can actually put some effort into hearing me out, and understand that I am trying my best here. Maybe I don’t know intuitively what words they want me to use for the questions, but it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext.

If anything, it is easy because I really don’t care about subtext, or patronizing people. Where is the fun in that, compared to the fun of solving problems.

> it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext

Has it occurred to you that just as it is difficult for you to adapt to the communication styles and thought patterns of allistic people, your manager experiences the same difficulty adapting to those of autistic people?

While I believe organizations and managers should try to accommodate neurodiversity and help all types of people be successful in the workplace, it's not unreasonable to expect you to expend some effort adapting as well.

In all your follow-up comments you seem to have some excuse or clarification for why you don't need to adjust your behavior and the problem is obviously that your manager isn't trying hard enough.

When your manager asks a casual question, he is not asking for a formal document describing pros, cons. He's looking for you to make a judgment call, express an opinion, or for you to say "hmmm, I might spend some time this week looking in to that."

Reacting to a two-sentence exchange by spending a week working on a doc is a communication anti-pattern.

> It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal.

Then why didn't the manager ask that instead of mentioning some article some other company?

> It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently

Yes, this is more likely. But autistics expect communication to be true and relevant. When it is not, it sounds like incompetence and dishonesty to an autistic.

If anything, allistic people allow a certain benefit of doubt in communications before assuming incompetence/dishonesty. And then they generally play along with incompetent/dishonest people if the social context requires it.

Oof. This is black and white thinking at its worst.

The author perceives only two possible outcomes, one where things go Right (correct according to his perceptions) and where they go Wrong (correct according to the other party's perceptions).

There's so much missing from this view of the world it's hard to know where to begin.

- The author could be missing some key facts.

- The author could be unaware of other priorities.

- The author could actually be wrong. It happens to the best of us.

- The author may have a history of being Right, getting others to go along with it, and then changing his mind to a different Right. That burns social capital really fast.

There are some algorithms for convincing others in a way that allows them to save face. Nemawashi is a good one to start with. "Disagree and commit" is another.

Best of luck to the author in developing some workplace skills. Once you're out of school, collaboration is more important than getting things Right all the time.

I read the outlined scenarios differently. They each speak to me as the other party engaging in black or white thinking while the author is attempting to maintain an open mind.

This causes the allistic person to perceive pushback. Neurotypicals expect tribemates to follow along, few questions asked. Every question an autistic mind asks to understand the scenario when the other party is looking for political alliance is a reminder to that other party: the autistic person is OTHER -- or at least more OTHER than Fred in Shipping & Receiving.

Great insights.

I often feel like saying: "normal people don't want to think about the details of a question." They grab for the quickest way to stop thinking and label it right or wrong depending on how much they like it.

This is of course an oversimplification.

I really think pinning this on autism is misplaced. Willingness to engage in exploratory conversation is a combination of intelligence and learned habits of mind.

If your boss (anyone, really!) comes to you with an idea and he misunderstands the first thing out of your mouth as a rejection, then you probably should work on how you communicate that thing. Or just surround yourself with smarter people.

Also if your boss doesn't know anything about technology and comes to you and says "I heard about someone doing this on a podcast, what if we made this arbitrary tech choice that doesn't apparently add any value?" then consider shopping for a new boss. Autism really is orthogonal to that situation sucking.

> consider shopping for a new boss. Autism really is orthogonal to that situation sucking.

The boss is doing absolutely the right thing here! Asking a trusted domain expert for an opinion about whether some technical investment would benefit the business.

The alternatives are a) the boss hears the podcast and the next day "rewrite it all in React" is at the top of the backlog, or b) the boss never polls the team about the technical state of things and everyone grumbles there's never enough time for paying down technical debt or experimenting with new ideas.

> Asking a trusted domain expert for an opinion about whether some technical investment would benefit the business.

Sure, that's good management - ask the expert.

But this manager didn't want to clarify the question, so that the expert could give a considered answer.

Perhaps the manager already knew what answer he wanted?

There's this estimating technique: it's called "Guess the number the manager wants you to give". It's much less career-limiting than giving an honest answer.

The boss is doing the minimum of being a good boss.

Its poor communication from the person who should be good at communicating.

The alternatives you’ve outlined are simply worse management - a threat that things could be worse, therefore the least is sufficient.

The issue with this article is how the author is approaching all of these discussions. There is no attempt to see the other person's perspective, or evaluate how the author should be approaching the discussion. This is very common among us Engineers but is a massive failure. If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion, not asking questions that would make you make the same suggestion they made.

I get what you're saying, but at the same time that is exactly what the author is trying to do, just that they are doing it in their own way, which just so happens to feel adversarial to the manager.

There is no right or wrong here. Asking the engineer to "think logically" in terms of how what they're saying might be interpreted is stupid. They are autistic, and you cannot reasonably expect them to do the exact thing autism prevents them from doing.

Asking the manager to try to understand is probably more efficient, but the manager might be geared to think the engineer is adversarial already, possibly because of demeanor, or past experiences getting similarly confused. In this case the manager is probably more able to reason logically that their counterpart is autistic and is probably genuinely asking, but that is not a default, and probably requires some diversity training.

> If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion

Isn't that exactly what the author did, at least in the React discussion? They tried to establish what potential benefits the manager hoped to get from the React rewrite. It was the manager who immediately gave up on the discussion, not the author.

The problem is with the (interpreted) subtext of the question. The question "Is our checkout page not performing well?" might be just a question, but in the context the author was put in, it usually has different implications. Many people would ask such question in order to imply that changing the framework was unnecessary and that the checkout page is already performing well enough. This seems to be how the manager interpreted the question.

There are different ways of asking the same question, with different subtext. He could had started, for example, by saying "We should analyze how our checkout page's performance could improve if we switch to React". This way he would be able to ask essentially the same questions he intended to, but without accidentally implying that the switch is undesirable and unnecessary.

Now, someone working with someone with autism should understand they have trouble with this kind of subtext, and give them more leeway. But most people don't know how to do this, as they're not used to such interactions.

> If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion

For someone having autism, this may be impossible. If they are open about their autism, one could argue that the manager should be the one trying to see the topic from two sides.

One may also need to come up with a shared understanding where the manager has a way to inform the autistic person more explicitly what to do than they would another person (who would get the subtle hints).

This can be pitched as a way for the company to accommodate for having an autistic person on the team (as opposed to firing or not hiring them), in other words that the manager would do this as a way to support the employee, not to be abusive.

What I've seen is that engineering departments tend to be engineers all the way down, so you often end up in a situation where the roles are reversed: the IC is neurotypical and the manager is autistic (especially asperger's).

And then, there is a lot of difficulty for the non-neurotypical to see anything beyond their "literal place on the totem pole", or their title. They lean on their experience to say what is right or wrong, even though they have far less context and the IC is trying not to ruffle feathers or hurt people's feelings.

I’m all for accommodating disability.

But in this case an obvious solution might be to do what your manager suggests simply because he is your manager.

As a non-autistic person I don’t find it difficult to voice my concerns about a particular course of action and then do it anyway if that’s what the boss wants. (I realize the sticking point is “voice my concerns” — doing that in a manner that doesn’t come off as confrontational or undermining can be hard.)

> There is no attempt to see the other person's perspective, or evaluate how the author should be approaching the discussion

The whole point of the article is to provide the perspective of the Autistic. Why are you assuming "There is no attempt to see the other person's perspective"? Why are you demanding the subject of the article be about what you want it to be or for it to cover the other side of the interaction? There are certainly interactions where there is a misunderstanding on the side of the non-autistic and that is what this article is attempting to provide insight into.

Yeah, the example about rewriting a page in React really stood out to me for this. He says "I entertained the question in good faith" but he was clearly just asking "gotcha" questions to try and show the manager what a stupid question it was. And it may very well have been a stupid question, but as you said, he didn't even attempt to understand his manager's perspective.

I can totally understand why his manager got frustrated by this.

> just asking "gotcha" questions

I didn't read them as "gotcha" questions. They looked like straightforward and sensible questions. I wonder if the manager was expecting some kind of kickback, and was braced to be adversarial. Perhaps there's some history here, between author and his manager.

Author here.

I am curious how these are gotcha questions? To me they are the proper questions to ask, as a manager, they probably don’t care about react or vue or any other framework, they care about conversions and revenue and other metrics. That’s exactly what I want to understand, so that I can contextualize and see if React might or might not make sense.

Reasons why React might actually make sense, to show I didn’t just cherry-pick this as a “well duh obviously it’s stupid”:

- we use shopify as a backend, and they published a nifty new react checkout widget that we could replace our convoluted checkout with - all our web developers are actually coming from react, and hate the current jquery mess, and really want to change. It would be time-intensive, but team morale would skyrocket, - another department is planning to move to react as well

After a long time in tech, I really have learnt to not really care about technology that much (as you might see in my article about PHP and JS :).

you seem to be very uncharitable to the author. Why would you assume some sort of maliciousness? Why is it that "he was clearly just asking "gotcha" questions to try and show the manager what a stupid question it was"? What are you basing this on?

Source: have worked with many smart and not so smart autistic people over the years. Have many friends “neuro atypical” and think I’m probably somewhere on the spectrum (aren’t we all?).

Autistic people have what seems like a much higher tolerance for bullshit both in the context of wanting to argue a point to finality or to obsess over a particularly detail until they’ve reached a shared plateau of understanding. Many times this is actually a very satisfying method of conversation, at least for me. Other times it can feel like talking to a wall.

Your mileage may vary.

> think I’m probably somewhere on the spectrum (aren’t we all?).

That, right there, is one of the least helpful things that can ever be said in these kinds of circumstances. It's understandable, and it's common, so this doesn't lay blame on you, but on the underlying cultural assumption.

"Aren't we all?"

Those who have truly neuro-atypical behaviours, to where it can be assessed as placing them somewhere else on the spectrum, will receive less helpful responses when people think along those lines. Their concerns are more easily pushed aside, and the things that can help bridge the gap are less easily implemented.

It may sound accepting, but it's a trivialising statement. It makes things harder, for everyone.

That poster was just trying to be inclusive, not trivialize. You are still part of a society composed of other humans.

I think less division and more inclusivity in spite of differences is a good place to be, while still acknowledging the struggles / addressing problems of minorities without making them “special” aka outcasts.

Ultimately, you choose how you react to something. You can choose to be offended and look at the surface level of what a person is saying, or you can dig into the essence of the essence and determine the nature, intention, and purpose of a statement.

Most people barely have their own lives in order, and I mean that in a neurological sense. Expecting others to also simultaneously keep track of nuanced triggers which are also not universally applicable, more individual situations, when they are operating in good faith is more counterproductive for everyone.

> I’m probably somewhere on the spectrum (aren’t we all?)

there are useful distinctions, and this is not one of them.

there are socially inept people that miss a requisite threshold of social cues.

It’s not clear in the article, but if this is all from the same company, this sounds like a really bad company to work for. The author is probably right that they’re being treated unfairly because of their autism (which is wrong), but I’d bet that the neurotypical engineers at the company also have experiences of being dismissed by management.

The example that stuck out to me was “should we migrate our website to React”. The questions the author wanted to ask seemed like very normal questions to ask, and good questions that any good engineer would ask before answering a question like that (unless they already have a lot of context about the website in question).

I don’t have autism, but I’ve worked with people with autism, and at my job I think they were treated more respectfully than what the author describes. It’s possible that they’re being mistreated but I’m just not seeing it though.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that although I can’t directly relate to the author’s experience, I would still recommend that they try to find a new job with a less toxic workplace culture.

What I expected: an article about the common ways in which autistic people don't realize they're wrong and therefore refuse to admit it. For example, autistic people will often optimize their engineering decisions around a performance metric (speed, memory usage, etc) that doesn't matter much, rather than a business metric (ease of use, maintainability) that does. When you push back, they will accuse you of not valuing "good engineering", just like this author does.

What I got: an article lecturing neurotypicals about how, whenever they think an autistic person may be wrong, it's actually just because autistic people are more holistic thinkers and know more than them.

The author explicitly states that "When these conflicts arise, here are some things that might be happening."

I think that's pretty important. This is not an article that says "I'm always right, people are just too stupid to notice that, here are mistakes they're making."

It says, or at least it reads to me as, "People often think I'm stubborn and can't acknowledge when I make a mistake. Sometimes, not always, that is a result of miscommunication, because my brain works differently from many others. Here are some of the ways it does that, and how it leads to that wrong perception."

His thesis is that autistic people are unfairly characterized as not being able to admit when they wrong… and then he proceeds to explain that he’s almost never wrong.

I don't understand why so many people are saying this. The article specifically says at the begging:

"When these conflicts arise, here are some things that might be happening"

SOME and MIGHT are being completely ignored and replaced with absolutes by many commenters. At no point does it claim to be an exhaustive list of every possible single interaction, nor does it say that there are no other explanations.

If anything, these kinds of reactions are proving the point that the Autistic are being misinterpreted (or in this case completely misrepresented).

Most commenters are saying this based on the conclusion the author ends with. The lines that stood out to me is "I don't care much for saying false things to appease someone's ego. In cases like this, I'm not the one who can't acknowledge being wrong." They decided that everyone around them needs to change.

I'm diagnosed and have adopted a sort of "default wrong" approach in situations like these because I realized, well, I am often wrong! Starting from the stance of "This could be wrong but.." and then jointly building upon and testing my hypothesis (that, in the past, I may have declared to be inarguable!) seems to result in far more pleasant interactions and consensus.

> 1. The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying.

It's possible that they're not smart enough, literally. I find ease of communication is uncorrelated with whether they're on the spectrum or otherwise. It's their raw intelligence level. Somehow the bandwidth between our brains is really high. They often know what I'm saying before I've finished my sentence, because they've already figured it out and have predicted what I'm going to say. But if you're talking to someone with 110-120 IQ, you really have to slow down and spell things out for them, and some things they will actually just never grok unless you have 30 minutes to explain the abstract foundational concepts behind what you're saying.

Wow.

He may sound arrogant, but he’s not wrong.

I imagine the difference in standard deviations is a good metric for cognitive distance. Mentally retarded people (-2) to ordinary people (0) are like normal people to gifted people (+2). And if hackerlight is more intelligent than that (3+), _smart_ people are dumb to him. Some studies show that mutual communication suffers on specific topics after about a standard deviation of difference.

There are people too dumb for addition; why shouldn’t there be a lot of people too dumb to understand hackerlight’s point about computer science?

I can’t imagine dedicating this much time analyzing whether or not I can acknowledge when I’m wrong. It’s almost like this entire piece is an elaborate rationalization the author is making rather than admitting they are wrong.

> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it.

> In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question. Is our checkout page not performing well?

> However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.

If this is what actually happened, the manager is terrible and unprofessional. I feel I run into situations like this as well, where I ask a simple question and because the person asking is treating me like an NPC in a game they're playing but not telling me, I don't get the question answered and furthermore I get something attributed to me (e.g. refusal, uncooperativeness, etc.) that isn't true at all.

I wish there was some way to easily communicate universally that "I mean the literal meaning of these words, nothing more, nothing less."

Imagine you hear throughout your life that you can't admit you're wrong or that your _kind of person_ can't admit they're wrong. Wouldn't it be a sign of healthy introspection to dedicate time to analyze whether that's correct?

And a fundamental requirement to admit to being wrong is, well, actually being wrong. If you analyze a situation and find that you're factually correct, you haven't failed to admit to being wrong.

> If you analyze a situation and find that you're factually correct, you haven't failed to admit to being wrong.

Ah, but here's the thing: if your interlocutor has some motive other than truth-seeking then they will demand you admit error regardless of whether you are actually in error. This means to them you can fail to admit error even when no error occurred.

It's circumstances like this that the author is analyzing by taking "I was right" as a hypothesis - the article doesn't claim this is always the case but wants to make some particular conclusions about cases where no error was made.

Unless the author is correct 100% of the time, it should be easy to point to examples where the author admits they’re wrong, which would trivially negate the hypothesis that autistic people can’t admit they’re wrong. Instead of providing examples, the author choose to write many hundreds of words that basically boil down to “I’m not wrong, everyone else is wrong.” That doesn’t sound like healthy introspection to me. It sounds like rationalizing.

> Wouldn't it be a sign of healthy introspection to dedicate time to analyze whether that's correct?

I wonder if Author is in fact autistic. It seems (not sure if I've got this right) that author wasn't diagnosed until his forties. I'd have expected a diagnosis of autism to occur pre-teen.

When you notice your self-perception is out of alignment with how other people perceive you, especially on an axis you value (e.g., intellectual humility in the author's case), I think that's a great occasion to spend some time analyzing how much truth there is to each perception.

If you discover your self-perception is wrong, the next step might be thinking about how you can change your behavior and clarify your own judgement. If you determine that others misperceive you, the next step might be thinking about how to change that.

The author didn't get far into a next step, but the first step is critical and valuable as far as it goes, IMO.

Just because you can't imagine a perspective doesn't mean it isn't real, my assumption is that you aren't on the spectrum.

For me, the claim is, "Why do you always have to be right?"

I've made the mistake hundreds of times in my life where I put a lot of effort into a project, only to discover that I missed something obvious at the start that invalidated the whole approach. Like selecting the architecture-defining processor for an electronics design, completing the design around it, and then discovering weeks later that it's obsolete.

It's not about ego. I've tried to explain that I want to be sure I am moving forward on the basis of correct information and reasoning. It's a desire to not risk wasting time & effort.

I don't think I'm (very?) autistic. Still, I share all 4 points of experience with OP, most frequently with one person with whom I've worked off and on for 15 years. We've grown over the years and learned to some extent to accommodate each other's way of thinking and communicating.

As I wrote in another comment, I think it's very helpful to notice the mismatch between how I understand myself and how others perceive me. It's also worthwhile to find ways to bridge the gap. E.g., in the "rewrite the checkout in React?" scenario, OP might be perceived as more open to the question if they offered, "That's not a small project, but we could definitely do it" before asking questions or if they started with an open question like "What might motivate us to rewrite the checkout in React?" instead of a closed (yes/no) question.

Learning to speak in a way that helps people understand your intentions doesn't require compromising your truth-seeking values: it lets you enjoy the journey more with more companions.

A lot of the problems mentioned here are absolutely an issue for every intelligent human being, and not at all exclusive to autistic people. It might be more annoying to them? That I don't know but is hell of annoying for anyone that is high in industriousness.

I'm specially annoyed when the interlocutor puts the burden of his own lack of understanding in you when you're trying to make a point across. If they secretly declared war on your idea, they can pick the least generous interpretation of anything you're saying and pretend you are an ignorant and pose as dismissive because you or your idea are not worthy of their consideration.

Short term they might be appearing smart but you know it was like trying to teach how to play chess to a pigeon that only bumped all the pieces of the board and look you in the eye wondering why you are so stupid.

Plot twist: you might be a little bit stupid in a twisted way: you were too generous with the wrong person. Giving too much attention to the wrong toxic interlocutor.

I don't think it's fair to assume the counterparty here is a "toxic interlocutor". Communication is hard, very hard, and engineers typically suck at it. And it is absolutely the burden of the speaker to communicate their ideas properly to the listener; it sounds like you're saying "the way I explained it is good enough for me so if you didn't get it you're an idiot". Finally, "secretly declared war on your idea"? This sounds rather overdramatic.

I'm with you in not always assuming the worst.

Not at all.

I'm also with you in that communication is hard and people high in industriousness and analytical can easily have a hard time with communication. Specialist have to pay attention to not forget how is it to communicate with "normal people" and speak more languages than nerdese.

Said that, I really don't think that evil has to be underestimated one bit. Ill intentions do exist.

Also, political agendas and ideological possession are brutally strong motivators for "secretly declaring war on your idea". Cancel culture is an obvious expression of that once you remove the secretive part of it and becomes overt instead of covert.

Most people are just bad at communication. Actually, neurotypical people especially and more so as they had less of the need to develop better communication strategies. That is why they can feel frustrated talking with a neurodivergent person, as it exposes their own flaws.

That said, a business is neither a democracy nor a meritocracy. Other than hitting some baseline of required performance, your actually work performance on the job does not matter much for career success. It is all about whether the right people like you or not.

You absolutely should be honest and direct when communicating anything that is in your immediate circle of concern. If you estimate the task will take you x time, never give in to pressure to lower it. Be clear what you can do and can't do and how long things might take you. Basically be reliable.

Everything else, well you can be right or you can be liked. Yeah, the company might make a mistake but does it effect you personally? If not, why bother arguing? Just go with the flow and enjoy the ride.

> 1. The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying.

> 2. I need to ask questions before forming an opinion.

I'm not considered as being on the spectrum (except when "everyone is on the spectrum" for inclusivity reasons of not alienating a socially inept person) and I've had an experience distinct with workers at big tech firms

when I offer a perspective they say I'm being defensive and impossible to help. I think I'm having a conversation, and they think I'm being defensive.

does anybody else have this experience? like, I'm presented with a unilateral view/criticism of something I did, and I'm still forming an opinion of it gathering more information and open to correcting myself or the perception, but any response is seen as defensiveness

given who this comes from, it makes me think that conversations within these firms go this way

I encountered some people that percive any discussion as arguing and frame every information exchange in combative terms (defensive, attacking, winning, loosing). They also tend to exhibit some narcissistic behaviors and qualities so I wouldn't think they are the norm.

I think you've just met some people from that flavor of assholes.

IMO autism causes an absence self-awareness, and because of that inability to recognize and modulate their own behavior, they are naturally defensive when you point out their errant behavior. In a way it's almost cruel. They don't, and can't see themselves the way other people do, and pointing out a flaw just makes things worse.

Is it wrong to say that a person with autism can't really help themselves?

I'm autistic and it definitely doesn't cause a lack of self-awareness. If anything I'm more aware than most neurotypical folks.

I can't speak for every autistic person, but at least in my experience when people do point out our mistakes it often tends to be lacking context. Indeed we don't see ourselves the way others do, but what is sometimes flaw in communication with a neurotypical person is exactly what I would want to do with another autistic person. Pointing out mistakes of this nature in a blunt way is unpleasant, and I've often been expected to be able to intuit the feelings of neurotypical people in these situations even though I literally think and feel differently.

It can be quite frustrating, and I've found that many autistic people will become defensive about personal qualities because of past poor experiences in giving/receiving feedback.

I wish neurotypical folks could see the other side and experience what it's like to be around mostly autistic people. I have no doubt many would become defensive when they've been told again and again that they're being too loud, that they're not discussing they're ideas in enough depth, that they're not being calm enough, or whatever autistic predisposition they'd end up accidentally bumping up against. Thinking and feeling differently from the majority of folks is difficult, but it's even more difficult when folks expect you to know and understand where there mind is at.

> I wish neurotypical folks could see the other side and experience what it's like to be around mostly autistic people.

Personally I suspect (without too much evidence) that what would happen if such an experiment were honestly tried is that the autists would "route around" the NT socially rather than trying to change them. The game of trying to squash individuality isn't terribly appealing to autists for obvious reasons, albeit historically contingent ones.

That's a bit reductive. I'd say that generally, autistic people have more of an issue getting implicit rules, expectations and social rituals, but that doesn't mean they're not self-aware. In fact I'd argue that they are painfully self-aware, especially when masking - that is actively emulating behaviors expected of them without them being intuitive. It can be pretty stressful to consider the impact of everything you do that other people trivially do automatically.

Do you know of any research that concurs with your opinion?

This article does give me a little more insight into working with divergent thinkers. However, this one part gave me pause:

"Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic."

I would have to disagree here. Authority structure is useful and sometimes there are multiple good options. Not "giving in" every now and then can lead to analysis paralysis.

Thanks for reading. I did indeed think a lot about leaving this sentence in / writing it like this. What I think you mean is that compromising is necessary to move forward in a team. That is 100% true, in fact most (if not all?) technical decisions are just not based in fact, as much as I would like them to. What matters is that everybody understands why a compromise has been made, and what the pros and cons were that led to that decisions.

I am fine shipping the most horrible code if we all agree that we discussed the pros and cons. This also makes it easy to avoid the “I told you so”-trap which further degrades work climate. Instead, we can go back to the original design document, see that a con we expected has happened, and pick the discussion up from there.

I realize I forgot the second half.

“giving in” without forming a compromise and making sure everybody agrees on what the compromise is however is just appeasing a bully (say “we do it this way because I’m the manager and you’re not” or “we do it this way because I have 10 years of experience and you don’t”).

I should probably have given it a bit more context.

Maybe I'm missing something but I have a hard time seeing what any of this has to do with autism. Everything in this article sounds like the lament of an intellectually honest and rational person working in an environment filled with people who are not.

I do recognize that we are only getting one side of the story here, but giving the author the benefit of the doubt, that is what I see in this post.

> "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic.

This doesn’t sound right. You are not going to agree with 100% of someone else’s decisions. No matter how much you discuss something, no matter if you understand all the ramifications, everything there could possibly be. Sometimes you’re just not going to agree with the direction someone else is taking, and you’re going to have to accept it.

And that’s okay. It’s not toxic to disagree with someone, or to accept that even though you might disagree, they’re going to do X their way (or that you’re going to have to do X their way because that’s what they want). That’s not office politics, that’s life.

If not agreeing means "let's agree to disagree" then that's fine and healthy.

If not agreeing means "I need to pretend I agree even when I have good reason to disagreee because this person needs to be appeased" that is not healthy and contributes to a toxic workplace.

This post is talking about the latter scenario.

What I’ve found useful is to dig until we understand why we disagree. Assuming the other person reasoned their self into a reasonable position, then if we have different answers then we probably came from different starting points.

Usually we can work backwards and discover that we have different starting assumptions or work forwards and discover that we have different goals. Those pieces tend to be more ambiguous and much easier to “agree to disagree”. And it’s why both people can be 100% that they are correct - because in each of their frames of reference they are.

This was a big red flag for me, too. There’s a reason the term “bike-shedding” exists among developers.

You want to keep the bikes dry, and what color you paint the shed, or whether you call the paint “tan” or “beige,” matters not at all. Labeling people who disagree with you about the paint color as “bullies,” and fighting them to the death, is profoundly useless. Just ask yourself what really matters, and let the rest go.

The thing is that sometimes people are right about a thing, and they know it, but they're not good at debate or arguing.

Other people are good at arguing and they often win debates, but in this hypothetical instance they are wrong.

I see this happen all the time, but I don't see anyone talk about it. Like your ability to think logically and express logical arguments doesn't 100% correlate with your knowledge, experience and intelligence, and just because you win every argument doesn't mean you're right every time.

That's why it's important to back down in arguments, we're all human and we all make mistakes.

> Because I tend to think holistically, my questions may seem unrelated to the original question. I reason in terms of systems, networks, interfaces, communication patterns, and feedback loops (...) Often, people will be surprised, not understanding why I am asking a certain question. Queue frustration and the dismissive "you're not getting it."

I get this a lot (relatively speaking), or I used to, especially when I was more active on places like reddit. Don't think I'm autistic, but it baffles me nonetheless. I mean, of course that a on-point and very focused discussion may be of value, in many cases it actually may be quite interesting, but imo the point of a internet forum (or of a general discussion, more largely speaking) is to try and reason exactly about these "holistic" approaches, no matter how bad or good the respective takes may be.

If it matters I find that people here on HN are a lot more open to that type of holistic/"let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture" discussions, without necessarily resorting to accusations of "you're not getting it" or "you're changing the subject" (which is partially true, of course).

You might be right about the ultimate outcome, but I think the questions you ask may be wrong. In the example of changing the checkout to React I might ask myself would it increase development trajectory and look for numbers related to that. Things like how many features were delivered last quarter and what was the scope size of those features? How might these things fit into a react framework and does it improve delivery times on our future project plans? Is our system a proprietary one and how long would it take to onboard a new developer vs hiring someone that knows React and can add value within a week?

It's easy to decipher that nothing is wrong with the checkout page as it exists from performance. What's really being proposed here is an attempt to get ahead of it before it becomes a problem. Keeping the growth needs of an engineering team in mind you have to remember nobody wants to work on a technical stack that uses ancient technology and hasn't been updated because "it's not broken". The evaluation just seems like it's too narrow of a focus the way it's worded here. Just my 2 cents though.

but I think the questions you ask may be wrong

Exactly this. You asked one question that you summarized dismissively as "...because they had read a blog post about another company doing it."

You could have stroked their ego a little by saying that you don't have the breadth of perspective that they do, before asking questions about what they perceive as the advantages of switching to React. Would it help get the team more visibility or credibility? Would it help advance their work goals?

What they should have asked you is: How long will it take to switch? What is your technical opinion of making a switch? They are not asking for push back about what concrete problems need to be solved. There are infinite ways to implement a solution, for some reason a manager focused on this way to create a solution, they want to know how long it will take and if you are interested in doing it, or would hate doing it.

“A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it. I entertained the question in good faith. However, in order to make an informed decision, I needed to understand a few things:

Is our checkout page not performing well? Will a new checkout solve our problem? Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Do they understand the implications of such a switch? In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question. I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.”

I have this problem which is that I don’t really understand what autism is supposed to be. Because the example of autism described above just seems like sound decision making. The person who wants to rewrite some software because they read a blog post about some programming language is just a person who doesn’t have a good understanding of what engineering and software development are.

As a fellow autistic in the industry, I've struggled with these same things as well. The world wants to tell us that it's entirely our responsibity to adapt to it, and there's probably some grains of truth there. But what I've learned from years of working on complicated systems is... nothing is so simple as it seems. I've read dozens of books about interpersonal relationships, taken classes, therapy, etc. and at the end of the day what I end up doing is a lot less than anyone would think is necessary.

1. If someone isn't listening, stop talking. Nobody is benefiting from that, and it's a waste of your time and energy. I get significantly better engagement with people when they can interact with me for information rather than getting an information dump. On rare occasions they ask me something that does have a long and complicated answer, I lead with that fact and ask if they want the full details or as brief of a summary as I can make (-vvv or -q).

2. Let people into your thought process. The way we associative thinkers work is completely different from what linear thinkers are doing. By walking them through your thought process (which is infuriatingly slow this way) they actually can vaguely follow why you're asking what you're asking. It also allows you to give early feedback. "There are lots of concerns that should be considered before re-writing any already working software..." Over time people will begin to understand _why_ they should ask you about certain things and they can be more understanding on what's going on under the covers.

3. I have expressed my concerns and don't believe this is the best strategy, however I will document these and will observe your orders. If it's something that keeps happening, I'm more likely to move jobs than I am to move mountains in an organizational structure. I also think it's worth at least being aware of the game, as someone who's had it played against them to significant detriment before.

4. Honestly, #1 and #2 solve this problem. It's not concincing to most NTs to recite information but allowing them to interact with you to discover the information themselves allows them to realize that you do understand the information at a deep level. We tend to recite things because a scripted response is a lot easier for us to provide, but it's not actually all that useful in the context of conveying information.

I read this as writing from someone who has a hard time seeing from other people's perspective. I believe part of the responsibility falls on the author. While they acknowledge that they aren't great at communication, their conclusion does not include working on soft skills.

It's something I realized when I started tutoring, if a student fails to understand you, it's not their fault for not understanding. It's on you, as the tutor, to communicate in a way that gets through to them. The ability to communicate your ideas easily and concisely is something you can learn.

Here's a good list of books, although I have not personally read all of them. https://socialself.com/blog/books-improve-social-skills/#6 At the end of the day though, real world experience is the easiest. Volunteering has been my favorite thing to do to get to know new people and practice my social skills.

I do not agree with the generalization of the author about all allistic people having the exact weakness outlined in the post. Effective communication is skill non-neurodivergent people work on to master too. What I'd argue is that allistic people learn more easily because they have a feedback loop they can rely on to self correct and autistic people need more clear examples to learn from.

"I don't care much for saying false things to appease someone's ego. In cases like this, I'm not the one who can't acknowledge being wrong." is just a very cold approach to social interactions. There's a time and place for when that kind of clinical approach is necessary, but it's not appropriate for every social interaction.

I understand where you coming from, and I do agree. I approached learning social skills as rigorously as I did technology books, and it has helped me grow a huge network of friends of all backgrounds, get married, move continents, get on well with pretty much all of my colleagues. It also ironically made me think I was not autistic for decades, because how could I be since I have such good social skills.

But I still have values that I hold on to. If someone adamantly states they are right about something, and turn it into a “social skill showdown” where one has to feign agreement and cave in to some sort of authority, then count me out. I know other people do it, I kind of understand why, but it’s not for me. I don’t think it’s cold at all, it’s just me prioritizing my values.

What I’m realizing as I write these articles and am more open about my introspection is that a lot of allistic people, for all their talk about empathy and theory of mind, really don’t try very hard to see things from the other side. Maybe I can’t intuitively chose just the right words to make my question not sound patronizing, maybe I don’t even understand what “sounding patronizing” is. At that point it’s really on that person to put in a bit of effort and skip over the jab and realize the question is probably not meant to patronize.

Otherwise it’s like asking a blind person to just look where they’re going when they’re walking into a wall.

With additional context, I think that's fair to ask but I want to believe there's still things you can meaningfully do to make these interactions feel more intuitive. I would argue that allistic people do see from the other side but have a hard time understanding why austic people end up with a different conclusion. People care how other people see them, that's true to a certain degree. People might not change, but everyone feels affected by other's perceptions of them. There's a lot of conditioned connotations that come from how we grow up in society, so it's not a small bit of effort to move on from a jab or patronizing talk. If someone has worked hard to gain respect and not feel insecure about themselves, patronizing talk is hard to move forward from. In that situation it doesn't matter if it was intentional or not.

People like other people that make them laugh, so I don't know how helpful this will be but I would say try your hand at incorporating some humor into your speech, if you don't already. Focus mainly on humor that punches up, lean towards the humor of Hasan Minaj and not towards the humor of The Big Bang Theory.

It's also not about feigning agreement or caving in to authority. You have to let other people be wrong. It's more nuanced than I can go into here via comments, but I imagine you understand. Letting other people be wrong shouldn't be about prioritizing your values, it's about respecting their learning process as well. If you want to prioritize your values despite understanding that it comes at the cost of respecting other people's learning process, that's a choice you can make. Intent doesn't negate the consequences of how words might affect someone else. I am trying my best to be respectful, I hope I didn't offend with anything I said because that's not my intent. I apologize if I did already at some point.

Thank you for the healthy discourse with me, I appreciate it.

> someone who has a hard time who has a hard time seeing from other people's perspective

You're blaming someone for their disability - this is basically the equivalent of blaming a paraplegic for not being able to walk. Social skills are almost entirely an intellectual process (as opposed to an instinctual process) for many autistic people. It's not like learning to ride a bike (as it is for neurotypical people), it's like learning algebra.

Here are some resources on accepting neurological differences, as opposed to trying to fix them: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/autism/neurodivers...

I apologize if that came off as something with a negative connotation, it wasn't meant to. That article was not as helpful as you probably intended. I also didn't realize how gender norms are inherently tied to the theory and diagnosis of autism according to certain frameworks in the article you linked.

I don't this it's fair to argue that difficulty understanding other perspectives/lack of empathy is something you should accept the same way you do a disability. It's not the same at all.

Knowing how your words will be understood from someone else's perspective is something that can be learned. I had to learn it when I started tutoring. Students with poor performance struggle due to the consequence of failure to teach, much more than a failure to learn. I didn't say it would be easy. Intellectual or instinctual doesn't make a difference as it can still be learned. Autism is very diverse in presentation so I know there are limits to the generalizations I am making.

Seems like op can’t acknowledge that they are wrong when they are actually right.

As many other things you may never actually do it, but it’s good to have that option.

Right because “neurotypical” people acknowledge when they’re wrong all the time.

The author's view is very relatable (to me). I am going to bookmark it since it verbalize my feeling so fittingly. I am not sure I am autistic, but I have to be to some extent.

I can see where the essay goes partial. The author focuses on explaining self, but neglect in analyzing why others are having issues understanding the author. And I think I understand the reason -- the author is simply (much) more interested in solving the engineering problems than the political problems. The author probably understand the importance of politics, but simply not interested.

I can relate to that. I don't even think that is a problem. If you are happy focusing on technical problems and want to avoid the political side, so be it. However, I am concerned that the author mentions burnout. If you are having risk of burning out, then apparently there is an issue and the author is stubbornly avoid addressing the issue.

The answer may not be -- you need learn and play politics. It could be -- you need learn to balance yourself. It depends on individuals, but refusing to address it is wrong.

I actually really enjoy the "politics" part of it. I think it's just a loaded word for "get many people to align and work together productively," and it's absolutely fascinating from a technical point of view. So many "technical" problems can be solved by just communicating, the best feature is the one that doesn't need to be written.

What I don't enjoy is when politics turns into bullying, where one has to give in to someone without proper reasons. This is for example a manager pushing through a technical decision the team doesn't agree with "because they're the manager", or a senior engineer dismissing a junior engineer "because you're just a kid". Expecting people to go along with that is what I would just walk away from.

A lot of what your are writing happens to other people as well.

For the "I know a lot" part, deep knowledge is open not recognized simply because people do not sense it. Unfortunately being recognized often means doing self promotion.

For the "I need to ask questions" part - I do too. And every serious engineer did too.

So far it looks tout are in a company that is not a great fit.

As for the rest, I am affraid that your may need to study people interactions me. It is not always politics, sometimes the way you engage other people.

I know that this is easier said than done, especially in your case but I would take it as a challenge. It cups make your like and intentions much easier.

Thanks! I hope you read this. My intent with the article was to say "you might thing someone can't acknowledge when they're wrong, but that's not always the case. here's my experiences." it might or might not help.

I am acutely aware that studying people interactions help me. I've lived in 3 countries and passed as native in each. I've come so much further than I ever thought possible because I studied interactions extensively, and practiced them even more. All that "talk to a 100 strangers every week", "learn public speaking," "learn to listen," "watch every possible show in the original language?" "immerse yourself in the culture." I've done it and then some, for years.

The treacherous effect of this is that the better you get, the fewer people believe you when you say that you are autistic / have trouble with reading people (I didn't believe it myself), and thus the more it is held against you when you actually make a mistake. "There is no possible way you couldn't know acting like X comes across as arrogant." In fact, it won't even be chalked up to cultural differences because no one realizes I'm french / german. They just think I have a slight speech impediment.

There is so much bronze-tier advice in this thread that shows that people have actually never tried or practiced what they are preaching here. There is so much rewording and "have you tried asking the question this way" or "you should do X," when really the words seem to matter the least. It's so much more about posture, demeanor, tone of voice, facial expressions than what you actually say. The irony of people immediately making the boldest assumptions and dishing out advice—all the while having no way of knowing if any of what they say is true (they don't know me)—is quite striking.

I tried not to engage on that topic, or bring up how many books about behaviour, workplace dynamics, politics, body language I have gone through because I don't like being combative.

I have found that sometimes nobody is wrong. Sometimes it is a preference that is being debated (once you dig in). As such, it's not as important to be right as it is to preserve a working relationship. I also try to decide if the thing being discussed the "hill to die on" or is it not really worth debating? Advice I give my kids to think about is- if you think you are right and it feels like the whole world insists you are wrong, take a second and try to make sure you are as right as you think you are. In my experience, it is a rare thing that everyone is totally wrong about something. And- in the end, if you're right, you're right-- but does it really matter? Does being "right" help you or those you are debating in that specific situation-- or is it only pride that motivates you? I think we need to relearn that it's okay to disagree.

I liked the article

> 3. I care more about doing good work than office politics.

This whole section illustrates the uncrossable chasm of not “getting” people, while at the same time believing in your own smartness

You should strive for general I, not just logical I

People are not computers, they don’t share your logic and your own logic is fallible as it runs on top of unreliable wet-ware

Let's be honest, that's what happened here. There are many reasons to overhaul a frontend, and performance is just one of them. Maybe the existing checkout is a mess that only OP understands how to maintain. Maybe engineers and designers want to find better common ground to work together and this change could facilitate that. I'm sure you can think of other reasons.

The narrow thinking is on OPs side here. They straight up assumed that this change was just chasing shiny new things (and, well, React isn't that shiny anymore), that all changes had to serve the user and not also organizational goals and then shut it down with the nearest plausible excuse.

I'm not sure I understand what this has to do with autism. Eg the "should we use React" situation - I have quite a few colleagues too (presumably not all of them autistic) who tend not to answer directly the questions that they're being asked until they can reframe them in a clean way going back to first principles. I think it serves them well in some instances like systems design where this kind of behavior is particularly useful, and it's very counterproductive in other settings such as dealing with higher level execs, who tend not to ask the "right" questions because they don't have all the context, but feel like they're being stonewalled when asking what (to them) sounds like a simple question. Balancing this is a communication challenge for everyone.

"You can't acknowledge when you're wrong" isn't about whether or not you're actually wrong, whether or not you acknowledge it, or even about you, really. It's often a social ploy to make your agreement unnecessary for the rest of the group to commit to collective understanding and action. "Oh, Jim just can't admit when he's wrong" lets the rest of the group use a "consensus of people we think are behaving reasonably" instead of actual consensus.

(The biggest other thing this can be is a complaint that the victim doesn't let the complainant win enough arguments, and that the audience should consider more of the arguments won without the victim conceding and with an extra penalty of being seen as a sore loser.)

My little brother is autistic and admits he's wrong all the time. The title of this is trash.

The title is a quote from other people, and the content of the article is an attempt to explain why the quote is incorrect; that it's just a different style of communication that's being interpreted as not admitting you're wrong.

The article is arguing against the myth that autistic people don’t admit when they’re wrong, hence the quotation marks in the title.

Oh man. Reading this hit hard on so many points for me. I am also autisic. I don’t agree generally with some of the conclusions and approach of the author, but I suspect they are navigating a truely hostile (to them) work environment.

Now before you dismiss me, consider that autistic people are generally speaking… awful at recognizing situations that are actively hostile to them. And yes, Neurotypicals are sometime quite hostile to autisic people. I’ve been a victim of discrimination and outright campaigns to isolate and harass me. It happens. Sometimes it’s on purpose, sometimes it is a natural result of repeated conflict.

Now, let’s say for example that you had a co-worker who actually had it out for you; would actively undermine your work, sabotage your efforts… for whatever reason. As a nuerotypical you would recognize this behavior quite quickly and develop a strategy around it. Perhaps that strategy involves talking to the right people, executing some kind of trap, confront the behavior head on, or simply walking away. Since an autisic person has difficulty detecting negative intent, they would instead try to puzzle out why the “clearly wrong” person just won’t listen to them. From that they draw these conclusions about themselves and the world around them about their behavior because they cannot understand the behavior of Nuerotypicals (to be fair here NTs don’t understand our behavior either). Trust me, I’ve drawn some pretty wild conclusions myself at times.

To illustrate, I recently worked with a very Narcissistic and toxic personality. By all outside observers this was 100% dark triad kind of behavior in this person (I verified it with multiple independent opinions). Anyway, this person was so difficult to work with, so directly hostile, and so stressful to work with that I re-entered therapy where I, at 36 years of age finally learned two very important things.

1. Some people will want to fuck you up, just because they don’t like you. Not everyone is good or does good things. This is “irrational” but it is real.

2. Not everyone had the same capacity as you do… and you don’t have the same capacity as others. For those without your capacity you must teach, and for those that have capacity that you lack, you must learn.

These two “rules” have finally demystified some aspects of office realpolitik for me.

I suspect that the author, my fellow autistic, has yet to also understand this about people. Their intent might purposefully be to oppose you and undermine you. Ignore it, work around it, or leave. They will never be an ally to you. Stop trying.

I recognize myself quite well in those words.

Thank god I didn't have to encounter an actively hostile person yet, but my big discovery last year was indeed that not everyone at work is motivated by doing a good job. It obviously sounds obvious when put like this, but it is something I wasn't able to put together in my own life. I have since left this job (my immediate colleagues and most people I worked with were great, it takes just a few individuals to really disrupt and dismantle good engineering), and am now in a place where I slowly had to discover how amazingly efficient and productive things can be when I am given trust and enough autonomy. I think I have 2. pretty well figured out. What I don't know how to handle (as evidenced by some comments here) is when to divulge how much I study / what fields I have a lot of experience in. I never understood where the boundary is between people thinking you are a know-it-all and arrogant, and thinking you are an idiot.

> What I don't know how to handle (as evidenced by some comments here) is when to divulge how much I study / what fields I have a lot of experience in. I never understood where the boundary is between people thinking you are a know-it-all and arrogant, and thinking you are an idiot.

I think the thing to understand, is that non-autistics are very, very particular about the difference between what's inside their own mind, and what's inside your mind. Even on a topic that you may know "everything" about, you still know nothing about what the other person knows about the same subject. Everything on the right side of the below drawing (assuming that you're the one on the left) is in the dark to you, or close to it. And, likewise, everything on your side is in the dark to the other person.

  |   O                                                           O   |
  | ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
  |   |                                                           |   |
  |  / \                                                         / \  |

The process of discussion, as seen from the non-autistic person's point of view, is to let you peek into their mind, and to let you see what they know (or don't know) about the topic that's being discussed. And they expect you to let them peek into your mind, and to let them see what you know about the subject. What they are very particular about is that their facts (about the subject at hand) are their facts, and your facts are your facts. Their mental model is to try and align their own thoughts about the subject at hand with your thoughts about the subject. Their goal is for both of you to "see" each others minds, and to bring them into sync, on the topic at hand. It's a process of alignment of two minds, on a particular topic.

  |   O                                O   |
  | ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
  |   |                                |   |
  |  / \                              / \  |

The autistic person, instead, has a tendency to think that when he has studied everything that there is to know about a subject it allows him to not consider the contents of the other person's mind, because the contents "should" be the same. This is what's considered as "arrogant" by the non-autistic counterpart. To him, when you do this - and I will stress this, even if you know everything there is to know in the world about a particular subject - it's a transgression. To him it's as if you disregard the existence of the contents of his mind. He wants you, and expects you, to consider the contents of his mind, even in the case where it's blank on a particular subject.

What non-autistic persons react to, usually, is the blurring of the line between what's inside their mind, and what's inside your mind. When you see it as if you're just communicating the objective facts of the situation, and "divulging how much you've studied the topic", they view it as a transgression, and as a side-stepping of the natural process of "alignment of minds".

Finally, since your user name has a sort of Nordic ring to it, I will disclose a related poem by the Norwegian poet Haldis Moren Vesaas (if you're not Nordic, just disregard it):

  ORD OVER GRIND

  Du går fram til mi inste grind
  og eg går òg fram til di.
  Innanfor den er kvar av oss einsam,
  og det skal vi alltid bli.

  Aldri trenge seg lenger fram,
  var lova som gjaldt oss to.
  Anten vi møttest titt eller sjeldan
  var møtet tillit og ro.

  Står du der ikkje ein dag eg kjem
  fell det meg lett å snu
  når eg har stått litt og sett mot huset
  og tenkt på at der bur du.

  Så lenge eg veit du vil kome iblant
  som no over knastrande grus
  og smile glad når du ser meg stå her,
  skal eg ha ein heim i mitt hus.

I sympathize with the OP. Particularly this part:

> A typical piece of advice I receive is that there comes the point where you need to "give in," especially to people in authority. This preserves peace in the workplace and helps with promotions. However, "giving in" is not the same as acknowledging when you are wrong: it is simply playing mind games—games I am not interested in playing.

I've repeatedly been in situations where a person in authority proposed a bad idea, and I tried to push for a better alternative, but I was told I should "give in" to preserve the peace. So I believe the OP.

In these comments, a lot of people are advising the OP to learn better soft skills. The implied reason boils down to "Most people are allistic, so allistic people make the world's implicit rules. If an autistic person doesn't learn to play by those rules, they're going to lose." For example, allistic people tend to respect hierarchies, so there's a "rule" that OP should "give in" to the person in authority.

I think this advice is correct for the individual; learning better soft skills is the only thing OP can personally do.

But, it makes the organization as a whole more dysfunctional. If a person in authority is wrong, then if the "rule" is that OP should give in, then the person in authority will continue to be wrong, and that's bad for the organization! I believe the organization can do better. The "rules" are not set in stone; although they arise from human nature, they are shaped by an organization's culture. For example, many small organizations are less hierarchical, so the "rules" would tend to put more pressure on the person in authority to listen to what OP was saying. If OP was actually right, that would lead to a better result for the organization than if OP gave in.

I’ve acknowledged I was wrong countless times - often readily. I don’t find it inherently difficult or uncomfortable. There have also been many times I’ve refused to concede even a little, because that would have been a white lie (in my mind) even though I knew full well it would smooth things over immediately. Those people probably perceived me as incapable of admitting fault. That’s what they usually yell at me, after all. And I get told I’m arrogant about once a week. I never reply to that, but I’m always thinking in my head, “I never tell anybody that they’re anything (negative). Why is it so easy for other people to tell me I am this that and the other……”. Am autistic.

I had a brilliant autistic girlfriend and everything she said was fine but she would say them at the wrong time. She couldn't read the situation. She would be the kind of person to correct her boss in front of his boss.

I learned from watching her and thinking about what she should be doing. For example, I had a altercation with a guy over a parking spot we both wanted. I was alone but he had his girlfriend in the car. I looked at it from his point of view and realized there was no way he was going to back down in front of his girlfriend, so I let him have the space in a friendly way and went about my day.

> people can become impatient and cut me off or interject with a snap interpretation of what I have said so far.

A phrase I've noticed zoomers using recently is "let me land!" if you interrupt them. It's probably not zoomer specific but that's where I've heard it.

It conveys that you still have more to say, mildly points out the rudeness of being interrupted, and people seem to understand exactly what you mean without further explanation so you can get back to your thought.

Whether it works in the workplace I'm not sure, probably depends on the tone of voice. I would throw a please in there too.

> 1. The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying

We are often hearing a lot of unspecific waffle at great expense. The author goes on to say they are spending a few minutes setting the context. I have to deal with this a lot, and in reality, without cutting you off, it often goes on for 30 minutes to answer a simple question poorly.

How this looks in reality. The worker wants to move some cables to another switch to install a server but prefers to waffle for 30 minutes instead of drawing a diagram. Typically this consumes the whole team meeting and nobody gets to discuss their items.

Imagine being so proud of being incapable of systems thinking that you come up with a derogatory term for it.

I agree, communicating efficiently and precisely is key.

I work pretty hard at it. Yet still, especially when someone is not conversant in my domain of expertise (real-time embedded systems, data engineering), I do need to give context. I am not talking 30 minutes here, I am talking 5 minutes at most, in the most complicated cases.

In fact, this article is me trying to boil down things, and I realized I might have gone too far into conciseness :)

Regarding the concrete example: IMO these questions have nothing to do with being autistic. They are product 101 questions to ask before jumping into a rash rewrite, and the manager in this example took the author's sensible questions poorly. Speculation: perhaps it was not the content of the questions themselves that set off the manager? IDK.

I'd venture that the majority of mid+ engineers ask these questions out of habit. That is, if such a proposition even makes it to them. A good product manager would ask these questions well before the proposal even made it to engineering.

I enjoyed reading the article. I think it does a good job of explaining the authors thought process. I would also like to see the author would write in a "potential solutions"(or similar) section. It sounds like the author has figured out what their next experiment will be:

> In the future, I will look for a professional environment that understands and accommodates divergent ways of thinking.

but the above mentioned section would offer insight into how the author reached that solution and what other potential solutions were considered.

I think this is a good/important article. Yes, it is a "POV" perspective, and has elements of defensiveness but it is also honest and open... trying to find better communication.

>>>impatient and cut me off or interject with a snap interpretation of what I have said so far.

So... this sounds like you have already entered into defensiveness by this point, one way or another. Defensiveness tends to be mutual, so perhaps you are also feeling/presenting defensiveness.

For example, in your manager meeting... "I simply need you to answer these questions" can easily seem prosecutorial. It is framed in a way that makes you seem good, and him (or his ideas) seem bad. He is making whimsical decisions based on blog posts. You are focusing on real, important issues like usability.

This is a frame, a somewhat combative frame... probably/probably loaded with non complimentary assumptions on your part. Whether these assumptions are true, false, exaggerated or whatnot... It creates a passive aggressive frame. These tend to be stubborn frames. It sounds like you are throwing out questions in an attempt to derail/dismiss the idea, not collaborate.

Imagine the tables turned around. Next meeting on the subject. This time, your manager "needs to ask questions before forming an opinion:"

(1) What is your objection to the react framework? (2) Why is performance selectively concerning only in this context, but not others?...etc.

You can see where I am going. These are loaded questions, passive aggressive. Such questions will almost always elicit a a defensive riposte.

> a somewhat combative frame

This is a technical discussion we're talking about. In technical discussions, I don't want to faff around with euphemisms, circumlocutions, or fancy pronouns. It's hard enough to be clear in technical discourse, even if you aren't carrying those burdens.

I expect people to speak directly, even if on the face of it their utterances might seem rude if spoken in a social context. If a colleague goes in with both fists and feet in a technical discussion, and wins, that doesn't mean they're no longer my friend - it just means I was wrong, and I learned something. Drawing blood in a technical discussion is just part of the life of a technician.

Technical, nerdy people are often combative in passive aggressive ways.

Assuming a "I am the objective one" is often just a blindspot. Everyone is subjective to some extent, and admitting that you are a person with a perspective (as opposed to a neutral observer) is useful for avoiding such tensions.

Just admit that you have opinions, and present them as such.

"I am concerned that we are taking on a risky project, without understanding the implications. I would like to analytically discuss performance, and plan this product to these performance goals. I prefer an approach based on..."

Place yourself into the narrative. Not just other people.

Thanks for reading.

The thing is, I’m absolutely not passive aggressive when asking these questions. On the contrary, I am engaged, asking them for their point of view and expertise, and actively trying to work in the same direction.

I would have zero problems answering the questions you bring up as a hypothetical. In fact these sound like great and interesting questions.

Hallelujah, as I recently discovered I'm on the ASD, this speaks great truths.

Autism is a disability (but it's only a disability because our society is disabled) —— the individual isn't disabled.

Obviously, many people don't believe "reasonable accommodations" are to be made and that our society is to be improved and resolve to neologisms such as "ausplaining" which I find deeply inappropriate in our times.

My father does the first and second things. I have no idea whether he has autism or not, but it used to drive me insane.

Using the React example, you do not need several minutes to explain why large software projects are a waste of money unless they're pursuing business objectives. It's trivially obvious, just say a slightly more diplomatic version of the previous sentence. The reason I'm not hearing what you're saying is because the question needed a simple two sentence answer, but you turned it into a two-minute rambling monologue involving several anecdotes and then began explaining what Chesterton's Fence is and how the sunk cost fallacy doesn't apply. At that point any reasonable listener would cut into what you're saying with "okay, but back to our shopping cart," and it would be 100% your fault.

Another thing my father is awful at is understanding when something is about general fact-finding vs a specific suggestion. If a manager comes up to you in the kitchenette and says "I've been reading about the new React checkout system at Dunder Mifflin and they say it increased ARR by $200k, do you think we should rewrite?" it's probably not a project proposal. It's a fact-finding question. You don't need to go into attack mode and protect your checkout flow from an unnecessary rewrite. Say "Well, React is a great technology for building really big web apps, but our checkout page is pretty small and not a web app, so we'd have to make sure we were solving real business problems."

I've worked with autistic people who managed not to do either of these things, I don't think it's inherent to the condition, and I have no idea if this is an accurate description of what the author's talking about. They pattern match very closely to experiences I've had before, though.

Benefit of the doubt to the author: they caveat the asking-lots-of-questions with "If [they] don't have enough information". Were they familiar enough with the checkout system to answer the question off the cuff, they may well have done so.

I once worked with someone who was also different in that sense. I'm not sure if he was autistic, but he had a hard time understanding or wanting to understand the business or functional part. His explanations were sometimes hard to understand, especially for non technical people.

He would get really frustrated when he would get vague specs to implement.

He and I however, got along fine, because I'm also a developer.

I see the author of the article is here on HN, so here is my advice: try to set yourself up in an environment where you mainly communicate with technical people, and receive proper specs. You can let the other developers work more closely with functional and business people. I would guess try to program something that interfaces not with users, but with other systems.

The "hey I read a blog post that we should use this" would also frustrates me a lot :D. That is the kind of person that should be made clear about where the boundaries are of their and your expertise.

Not autistic at all, just not actuated by submission. I have compassion for my socially awkward brethren, but sometimes we just need a push. If most self-diagnosed "on the spectrum" people would self-accept instead, it would reduce their neuroticism and agreeableness, and most of their social issues would disappear. The anxiety comes from the double bind of having compromised ourselves into relationships where we can't maintain the dissonance between the agreeable way of relating with "good behaviour" to others that we have structured our personal relationships around - and the self we have diverted and often hidden thinking that's what we needed to do to have healthy relationships and jobs. Chances are they (we) lack personal boundaries because our ability to develop and set them was hampered by early life experiences and parents with poor personal boundaries. If you learned get things by "being good," your idea of "good" may be a transaction, where you expect others to give you things because you are good, and the compromises you make to do it pile up as resentment and soul debt. When you don't have tools to navigate the world without pretending to be "good," (whatever that means), we don't even know we're misrepresenting anymore. Internet pop psychology, but carrying around these self-diagnoses like talismans to ward off disapproval and maintain our perfectionism needs to stop. Be imperfect and accept that you are going suck at anything you haven't actively practiced with intention, particularly something like self acceptance. Anything that looks easy is almost always the effect of a huge amount of invisible work, and by starting with respect for that, it's possible to maybe walk back these protective self-diagnoses and use the same decision power to self-identify as responsible for your own feelings, and self-accept as having a quite complex experience where the journey isn't to mitigate it, but to really fully explore it. It goes so fast. Don't forget to enjoy it.

I found this to be the most insightful comment in the whole thread.

I've known autistic people and there was a strong tendency to reject what they don't want to hear.

I've also met a very autistic/aspergers person who would listen and consider (and there may be more than one, I just can't think of them ATM).

I've also met non-autistic people who simply can't listen or accept any kind of 'challenge' (as they perceive it). Not a few of the buggers either.

I've come to wonder if bloody-minded utter certitude is in fact a distinct and separate trait that has some positive, but not absolute, correlation with autism. Given the way my exposure to the autistic and the non-autistic-but-bull-headed run parallel sometimes but at others it diverges, perhaps that's a better description of what's going on. Maybe.

I don’t know if I am autistic never got tested and I don’t care, but I’ve found myself at the start of my career in some compatible positions and thoughts, which now I have grown away from, are you sure that these things are about autism and not just simple immaturity?

I think I often do #1, but the point is to get acknowledgment whether I am understanding things correctly, by rephrasing them. The point is not to undermine the train of thought, but rather confirm the agreement before the train of thought leaves to some distant land.

Sounds like my experience, too. I'm not autistic.

As best as I can tell, only the first point seems related to autism.

All of the questions listed in 2 are things that an allistic person might (should) ask. Plenty of allistic people care more about doing their work than politics. Plenty of allistic people have their knowledge underestimated in the situation presented.

Even #1 happens plenty with allistic people, but I do understand that this is more likely to occur when an allistic and autistic person are interacting.

In my personal experience, I find it is difficult for people to admit when they are wrong. I've never found it to be particularly correlated with being neurotypical or neurodivergent, however.

“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

I have some ruminations on this. My ruminations may be completely wrong.

Double empathy problems start from a young age. Those with ASD figure out from a young age that there's a layer of social communication that they are not getting. They are often overtly teased for the faux pas' that inevitably occur. I wonder if this, plus a stronger penchant for black and white thinking does enforce a stronger aversion to "being wrong" then your average person.

Possibly even a stress reaction to previous trauma for some (I definitely think I'm on shaky ground there).

I disagree, I work with many. Wrong on a technical thing, no different than most people.

Wrong on a social thing, agree. Anything with fluid changing rules and subtle context clues will drive them insane

What if you try to get along with others instead of looking at their logical mistakes and fallacies and verbalising them and see where you can both work together.

Hopefully this will bring you peace.

> I care more about doing good work than office politics.

Interacting well with other people (what the derisive “office politics” actually is) is good work.

And to you with the college degree, that he mentioned. Be aware that, by now, several years beyond typical college age, OP now reads more textbook material in a year than many graduates read in their entire college experience.

The wizard has worked much harder than you for many many years. He just doesn't frame it and hang it on his office wall.

I'd say a lot of people experience this and feel this way, whether allistic or autistic. It's just normal office stuff.

Repost of an earlier comment I made, on a different thread:

I think the difference is that an autistic person will see reality like this:

  |   O                                O   |
  | ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
  |   |                                |   |
  |  / \                              / \  |

While the non-autistic person will see it like this:

  |   O                                                           O   |
  | ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
  |   |                                                           |   |
  |  / \                                                         / \  |

The non-autistic person will always assume that there are two inner landscapes at play, in any given social situation, two versions of reality, if you will, and two sets of facts. And they will assume that the other person sees it in the same way: They will assume that the other person also allows for two versions of reality, and two sets of facts.

The autistic person will, instead, view it as if there is one big unified shared reality between him and the other person, and one true fact, in any given situation. He will also assume that the other person sees it in the same way as himself.

The "double empathy problem" is that neither of them can see how the other person views the world. The non-autistic person cannot comprehend that the autistic person sees a single shared reality, and a single fact. Likewise, the autistic person cannot comprehend that the non-autistic person sees two different realities and two sets of facts.

What makes you think autistic people are more inclined to have the first view, and the neurotypical people the latter?

It's my personal experience from interacting with people who are on the spectrum. I generally find it very difficult to make sense of the communication that I have with people who are autistic, especially socially, and especially if I'm close to them. To me it's as if everything is backwards, sort of. But I've come to realize that they also see it in the same way. They also perceive their own communication with non-autistic persons as being backwards. They perceive it as if there's something important that the non-autistic person "does not get". And I perceive it as if there's something important that the autistic person "does not get". The model that I've described above is the only way that I can make sense of it all.

I also note that the author of the original post describes himself as being more "holistic" in his approach to problem solving, than his non-autistic co-workers. He has the belief that he "sees the whole picture", while the other non-autistic person "sees only half of it".

What autistic people fail to recognize, in my mind, is that it does not matter if you've read 50 books about a topic. Even if you have, you still only own "half of the reality" in a meeting with another person about a topic. You still have to take his world view into account, even if you've read 50 books. You cannot "own" or "control" the reality, or the facts, of a situation, no matter how much you know about it. In a meeting with another person you always own only half of the reality.

Author might be confusing “autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong” with “you can’t acknowledge when you’re wrong”

In all of the straw men he presents, it’s curious that none of them entertain the possibility that he ever is actually wrong. The issue isn’t that he is autistic it’s more likely he's simply insufferable.

>> autistic people cant acknowledge when they are wrong

The only acknowledgement made in the article is internally: I read more, I investigate things I don't know.

Other than this, the person seems to fail to acknowledge the possibility of ever being wrong to us readers. Indurectltly justifying the presumed prejudice of allistics.

This seems a good place to ask if other people have issues when people ask them "Is this possible?" but really mean "Would you recommend we do this/is this feasible enough to consider/is this a good idea?".

I have to stop myself and mentally translate every time.

I vibe with this

> my strategy was to leave the room quietly

I'm not autistic; but I often just walk away from arguments. I'm an argumentative person, so it runs against the grain; but I don't actually enjoy arguing.

Aren't autists notorious for introversion and a hyper-fixation on logical coherence - to an obnoxious degree? Wouldn't that make them the least likely to engage in self deception?

the world is too complex to reason about hyper-logically

confusing lack of subtlety with logical clarity is precisely the issue

How far on the spectrum do you have to be for this to apply? I and a few of my friends are ASD, though very high functioning, and I'm pretty sure none of us have this problem.

Same here, and I'm quite literally the opposite. I'm the first to admit that I'm wrong, and I don't see how one could be logical without that trait. Being wrong is trivial compared to being right. Great care should be taken when presenting something as "correct", and equal care should be taken to communicate uncertainty, when it's present. I try very hard to never be "wrong", because I find it very uncomfortable for everyone involved. It's a waste of time and effort, and often causes emotions.

I'm also a person that has "I don't know" in the ready, in my vocabulary, which I've found is somewhat rare in the professional world, especially as education level increases.

Also good for them if true. Adults must be resistant to worldview challenges or they will be taken advantage of and brainwashed. Admitting that one is wrong should require that: - The case is made through facts and reason rather than emotions - The challenger is willing to invest time into making his or her case and be as open minded about possibly being wrong as he/she wants me to be open minded about me being wrong - Significant practical harm of me continuing with my current position has to be demonstrated When people expect everyone to just change their minds to suit them, the issue is a personality disorder, not autism.

It depends of the degree of autism. The less autistic one will need proof to accept the true. The hard autistic one will not accept any evidence until his way of think.

It's 1:24PM now. Scrolling back in office chat:

> But yes Person X / Fund Y is wrong size for us. (11:52 AM)

So based on a sample size of one, they acknowledged they were wrong about 90 minutes ago.

As an aside, can anyone recommend a subreddit or community for parents of children with autism?

I feel like it may be a good place to consolidate strategies.

Hi Julian. Don't know about Reddit, but you can probably find some groups on Facebook. I'm a member of a few there, but they are specific to my city and/or country (Australia). Some groups can be good, and others toxic, so your mileage may vary. In particular a Dads-only group can be a pretty good low-judgement venue for blokes.

My daughter (22) and son (20) are both ASD. My email is in my profile if you want to reach out. E.

95% of all people don't. the more you present to them facts the more bullheaded and stubborn they become.

Wow, I am floored at so many comments painting an egocentric view of the author. I find it highly ironic that supposedly high EQ neurotypicals would not be able to take one small step back and evaluate what is written with a modicum of assumed good intent.

Take this example:

> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it.

> [...]

> In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question.

My reaction to this is, yes obviously an engineer should be asking these questions, and it's a huge red flag that the manager didn't entertain even the first one. Obviously we don't have that managers side of the story, so I take it with a small grain of salt, but on the other hand the issue is articulated very clearly, and it is decidedly not personal or egocentric. In fact the questions are exactly what I as an EM expect my senior ICs to be asking. This demonstrates ownership and good thinking about the overall cost and impact of resourcing decisions. Good systems can not be built by managers dictating things without buy in from the expert ICs who actually build and maintain them. Therefore I think it's completely bass-ackwards that we would ding the IC for a communication gap (regardless of neurotype)—I've seen far too many cases of teams just doing what they're told and driving off a cliff because everyone prioritized agreeability and had a very narrow view of their own responsibilities. When the shit hit the fan everyone just throws their hands in the air and says "not my job".

So let me first say, kudos to you larve, you are the type of engineer I want on my team.

Now that said, some feedback. Describing office politics as "playing mind games" does you no favors in terms of being understood. I know what you mean—office politics often involved bending over backwards and dancing around issues to avoid offending people. This is not my idea of fun either. That said, morale matters, and this song and dance is a big part of how morale is managed for allistic people. Furthermore, there is a fundamentally difficult issue which is if you have 100 smart people, building consensus through complete understanding is impossible. At some point owners need to be identified, decisions made, and progress begun. Some people will need to "disagree and commit" with partial understanding. Given your experience I don't expect you would disagree with that in any way, but when folks are short with you, consider the difficulty of reaching such consensus. I don't think it's an excuse for shortcuts, but this is the art of technical management, and it requires hard work and a commitment to building trust and understanding from all parties to have any hope of realizing large scale technical achievements.

Thank you, it's very nice to read this.

I actually love "office politics" when people engage in it in good faith. I love crossing team boundaries, figuring out who is not talking to whom, who works well with certain kind of people. I love running good meetings and making sure everybody is heard. I love writing and editing documents, cleaning up meeting notes, I am happy writing whatever shitty glue I need to to make other people's work smoother.

I think office politics is just a derisive name for the very important work of having lots of people of different backgrounds work with each other towards a same goal. I've come to understand that my biggest technical capability as an engineer is to play office politics well. Organizing a single meeting between two people (or conversely, making sure two people never have to code review each other) can be the difference between a dead project and a successful one.

The "mind games" is specifically about getting me to say something I can't stand behind. I am fine doing things I can't stand behind, because I'd rather get something janky shipped than nothing at all, and I will do so without complaining, in fact I enjoy it. But don't expect me to say something I don't mean, I'd rather say nothing at all. I have two anecdotes come to mind. One is a colleague not wanting to use the API I provided to store configuration files (an API I provided so they wouldn't have to deal with the versioning, saving to flash safely, validation and encryption), instead repeatedly bringing up in the public slack channel how I should KISS and that writing a file is really not a complicated thing (it kind of is, especially in an embedded system). I don't really care too much about engaging with people calling me stupid in public, and I'm certainly not going to say that writing a file is simple.

I also care very much about other more junior engineers not getting bullied by older engineers. Junior engineers might not be very nuanced in their opinions, or might need to learn a few lessons the hard way, but that is not done by playing the authority card, that is done by providing a safe space for them to discover these things on their own (be it by mentoring, by watching more experienced people do it, or by giving them enough ownership to be able to make a few mistakes without impacting the business).

Thanks again for your comment.

> The "mind games" is specifically about getting me to say something I can't stand behind.

Cool, that's a great clarification. I agree with that characterization of "mind games", and its obviously 100% legitimate to stand your ground in those cases.

One reason I think these things happen is because people go straight from school to the corporate world where they expect to be told what to do and never develop their own agency and feedback loops for higher level goals. In a big org it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. Silicon Valley youth worship doesn't help either as it takes time to get enough experience to learn the myriad different ways things can succeed and fail. Young managers often feel they need to have all the answers and control everything rather than realizing the job is really about understanding individual strengths and giving everyone the right incentives and well-defined goals (appropriate to their competence level) to work together and produce output greater than the sum of the parts.

In one of my first jobs (an internship actually), I had a great manager who introduced me to the concept of active communication. While unfortunately the internet has some terrible articles about the subject, the actual idea behind it is taking responsibility for the whole communication process. I find it is extremely helpful for coming across clearly and effectively, especially as a person on the spectrum.

In the case of a disagreement, basically start out trying to figure out where the other person's head is at with open ended, exploratory questions (stuff like "what are you looking to achieve?" or "why do you feel this is the case?"). Avoid accusatory questions like "what makes you think that?" or "do you think X is bad?" Expressing humility by, for example, stating that you don't understand something before asking them to explain their view of it helps.

Once you know their starting position, instead of simply speaking at them, instead guide them to reach the conclusion for themselves. Repeat information they've already accepted as true frequently ask them what these givens imply.

Always maintain an off ramp. If someone initially disagreed with you, odds are at some point you're going to find a sticking point where one of you is either factually incorrect or you have fundamentally different judgements. This normally is where discussion turns into argument. Give people an opportunity to save face - something like "you know I only very recently learned myself that this isn't actually true" or "you would think that's the case but there's this unintuitive gotcha in this instance" allows a person to change their position without calling their general intelligence or expertise into question. In the case of a judgement disagreement, something like "let's pretend for a moment that you desire this" let's them move forward without having to actually confront the disconnect. If someone is fatigued or aggravated, make sure there's a way for them to blow off steam, for example something like "you're making some good points, I'd like to double check my info, can we revisit this later" let's them walk away feeling good and makes you look humble while also giving them leeway to be more agreeable when you do eventually bring it back up.

At the same time, always be responsive to the other person. If they are interjecting, let them speak and take note of what they say. Again it's more important that they feel they've explained their reasoning than that you lay the groundwork for yours. When they legitimately bring up good points, acknowledge them; when it seems like they are holding something back, probe a bit; if their train of thought goes off on a tangent, explore it. While this might sound a bit tedious, especially if you already have a pretty good idea of what specific points you need to convey, a lot of people care more about being heard than the particulars of what they are saying. Ultimately, reel them back in after they've made their point and modify the logic path you're taking them along accordingly.

After guiding them through the thought process, then confirm that you have communicated your point by having them repeat back to you their current understanding. If your message was successfully communicated, it should be readily apparent. If not, it should still be evident where the miscommunication is occurring. Recursively repeat the process until the message is completely communicated. You may still not agree in the end, but both of you should be well aware as to why you disagree.

That is the reason why the worlds is going to chaos, we are driven by political autistic necromancer O_O

7000 years after the first pound, we are ending the planet ... and no one agreed that human is wrong ()

Just remove the quotes from the title

>Because I value learning, I read about 50 technical books every year

OMG You must be very smart!

> OMG You must be very smart!

You must be very angry.

There are a lot of obvious questions to ask about a situation that aren't being mentioned. What is my actual power to influence this decision? What would the most effective line of communication look like? What are the motivations behind this? What do different people think is at stake? What kind of appeal will have the most influence on the person in front of me?

I don't think autism prevents a person from appreciating the importance of these questions. It might affect your ability to answer them quickly or correctly, but it doesn't render you incapable of posing them and acknowledging them as important influences on the situation. A person who is blind from birth can understand that their clothes have color and that color-coordination affects how other people perceive them.

So why do those questions get left out? I think the answer is that some autistic people, including me when I was younger, cling to a very strict idea of what it means to communicate in good faith. I used to assume that if people were speaking in good faith, they would appreciate me taking their arguments at face value and directly addressing the objectives we had in common. They would be rigorous about admitting their motivations and, in general, be willing to be explicit about every factor they were taking into account. I also felt that if they weren't speaking in good faith, I was pretty much screwed and helpless. I didn't have an answer for that. So I handled every situation by striving to speak in good faith, owning my deficiencies in that regard, and hiding any suspicion that the other person wasn't speaking in good faith because 1) I didn't have a game plan for it, and 2) being aware of it made me feel guilty and scared.

Over time it dawned on me that this "good faith"/"bad faith" dichotomy, whatever its merits might be in a society that embraced it, wasn't useful in this reality, because most people don't think in those terms. There are a lot of people of basically good will, who aren't overly selfish, who go through life being mostly nice to people, who also violate the rules of good faith argumentation (as I understood them) virtually every time they open their mouths, and are completely un-self-conscious about it. I had to learn that even though they were good nice people, it was okay for me to be aware of "impure" aspects of communication with them. I didn't have to feel dirty about seeing into the mix of motivations of the person I was talking to, even if I liked them and thought they were a good person.

That didn't make me immediately better at dealing with people, but it was one of those "oh now I can start learning" turning points.

It also led to a big improvement in my personal life. Understanding something about somebody and making use of it without explicitly acknowledging it used to feel dirty to me, but other people want and need you to do it, especially when you're first getting to know them. You need to be able to understand and accommodate people's quirks long before you become close enough to talk about them.

That rule turns out to be just as true in business. When it comes to dealing with people's flaws, what's best for the business is usually what's best for them. It's very bad for someone if their flaws cause problems for the company. They need their coworkers to be aware of their weaknesses and adjust for them, but they probably don't like hearing them mentioned unless you have a very close personal rapport with them (and maybe not even then.)

Anyway, before I accepted all that, I used to obsess about improving my adherence to the rules of good faith argumentation, assuming that anything outside that scope would be scary if not morally wrong. Really, most of the mistakes I was making were caused by me intentionally ignoring everything I knew about the social context of a discussion because I thought it would be insulting to other people if I did anything that reflected an awareness that they might be influenced by factors that they weren't explicitly acknowledging.

How exactly autism or other factors might have got me into that mental cul-de-sac in the first place isn't clear to me. I might have some deficiency in my ability to instinctively read other people's minds and emotions, but in this case, the problem was not lack of insight but a deeply engrained taboo against using the insight that I had. One explanation is that when I was little I wasn't good at observing the taboos around what motivations can and can't be acknowledged, and to protect myself against repeated failures to observe those taboos, I created a blanket taboo against acknowledging people's internal lives. Or maybe my parents instilled some weird stuff in me and I was too autistic to learn different rules for home and school. Who knows.

Some non autistic people chose not to acknowledge when they're wrong, as part of their sociopathic dominance behaviour. If you have control, it can be a mode of operation which "works for you"

The interesting thing to me is that the statement "autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong" actually holds some truth in my experience, but it's not from some flaw of character, but the result of the more underlying issue "autistic people can’t endure to accept or reason with statements they don't see as bivalent true".

For people on the spectrum fuzzy, hypothetical, conjectured, and underspecified statements are physically painful. Bad when uttered by others, hence the need to correct them, unbearable when forced to reason with or produce them oneself.

I'm aware that people on the spectrum have a really hard time doing this, but viewing the points from the others viewpoint is still illustrative.

1. The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying.

They are hearing, but they didn't come for a perfect lecture/monologue with the beauty of a mathematical proof, they came for a conversation where truth crystallises from the exchange of half truths and fuzzy concepts.

When they come to you with a question on X, they don't come for your train of thought about X, every fact you've accumulated on X and every bit of reasoning tangential to X, showing the full validity and self consistency of X.

They need a conversation where they pose a vague question, get a vague reply with follow-up questions, to which they provide more information, and so on and so forth, until the concepts are crips and bivalent truth can be attained.

Because they do a top down breadth first fuzzy search their brain starts filtering out the very information that your brain deems essential to bottom up depth first process of establishing truth. So while you create "context" they are just zoning out, making affirmative noises and nods for you to continue, and hope that you'll eventually divulge information relevant to what they came for.

2. I need to ask questions before forming an opinion.

The issue is very similar to 1. People don't come to you in need of a solution, with all conclusions laid out and wrapped up. They might have their own half-finished ideas and opinions that they are in the process of forming, and they are coming to you asking a question to form that opinion. You then attempting to form the same opinion by asking more questions just creates a deadlock.

The conversation could have gone like this:

"No, that would be way to expensive." - "Ok thanks, then nevermind."

"We could, but isn't our current website fast enough?" - "Yeah, but we were hoping to attract some additional talent by incorporating interesting technology into our product."

"I guess, but why?" - "I've heard a lot of things about React lately and am not sure what to think of it, but if it's potentially usable for us I should look up on it a bit more."

But that requires acceptance that no opinion or truth might be formed at all.

3. I care more about doing good work than office politics.

Heres the bummer for people on the spectrum, the world is not made of platonic logic, there are sometimes no rights or wrongs, even with Bayesian reasoning given two different priors the same observation can move those priors in contradictory directions. The world is fuzzy, half truths are everywhere and sometimes a tiebreaker is needed, or the answer to a question is not worth exploring. Giving in acknowledges these simple property of math and the universe, but for a person on the spectrum this is like acknowledging a Lovecraftian horror:

“The piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

4. The person underestimates how much I know about the topic.

While people in IT have a general tendency to underestimate others, I'm certain that a lot of them do know. It's just a combination of 1. and 3. They don't require the convex knowledge hull of the topic, because either they know already, because it's not relevant, or because there is no clear cut answer. Sometimes they know that their position is a gross oversimplification, or that their metaphor is actually contradictory, but it helps them think in the context of their self inconsistent reasoning process which, unlike classical logic, might actually come to valid conclusions from inconsistent assumptions.

The take away from this is that I can probably help myself and my spectrum colleagues by writing questions and requests more appropriate to them, with clearer mental paths, more crisp concepts, preferably by e-mail with a very explicit description of what response I need. Maybe I should also use the phrase "humor me" a lot more to acknowledge that what I'm asking is inconsistent and doesn't necessarily make sense from their perspective.

I'd hope that the author would take away from this, that they don't have to be factually wrong in order to respond in the wrong way. Sometimes giving in and kindness just means having the same non-judgmental understanding for the needs and thought patterns of others, that they expect for themselves.

Edit:

There's actually research that quantifies this https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00283...

thanks for the thoughtful answer.

I agree with quite a bit of it, but also would like to present a few nuances.

1. The problem is here that they will cut me off short (not a problem) and then say something that is not what I want to say. What can I do? Push back? Give in? Leave?

My strategy was to just leave, because if you don't want to hear me out, and misinterpret what I want to say, we might as well save ourselves all some time. I have learned over time not to infodump (for example, by regularly asking if this is all stuff that is well known). I don't mind being reminded rather abruptly that I should get to the point, if my point is understood correctly.

2. How do I know what aspect of the question I should answer. Sure I can focus on costs, or performance, or memory usage of react, or state handling, or framework adoption. The fact is that I can't provide an opinion, because of all these have different answers. I have plenty of similar discussions that work out well enough, and it is something I think I am good at (hearing out the concerns of the other party, and then focusing on that). In fact, I think being product-minded and listening to the concerns of the business/manager/stakeholder is the most impactful skill an engineer can have.

But it is also the kind of discussion that can lead to the "You just can't admit you are wrong," even though... I haven't said anything wrong. I am very much aware that there is a communication problem, and thus provide my side of the discussion.

3. This is very much about my values, and the choices I make depending on those values. I am not saying the world needs to be a perfect world of engineering, it just means that I am not going to say something I can't back up. That might sound backwards to people, because they have other values (say, acquiescing because you might otherwise lose your job), but that's me making a choice. I'm not pretending to acknowledge I am wrong, and I'm not expecting the person to either. If you really want me to say that rewriting everything in elm, when we are a react shop, is a good choice, then I will state that not pretend to say that elm is a good choice. It doesn't mean that we can't rewrite things in elm, experiments are great if we can afford them. Engineering is about compromise.

But don't make me state an opinion I don't hold.

I am not sure if the nuance is clear here. I know full well that both opinions (elm is a good choice, elm is not a good choice) can hold true at the same time. In fact, none of us really can know which is right!

The business can be just as successful with react than it would with elm, who knows? Maybe in 2 years it will become clear that moving away from react was great, maybe it will become clear that staying with react was the thing to do. But currently, my opinion is that it is a bad choice, and I can argue why I think so.

4. I realize I should have just left this section out of the article and kept it for another day.

It is the first time I mention how much effort I put into learning things publicly, previously only my wife would know. I often come across as boyish and people very often assume I'm the intern, when I actually have 10 years on the most senior person after me. I don't like stating that I've done X for 15+ years, and when I do, some people just straight out don't believe me.

---

As for your take away, I fully approve. I think that writing is a way to avoid these confrontations. Being explicit, and indeed indulging a bit into "humor me" or giving me just a few minutes to get comfortable would help us. None of us benefits from misunderstandings or snap judgments. If I don't seem to be choosing the right words or making the right facial expressions, you can't just dismiss me by saying to get better at choosing the right words. Obviously, I tried. It would be like telling a blind person to just look more closely, and that "they just don't want to see".

You will also of course never realize how often we actually successfully adapted. In fact, it was very easy for me to forget just how much effort I put into these little social dances everyday, and how exhausting it is. The pandemic and working from home and mostly communicating by email has been life-changing.

I realise how exhausting it must be to put yourself out there and under the scrutiny of strangers, especially with the need to not leave loose threads and untruths hanging, so I'll try to keep it short and don't expect an answer :)

1. I feel like this is often a miss-understanding between neurotypicals and many neuroatypicals (not limited to autism, but also including disorders with emotional dysregulation, anxiety and others). Neurotypicals often finish each others sentences to signal understanding and engagement, or as a means of implicitly checking if they are still on the same page.

It's a bit like a checksum, a heartbeat package, or a TCP Ack.

"So we should make the cache at least..." - "Three times as large!" - "Yeah or four times for good measure."

For somebody who has trouble reading the intentions of others (as with autism), or who have a tendency to feel judged and controlled (as with anxiety or BPD), this often comes across as a rude interjection.

2. You can't know the aspect. Sometimes it's apparent from context, but most of the time neurotypicals just do a wild guess, and provide some answer. It is up to the other party to clarify, and given that they are the ones with the request, they will probably do so until they receive a satisfying answer.

3. Of course. Nobody expects you to just make stuff up, or have unfounded opinions. But I've noticed a certain tendency of people on the spectrum to vastly prefer forward chaining over backward chaining reasoning, whereas it's the other way around for neurotypicals. The truth I was trying to get at is that often there is no clear answer even if you had all the information available, and even worse often times it doesn't matter. Your company will probably be equally successful with react or elm, because it's other factors that are much more influential for success. With forward chaining reasoning that's a bit of a problem, because you can reach a point where there's no real path forwards. With backwards chaining you can just presume that some missing piece of information will eventually pop up or not matter that much and continue.

It's akin to Goedels first incompleteness theorem paraphrased very roughly: You can either have a system of reasoning that's consistent or one that's complete, but not both. Forward chaining gives you a consistent system, but you will have cases where you can't proceed, whereas backwards chaining allows you to sometimes just assume missing facts to be true, allowing you to take "a leap of faith". Those facts might actually be (unprovably) true or they might lead you to mistakes/inconsistencies.

That's not to say that backwards chaining is superior, forward chaining will allow you to more thoroughly explore the search space for which you _have_ all the facts, and it's a lot less likely to bring you to wrong conclusions.

4. Yeah maybe that is actually a problem that the industry has as a whole, and not specific to neuro(a)typicality. Sadly it's often, strong opinions, strongly held.

---

Text based mediums for the win!

>In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question. I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.

Well, it was "outright rejecting their idea".

Whatever the phrasing used, the actual question wasn't "Would it be technological better and improve the user experience if we use React for our checkout UI?".

It was rather "I read about this React thing. Sounds cool. Cool companies use it. Should we use it ourselves too and be cool like them?"

More charitably, there was a pretty good probability that the manager was asking a variant of that question. So the reasonable and respectful response is to invite them to say more about what they are thinking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com