Autistics in the Silicon Valley
modelviewculture.com
modelviewculture.com
Erm, wouldn't having communication difficulties and trouble identifying emotional state in others be somewhat of a barrier in all but the most by-the-book soul-sucking HR positions?
My brother is one of them, and despite is "better" than most certainly can't have a job. In fact, is too smart to be in the repetive kind-of-jobs and too crippled to havce a chance elsewhere.
A very small subset of autistic people have won the "lottery", so can complain about stuff and have a more-or-less independent live.
To think: Is like have a(several?) thin sword passing in to your brain, and you don't know what exactly it damage. That is autism.
The way I explain it to people regarding my son is that you have the brain, the brain's modules are all there, but all the interconnecting stuff that helps the different parts of the brain work together, self-regulate, etc., are all much weaker than in a typical brain.
Thus you get people who are very impulsive, or are great problem solvers but have trouble with language (which requires the cooperation of many different parts of the brain), or much prefer visual inputs, etc.
Even that is only an approximation of what must be going on, but certainly most of the gear works; it just doesn't work together concurrently as it should.
But then the author also starts off with wide, sweeping statements about Autistics without citations or evidence:
> Autism Speaks, an organization despised by most Autistics and many of their parents
> many Autistics, myself included, liken [listing ASD in the DSM V] to homosexuality and transsexuality being listed in previous DSMs
As I continue to read it, I start to wonder whether the author is just upset because they heard about SAP hiring Autistics and was disappointed that his/her skill set wasn't a good match for the role:
> I would be a disaster in the coding and software testing departments, but would be more successful in a technical writing, communications and PR role
I hope this isn't the case, but it's hard to say.
I also imagine that it is a much easier sell for someone at SAP to say "we should hire Autistic developers" -- even though SAP would have to spend extra to train the people interacting with Autistic developers, that amount is dwarfed by the profitability of software developers in general. (The financially-relevant but non-tangible goodwill of hiring Autistics is just icing on the cake.) On the other hand, I feel like it'd be harder to convince higher-ups that hiring Autistics in other roles is at all worthwhile if they can't get through a neurotypical (unaccommodating) hiring process.
When OP said "I would be a disaster in the coding and software testing departments, but would be more successful in a technical writing, communications and PR role", I interpreted it as a concern about autistic people being typecast as techies. People are really excited to help autistic people join the work force, but most of the efforts I see are directed at technical jobs.
To be fair, quite a few autistic people are well-suited for technical roles. I myself happen to fit the stereotype.
Judging from the author's bios[1][2], it appears that the author is an Autistic that writes. Given this context, I'm more inclined to interpret these words literally (i.e. as in, "it's unfair that SAP is willing to accommodate coding/testing Autistics but not me") than as a general example supporting "a concern about autistic people being typecast as techies".
If you're looking at Autistics on a site called Hacker News, I suspect you're going to find more technical people than not. That doesn't mean you can generalize that to the general population of Autistics.
[0] http://apoststructuralautistic.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/my-a... [1] http://modelviewculture.com/authors/erika-lynn-abigail [2] http://apoststructuralautistic.wordpress.com/about/
I am autistic. While either of us could be wrong, I think its pretty safe to say I have a better idea of what it means to be autistic than a person that isn't. You are basically saying that your interpretation of what he meant is based on the ridiculous assumption that we are incapable of making statements that aren't intended to be taken completely literally. If being autistic hadn't rendered me nearly immune to being offended, I'd probably be pretty upset about someone making such an ignorant statement.
>If you're looking at Autistics on a site called Hacker News, I suspect you're going to find more technical people than not. That doesn't mean you can generalize that to the general population of Autistics.
As a person with Asperger's that has two nephews with severe forms of autism, I assure you that my experience reading about autism is not limited to Hacker News.
So basically, if I mention the simple fact that there is a stereotype about autistic people, I am attempting to generalize the population. However, at the same time its OK for you to make bigoted assumptions about a complaint that a person made without actually weighing it on its own merits.
I can see how many reasonable people might end up disagreeing with the OP's claims. Unfortunately, you appear to be simply writing it off because he's autistic.
I am "writing it off" because the author writes in a way that suggests that their experiences represent all people with autism, but I feel that they do not represent me.
I am not saying that the author's opinion is not valid. I think that it's a perfectly reasonable position. What I'm upset about is the tone the author chose to use to convey their point.
(Edit: I find it ironic that I'm writing this, because the author has written articles saying they're upset with Autism Speaks because the tone in Autism Speaks' materials don't agree with the author's experiences.)
May not matter what higher-ups think in that regard (at least in the U.S.), as to be compliant with the ADA these companies would have to allow reasonable accomodations if necessary for the disability in question, even for the job interview process.
If the job to be hired into doesn't require any further accomodation because it so precisely matches the skillset of the person involved, so much the better.
However, for an HR or PR job; I have a hard time believing that proper accommodations could be made that would allow them to function as well as someone with more social skills. When the job basically boils down to dealing with people, the vast majority of who will not be autistic; your ability to make eye contact, or be in social situations, is a defining characteristic of the role.
For those jobs where the nature of the disability itself prevents someone from being able to accomplish those BFOQs then no accomodation is necessary, nor would you have to hire someone to fill that job. But I was referring to the hiring interview process itself, where it's completely possible to imagine that some assistance would be necessary even though, if hired, the autistic person would be able to complete their job requirements with only reasonable accomodations.
Likewise you don't need to provide unreasonable/super costly accomodations. But you can't just ignore ADA either.
Secondly, but perhaps more important, I see companies that solely hire the autistic more as taking advantage than as providing assistance.
Perhaps, but this only works in a world in which our evaluation criteria and processes are sophisticated and mature enough to be fair to all applicants. The article illustrates a few reasons this is not the case (such as expecting candidates to look you in the eye when talking to you).
Interviewers (and systems/processes) have biases - the first step to eliminating those subtle (or sometimes not-so-subtle) biases is to be aware of them and actively work to eliminating those biases, not pretending that being {race,gender,disability,etc.}-'blind' is the same as being 'neutral' and therefore unbiased.
> Secondly, but perhaps more important, I see companies that solely hire the autistic more as taking advantage than as providing assistance.
This may be true; I'm not familiar enough with programs such as the one mentioned in the article.
That problem is that "fair" is a subjective notion. Most people value being fair, but they will disagree on which decisions are fair.
Also calling people 'autistic' and later calling people with autism 'it' as in 'try to injure itself' is a really shitty way to talk about human beings. Check yourself.
mamcx is not a native English speaker and was perhaps trying to use "it" as a gender-inspecific pronoun rather than intentionally portraying people on the autistic spectrum as "objects" or "inhuman."
I think most people will tend to use a plural (they, them) in this kind of situation. People who are pickier about grammar will probably say "he or she" or "him or her."
People-first: http://www.asha.org/publications/journals/submissions/person... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language
Identity-first: http://www.xojane.com/issues/i-am-not-a-person-with-a-disabi... and http://cheshirekit.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/the-social-model...
On the whole, the term "autism" has always bugged me. I know that it's always painted as a spectrum, but said spectrum is so wide as to render the definition alone almost completely meaningless. A person who can't live without constant, 24/7 supervision and is unable to communicate is in an entirely different category than a person who just has trouble maintaining eye contact in a conversation and is maybe a bit too passionate about some niche interest.
Increasingly, I've seen it being used as a pejorative against software developers (as this profession does indeed require extreme dedication), usually by the types of people who have zero ambition of their own. Most likely as self-validation that their apathy is normal, and it's others who have the problem.
I think this really does a disservice to the people who are genuinely suffering from an actual disorder. And it also pushes people toward the lighter end of the spectrum to play up how autism is really just a different mindset and not a disorder at all.
In my personal opinion, (I don't publish any manuals on mental disorders,) if you are living on your own, earn a decent salary, have friends, and otherwise appear completely normal to others in person; then I don't care if you have a bit of trouble with social cues: you're not autistic. And it's insulting if you or others refer to yourself as such. Even worse is when I see them being used as excuses. I had some issues with social graces as a teenager, so I practiced and do pretty well now. It's disgusting for someone to play off issues that they could easily address with some effort on their part. Even if it's legitimately a problem, a disorder is not an excuse to give up on trying, and just expect everyone else to tolerate you. Yes, it sucks that you have to try harder than others. Welcome to life, it's not fair.
I see this same situation with regards to the obsessive-compulsive label. People who simply have a perfectly sane desire to want an organized work desk, or to wash their hands before eating, or to double-check that they locked their door often identify or are identified as having OCD. That's a joke compared to the people who live in a constant state of intense anxiety, who can get stuck for hours turning a light switch on and off hundreds of times until it "feels right", or who end up driving around the neighborhood dozens of times, terrified that they ran someone over and need to go and make sure they didn't.
Let's leave the "disorder" label for people who really are disabled in a significant, life-impairing way.
I see this on almost a weekly basis. It is really disheartening and almost infuriating. I feel like this outlook only serves to reduce diversity by alienating anyone who would rather spend their time building things than "shooting the shit" with other people for the majority of their days. It also seems like it might be a relatively new phenomenon? Maybe in the future the masses will be more accepting of different approaches to social interaction (or lack thereof) and living life in general.
> I think this really does a disservice to the people who are genuinely suffering from an actual disorder. And it also pushes people toward the lighter end of the spectrum to play up how autism is really just a different mindset and not a disorder at all.
> Let's leave the "disorder" label for people who really are disabled in a significant, life-impairing way.
Very well said!
I think it's part of the broader anti-intellectualism movement. For whatever reason, people who strive to exceed in life offend those who don't. As if we are passing judgment on them. But they're only reaching that conclusion through their own self-reflection: I certainly don't think of myself as better than others; I am in fact quite envious of them. Being able to believe in a deity would mean freeing myself over the fear of death. Being able to tolerate crowds, sports and pop-culture would mean I'd have a network of local friends to hang out and have fun with.
My dedication has extreme sacrifices: I work 40-50 hours a week, only to get home and spend another 6-8 hours a day working on my pet projects. The intense frustration it causes is hardly made up for by the moments of joy when I accomplish a difficult task. I'd love to go and grab a beer and talk "approaches and tradeoffs to supporting polymorphism in shared pointers" with a group of friends. But to find anyone who understands any of that requires such vast distance that we can only communicate online. Hell, my interests are becoming so niche that it's becoming difficult for me to maintain a network of people to converse with even online. I've been struggling to write software to create a list of deltas between two binary files (think Xdelta or bsdiff) in less than O(n^2) time for years now, and can find no one who shares an interest to discuss that with.
I may be an intellectual, but if I had my way, I'd much rather be a creative artist. I wish that I could play an instrument, compose a song, write a story, draw artwork, cook great food, learn a foreign language, and so on. All I can do is string together raw, digital logic. And then bash at it until it does mostly what I want. Nothing I ever write ever feels complete, nor completable. There's always something to refactor, bugs to be fixed, features to be added, mutually exclusive tradeoffs to be made. I look at all of my past work and instead of being proud of it, go, "wow, I was really quite awful back then.", knowing I'll feel the same a few years from now even.
But it's what I'm good at; it's what I relate to. So it is what it is. I'm not going to lie and pretend I'm just your average guy (tall poppy syndrome), but I'm also not so vain as to think raw critical thinking is the only important metric of worth in this world, nor even a particularly key metric.
Happiness is much more important: which is why disparaging others seems so anathema to me.
> It also seems like it might be a relatively new phenomenon?
It probably has analogies to the past; but the computing movement really is a very recent development. In my childhood, it was very rare for a middle-income family to have a single computer. Nowadays, they are almost ubiquitous.
> Maybe in the future the masses will be more accepting of different approaches to social interaction (or lack thereof) and living life in general.
I think so, yet I'm not sure if it'll all be for the better. All I see at restaurants anymore is people looking at their smart phones, to see what was posted on their Facebook wall. It's almost disturbing anymore when someone you don't know and haven't engaged speaks to you in public, eg at a line in a store.
I also see the internet as enabling new cliques of people over broader distances. Take for instance, fetish communities such as furries. I had certainly never heard of anything like this pre-internet. Although this can be great for personal acceptance, it can also lead to more stratification, and thus isolation, of groups.
For instance, the culture of Hacker News is pretty much the polar opposite of 4chan. And that just leads to the kind of derision we were abhorring above.
But maybe it's not all bad. Obviously people were just as unique and individual before, they just kept it all bottled up inside. The internet is letting people come out more and be themselves. Unfortunately, a lot of those people, deep down, are secretly raging assholes.
Have you come up with a solution (I'm interested to know how, if you succeeded)?
> I wish that I could play an instrument, [...]
Why don't you take lessons in your favourite instrument, then? I see no shame in being short of money, but getting money is a different problem to solve than finding a good teacher.
> learn a foreign language, and so on.
Take a look at duolingo.com. Probably you'll like it.
Nope. Naive approach is: for every byte of the modified file, compare against every position in the source file and find the longest match. If less than the cost of encoding the pointer+length pair, then add it to a queue of raw bytes to write. Flush the queue whenever you find a long enough match. That is of course O(n×m), which is easier to just say O(n^2).
Tried exploring string-search algorithms like Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore; tried keeping a tree list of 16-bit matches (which in fully randomized data reduces search overhead to O(n×m/{between log2(65536) and 65536}) ... but in a file of nothing but null bytes slightly hurts performance), tried skipping by S bytes per compare and then backtracking when long enough matches are found (hurts patch size efficiency as N goes up, but reduces overhead by O(n×m/S), and so on.
I can get up to around a 64MB diff, before memory constraints and the inevitability of quadratic growth start to ruin me. Have tried to analyze what Xdelta/VCDIFF were doing, but the code is just too difficult to follow at my skill level.
> Why don't you take lessons in your favourite instrument, then?
I've tried, I just don't have the raw talent for it. Have no rhythm, have very poor note deduction ability, my mind trips all over itself when trying to use each hand to play a different part of a piano song, etc.
Not a huge deal, just something I'd like to do. But even if I could do all these things; a jack of all trades is a master of none.
A helpful idea is first to consider what you consider as the "correct" alignment. Often the Levenshtein distance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance) is used and an alignment is considered as proper if the number of necessary steps (insertion/deletion/replacement of 1 character) equals to the Levenshtein distance. Obviously this does not necessary define a unique alignment (consider "a" - "aa" or "ab" - "ba").
An idea that I find interesting to consider is whether you could construct a o(m * n) (i. e. asymptotically faster than O(m * n)) algorithm that computes k elementary operations (insertion/deletion/replacement of 1 character) that convert the first string s into the second string s' such that there exists a fixed constant 1 < C with
k <= C * d(s, s'),
I live in Silicon Valley, and I have an autistic 9 year old son. He resembles the former, not the latter.
Thank you for actually understanding the difference. I am glad someone gets it. The spectrum is largely diluted to the point of needing to be broken up into smaller spectrums. It pains me every time to explain what "low functioning" autism is, or "classic autism".
My son was told he couldn't really join a Bay Area Autistic Minecraft group because he was "too autistic" and it was really for high functioning autists or "Aspies."
Maybe I should just start saying "mentally disabled". Easier.
I've seen the difference first-hand many times growing up, perhaps more so than most having attended private schools for a while. I have nothing but respect and adoration for you and others who care for the truly autistic.
More societal acceptance would be great for increasing quality of life, but what we really need is further research into treatments and prevention for the actual disorder. This downplaying of significance through "high-functioning autism" is a disservice to that aim.
> My son was told he couldn't really join a Bay Area Autistic Minecraft group because he was "too autistic"
That is so intensely infuriating, I'm very sorry to hear that. If it's any consolation, I can tell you with unfortunate experience that kids are the cruelest of all towards those with disabilities beyond their own. Nonetheless, I do hope you can find another group that is more accepting.
> Maybe I should just start saying "mentally disabled". Easier.
And you really shouldn't have to. It makes little sense, because as a child we all seemed to know what autism meant. Yet lately it's become trendy to associate with things like Aspergers (which I would argue could almost be an advantage in today's increasingly specialized world.)
But whatever label you settle on, just don't fall into the trap of arguing semantics. Like in the linked article, "autistic" vs "person with autism". A label is only offensive when it's used to disparage. And in that sense, any label can become offensive. Political correctness distracts from the core issue.
Don't be ridiculous, Gawker writers, social justice warriors and others of their ilk have plenty of ambition. They're angry that the nerdy kids are doing well economically and they're not. It must gall them terribly to see the ones they bullied and ignored outdoing them in the game of life when their social skills are so much better. But they can fight back. One of the joys of having better social skills is being better at politics. So the nerd advantage had better be large and enduring because the difference in social skills is ineradicable for the same reasons lawyers and engineers have noticeable differences in social skills.
>In my personal opinion, (I don't publish any manuals on mental disorders,) if you are living on your own, earn a decent salary, have friends, and otherwise appear completely normal to others in person; then I don't care if you have a bit of trouble with social cues: you're not autistic. And it's insulting if you or others refer to yourself as such. Even worse is when I see them being used as excuses. I had some issues with social graces as a teenager, so I practiced and do pretty well now. It's disgusting for someone to play off issues that they could easily address with some effort on their part. Even if it's legitimately a problem, a disorder is not an excuse to give up on trying, and just expect everyone else to tolerate you. Yes, it sucks that you have to try harder than others. Welcome to life, it's not fair.
Indeed, life is not fair but I'm not giving up the diagnosis or the label just because the DSM-5 merged Asperger's and autism. I think it was stupid but it is what it is. I like to think I'm doing pretty well socially now but I remember one Asperger's support group I went to for a year. Aspies are annoying. Lack of social graces just barely begins to cover it. I spent most of a decade knowing or fearing I was fucking up socially somehow and it was shit. If the label changed, fine, the diagnosis is the same and the literaturew written to help Aspies is still maybe tied for the second most helpful thing to help me out of that unfortunate hole.
Take your problem to the APA. I'll call myself autistic if I feel like it.
The author appears to prefer the term Autistic, and has specific reasons for disliking Autism Speaks (and the term "people with autism", with the author claims is promoted by Autism Speaks), as described in [0] and [1].
[0] http://www.stanforddaily.com/2014/05/27/autism-allyship-and-... [1] http://apoststructuralautistic.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/my-a...
> You might have noticed several unusual things about how I discuss Autism. I’ve capitalized Autism, and I have not once used the word “disorder” or “syndrome” in tandem with it. I also say Autistic, rather than “person with autism” -- the term Autism Speaks, an organization despised by most Autistics and many of their parents, would prefer you to use.
Also, it's a lot easier to just use 'they' instead of he/she most of the time anyways, food for thought.
A parallel issue is expressly the case here -- as is mentioned in the article here.
(Even if you are in the group to which the alternative labels would apply, its not a great idea to pretend that your preferred label is the preferred label of everyone in the group.)