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Comment by Rayhem | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I had a similar head-tilt at leading with "How are you doing on a personal level?" I'm not outright opposed to the question -- managers are human (gasp) and it is true that we tend to work better with humans when we connect with them as such -- but it's going to take a lot of prior work for anyone with professional power over me to convince me that question is for my benefit and not simply to extract more value.

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Bingo, and this is it:

> if the person isn’t in a positive state of mind or heart outside of work, chances are that she won’t be as effective at work

Aka next person on the pink slip list.

This person would be a terrible manager of anyone neurodivergent.

Most, if not all, managers I've had are terrible for neurotypical. I imagine it's sort of like talking to the cops as a neurodivergent person. You're just guilty because you don't behave "right".

I think I might be neurodivergent but I'm not going to get diagnosed so I have no idea. I will say it seems like no team I have ever been on really understood what to do with me. Which -- fine, I don't care to do anything with them.

This is essentially standard 1:1 at my prior company. It worked amazingly well.

People aren’t robots. They get tired. They get distracted. They can’t show up for work every day and give perfect, 100%.

I’ve been asked and asked that type of question frequently to help understand if I needed to be mindful of temporary circumstances. It often works out that one person on the team is feeling high energy when someone else is feeling low. It’s not permanent, so you make minor short term tweaks. Particularly, on the small stuff. I’d tried to go to someone who’s feeling higher energy.

Over time, it tends to even out. Or, at the very least, people who are frequently high energy feel satisfied with a full queue while others have a chance to refocus. At some point, that probably means high energy person is going to get some slack to do a bit more 20% type of work.

You end up with a team that delivers on its core competencies while keeping most people happy.

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