saraislet

hosford42 , 5 months ago to actuallyautistic

Requirements to put in a job description to discourage or filter out autistic people:

• Comfortable with ambiguity
• Strong people skills
• Good culture fit
• Multitasking
• A fast-paced dynamic environment
• Bachelor's degree or better

I see these things and think you don't want my >30 years of programming and machine learning experience, or my problem-solving skills and comprehensive knowledge that had people mistaking me for one of the team's PhDs, or my solutions that have proven patent-worthy. Your loss.

#ActuallyAutistic
@actuallyautistic
@neurodivergence

saraislet , 5 months ago

As an autistic manager of a security engineering team, I want to call out that some roles genuinely require navigating ambiguity and building relationships (trust, collaboration, partnerships, etc).

But they shouldn't be phrased like "comfort navigating ambiguity" or "people skills", rather phrases like "capable of turning ambiguous problems into a structured understanding and solution" or "able to build trusting partnerships out of damaged relationships".

I've been in those roles. I thought I was allistic because I was good at those roles. Autistic people have stronger potential for "people skills" than allistic people because we're far more able to build mutual understanding humans across cultures because almost every culture is a foreign culture to us (even the culture we grew up in). Allistic people don't face the initial cliff but for us it's a plateau past that.

I'm open to being wrong, but these requirements don't appear to necessarily be ableist if they're genuinely, actually required (other than degrees, which should never be requirements outside academia, and "culture fit" which is nonspecific bias fodder unless there's a specific documented company culture). Multitasking and a fast paced dynamic environment are unfortunately necessary aspects of my team's work, and while most of us are neurospicy, that doesn't work for every neurotype (I for one would absolutely fail at doing what my team does).

@hosford42 @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence