thanks for the comment. for what it's worth, I absolutely don't recognize myself in either description.
If anything, I am a pretty good software engineer because I can "literally" see how people think about software when reading source code and pull requests (I say literally because these things are... objects I can manipulate in my mind? it's hard to describe, and it took me a while to realize not everybody sees it this way).
There are many different ways of thinking, and they are right there in front of me, and some people are aware of certain patterns, certain people tend to consistently not realize this approach exists, others just can't back down from rewriting everything in a functional style, when others in the team don't do well with it. When I see programmers argue about style or programming language or framework I am often confused because I don't understand why they can't see that other people don't think like them :)
This same kind of behaviour can be observed all around us every day. I never understood how people get upset at staff at a restaurant, or get angry when someone bumps into them. Don't they realize that the other person didn't do it on purpose, and didn't mean harm? Why do people argue about politics so much? Don't they realize that other people have different values, and that we have a government in place to channel disagreement about them? Why yell at each other on facebook, don't you realize none of this is going to change the other person's mind?
> I can "literally" see how people think about software when reading source code and pull requests (I say literally because these things are... objects I can manipulate in my mind? it's hard to describe, and it took me a while to realize not everybody sees it this way).
I think you're right.
The impression I get when I talk to an autistic person, or when I cooperate with him on a problem, is that he sees my thoughts and my ideas as "entities" within his own mind. This rhymes with what you say, that you perceive it as if other people's thought patterns are "objects that you can manipulate in your mind".
My subjective experience is that the autistic person will "dive into himself" to find the answer to who I am, in a given situation, while the non-autistic person will look outwards. It's as if the non-autistic person processes me in real time, using a massive parallel social GPU in his head, while the autistic person, instead, consults massive internal lookup tables to try and derive the same information.
I think the difference is fundamental. It has to do with the very "shelf system" in our brains; the way that we have stored information about the world, and made sense of it, since we were small kids. It's not something that we can change as adults, I think.
If anything, I am a pretty good software engineer because I can "literally" see how people think about software when reading source code and pull requests (I say literally because these things are... objects I can manipulate in my mind? it's hard to describe, and it took me a while to realize not everybody sees it this way).
There are many different ways of thinking, and they are right there in front of me, and some people are aware of certain patterns, certain people tend to consistently not realize this approach exists, others just can't back down from rewriting everything in a functional style, when others in the team don't do well with it. When I see programmers argue about style or programming language or framework I am often confused because I don't understand why they can't see that other people don't think like them :)
This same kind of behaviour can be observed all around us every day. I never understood how people get upset at staff at a restaurant, or get angry when someone bumps into them. Don't they realize that the other person didn't do it on purpose, and didn't mean harm? Why do people argue about politics so much? Don't they realize that other people have different values, and that we have a government in place to channel disagreement about them? Why yell at each other on facebook, don't you realize none of this is going to change the other person's mind?