With all the discrimination and bullying going around, I think it is good that someone has something nice to say about autistic programmers. Like Ian Murdock who founded Debian and recently committed suicide had Asperger's Syndrome. Despite obvious impressive technical skills, life probably wasn't easy for him.
Most companies favor hiring average programmers that fit the mold over "weird people" even if they are amazing at their work. If Microsoft is doing the opposite and targets autistic programmers, then good for them! I see no reason to complain about that.
And for the record, the "myth" he is dispelling is a common misunderstanding of statistics. I can say that almost all rapists are men. Obviously that doesn't mean that all men are rapists, it means that the probability that a given rapist is a man is very high. It also doesn't mean that females can't be rapists.
In the same way, I can say that a "genius programmer" likely is on the autistic spectrum, without saying that all autists are geniuses and without saying that you can't be a genius programmer without being an autist.
I was pretty surprised by how much time was devoted to rebutting "everyone autistic is a good engineer" when all of the quotes cited (including the infamous ppt) were claiming "every good engineer is somewhat autistic".
I don't buy that latter claim either, and it's worth talking about how the "autistic programming genius" stereotype is harmful to everyone, autistic or not, but writing an article that's centered around committing the base rate fallacy doesn't mean much of anything.
Well being somehow autistic comes as both of a blessing and a curse.
Imagine a gaussian curve compared to the average (bi modal)
Autistic curve is somehow a little centered below the «average curve» when it comes to learning, because of the sociopathic trait making them tougher for them to enter the mold.
Then this curve will be more spread than the non autisitic one: those who fail will fail harder, whereas those who make it at the end will have learned either to compensate the lack of «empathy» with observations and/or working more the raw knowledge.
For every «gifted» autistic there is at least one that failed harder than average in academic field.
A handicap is like a marathon you are given to run with a distanced point of departure: it will be tougher for you in life and you may have to work more than the others to develop your raw running skills to make it to the finish line.
People able to make it, are both still handicaped (mold adaptation) but also they over-developed skills to compensate. But they often don't complain; they finally want to be seen as normal. So they silence their pain, and probably have met people like them that failed without deserving it. Plus, they have experienced bullying and may want to make a low profile to avoid it again.
HR in Tech industry at my opinion have developed an intuition of the profile of autistic coders and are taking advantages of them.
They are weak, they fear to unionize because they fear retaliation, and they don't like how they are represented.
Most of them who believed once that computer science would be the saving path, may now be disenchanted. But like people who turned the table once, maybe they don't care thinking of the next plan to finally achieve happiness for what remains of their life.
Overcoming a handicap gives you both confidence, and doubt.
Oh! By the way, a handicap does not come from your differences, but from the look the society is having on you.
I have no doubt, being black or a women... is not making you significantly different, the handicap comes from being treated differently... especially by Human Resources.
Obviously a tangent, but this strongly depends on how you define rape. Recent CDC studies find that a huge number of men report being "made to penetrate" women against their will. Most normal people would classify this (sex against your will) as rape, but the CDC only classified it as "sexual assault". Unsurprisingly, if you define men being forced to have sex with women as "not rape", then tautologically almost all rapists are men.
I have the feeling that as society moves towards true gender equality, we'll realise this problem is much less gendered than people currently assume.
Sexual assault also covers things like someone groping someone else's backside or chest in public without permission. Most people wouldn't consider those rape.
You're right that sex should be about a sober uncoerced "yes", rather than just an absence of "no", and that society needs to do a lot more to protect men. This narrow point is something that feminists and MRAs should be able to agree on. It benefits both of their groupings. The extreme end of MRA that rejects all rape statistics, and tries to suggest that rape (in all parts of the world, not just the US) has more male than female victims do great harm to this cause.
Having said that, the UK has some pretty clearly defined laws. They're written well, and are easy to understand and are not ambiguous. There are 3 laws relevant here. i) Rape ii) Assault by penetration iii) Sexual Assault. (I'm making the assumption that offences against children are different.)
Rape and Sexual Assault by Penetration are equally serious and are almost identically written, except rape requires the penetration to be done by a penis.
Women can't be rapists under UK law. Women can be perpetrators of the equally serious crime of assault by penetration. Men can be the victims of rape or assault by penetration. Men and women can be the perpetrators or victims of sexual assault.
All crimes of rape and assault by penetration are under reported by victims, and under-recorded by police. It's likely that these crimes with male victims are less reported (more under reported) (and less recorded) than these crimes with female victims.
The UK has 2 sets of crime data. The first is what police claim has been reported. (These are not seen as statistically robust because of variations in what police record). The second is the annual Crime Survey of England and Wales. These are seen as robust statistics.
Here's the reports for "Crime in England and Wales" for year ending March 2015 and year ending December 2015. Note that the sexual offences here also include offences against children. I think that's an unhelpful
The reliance on police recording, and the lack of reporting about sexual offences in CESW means that any stats the UK has for sexual offences are seen by government statisticians as being unreliable.
> Police recorded crime figures showed an increase of 29% in all sexual offences for the year ending December 2015 compared with the previous year (up from 80,265 to 103,614; Table 10a), reaching the highest volume recorded since the introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) in April 2002 and marking the first time that the total number of offences has exceeded 100,000 in a given year. The latest rise remains among the largest year-on-year increases since the introduction of the NCRS, although it is not as steep as those seen in the years ending March, June and September 2015 (36% to 41%).
> Police recorded rape increased by 30% (to 34,741 offences) compared with the previous year, while other sexual offences increased by 29% (to 68,873 offences). Offence categories that directly relate to sexual offences against children[2] contributed 44% to the total increase in sexual offences recorded by the police.
> [2] This includes "Rape of a male/female child under 16", "Rape of a male/female child under 13", "Sexual assault on a male/female child under 13", "Sexual activity involving a child under 13/under 16" and "Abuse of children through sexual exploitation".
> Approximately 85,000 women and 12,000 men are raped in England and Wales alone every year; that's roughly 11 rapes (of adults alone) every hour
> Nearly half a million adults are sexually assaulted in England and Wales each year
With all these caveats to say that we don't really know the picture around sexual offences in England and Wales I still think it's reasonable to say that sexual offences against adults tend to be committed by men, and that while anyone can be a victim of these crimes (and certainly it's not as overwhelmingly gendered as some people suggest) the victims tend to be female.
>Women can be perpetrators of the equally serious crime of assault by penetration. Men can be the victims of rape or assault by penetration
But the point being that a woman forcing a man to have sex counts as none of those things. It only ends up in that list if she sticks something in his butt.
Sure, but the lesser (but still serious) offence of sexual assault is very clearly defined, non-gendered in law, and while subject to more under-reporting and under-recording of male victims is still mostly male perpetrators and female victims. That's unlikely to change even if every victim is accurately reported and recorded, or if the English and Welsh crime of rape is expanded to "non consensual sex".
Your use of "force" here is unhelpful. We know that juries don't convict because they feel that force is necessary for rape - thus women who don't fight back are not seen by juries to have been forced into sex.
It's much better for us to focus on consent, and to educate people that consent can't involve coercion.
That recognises the under-conviction of rape for women victims; and it also promotes the rights of men to not consent to sex and to have that recognized as the abusive crime that it is.
My aim here - just in case it's not clear - is to make it easier for men to report crimes committed against them, and to make law enforcement record those crimes, and to make juries convict those crimes. I also want to make those things happen for female victims. (And here where I use male / female I don't want to limit to a gender binary).
Yes they do. Companies value organizational fealty above all else, and genuinely care little about productivity or talent. Sure, they talk and talk about caring for talent -- lip service necessary for various political pursuits -- but they don't actually value it. Even when an especially productive person is hired, their ability is more often talked about as a credential and used to win arguments from authority between rival political factions than to generate real business value.
Large parts of the research book Moral Mazes talk about this and various pieces of evidence for it.
Would you rather have an average programmer or one that does twice as much productive work every day but is only in the office half as many hours per day, given that they are both paid equally?
I have asked this question to people responsible for hiring and not one have answered that they would prefer the programmer doing double the amount of work. The "inconvenience" to the rest of the team that a peer is only working half as many hours is costlier than the benefit of doubled work. My conclusion: Fitting in >> Output. Maybe it is different in Silicon Valley. I don't know. :)
Also, your joke is an oxymoron. If someone is socially well adjusted then they will fit in. One key characteristic of Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that it is hard for them to fit in and they may not even want to. You write "we prefer a bit of spergy" which probably means that your workplace has preferences for how employees should behave. Which means that there is something in your workplace to fit into which means trouble for employees with ASD.
Given a person that does absolutely nothing but working. Like not communicating unless it is work related and necessary, not partaking in joking, not going to lunches, not talking, not chit-chatting... Would that person "fit in"?
It's a weird social balance today, between employers and employees.
It used to be that an employee needed to step up to the needs, expectations and social compatibilities of the company they're going into. Certainly that's still much of an expectation today; as you mention employers prefer average & expected, vs exceptional (including all meanings of the word), though there's a bit more two-way action mixed in especially with physical disabilities and discrimination.
But what actionable changes are mentioned in the article, and what are their tradeoffs? Dropping a degree requirement is obviously sensible that benefits pretty much everybody, and has been for a long time. But the biggest issues seem to be social and communicative processes with team development of large projects. How can things change there? Any great ideas need to be presented and gain traction and acceptance in order to be adopted in a larger team environment. So much of design and implementation is not just technical creation of stuff that works, but social championship of gaining consensus so that software works together.
In the high speed development environment of the larger commercial games industry, there's no real place for people to sit off by themselves and code some grand project solo to avoid those issues.
> Most companies favor hiring average programmers that fit the mold over "weird people" even if they are amazing at their work. If Microsoft is doing the opposite and targets autistic programmers, then good for them! I see no reason to complain about that.
Recognizing the strengths of autistic coders is great. Doing it specifically and explicitly because you think they're easier to abuse is a big problem.
I have a friend who was recently hired under Microsoft's autism hiring program, and is still really excited about it. I'm trying to decide if I should show her this article or not. It would almost certainly sour her feelings on the whole deal, and I'm holding out hope that her direct managers are more humane than this "they work like machines" motherfucker.
Why do you think Microsoft is abusing autistic programmers? It is not everyone that thinks working hard and long hours is abuse. At least not if they are compensated fairly for their time.
It is difficult to judge Phil Katz's case. Phil was very very attached to his father. His fathers' passing destroyed him. His father was probably his best friend. I think that is more important that anything else in Phil's case.
> I can say that almost all rapists are men. Obviously that doesn't mean that all men are rapists, it means that the probability that a given rapist is a man is very high.
You can't determine the probability of an individual like that, at least without more data. I can say that almost all the people who contract HIV are african american or men who have sex with men, that does not mean that the probability of any given homosexual or black person having HIV is high (greater than 50%). The vast majority of men have never raped a woman and will never rape a woman.
And this error is ironically an illustration of the exact problem he was commenting on: our brains tend to work by association, and implication (A implies B) tends to be interpreted as association (A implies B means A and B are associated, which means they go together, so A implies B is a way to say B implies A).
I dont know if autistic people are better programmers, but what I feel that - from 20 years making software - is that people with these personality traits that fit into the spectrum of autism and who happen to end up in the software industry are extremely vulnerable to being exploited by people with certain other personality traits.
Put a narcissistic (or whatever you want to call this type of people - maybe sociopathic? I am not a psychologist) CEO or a manager in a room with autistic software developers and you will could have some great things churned out, but there are probably going to be a couple of heart attacks and maybe worse, if you are unlucky. For sure, there will be some very unhappy people.
Ironically, it's Jobs that has all of the typical Aspy traits, not Woz—right down to deciding on one set of clothes and sticking to it.
If you actually read an S. Jobs bio and are familiar with Aspy traits, he's a textbook case.
What confuses people (if they are confused) is that most people with Aspergers are not artistic, don't like speaking in front of crowds, or running teams.
However, it makes a ton of sense if you understand what the underlying brain differences are. People with Aspergers can be superior at artistic and group endeavors because they can easily ignore human quirks and are able to instead focus on the archetypal aspects. Certainly Jobs did.
A handful of extremely successful film writer/directors are also on the spectrum, and I suspect, for similar reasons. All, like Jobs, are considered to be "assholes" by some, and absolutely loved by others.
I have read SJobs bio(s). My father, brother and fiance have Aspergers. My father and brother especially relate more to Woz and are scared of people like Jobs. I relate more to Jobs than Woz, and I am more OCPD. If Jobs is Aspergers, he is also very manic spectrum. My father/brother are strictly unipolar. Here is more on the OCPD thing if you are curious: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
Oh for sure, I didn't mean to imply that Jobs was _only_ on the spectrum.
I work in film (in addition to tech) and know a lot of people on the spectrum that I think people who only meet autistic programmers would have difficulty recognizing.
Even in TFA, one of the descriptors is:
> They generally marry the first girl they date
Maybe, but in my experience, that's only one specific kind of person with Aspergers (who I agree definitely exists). However, at least in film and other artistic/people disciplines, that wouldn't describe the "typical" person on the spectrum—I think you mainly see that type in tech/engineering circles. (To be fair, that's what the article is focused on.)
In my experience, at least in the fields I work in, people with Aspergers are "sigmas" (to use PUA terminology for a moment) and have no difficulty whatsoever dating, meeting people, etc. Certainly they don't do it the "normal" way, but they're very successful.
UDPATE: Thinking about it further, most people on the spectrum are not intuitive feelers (in the Myers Briggs taxonomy), they're sensory thinkers. When you find an Aspie who is an intuitive feeler, like Jobs, it's certainly confusing to people: if he's an Aspie, how can he get up in front of crowds? Lead a team? Negotiate? Etc. Unpossible.
It's really just "normals" applying their own biases on what a normal person would/could do, without understanding what makes those on the spectrum—especially those that are more emotional/intuitive—tick.
Completely agree with the Sigma thing. I found the PUA stuff (my interest was more evo pysch) so frustratingly irrelevant and misguided until I read about the Sigma reproductive model. I think the difference (clinically speaking) between narcissists and aspergers is the need for admiration. No one I know with aspergers wants any attention, basically ever. I think Jobs is more of an INFJ narcissist. As opposed to more borderline INTJ (Aspergers).
Thanks for the comments, I don't find many people who are into this stuff AND don't have cartoonish views of people on the spectrum.
I wanted to share this next bit because you seem like you might appreciate it. At least it took me awhile to figure it out. :)
In my experience, Myers Briggs is most helpful if you think of all eight attributes as independent capabilities each person can have, and then rate each on a scale, say, from 1-10. From each pairing, the one with the highest value determines their type, e.g. INFJ.
So, I would agree that Jobs is an INFJ (let's say that all are "10s"), but that doesn't mean that his ESTP traits are all pegged at zero. Instead, you might say Jobs has E=5, S=2, T=8, and P=6 in addition to I=10, N=10, F=10, J=11.
Mostly what the dominant Myers Briggs type gets you is a way to determine a person's typical problem solving pattern. NFs feel (and get excited) about a solution first, then convince (think) themselves why it's right.
OTOH My wife is an ENTP, and she thinks things through first and then gets excited—the opposite of me. If I wasn't aware of the underlying dynamics, I'd get super frustrated every time I brought her some exciting thing only to get calm analysis and no excitement (at least, at first).
Interesting. That is actually quite helpful. My fiance is INFJ and Aspergers, and I am ENTJ and not Aspergers. She gets excited and blurts things out, where as my excitement builds as my mental model of something does.
Autism is complicated. Asberger originally labeled people with these traits as people with "psychopathic autism".
I don't think Jobs was heavy on the nerdy side of the autism spectrum. More likely on the psychopathic side - I don't mean this in a bad way. Just trying to analyse things.
I've both read the Isaacson bio and been diagnosed with Asperger's. I strongly disagree (with erichocean) that Jobs was on the Autism Spectrum.
Jobs's bio was in fact a textbook case of psychopathy: his eyeballs "drilled into your soul with a Deadpan Stare"; he was highly manipulative (which proves he was socially adept); and he was so charismatic that colleagues say his presence was a Reality Distortion Field.
Meanwhile, most Aspies can't even maintain eye contact (let alone herd cats). Regarding the diagnosis for Asperger's/Autism, the trait clinicians test for is literally "social ineptitude".
> Regarding the diagnosis for Asperger's/Autism, the trait clinicians test for is literally "social ineptitude".
And yet, on the Wikipedia page for Asperger Syndrome[0], the phrase "social ineptitude" is nowhere to be found. Strange.
From Wikipedia:
> Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's, is a developmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.
Jobs did have "significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication". Everyone who worked with him thought he was an asshole, he pissed off even his friends (e.g. Woz), and had an extremely difficult time in normal roles with his first wife and child, etc. In person, Jobs was a hot mess. Of course, this—by itself—is insufficient. Lots of normals are assholes, too.
The real tell for Jobs is the second requirement: restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. Jobs had that like crazy, right down to wearing the same clothes for—literally—decades. The history of Pixar actually has better information on Jobs (oddly enough), including a lot of his extremely non-normal behaviors that fall into this second category.
People who are just sociopaths don't have "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests". In fact, they appear normal (it's part of the game, in fact). Jobs couldn't even begin to fake "normal"—and didn't try.
People are confused about Jobs because he could manipulate groups, and was, generally, successful. The Aspie types you find in tech are usually of the variety you mention: won't look people in the eyes. Jobs was definitely not that.
FWIW It's easy to confuse a sociopath and a non-engineer Aspie, because both have less empathy for normal people than is typical. You can tell them apart easily though: sociopaths also have less empathy for archetypal people, whereas Aspies (like Jobs) have more empathy than is typical for people and situations matching archetypes. This can be extremely frustrating to those closest to them, who (legitimately) are upset that they care so deeply for archetypal things, but can seemingly ignore the very real hurting of, say, their daughter who is right in front of them.
Incidentally, the ability to strongly relate to archetypes, IMO, is why Jobs (and others like him in, say, film) are successful. It allowed him to focus on what is truly important to a huge swath of people and ignore small details that are only important to the few people near them. (This is Jobs legendary ability to "focus".) Normals, in my experience, have a very hard time doing that precisely because they can so easily empathize with anyone.
Let me tell you a little about the ADI-R [0]. The clinician reads your biography, makes small talk, asks you to make up stories, watches for any abnormal behavior, et al. The madeup story of a NeuroTypical will include the emotions of other people. E.g. "My friends and I went to the beach, but we were sad because it rained, and Alice got mad because it was her only day off, etc".
An aspie's story will show ZERO AWARENESS of other people's emotions. Their entire world consists of PvE. Not because they have no sympathy for others' emotions, but because deciphering non-verbal cues is as opaque as deciphering an enigma. It's like the opposite of clairvoyance. Does that sound like empathy to you?
I agree that Jobs must have had empathy. Otherwise he wouldn't have been so successful at manipulation. It's just that he was such an asshole that he abused his knowledge of others' emotional states to gain leverage over them.
In what world does "social ineptitude" not map to "significant difficulties in social interaction and non-verbal communication"? This feels like one of those bifurcation situations where someone is like "I'm not fat, I just have a BMI of 9000".
> sociopaths (...) appear normal (it's part of the game, in fact).
Psychopaths are the ones who blend in. Sociopaths are pretty conspicuous.
> "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests"
Also fits OCD. We agree that Jobs was highly neuroatypical. But whatever his quirk, it's not autism.
> All, like Jobs, are considered to be "assholes" by some, and absolutely loved by others.
I think the results are appreciated by-and-large by the people who haven't worked with them. For people who have, they might add the "...but he is an asshole" postscript/disclaimer.
Yes.. Other people might call it some form of synergy and it happens all the time. The problem is that for every Apple and every Microsoft, there are hundreds of "nerd exploiters" ruining nerd lives.
It almost sounds like I am turning this into a "nerd lives matter" campaign or something like that. This is not my intention, but it is a real danger for autistic software developers, which may lead them to engage in some extremely unhealthy behaviour.
Indeed. Although eventually nerds learn boundaries in most cases that protect them. Apple and Microsoft worked out pretty well for Woz/Allen without them having to do any sales themselves. So it can be win-win. My Dad, fiance and brother all have psychiatrist-verified Aspergers (pre DSM5). So the nerd and nerd-exploter dynamic plays out in day-to-day lives too. I am a very strong verbal communicator, as is my Mom for my Dad. I think they appreciate our ability to be explicit, direct and do what we say we will. Because people who have opaque motives are too anxiety-provoking for people who cannot see through it.
Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be?
It is an honest question. I really dont know. I am sure he had some great technical insights, but I haven't seen anything that would lead me to believe that he was actually a genius coder or engineer.
> Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be?
At least there are strong signs:
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=... "In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent."
According to https://www.quora.com/Who-beat-Bill-Gates-in-math-at-Harvard... "Christos Papadimitriou, one of the absolute top theoretical CS people in the world (almost certainly top 10 active researchers), told his girlfriend at the time that Bill Gates was the smartest person he had ever met.
Bill Gates, advised by Papadimitriou, found a bound on a problem that stood for 30 years."
Given that he would sit down, read, and annotate, a technical spec, and then grill the reporter during the next day meeting on technical aspects, yeah he was.
Dont get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. I just dont see this particular incident as anything special. Bill Gates didn't actually do anything except annotate the spec and throw some ideas out there.
> In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou[3] gave an upper bound of
(5/3)n. This was improved, thirty years later, to (18/11)n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough[4] (Chitturi et al., 2009).
Hey, that's the official name for what I thought of as "aligning a stack of coins".
The Google Code Jam qualification round this year included the problem "write a function to report the minimum number of flips necessary to sort a stack of pancakes". I'm not too pleased to see this in the wikipedia page:
> The minimum number of flips required to sort any stack of n pancakes has been shown to lie between ~1.07n and 1.63n (exact boundaries: 15n/14 and 18n/11,) but the exact value is not known.
I read too hastily. Pancake sorting involves sorting pancakes by size using the pancake-flipping operation. The problem at issue was aligning them into the same orientation without regard to size, which is the "more difficult" burnt pancake problem, except that all the pancakes are the same size.
I guess for completeness, I should post the solution to the sortless burnt pancake (to me, "coin alignment") problem:
Consider a stack of coins, like top-HTTHHTTHTHTTTTTTH-bottom. The number of flips required to align it is equal to the number of transitions from tails to heads or heads to tails as you move through the stack. In the example, we can break the stack conceptually into runs of H TT HH TT H T H TTTTT H, which is 8 transitions.
1. (This number is necessary.) Two adjacent coins which differ in orientation can only be made not to differ by a flip at the position between them. A flip above or below that position in the stack reverses neither or both, which preserves their difference. Stated another way, no flip can reduce the number of transitions in the stack by more than 1.
2. (This number is sufficient.) If you move from the top of the stack down, flipping whenever a transition is encountered, you preserve the invariant that the prefix of the stack above the point you have reached is all aligned. This is one flip per transition, so one flip per transition suffices.
If the coins must be aligned to a particular direction, for example heads up, just suffix a coin of that alignment to the bottom of the stack.
There are a whole bunch of skills that go into being good at delivering working software. One such skill is remembering details of how lots of things work, and especially knowing when seemingly simple things will hit hidden stumbling blocks.
Obviously, there are a bunch of other skills required too, and some skills get a lot more respect than others.
One reading of the story is that Bill Gates, despite being six layers of management away from 'the coal face' of actually making the date functions work, knew about the 1904 Date System and why it was there; and that he was able to ask harder and harder questions until the project manager looked unprepared because he had a lot of the specific skill of remembering lots of details and stumbling blocks.
Obviously, an alternative reading of the story is that Gates didn't know those specifics about date handling in Lotus 123, and he was going to ask about something else (or maybe nothing at all) and it was only by random chance that made it look like he knew about this complicated detail.
I wouldn't be suprised if he had written the whole thing ON PAPER, and then just re-type it to a computer.
Also, there is known story that Gates and Allen wrote BASIC compiler for some obscure microprocessor without having access to an actual thing, just paper spec. So they wrote emulator first, then compiler and guess what? when run on the real processor it worked like a charm from first try.
... Or someone who was understandably proud of having written a basic but serviceable filesystem on an airplane. Please at least consider the boring hypothesis.
> In the ensuing outrage, a PowerPoint presentation written by St. John surfaced which included a slide in which he referred to engineers with Asperger syndrome as being "the holy grail" of hires. "They work like machines," he wrote, "don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs."
Someone needs to send all these people patio11's guides to salary negotiation, and maybe some drug to make them more aggressive and disagreeable. (Modafinil?)
Because negotiations (thus salary negotiations) aren't about spreading disagreement, but about making an agreement with which both sides can cope.
Thus if you add the personality trait "aggressive and disagreeable" to a typical aspie, you'll get a termination of negotiation instead of a strongly suboptimal (for the aspie) negotiation result.
I second this. Having employees that 'never engage in politics and work like a machine' sounds like a recipe for exploitation. I've seen FAR to may managers take advantage of people 1 rung down on the social ladder.
As they say, if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. It's not just that autistics are all different the same way allistics are all different; compared to the breadth of the entire autism spectrum, allistics are all pretty much the same. You never know what you're going to get when picking from the autistic box of chocolates. Maybe a savant, maybe a person of average intelligence but remarkable coping skills, maybe a person with not much of either.
As for "autistic programmers": for those of us with the skill to program, programming is a much better career choice than most, but even that is changing. Since the internet bubble of the mid-late 90s, allistic people have taken up programming in droves. The promise of easy money and prestige made programming a much more palatable career choice for allistics than it had been in the past, and now they've pretty much taken over. Programming is now a social activity. Cubicles are a luxury; the boss insists that seating everybody at long crowded tables with enough room for one laptop per seat, where everybody can hear everybody else's noisy conversations, makes the workplace more "collaborative". You are expected to be interruptible at any moment. Meetings are more frequent. ("Stand-up meetings" have had the effect of increasing the frequency of the weekly meeting to daily, while the original promise that they be short is falling by the wayside.) Some shops have enshrined the doctrine of Extreme Programming to such an extent that you are not permitted to get any work done without another person very close at hand, watching every move you make. Articles for employees state, in a very as-it-should-be manner, that the relevant criterion for determining who gets hired, commended, or promoted is not technical prowess but rather "soft skills", which bears out in reality as the number of tech startups founded by bros and hipsters who only hire "cultural fits" (autistics don't really fit in in any culture) increases. And books and seminars tell the boss that the person who prefers long stretches of working alone because that is how they get their best thinking done, is a danger and a threat to the organization and must be eliminated.
So in the modern workplace, hiring an autistic is indeed a very poor choice. Unless you can tailor the environment to their needs -- which approaches impossible unless you know them personally -- you're probably better off hiring the "cultural fit".
I like your comment about cubicles being a luxury. I don't know why they became a funny cliche of office horror. You don't have to be autistic to be driven mad by the constant interruptions enforced by office culture. When they tried to make pair programming mandatory, most of us decided to ignore it. Can't ignore the daily standup though. It just means I will not be able to concentrate until 10:30 every day. If that's the way they want it, so be it
> You don't have to be autistic to be driven mad by the constant interruptions enforced by office culture.
There's a difference between finding something completely pointless and stupid (an exaggerated "this is driving me mad!") and completely losing your ability to concentrate ("my productivity is 10% of what it was when I had a quiet room for myself"). I get so aggressive, hopeless and sad when overstimulated that I had to quit the job because open space was too much to handle.
> Can't ignore the daily standup though. It just means I will not be able to concentrate until 10:30 every day.
I purposely miss the standup meetings and just mail my report in instead. No one has complained, as my work still gets done and I still communicate with the team (although by Slack, not in person).
> When they tried to make pair programming mandatory, most of us decided to ignore it.
Oh, it's still doing its job because now it becomes a speed trap. Failure to pair program then becomes something to put on your pink slip when management fears the possible repercussions of "we just don't like you".
IMHO it is the problem of trying to make things black and white: either being diseases (or worse: used as an insult) or a super-power (or: an excuse). Usually it's a combination of special skills, and special needs (and things which are just different). As with almost every other psychological "deviation" from the norm. Hence "neurodiversity" not "neurosuperiority", or the traditional medical distinction between "healthy" and "ill" (and nothing beyond).
> Yet, it is good to be aware of the neurodiversity and that other people can have different styles of thinking than ours, with their pros and cons. It’s not a challenge – it’s an opportunity to see word through various lenses! (As long as we respect other’s right to be different.)
I actually like flapping my hands, nerding out about things, and being me. I wouldn't want to be someone different, even if that different person had an easier time buying pants, and wouldn't have gotten bullied as much in elementary school. Oh, and I read at rates beyond what is commonly cited as the physical limit, after teaching myself to read before kindergarden.
Some people with very real impairments are against being cured, while some people with mild ones want a cure. And yes, being able to have an opinion and not constantly wanting to rip your skin off means you've avoided some bad outcomes: they probably want a cure.
An obsessive personality can lead to an individual working 80 hour weeks - not by choice, but by default. They literally don't know any better and are not necessarily competent to make a conscious decision not to this.
I've worked with two suicides, both of which would have scored as Asperger's (a diagnosis in retrospect) and two others that completely broke down from the stress of 80 hour a week software engineering jobs. They didn't need to be taken advantage of, they needed an environment that didn't demand they live under that kind of pressure, and an organization that was in tune to the consequences of applying this kind of pressure to non-neurotypical employees.
I wonder if program's like Microsofts deal with this. These are special needs employees - and its sick to read that business people want to exploit someone's disability to further their own careers.
The social skills issue is often not for want of social connection, but a frustrating inability to be able to participate. Again, this is a disability, not a choice. The social isolation can easily turn to depression and an unintentional withdrawal from society with co-morbid substance abuse problems. Someone else in this discussion mentioned the recent medical examiner findings about Ian Murdock's suicide.
> An obsessive personality can lead to an individual working 80 hour weeks - not by choice, but by default. They literally don't know any better and are not necessarily competent to make a conscious decision not to this.
It gets even worse. Once someone with Asperger's "clicks" into a specific routine, it becomes a pretty challenging endeavor to change it without some external influence. Same with bad eating/sleeping habits. I'm currently in the "works overtime out of habits" phase and it's extremely hard to snap out of it.
I was diagnosed with Aspergers early on in life. For a long time, I tried to ignore it. But there's parts that you can't. It's difficult to make friends when you can't read people's intentions or read between the lines. I don't have a great interest in hanging out with people because I often don't feel like I fit in.
In my teenage years, it meant that I was a loner who went home at the end of a school days, played games by myself, and that was it. In my adult years, it's been much more difficult.
My background is a complete mess. I got a degree in Computer Networking because programming wasn't available, and then later went on to work retail for several years. In the meantime, I kept working on programming projects.
On the programming side, I have a 5 year project where I built everything myself, and a handful of 1 year projects, most of which the source code has been lost for.
Trying to get jobs in the industry is a joke. Take a look at the above, and you'll see someone who isn't normal, isn't average. I send resumes off and I get "We don't think you'll be a good fit" or ignored. That right there is what hurts the most. I could accept getting interviews and failing them, but being outright rejected before being given a chance, that flat hurts.
I've got a lot of traits that come from Aspergers too. I don't have an interest in much besides computers, so I often spend entire days at home and coding or thinking about coding problems. Doesn't bother me to spend 12+ hours in a day just coding.
Horrible at eye contact, and don't know why. Monotone voice? Check. Sometimes I'll mean to say one word and say another without realizing it, or focus on someone's meaning in one part and miss the others. I don't have that rage though. Used to when I was younger. But the computer doesn't care if you get mad, and it's better to just let logic take over.
I've still got my fingers crossed that I'll find a place that will give me a chance. But if I can't find that, then I'll shrug my shoulders and go back to working retail.
I have a github account established, and it has a couple of projects on it. One, a telnet client, is missing. I keep forgetting to add that in. I've been meaning to, once the language is more established, to spread the packages out into different repositories.
I know I should have more of a variety there, the trouble thus far has been the 'what'.
I see the "Alex St. John's infamous PowerPoint" image, pasted in the article, as more valuable than the entire article.
St John is harsh an direct, and seems to contain more objective true than the entire article.
Maybe another trait related to high-IQ+autism is a profound disregard for political correctness. Is St.John diagnosed with autism?
Maybe the part of the brain dedicated to social-political "skills", in an Aspergers-diagnosed brain is really dedicated to abstraction processing or pattern recognition?
Of course that the lacking of social-political skill frees your mind to concentrate long hours on complex abstractions. You shun the "social" world, and then concentrate on the mathematical or algorithmic world, where the "entities" have interesting and also predictable behaviour.
Thanks for pointing me to the St.John article, it looks like a good read.
The fact is that people who are actually autistic struggle to gain employment anywhere, including as software developers.
The vast majority of programmers are not autistic. The stereotype that they are is damaging both to programmers (by typecasting them) and to autistic people (by ignoring their real challenges).
We can't just "consider autism an advantage in programming jobs." It's not. The majority of programmers are not autistic and there are large parts of programming jobs which are very difficult for autistic people to cope with.
At best, autism is less of a disadvantage in programming than in other jobs. That's why it makes sense to focus on programming as a field for autistic individuals to move towards, though in practice my understanding that QA roles are actually often more suitable.
Unfortunately, what you end up with is individuals like Alex St. John taking someones disabilities as a reason to exploit them. That's ugly.
> How many out-of-the-ordinary programmers have some form of mild arperger's? 90%? 99%? none?
The fact that you're even throwing out numbers like 90% is ridiculous. There's no way that 90% of programmers have "mild Asperger's."
Anywhere on the Internet. Plenty of people in online forums who claim to have Aspergers and thus smart and not care about socializing. Same thing as saying you're INTJ.
St. John's perspective is, to be blunt, idiotic. I work in the game industry, and being effective as a programmer involves a lot of people skills and a lot of communication with other disciplines. It doesn't matter how technically brilliant you are if you can't sell people on your ideas or communicate effectively. If you were to go out of your way to hire emotionally stunted young people like St. John suggests you'd just end up with a miserable place to work.
The funny thing is, all of my friends with autism are fiercely political. If you asked me, I'd probably say people with autism were MORE political than those without. Of course, none of my friends with autism work in software.
Are we talking about the same kind of politics? Because, from my experience, autistics are more likely to hold strong views and discuss the "big" politics (as in, people ruling the country) while allistics are more into the practical "small" politics (like, say, typical office drama).
St. John's point was that programmers with autism spectrum disorders are easier to take advantage of. Further, ASD's are not a superpower and don't rededicate parts of the brain to other useful tasks.
I think some of the best programmers are very collaborative and not at all introverted. It's just stupid to generalize like that though. When I'm putting together teams I find I get the best results when I have a mix of nut jobs from across the spectrum of programmer personalities... except brogrammers, hate those guys ;)
I don't mind collaborating, and indeed enjoy it. But don't force it upon me by an oppressive open office environment. I need quiet and an environment free from distraction and other people to really dig into my code and produce my best work.
Living in a constant state of interruptibility, observation, and distraction will not get good code out of me, and indeed many other devs. I, like many others, can make do, but why pay us so much money if you're going to put us in an environment guaranteed to make us produce sub-par code and products? Seems like a poor use of capital.
Everything you said plus having a developer assigned to several concurrent projects. Jumping between different project setups, PM's, software designs, etc. is mentally taxing to an extreme. It leads me to make more mental mistakes. Rapid task switching is not conducive to quality, detailed work.
The point at issue doesn't seem to me to be whether autism is conducive to programming ability, but that someone is essentially arguing that a disability is a great means by which to take advantage of someone in a notoriously exploitative industry.
I think article is mixing up cause and effect. It is not that autistic people are good developers, but software development is one of a few good jobs for autistic people. There is zero barrier to enter, study materials are free and it offers great flexibility.
Most developers would love to do some other jobs. But the amount of office politics, backstabbing etc is not possible to handle for some people.
IMO, whether or not it's true that certain traits of autism make for better programmers is actually irrelevant -- it's not useful for that kind of generalization.
Not all high functioning autistics become great programmers, just as not all introverts are necessarily great programmers. And saying that "all" programmers share one or more of those things just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you disenfranchise people who don't think they "fit".
> "The internet has kind of killed my 'autistic pride,' so to speak," says Gillmer. "The constant use of it as an insult makes me want to hide it, so I tend to not bring it up unless it feels like I'm not communicating properly."
I cannot for the life of me understand why I see "aspie" or "spergy" used as insults on both reddit and tumblr.
I find it quite annoying that we can't say "retarded" anymore but "autistic" and "autism" are valid insults. This has a lot to do with high-profile autistic people such as Christian Weston Chandler, who have a whole host of other psychological and emotional damage that has little to do with autism itself. They are the ones who wear their condition on their sleeve and try to use it to excuse all sorts of reprehensible behavior. Until in the public mind the words "autism" and "Asperger's" become associated with cringe.
As far as anti/pro SJWs are concerned, I've mostly seen it as an insult by pro SJWs against white nerdy autistic gamergate basement dwellers.EDIT: which annoys me, since I'm more on the Pro SJW side by default.
Queasy nerds make SJWs uncomfortable because they are perceived as much more likely to display shockingly inappropriate sexual behavior. Since women have the right not to fear for their lives or chastity, the reasoning goes, they have the right not to have any contact with queasy nerds, and so they must be expunged from the places in society where they nest (computing, gaming) in order to create "safe spaces" for women.
This is also a subtext in the upcoming 2016 Ghostbusters film: the villain is a queasy nerd who summons ghosts to Manhattan as revenge for getting the mockery and rejection he deserved; so it is up to the Empowered Womyn Ghostbusters to exorcise him so NYC can become a safe space again.
We've done such a good job with autism awareness that at this point I'm honestly not even sure that people know what autism actually is. Our idea of "autism" has become less Temple Grandin and more the nerds from Revenge of the Nerds. So, yeah. You should probably want to hire nerds as programmers.
I fail to see the fallacy in the St John's presentation. The Gamasutra editorial seems to widen the discussion to ALL autistics, which is not what the original presentation was talking about. It then goes on to say that not all Autistics match the "holy grail". Well no shit, Sherlock.
You're telling me. "Can't make eye contact". What is going on inside this guy's head that his employees being unable to make eye contact is an advantage to him?
As someone who perfectly fits the description of an "Aspergers Programmer" I think this is all spot on. Maybe people don't like it, but I will take some introverted geeks who love to code over all other possible applicants.
The problem is that the criteria for autism is very loose. If you restricted your search to only low functioning autistic savants then it might be harder to find someone like this.
But that doesn't mean there isn't an autistic savant who is a great programmer/computer scientist.
In the end this is a game for monkeys and typewriters.
Given the rate that autism is showing up nowadays, it seems like spectrum disorders are over-diagnosed. People who were once just odd-balls or non-social are now being lumped in with people who have moderate to severe issues, and it's to the detriment of both groups.
As someone on the spectrum I don't see it as a detriment. Despite a seemingly vast difference between a high-functioning engineer and a low-functioning child, the strategies for improving the quality of life are pretty much the same. Routine, sensory stuff, avoiding meltdowns, recognizing emotions, all that stuff - it's as real for a brilliant but eccentric programmer as it's real for a non-verbal kid with no particular talents.
Because in the end, it's about improving the quality of life.
I'm on the "eccentric" end of spectrum; for 27 years I've been told that nothing is wrong with me, that I'm just "too smart". I can tell you I was pretty close to joining the 27 club; the piling problems ended up being too much to handle. I came upon the description of Asperger's purely by accident; no mental health professional would even suspect it because I "seemed normal". Finally being able to understand why I'm losing my ability to speak once in a while or getting violent whenever overstimulated wasn't just a relief. It was a life-saver.
If I didn't realize it's ASD, ignorance and stereotypes could have killed me.
PS. Yes, some people will claim they are "a little bit autistic" out of ignorance or attention seeking. Others will lump clinical cases with weirdos. Both don't change the validity of a proper diagnosis.
I'm glad to hear you disagree! My concern is that people who might be borderline-or-not-really-spectrum (if that makes sense) will cause people to look at ASD individuals and say, 'well he gets along alright, you're obviously just not trying hard enough.' Despite our best efforts, mental health is a tough topic to educate people on. I still hear 'she's just sulking' to refer to people with severe depression, and it makes me quite sad.
Found a link to this paper yesterday on the topic and it's very interesting: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2016.00.... Not close to the final word on Autism, but it does a good job of showing how both the causes, and the way the syndrome plays out in individuals, are much more complicated than media portrayals.
some real abuse of psychological terminology here. most clinically autistic people don't hold down jobs, certainly not professional roles, even if they have a high IQ
This used to be a really damaging stereotype and a de facto standpoint of psychology (and psychiatry) for years. I've personally met experts who wouldn't diagnose ASD in people who managed to get married or get a job. I've personally been dismissed because I "look normal" (whatever that means). I've been given several bogus diagnoses because ASD has been repeatedly ruled out based on nothing but presumptions and prejudices.
There are no family, job, or looks criteria in DSM-IV. I know ASD folks who hold jobs, have families and are more than successful in life. From the outside, they seem pretty normal, maybe a bit quirky or eccentric. From the inside? The way they arranged their lives to work around the social/sensory problems is something to applaud.
The important part? They don't "look" autistic, so most laypeople don't correlate autism with "a possibility for a successful life". Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
So, for the record, this is completely not true. You probably pass autistic people on the street every day.
Autism is a broad spectrum. I have hypersensitivity issues, even if loud noises don't make me fall down screaming. I tend towards obsessing over specific things, even if I don't block out all other stimuli for hours on end. I'm not naturally good at reading people, but I've been able to teach myself a fair bit over many years, so human emotions are no longer a closed book. I can look at a low-functioning autistic and understand what's going on in their head, as a magnification of what's going on in mine. And I've got a degree and a 13-year career as a coder.
I don't understand why so many people think that autism universally means needing help dressing yourself.
autistic programmers can be great but they can also be a liability. I am not saying this to be mean, it is just my experience. We had a situation once where an autistic person repeatedly did extremely inappropriate things both to people within our company and outside. It got to the point that it wasn't clear whether it was a result of his autism or if he wanted the company to fire him so he could sue for discrimination.
Tell that to guys like Igor Sysoev, who outperformed averages by an order of magnitude due to autisticly intense attention to details.
Hint: a mild form of autism, what casuals call Asperger, given that one survived childhood constant bullying and confusion about its causes, is actually good to have.
Maybe its neutral or slightly better in adulthood, but only if the autism isn't accompanied by other problems that frequently accompany autism, such as language disabilities and anxiety.
Or like the people who are unable to have jobs, even programming ones, despite being very skilled at it, because their aspergers causes them so many problems that they cannot work in an environment with other people or to deadlines, so, instead they are stuck unemployed, living at home, and terrified about what happens when their parents die and how they will cope, while people make fun of them for being basement dwellers.
Hell is other people. And yes, it is difficult to hold a programmer job in a circus, among self-obsessed, cosplaying sophisticated individualty, bearded and tattooed clowns.
But there are many niches for those who can't stand narcissistic cosplaying mediocrity in charge - craftsmanship of any kind, not necessarily digital. Making good sandwiches will do.
One could be a self-employed, paid open source contributor, a freelancer, a subcontractor, etc. Yes, one probably will never "succeed" in one of valleys sweatshops, but there are always other, less traveled pathways..
Again, Igor Sysoev, who have bootstrapped the project alone, according to his tastes and preferences, and then went back into shadow, leaving all the singing and dancing to those who liked it, is a classic example.
There is also Pirsig's book, Atlas, and a few other good ones.
I don't want to go point-by-point, but you seem to have a very poor grip on...anything to do with autism, really. Do you also think it's caused by vaccines?
Most companies favor hiring average programmers that fit the mold over "weird people" even if they are amazing at their work. If Microsoft is doing the opposite and targets autistic programmers, then good for them! I see no reason to complain about that.
And for the record, the "myth" he is dispelling is a common misunderstanding of statistics. I can say that almost all rapists are men. Obviously that doesn't mean that all men are rapists, it means that the probability that a given rapist is a man is very high. It also doesn't mean that females can't be rapists.
In the same way, I can say that a "genius programmer" likely is on the autistic spectrum, without saying that all autists are geniuses and without saying that you can't be a genius programmer without being an autist.