It's interesting to me that all four examples put the blame with the other party.
I hope it's just worded poorly or I am reading too much into it.
Edit: I'm not saying that invalidates the article's content (in fact I recognize the situations from personal experience), but it doesn't really put a positive spin on it.
That could be your ego talking? Always re-interpreting reality to put yourself on a pedestal? It is a bit silly talking in circles with people that have theory of mind deficits. You just have to avoid the "correctness conversation" and try to point them in the right direction, but it's honestly like pulling teeth.
I realize I was too quick to edit this down into a single sentence in the first paragraph, but my standard MO is to go “oh you’re right” if someone points out an error in my thinking. And if I can’t realize I’m wrong, but I also can’t explain why in precise terms, I make a note and go study the heck out of the topic in the next few days.
Interestingly, as I’ve grown more experienced, it has become much easier to realize that I don’t know jack about anything really, and that it is so easy to go out and look for answers with the resources we have nowadays.
thanks for reading, author here! the article is very much a response to a blame already expressed. People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions.
These are my thoughts on why differences of opinions get phrased as “autistic people just can’t admit when they are wrong”, when myself and most autistic people I know in fact readily admit when we are wrong and move on all the time. I don’t think of blaming anybody here, that is you reading things into it. I just need explanations and strategies to handle these situations.
> I don’t think of blaming anybody here, that is you reading things into it.
Alright, thanks for responding directly to that.
In my personal experience, people don't typically conclude that I would refuse to admit I'm wrong. The only conclusion drawn in my experience (usually) is that we're unable to get our points across, in both ways, and we should probably try to come back to the same topic again later and maybe prepare a little bit better.
That’s what I think is happening indeed, and I’m almost never the one shutting the conversation down. I didn’t go into “strategies” to address the issue in this article, mostly because I just don’t have enough experience to back it up, but I think recognizing that something is spiraling, saying “let’s continue in writing/retable this/i will try to understand your point of view” is something to try.
People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified.
We need to be careful, though, to not adopt black and white thinking even around "facts." Often, multiple contradictory factual things can be true at the same time and all pass verification.
Illusions are a lighthearted example of this that helped me appreciate this point. For example, the Yanni/Laurel audio illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) where people on both sides argue, in good faith, that the sound is one or the other. And even if you analyze the underlying audio in depth, neither side is factually wrong because that is how they experience it and isn't merely based around an opinion :-)
> Illusions are a lighthearted example of this that helped me appreciate this point. For example, the Yanni/Laurel audio illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) where people on both sides argue, in good faith, that the sound is one or the other. And even if you analyze the underlying audio in depth, neither side is factually wrong because that is how they experience it and isn't merely based around an opinion :-)
This example does not add much. If it is how people experience, then the only fact they can derive is, that they personally experienced it that way. There is no point in fighting about "what it really is", when all you have is a personal exerience. Anyone saying it objectively is this one or that one, only based on personal experience, is not accounting for the fact, that others can experience differently, which is silly.
In this light I assume, that you put quotes around "facts" as a means of saying, that they are not really facts, because if they were, then there would truly only be black and white.
So when I say it's Yanni, and you say it's Laurel, which of us is supposed to admit we're wrong? Neither of us are wrong, it's just a difference of opinions.
In this case, the recording was of a person saying the word laurel as part of a collection of reference pronunciations. If you don't hear the word laurel, you're the one in the wrong, having been deceived by an audio illusion.
I've run into the same issues constantly throughout my life, especially when it comes to asking clarifying questions to get a grip on the situation. Something I'm going to do moving forward is first stating that I have a few questions that I need to ask to better understand the other's statement or question.
I think this sharing of my perspective may help the conversation to move forward in a more productive manner.
Thank you for putting this information out there! I hope it helps other people understand autistic communication and intentions a little bit better.
The biggest insight I have had in my personal life is that relationships are more important than facts. Building and keeping long-term relationships at work and in my family is, by far, more important than being right every time (even if I can verify being right). Verifying it just makes the abrasion to the relationship worse.
Important caveat, for me, is that I want to be able to share my perspective, and believe that, over time, they will consider it, and it will impact their thinking. I think this is the case more often than people think.
Yes, I was more referring to insisting on being right and being dismissive of other viewpoints. I have caused incalculable damage to my personal relationships because of this pattern of behavior in myself.
What follows is not really directed at you but rather reflecting on this whole comment section, I hope you forgive me :)
IN the article, the only case where I insist on being right is in scenario #4, where I can actually demonstrate that a fact is true. In fact, it's not me being right, it's the result of the experiments I propose. Otherwise, I'm either asking questions, trying to actually state my opinion in the first place, or not willing to say something I don't agree with because it goes against my values.
Agreeing or defusing the situation is necessary for personal relationships, but this is the workplace, and while it's good to be nice, it has to go both ways. The easiest way to deal with conflicting opinions in personal relationships is just to be curious, a good listener, and not (or rarely) state any opinions of your own. That might sound a bit sad, but I have plenty of fun debating opinions on my own, no need to involve other people.
However, I'm not at work to read your mind and guess how you might interpret my words. I am at work to be an engineer and produce results, and I am an engineer because I love technology, not to make money and have a career. I also really don't want to antagonize people or prove my superiority or brag or retaliate, I legitimately just like solving problems to the best of the team's capabilities.
Because I don't have an intuitive sense of how to react in a given situation, extending some empathy my way helps a lot. And for that, it's worth communicating my point of view: that I am not being patronizing; I am just asking questions I think are necessary.
It's like asking a blind person to navigate around potholes. They might be able to do it, but it's also nice to understand they're not tripping on them on purpose.
A thing I have learned is that sometimes relationships rely upon facts -- or at least a shared view of facts. If the relationship includes you bearing responsibility for something, being factually correct about details within that sphere of responsibility does matter.
I hope you take this as constructive criticism, as it's not intended to offend:
Your post reads extremely arrogantly. It's a "I am very smart" type of communication style.
None of the points you bring up are specific to autistic individuals. I'm allistic (as you put it) and, realistically, not that intelligent, but I experience the first two of your points on a regular basis. But I've learned to modify my handling of these types of situations so that, most of the time, I get a positive/productive response.
Now I obviously can't know how you communicate outside your blog posts. But it may be prudent to think about it – if you come across as arrogant or a "know it all", then the "you don't acknowledge when you're wrong" is just a nicer way of saying it.
And when people get a “vibe” of arrogance/know-it-all-ness from a person, they will be much less willing to accept, well, anything. And for good reason. This especially applies to corrections, "let's play 20 questions" and long-winded explanations of context (especially if you explain something they already know, even partially).
I totally understand, and I knew it would be perceived this way. If I can trust my colleagues and friends, I come across as very humble. This article is the first time I ever mentioned publicly how much time I put into learning technology.
The question is, when and how do I communicate that best without coming across as arrogant.
The tricky piece of this is that people can be right about the facts and still be wrong, or at least in complete disagreement with each other. This is because there is a latent opinion in each fact, which is that the fact matters and is relevant for the conversation at hand.
If you start from your own set of priors and are getting nowhere, you probably want to consider there might be a more relevant fact (for that person, opinion alert!) that you don't know about and aren't considering.
One time I was in an argument about whether something could be done within a six month timeframe, and when a manager dropped in and asked a few clarifying questions it became clear that the other guy was working from the underlying opinion that nobody cared at all about the deadline and they were really just arguing about whether they wanted to do it. The timeline was clearly literally impossible, but he did want to do it.
Ended up that he told manager we could do it, manager was nuts and so signed us up, I left the team, they missed it by about two years. But he had fun, apparently.
> People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions.
This attitude is exactly what [neurotypical] people generally mean when they say "[some] autistic people can't acknowledge when they're wrong".
Not that autistic people are so convinced of their own rightness that they stare at the compiler saying "my code is flawless, the compiler must be bugged" because there is literally no circumstance in which they will ever update their worldview. But that when it comes to cases where [multiple] people suggest that the question they asked or the tone they asked it in might have been suboptimal for the situation, they are likely to rationalise it as just unverifiable opinion or status games which can't be learned from (but nevertheless, the difference of opinion probably results from misreading by the other party)
> But that when it comes to cases where [multiple] people suggest that the question they asked or the tone they asked it in might have been suboptimal for the situation, they are likely to rationalise it as just unverifiable opinion
I mean, that judgment is literally a matter of opinion. If they had behaved the same in an office full of autistic people like them, or with people of another culture, the outcome would have been totally different. That said, sometimes opinions matter, like say, the legal rights of fetuses when it comes to abortion, to pick a recent example.
So concluding something is a "difference of opinions" is not the end of the story, sometimes such differences need to be resolved.
I fail to grasp what "acknowledge when they're wrong" is supposed to mean. From what I can tell the author insists on deductive reasoning to determine whether something is right or wrong and any wrong conclusions are quickly discarded. Hence, there are only two options, right, not disproven (opinion).
If somebody has a goal to communicate a certain thing, and does not succeed in communicating that because [nearly] everybody interprets them as being rude or obtuse instead, deductive reasoning would point to the conclusion that their approach to communication was the wrong one for the situation, and to the conclusion they should probably attempt to modify their communication if they wish to achieve a different result. (I appreciate that for autistic people, it might be particularly difficult to discern how or why their attempts to communicate a point do not succeed. I also appreciate that failed communication applies both ways, and that a neurotypical person telling an autist that they "never admit they're wrong" is a failure on the part of the neurotypical person to appreciate that this statement will most likely be interpreted hyper-literally)
Alternative, one can avoid that reasoning and rationalise not discarding consistently failing conversational stratagems because the cause of the failed outcome of a conversation is a person's opinion which lacks the same consistency as mathematics (and therefore more effective conversational stratagems can - at best - only be supported evidentially by inductive reasoning). But that just leads to the wrong outcome more often.
I feel like the article isn't actually directly addressing its title. It could be stronger with some situations to when you were wrong, with examples of how that was swiftly resolved, as you mentioned in the intro paragraph.
At the moment it feels like it takes for granted that you're good at resolving situations where you're objectively wrong, so it's only addressing situations where there was a difference of opinions.
I'm not implying that you're bad at the former, of course. However, it's entirely possible for people to have trouble engaging you when there's a difference of opinion and for you not to be able to acknowledge when you're objectively wrong - i.e. that all of the issues you've identified in the article are happening, but that the title quote is still actually true.
I think the point of the article is to express the ways in which it can feel like those on the spectrum are unwilling to admit they were wrong when it might not be what is happening by providing the perspective of the neurodivergent.
I don't think an article providing a couple examples of how one individual was willing to admit they were wrong is providing much in terms of discussion or new perspectives. "See, I can admit I'm wrong!" would be a pretty shallow way of addressing what could often be a misunderstanding. Instead, the post is attempting to offer some insight into the different opinions people might have about interactions with an autistic and explanations for what is going on behind the scenes.
Yep, I understood that, but I disagree :) But I do realise that that could also have made the article longer and less focused. I think the gain in clarity and context would be worth it, but that is definitely my opinion, and I'm no writer.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. I think you are right.
For every “you can’t admit you are wrong” discussion, I must have a 1000 discussions where I just go “oh you’re right” and move on. My default operating mode is being wrong and knowing I am, or knowing that alternative approaches are just as valid, or sometimes less valid but still bring value to the table. This was not easily learnt, but it just leads to better engineering so it’s a no brainer. I brush over it in a single sentence, and this is not enough, as evidenced in some comments here.
I had a much longer first draft, much less focused, and edited it down to crystalline precision. The next article I write about the topic, I will chose the other approach, and see how that resonates.
Yeah, the rebuttal to "you never admit that you are wrong" is "here's a bunch of situations where I admitted I was wrong", not "I actually was just never wrong in the first place".
People can also be objectively wrong when it comes to social interactions as well though.
To give an example, if someone who is less technical asks you a question that does not give enough background information to give a precise technical answer on, the wrong thing to do is respond by first simply asking questions back at them. Particularly if the questions could be difficult for them to immediately see how it relates to answering their initial question. It doesn't matter that it's because you think holistically or they don't have as deep an understanding, or anything else. The right thing to do is try to stay with people in conversation. Explain your thinking, make sure they understand why you need to ask these questions before you can answer, or give them a range of possibilities that are dependent on these unknowns.
And asking somebody to explain their reasoning and justification for their question before you begin to answer it is very rude, so that's wrong too. It's reasonable to expect more justification as requests become more time-intensive, but an initial response to a question should have some degree of good faith and politeness. Clearly they don't understand all the implications, which is why they asked for your opinion. So asking whether they understand all the implications of what they are asking is a rhetorical question and is basically calling them a moron.
"Should we rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React?"
This question might sound like your manager is expecting a yes or no answer, but they aren't. They want some "conversation". They want your opinion, some explanation for it, an opening to continue the conversation. Even if you could answer with an unqualified "no" without further clarification and be correct on a technical basis, that response is wrong in this social interaction.
"It's possible react could help with performance but it would be quite a lot of work. I don't think we should at this point unless we're seeing performance problems."
I don't know if I go so far as to say objectively wrong but definitely felt off. And other approaches would probably have been better.
If it is a question: "Should we do X?" They are asking for an opinion about if it should be done or at least some sort of conversation. Not asking for you to make a decision. Just state an opinion based on what you know and follow up. "I doubt it, it would be a large investment of resources that may not lead to noticeable improvements. Why?"
Is it rude to ask why someone is asking though? Understanding context can be good. It might be fine to ask something like "Why do you ask?" to get it started, before answering. Then, if relevant, follow up with those in depth questions. But just jumping into technical details feels like they are meant to shut the initiator down.
If they come to you and say: "I think we should do X." Then those questions make more sense. "Why?" is still probably enough though. Let them elaborate on their thought process. And if it really is just they say something about it in a blog. You can explain the trade offs and guide them with your knowledge.
Asking clarifying questions is engaging with them as best as I know. To me, it's the gracious, honest, polite, and professional thing to do. I can't just make up an answer (say, that performance is what they are thinking about) and then riff on that.
I know this sounds blind, but it literally goes against my values. To say something I just made up without clarifying is not honest: it is playing a game. Because if I decide to play a game, where do I stop? What are the rules? I can't rely on my intuition and gut feeling, as we already established.
I thought writing things would be a better avenue, and in many ways, it is. But a document that shows "I engaged with your question for hours, for days, and these are my conclusions, along with backing-up research" is often perceived as even more dismissive or passive-aggressive, while it is literally the opposite.
> Asking clarifying questions is engaging with them as best as I know. To me, it's the gracious, honest, polite, and professional thing to do.
You are wrong about that though. In the way you are asking, anyway.
> I can't just make up an answer (say, that performance is what they are thinking about) and then riff on that.
It wasn't making up an answer or presupposing his intention. He asked whether you should switch, giving an answer that's essentially "no" but colored with a possible reason for switching is not making anything up.
How do I even know we should switch or not though? A good reason could be "we are moving the office to the UK, and we were only able to find react developers there". That's a pretty good reason to switch, if not an easy one.
I do think this is a strategy to try, although I'm pretty sure it's really not about the words, but about body language, timing, whatever... But it is really puzzling to me that you shouldn't ask questions because people will think you are asserting something, while making random assertions in order to probe for answers is the accepted way. I know it's probably how it works, but it will never really make sense to me, and I wish these games were just a little bit easier to play if people did see things from the other side more often, instead of throwing words like "asshole" around (as you can see in comments around here).
You can give him some information along with your questions, just like any social interaction. "It could help with performance if we are having issues there, but I personally hate the React ecosystem. Why do you ask?" That way you're both getting information as you go, rather than you making him wait until you've fully understood the question to get any response. That makes the conversation way more efficient too - if his underlying thought was "you seem bored, maybe this would be fun for you", then you've answered it completely already.
If efficiency was what he was after, he could have just said, "hey you look bored, would you feel more engaged if you were working on a migration to react?" Failing that, he could have clarified what he was going for after noticing the author missed it. Either way, it seems like the communication failures are more on the manager, for not having the awareness to appropriately direct the conversation and understand his needs, rather than the author, for failing to appropriate guess what the manager was obscuring.
This remains true even if allistics are generally better at such guessing.
If he's happy with the results of his efforts, then he doesn't need to take any advice. If he's not, then perhaps he will be interested in suggestions that he can implement, rather than "make your manager better".
If that's what the manager wanted, they could have clarified as much in response to the author's first answer, or at least recognized there was a disconnect, and worked backwards from that to the point that their expectations were aligned. If they can't do that, then it's not clear their goals are well-defined enough to have a productive conversation on the matter in the first place, or that they are capable of correcting a misconception in the first place. That's a pretty low level of communication skill.
I can definitely imagine a manager who might (unhelpfully) say "Should we rewrite in React?" to mean "I want the team to move to React for reasons I can't [or don't feel I have to] rigorously justify, I expect you to defer to me here, and now is your chance to alert me of big gotchas that we'll have to handle in the process".
Such a manager has failed to communicate what they actually want, and unless they can "correct" the listener to the desired interpretation, they're going to be frustrated when said listener takes their surface level meaning seriously. It sounds like that's what the OP was doing here (as the listener).
Yeah they could have. I'm talking about responding to what they actually said though. If the manager was here I might also have some advice for them too, and it wouldn't involve telling them they're right and the other guy is wrong because he just doesn't understand you.
He was responding to what the manager actually said; your advice was that he should have replied to one "correct" interpretation that was not explicit. But in any case, the author's response revealed what he understood the ask to be, allowing the manager to redirect. So if the interpretation is bad, the error is correctable.
In contrast, the manager just seems to be flailing around, unable to clarify. That is not correctable.
Only one of these people was ruining the interaction and thus needed advice.
> He was responding to what the manager actually said;
And that's what I was responding to. I'm not going to respond to the manager because he's not reading this.
> your advice was that he should have replied to one "correct" interpretation that was not explicit.
No that was not my advice. I gave an example of a response which acknowledges the question, provides an answer "no", and gives the opportunity for the manager to come back with something if they really did have some valid case it might help. All in fewer words flailing about with a bunch of questions that still didn't answer the original.
My example remains valid even if the interpretation of the question and whether it matched the manager's intention was wrong, it still works.
The correctness I'm talking about is not in the answer to the technical question, it is how to go about having a polite interaction with others, which is what the author's stated goal was and what they got wrong.
> In contrast, the manager just seems to be flailing around, unable to clarify. That is not correctable.
I don't know what you mean by "not correctable". Correcting the behavior corrects it.
> Only one of these people was ruining the interaction and thus needed advice.
No, both do, and the manager isn't here, hence my comment.
>People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions.
What doesn't come across in your article is that you can be wrong about factual things. It is unclear or unmentioned that you actually can be wrong sometimes.
These communication patterns make sense with what I know about people. I don't doubt that they happen relatively frequently, and can result in a situation where it seems like you can't accept the wrong answer. But I would ask you to re-read the piece and find a single part where you admit that you can be wrong. I can only find one, and it's in the first paragraph. It also barely qualifies as admitting you can be wrong.
None of this is to detract from the content of the piece. I just wish that it had been framed differently so that people could appreciate the insight without it coming across as egotistical.
Author here, thanks for the feedback. This article is indeed edited down heavily. I had more conversational drafts.
Your remark is something I have been thinking about. For me, it’s patently evident that I’m wrong about 90% of the time when discussing facts. In fact, “truth” is one of my core values, and the only way I can honor that (and be a good engineer) is to question my every statement. That’s why I write unit tests, run experiments, read so many books, etc…
When I know something is true, I tend to only state it once, because why would I need to repeat it. I am starting to realize this doesn’t work out that well :)
These articles are in themselves a series of experiments to see how I can convey these thoughts.
>When I know something is true, I tend to only state it once, because why would I need to repeat it. I am starting to realize this doesn’t work out that well :)
The point I'm making is that you didn't state this once. You kind of stated it in the first paragraph, but not in a way that implies that you can be wrong for reasons that aren't miscommunications.
>For me, it’s patently evident that I’m wrong about 90% of the time when discussing facts.
I think that's the part that wasn't clear from the article. When you title an article "Autistic people can't acknowledge when they're wrong," then spend an article talking about how this is due to misunderstandings, it comes across like the exact rationalizations that your article strikes back against.
The thing is, at least in the first example, the way I read it isn't "autistic people can't admit when they are wrong". From your own telling of the story it seems like a manager asked you "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React?", and you responded with "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React?". You failed to realize that all of the questions you asked them are the question they were asking YOU. They've been reading articles about technical teams gaining things they don't really understand from switching to React. Maybe increased velocity (they know what velocity is but don't know how React increases it), reduced bundle sizes (what's a bundle? why do I care?), faster rendering times (faster is a good thing, right?), etc. But they don't have the knowledge to judge if React will do this for them.
Answers to this question might be "No, we already use Angular which provides similar benefits to React", "Yes, switching to React from MooTools (I'm old) would simplify the design, increasing our velocity and probably resolve some annoying rendering bugs", or even "I'm not sure. Perhaps we should meet and discuss the weaknesses of that page and figure out if React is the right tool to resolve them".
Instead they got back the questions they were hoping you'd answer for them.
Many long years ago the CIO at a company I worked for asked if we could use machine learning to improve our data analytics. I responded with "I don't know, what kinds of questions are you hoping to answer?". We went back and forth on this several times, with me insisting you couldn't just throw machine learning at data without some idea of what your hoping to get back. This wasn't resolved until they brought in a vendor claiming to provide turnkey machine learning solutions, they ran it against our data and came up with the stunning insight that the biggest predictor of dollars sold was.... units sold. To be fair they did provide other data points, but it was all things we either already knew, or didn't care about and if we ever did could find out quickly.
I failed to recognize that the question I was asking was a big part of what I was being asked. If I had realized this and provided some insight into the kinds of questions machine learning could answer, and why we didn't need sophisticated machine learning algorithms for the ones the business cared about I could have saved everyone some time. Instead I kept rephrasing the question back at him, with neither of us having the insight to realize we were actually asking the same question.
The questions you bring up are really the questions I am asking?
What do they think the weaknesses of the page are? Do they think rewriting the checkout will solve these problems? How much of the technical tradeoffs do they understand or care about?
To recap:
Is our checkout page not performing well?
Will a new checkout solve our problem?
Why do they think a technology change is a solution?
Do they understand the implications of such a switch?
Otherwise I won't be able to assess if react makes sense or not. It makes sense for some reasons, not for others. If I don't know why they think we should consider it, I can't provide a valuable answer. These are exactly the points you are bringing up as well: I don't know, and I need your input to clarify what we are trying to do.
I understand there is a communication problem, but I'm most definitely not refusing to accept I am wrong.
I haven't even stated anything that could be wrong. And because I have fully put the blame on myself, after this particular interaction, the fact that I am able to work perfectly fine at a very strategic level with other stakeholders in my new job shows me that it's not just about me.
Obviously I wasn't there and am going by your accounting of the conversation, but from the way you laid it out, the questions I brought up are the questions your manager thought they were asking you. Hence the confusion, followed by frustration.
From my interpretation of the conversation, you thought the question was: "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React, yes or no?"
And responded with "Why do you want to rewrite it in React?" (paraphrasing)
Meanwhile the manager thought they were asking: "Please discuss the reasons why we should and should not rewrite the checkout page in React, including your recommendation on a course of action"
And you responded with "Why do you want to rewrite it in React?"
Spelled out like that it's hopefully a little clearer that the "why React" was part of the question. They don't know if the page is performing "well" or whatever that means (even from an engineering standpoint it's hard to define, render time? bandwidth? server CPU?). They might know if users are complaining about checkout being slow, but even then users tend to leave rather than complain. If you were to tell them that the checkout page was performing "poorly" and React could fix it, that's the kind of information they were hoping to obtain from this conversation.
Similarly in my machine learning question, my CIO was actually asking me "how do you think machine learning can benefit this business?" And I responded with "how do you think machine learning can benefit the business?" He didn't know, he was asking me. He had just heard about the wonders of machine learning and was fishing for how it could benefit this business. Just like your manager had heard about React and was fishing for how it could benefit the business.
If your manager were here replying to comments I'd advise them to remember that engineers in general (spectrum or not), tend to be the literal sort, and if you aren't getting the answers your looking for it's often useful to examine the words you used and ask if you are actually asking the question your hoping to get answered or relying on subtext. But for the engineer's side of this conversation, it's important to ask if the question your answering is actually what they are asking, or if you failed to parse their intentions.
Thanks for the response. I do agree to all of these suggestions, and honestly we can't just make up hypothetical scenario after hypothetical scenario of what the best way to phrase things are. It depends so much on me, the manager, the time of day, the team culture.
I think my point in the article is to say:
I am autistic, and I might not communicate the way you are expecting. If I am asking questions, it is for what I think is a good reason. What I am not doing is rejecting your question and not acknowledging I am wrong. If I wanted to reject your opinion, I would reject it, not mess around asking oblique questions.
It's great that everybody seems to think this is my problem alone to solve, and I'm somehow doing this on purpose. I am not, I am trying very hard to get better, part of which is to share my experiences. Yet, that also seems to be criticized ("who puts so much effort into analyzing these situations?").
I have very productive relationships with other engineers and product managers and business owners, so clearly this can work out just well, but that's not what I wanted to cover here. I will in the future however, and I covered a tiny aspect of "digging deep into business questions, as an engineer" here: https://dev.to/wesen/worse-ux-for-a-better-product-how-to-th...
Many autistic people prefer to say they are autistic. Hopefully it's become clear that I think this way, and I can't just not think this way. Thinking is my main way of interacting with the world, it's not just "a trait".
You can ignore the parent comment. It's become fashionable these days to not use certain descriptive labels in a traditional manner because a certain class of people feel it's dehumanizing by "reducing one to one's condition". For instance, someone isn't "diabetic" they're a "person with diabetes", because the diabetes is just something they have it's not who they are. You're not "autistic", you're a "person with autism", and so on.
It's just a semantic game that is only making communication more verbose for no meaningful gain, as if everyone didn't already understand "autistic" to mean "person with autism".
You are working with him to create a solution and should ask questions from a shared point of view. Your questions instead sound like you are doubting him.
"How can this make our checkout page better?"
"What benefits do other companies get from using React?"
"Is it feasible to change technology at this time?"
"There might be implications if we switch, like..."
You are not understanding why they should consider it; you are subtly asking them to justify why they are bothering you.
> Your questions instead sound like you are doubting him.
Respectfully, I disagree: _to you_, the "questions instead sound like you are doubting him".
Maybe it even sounds that way to most people. It doesn't to me.
I have been in very similar situations, and having experienced the frustration of communications failure, I've tried to take other approaches.
A few times I've prefaced my questions with something along the lines of: "In order to answer your question I'm going to have to ask some questions; a few of them may not make sense to you, but it's just the way I function".
It has not helped. One time it was met with a kind of "gee, here you go again, giving a lecture on how special you are."
The crux of the matter is that I _need_ to do that if I am going to give a helpful answer to the question that I was asked. Either the manager's question is important and warrants a thoughtful reply, or it's unimportant, in which case almost any kind of reply is ok.
I think the problem, in a nutshell, is neurotypical people's absolute refusal to acknowledge when they're wrong -- for example about what a normal way for an employee to respond to the question: "should we switch to React?" is.
There _is_ no normal way. But neurotypical people, stereotypically, labor under the incorrect assupmtion that there is one. And the discussion in this thread has, in my opionion, made that extremely evident.
To clarify: sure, I'm wrong in the sense that there is a normal way if we by 'normal' mean 'most people do it like this'. Unfortunately, 'normal' almost always also carries a meaning of 'the proper way'.
Also, something that's normal (in the sense of 'most common') in, say, the US is not necessarily normal in, say Norway or Thailand or Zambia.
I'm hesitant to reply further in this thread because I get the feeling I've made some people feel attacked and criticized which is not my intent, but I really don't think the issue here is the neurotypical manager's inability to admit they are wrong. Everyone in this conversation is wrong. Everyone believes that both sides of this conversation are having the same conversation, when instead each side is having a different conversation.
To the engineer, they've been asked a specific question "should we rewrite in React?". They assume the manager's has a specific motivation for asking, because the engineer would have a specific motivation for asking, and are asking questions to try to get at that motivation and determine if React will fill the manager's needs. The engineer is having a reasonable conversation.
To the manager, they've asked an open ended question "should we rewrite int React? What are the reasons why and why not? What issues could it address? What are the drawbacks? Any guess on time-frame? Cost?". The question "what issues is the site having that React could address?" is contained in the manager's question. The manager is also having a reasonable conversation.
The breakdown happened when both sides fail to realize that the other person is having a completely different conversation than they are. To the manager turning around and asking them "what issues are you hoping to address with React?" is the same as if someone asked "does this truck have a lot of horsepower?" and I replied "I don't know, how much horsepower does this truck have?" I'm echoing the question back at them. It's confusing and they don't understand why I'm doing it, and it's naturally going to make them feel uncomfortable and agitated. Meanwhile the engineer doesn't understand why they someone is getting agitated over their reasonable fact-finding questions and start getting... well confused and agitated.
In general, I actually blame the manager more for this breakdown in communication, and that's where I'd put the majority of my coaching efforts. After all, probably 95% of a manager's job is communication, and I view understanding how to change your communication to establish a rapport with other people working outside your framework to be part of the job (this kind of breakdown can happen a hundred different ways, it's not just neurotypical vs non). Sadly, most managers never getting any kind of training on this, and many (most?) are abysmal at it.
But the fact is both sides of this conversation failed to understand the conversation the other person was having. No one is "wrong" or everyone is.
I brought this example up because clearly there is a problem here. But, no one is wrong, and shutting down the conversation as "you just can't admit when you are wrong" is not productive for anyone (since no one is wrong). Maybe the conversation will go nowhere, and because I might be completely oblivious to that fact (I try to be, but it's a lot of work), it helps if the manager, whose job it is to facilitate communication, becomes aware of what is going on, and says "I know you are trying to establish context, but it sounds like you are just echoing my questions back at me. I actually want a list of reasons why YOU think it is a good or bad idea. I won't mind if you assume things; we can clarify that later". I have absolutely no problem being interrupted that way; that makes a lot of sense and helps everybody. Once I know people won't mind me riffing without making absolutely sure we are talking about the same thing, I can go with that just fine.
This assumes good faith and open-mindedness on both sides. Assuming I am being arrogant, dismissive, know-it-all, won't back off, can't admit I am wrong, when I am trying not to, helps nobody.
It looks like you are overfitting a couple cases of individuals mistreating you into a set of rules which are not true to reality. The reality of sociology and group psychology is a rich, vast tapestry of anthropological progression that numbers over 7B individuals today and countless others of their ancestors over the past 500M years; from when we began as apes and progressed into hominids and then sapiens.
"The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying."
"I care more about doing good work than office politics."
"The person underestimates how much I know about the topic."
These are statements that, when read on their face, seem to apply to disagreements that you have had with individuals. None of them seem to complain about (or even address) the ways clusters of people behave as a group.
I don't think this blog post is actually about autistic people, or allistic people, at all. I think this post is about one person, and some other people that the person had conflict with. If the author is reading this, I think it would do you well to slightly reframe things in that light.
There are two different things being discussed here, and it's creating a disconnect.
The first is, "Can autistic people admit they are wrong when they themselves know deep down that they are?"
The second is, "Can autistic people be easily convinced that they are wrong?"
I'd say most commenters are expressing a "no" to #2, but your replies retreat to #1. I.e. you say that once you know you are wrong, you find it easy to admit it. However, given the content of your article, I'd speculate that it is very difficult to actually convince you that you are wrong in the first place.
So you want them to prepend every paragraph with "I know I'm wrong sometimes"? What does that achieve? The article is nice, concise, and gets the point across beautifully. Everybody's wrong sometimes, but some people are genuinely very rarely wrong in their area of expertise, and I'm willing to believe this guy is one of them. I'm glad he doesn't give in to the petty workplace politics, and I wish more people would.
Thanks for reading. That is a very good point I have taken away from publishing this. I stated in the first sentence that I have no problem being wrong, in fact, I want to be wrong because it means I can do an even better job and learn new stuff.
If anything, the ratio of “you can’t acknowledge you’re wrong” to “oh i’m wrong” situations is about 1:1000. In future articles, I will spread and repeat things out a bit more, instead of editing an article like I would a strategy document.
I've never been diagnosed with autism, but I'm certain I'm on the spectrum.
I hate repeating myself. But I had to learn to write in such a way to do so because if I don't I end up with 4 sentences when a person further off the spectrum will write an entire page on the subject... or maybe that's my subjective opinion.
You can make all the personal inferences you want but I don't agree; I repeat myself because if I don't I received lower grades and downvotes.
I didn't ask for any of that. I'm explaining why the article came off badly to me. I'm assuming that was not the author's intention. I provided this feedback in my comment so that they may reflect on why this is so.
There's nothing else in my comment. You are reading too much into my comment.
The frustrating part was that this was framed as "any time I'm wrong, it's simply a miscommunication." The author barely acknowledges that they can be wrong in the first paragraph, and it's phrased in a way that makes it seem like a legal disclaimer. It's not phrased in a way that implies the author ever believes that they're wrong. Because of this, the entire article is colored by the attitude that any time an autistic person is wrong, it's miscommunication.
I don't need it repeated over and over. That's overkill, not concise, and adds nothing of value to the conversation. Based on the comments I've seen in this thread, it seems clear that this point never made it across, or barely made it across.
This is unfortunate because the actual content of the piece is great. It highlights the ways that people with autism and people without autism can miscommunicate.
You are telling me I shouldn't miscommunicate in an article where I try to explain what it feels like when you have a disability that leads people to think you miscommunicate. I understand that I probably should have somehow expanded on the "I am wrong daily" part, but to me, I wrote a clear sentence: "I am wrong daily, it's absolutely no big deal, in fact, I enjoy it and seek it out."
This is the problem I am trying to highlight. I think I state something as clearly as I can, then people think I am lying, or wrong, or deceiving, or arrogant, or not clear enough, or overexplaining, or not explaining enough, and frame the rest of the article in that light. If i say "I am not trying to be arrogant", people will take that as even more evidence, so I don't even try. This is literally what I try to explain in this article.
So many people in this comment section apparently being blessed with the infinite power of nuance, mind theory, social grace, empathy and linguistic intuition could maybe try to be charitable in light of this.
If anything, the reactions to this article highlight how embarrassingly bad the average person is at interpreting communicating that is written in an (arguably) slightly unusual way. I feel bad for the author for having to withstand this barrage of hopelessly nitpicky readers. I dearly hope this doesn't discourage them, because it definitely would discourage me.
Or maybe the specific scenario presented in the article triggers some sort of a "it's not me, it's them autists!" reflex in people who visualized themselves on the other side of these interactions; I honestly don't know any more. I'm not (diagnosed to be) autistic, but fucking hell, I'm having a ridiculously hard time empathizing with these reactions, so maybe I should get that checked out...
This was my take too. The break-down in communication might not be WHAT is being said but HOW it's being said. This is certainly my experience of being a dev and a manager, sometimes people just seem a bit rude and it's hard to get past.
Is the rudeness excusable? I guess. Especially if I understand where it's coming from. Otherwise it's just rudeness.
And I guess that the point of the article, but you need to get to know people before you can make the judgement of why someone is how they are. That takes time.
This reminds me of a time, many years ago now, another engineer and myself ended up in a debate with one of the executives. We seemed to be in a very strong disagreement with them. After well over an hour of getting nowhere we ended up going back and essentially starting over breaking everything down into little pieces and ensuring our definitions of everything lined up. Turns out we agreed the whole time, but how each side was saying it made us think we did not. I believe it provided me a valuable lesson in this but it was so frustrating at the time and that certainly didn't help the cause. Sometimes I have to remember back to it and to take that step back take a breath and reframe things. How things are being said can really affect the conversation.
Yes, it’s a hard skill to learn, and … it’s why I ask so many questions / make sure we have the same context.
Very often in software engineering, people use abstract words that have been overloaded with meanings in many different ways, and it can be easy to think the other person is suggesting something completely different. I love using diagrams because they remove a lot of the “words”.
An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1]
The comments in this blog post don't just apply to autistic people, but apply equally to people that are simply less wrong than average.
An observation I made is that some people make correct statements approximately 90% of the time. This is waaaay above the typical, which is more like 30-40%.
Typical people assume that everyone else is typical, because that's what typical means. Average people are average, and the Bell curve is the tallest in the middle. So when they encounter someone who isn't typical (not just autistic), they assume that their behaviour is arrogant, because someone who is right 35% of the time and talks like they're right 90% of the time must be arrogant!
Someone who is right 90% of the time faces an endless series of accusations of being overbearing, arrogant, self-important, not-a-team-player, or not "giving in" as in the blog post. Being contrary, argumentative, or not taking the blame to a sufficient degree are commonly said as well.
Speaking of giving in, most people follow the ten-thousand-year-old[2] tradition of doing whatever the grey-haired tribe leader says. Authority over correctness. Toe the line. Know your place. Keep your head down. Don't rock the boat. Part of the team.
The thing is, being old doesn't mean much, especially in a time of exponential change. In fact, the older you are, the more wrong your rules-of-thumb are, often exponentially wrong. This leads to endless fun conflicts of opinion where the young inexperienced buck is actually entirely correct in disregarding decades of experience[3]. But that leads to ostracism and exclusion, because we're all human, which is to say that we're basically strategically shaved gorillas in suits.
[1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in.
[2] Did I say ten kiloyears? I meant megayears. Sorry. This is what we've been doing since before we were human. It's wired into us deep.
[3] A random example from very recently is that I had to explain with pictures to senior management that upgrading the WAN links for one hundred sites from 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps and locking in that telco contract for 5 years is a mistake three zeroes in size.
That's the median. The "average" (when used undecorated/unspecified) generally means the mean.
A distribution which is biased towards high-side outliers (such as wealth or income) will generally have more than half of the population below the mean.
It's not at all obvious to me that general intelligence has such a distribution (and I can think of plenty of physical mechanisms [injury, disease, malnutrition during development] by which the opposite could easily be true).
> The "average" (when used undecorated/unspecified) generally means the mean.
I wouldn't say that. Most population statistics--think "average" wages and the like--tend to use median. And when we're talking about intelligence, this isn't something that is readily quantifiable with a number. IQ is explicitly normalized so that 100 is median, and 110 is one standard deviation above median. "mean IQ" isn't a meaningful concept. Given that we can't even measure "mean intelligence", average intelligence tends to mean median intelligence in practice.
I think you might be confusing autistism with high intelligence. The two are very different. I'm not sure it's even remotely comparable. Most autistic truly autistic people have a severe deficit to the point they have a problem with basic navigation of the world. Not just inconvencies. There's a tendency to turn every difficulty into a syndrome.
While reading the article, I had the distinct feeling the author was not, in fact, autistic, but merely had a lack of social practice.
There isn’t anything “most” autistic people have. The disorder is defined by having at least three of twelve major symptoms so it’s possible for two people with autism to not even overlap in their symptoms. There is also a huge range of severity and many people with the disorder are high-functioning. High-functioning autism is significantly correlated with high IQs. This dismissal amounts to “this can’t be hard for you, you’re just choosing not to practice” which is a rather offensive way to deal with someone’s disability.
That's kind of my point. The traits that characterize the disorder are so varied, it's hard to believe its just one disorder. I think most people can identify with many of the symptons. I know I can, even though I'm not autistic. Personally, I think the economy seems to encourage that kind of productivity in many ways, so it shouldn't be such a mystery as to why some who are hyperfocused on succeeding should be identifying with it.
I dont think I was being dismissive of anyone, but is it really necessary to call all of life's difficulties some kind of disorder? Does making it a disorder some how legitimize someone's struggles? I don't think so.
>is it really necessary to call all of life's difficulties some kind of disorder? Does making it a disorder some how legitimize someone's struggles?
You tell me, when I grew up being called autistic I tried to hide the disorder and get my teachers to not know I had it. It was everybody else who insisted on the names disorder, and it did legitimize it in their eyes. It meant a LOT of funding money, an extra teacher in the classroom, overall favourable treatment relative to other students. It was alternatively used as a pretence to discriminate against me. It was used to guarantee me accommodations. It was used as a means of getting a poor family money.
Lots of people have lots of different motivations for using that word. What I do know is there isn’t really any scientific basis for the idea that only severe autism is somehow real though.
The word autism does legitimize one’s struggles though, and people recognize that legitimacy. It’s pretty sick.
There was a time when the term Asperger's existed to distinguish this particular sort of autistic person from other forms of autism, which as you allude to, can involve severe mental disability and require a lifetime of care by others.
Asperger's was removed from the DSM for somewhat opaque reasons, and then, contemporary Discourse being what it is, some people decided the term was offensive, and we no longer use it.
Which is good for the people [citation needed] who are autistic and find the string "Asperger's" offensive, but bad for discourse, since one must either specify "high functioning autism" or "autism as highly-intelligent nerds are likely to encounter it in a professional context", and if you leave it out, someone will be along to point out that this condition shares a name with adults who wear helmets when they leave the house.
If it were me, I wouldn't categorize my peers in the same category as adults who wear helmets and diapers. It just doesn't seem like the same thing. But, fortunately, categorizing mental diversity and pathology is not my job.
I think you should probably do some more reading into Autism Spectrum Disorder. Your comment echos cliched and harmful ideas of what Autism is.
The reason "Spectrum" is in the name is because there is a wide range of ways it can manifest - from very severe on one end to less impactful (and in some ways beneficial depending on context) on the other. People who used to be referred to as having Asperger Syndrome for example are normally highly intelligent and capable individuals, many of whom you'd have no idea had Autism if you met them.
Please do not continue to spread this kind of thinking - it is very antiquated. I also don't know why you would doubt someone is Autistic based on a single blog post.
the idea of a spectrum is still relatively new. Medicine goes through these fads all the time. There's also a natural tendency to define syndromes broader than they actually are. It still seems a very loose definition of the term, as they still, as far as I know, have yet to identify the underlying biological mechanism.
This is not to diminish anyone's suffering. There's also a danger of taking false refuge in a syndrome that can be equally demoralizing and even paralyzing. No one should be defined by their diseases or medical conditions.
It is arrogance though. For example, let's say you're smarter than someone who has authority over you, i.e. their social status is higher than yours. In that case it wouldn't be smart to make that person feel inferior. Since if you were truly smart you'd think of a way to be right in a way that makes people like you.
I mean I’m autistic and on intelligence testing I’m all over the map. How smart I am depends on what you’re talking about. Just because I’m both more able and more trained to understand something than some senior manager, and I’m bad at the politics, doesn’t secretly unveil I’m not TRULY smart. In fact if we go back to OPs actual point, it was over people taking offence to his great confidence in specific subdomains of technology, something I have seen autistic people understand to a level of genius more than once.
Medians, averages, and the peak of a probability distribution are all distinct in the general case.
You can't be stupider than a rock, but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence.
Hence the IQ curve isn't a Gaussian. It isn't symmetric. The average is dragged upwards by very-high-IQ people, above the median.
This is like a billionaire moving to some tiny country town. The average income suddenly becomes much higher, but the typical (median) income doesn't budge.
Rich people is a useful analogy to the point I'm trying to make.
When I was on holidays in Vietnam, my chauffeur was horrified to hear that I was too tired and that I wanted to skip a pre-paid dinner reservation at a "fancy" restaurant and that I preferred to simply go to my hotel and crash. That fancy dinner was something like $20. To him that's a lot of money. To me it's nothing. Meanwhile I hear about rich Saudis abandoning italian supercars because they're "broken" in the same way my kid throws away broken toys.
Intelligence and wealth are vaguely similar. People used to a certain level just can't wrap their heads around how people at different levels do things.
> but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence
I assure you this does not seem to be the case.
There is an observed, and inexact, upper limit on human intelligence, just as there is with human height, and for broadly similar reasons: gravity, in the case of height, and for intelligence some much more hand-wavey limit to the amount of neurons and dendritic links a human body can construct inside a skull which has to fit through hips which are capable of bipedal motion.
(Some of you are curious, and yes, there is a real correlation between skull volume and measured intelligence, but let's not bust out the calipers because it's a bad proxy for something we can measure more accurately with tests).
Hence the IQ curve is, in fact, Gaussian, just as human height is, despite the fact that you can't be shorter than a mushroom, and the Empire State Building is an existence proof of very tall things.
The analogy to power-law distributed wealth where some people clearly tangibly do have a billion times more than other people feels stretchy. To the extent that standardised IQ tests adequately quantify intelligence, Marilyn vos Savant might have busted out of the constructed Gaussian distribution by registering 2.28x the average score, but she's comfortably outnumbered by people lacking the ability to register a score in cognitive ability tests. And if anything, the score range probably inflates the differences in overall capability given the respective quantifiable intellectual achievements of people on the upper side of the bell curve seem to be more about specialism and motivation than dozens of point differences in test scores...
>> You can't be stupider than a rock, but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence.
But to conclude from this that most are below average, wouldn't you have to know that the high IQs pull the average up more than the low IQs pull it down? I don't see how the mere assumption that there's no upper limit gets you there (not to mention that this assumption is bound to be wrong anyway). But as you say, maybe there's a reason I'm in the big half...
Yeah it is either a fantastic bit of art or hilarious lack of awareness of the irony. The guy actually reminds me of a coworker that I like a lot who is on the spectrum. Once in a meeting a manager was describing why we needed to do some task. Autistic coworker: “oh so we need to do it for political reasons”. and manager starts to freak out and backpedal trying to say its more than just political reasons. Autistic coworker, calmly: “oh no its ok, political reasons is fine!”
I often feel like saying: "normal people don't want to think about the details of a question." They grab for the quickest way to stop thinking and label it right or wrong depending on how much they like it.
I really think pinning this on autism is misplaced. Willingness to engage in exploratory conversation is a combination of intelligence and learned habits of mind.
If your boss (anyone, really!) comes to you with an idea and he misunderstands the first thing out of your mouth as a rejection, then you probably should work on how you communicate that thing. Or just surround yourself with smarter people.
Also if your boss doesn't know anything about technology and comes to you and says "I heard about someone doing this on a podcast, what if we made this arbitrary tech choice that doesn't apparently add any value?" then consider shopping for a new boss. Autism really is orthogonal to that situation sucking.
> consider shopping for a new boss. Autism really is orthogonal to that situation sucking.
The boss is doing absolutely the right thing here! Asking a trusted domain expert for an opinion about whether some technical investment would benefit the business.
The alternatives are a) the boss hears the podcast and the next day "rewrite it all in React" is at the top of the backlog, or b) the boss never polls the team about the technical state of things and everyone grumbles there's never enough time for paying down technical debt or experimenting with new ideas.
> Asking a trusted domain expert for an opinion about whether some technical investment would benefit the business.
Sure, that's good management - ask the expert.
But this manager didn't want to clarify the question, so that the expert could give a considered answer.
Perhaps the manager already knew what answer he wanted?
There's this estimating technique: it's called "Guess the number the manager wants you to give". It's much less career-limiting than giving an honest answer.
The author has not even attempted to paraphrase or summarize the manager's response, so this is also guess-work on your part.
Conversely, if I ask a colleague, however smart, a question but their response is "first I need a 10min infodump on things many of which I should already be aware of", I'm just going to say "nevermind then, thanks" and go ask the colleague who can communicate in a more focused and proactive way. (It's not a very charitable reading of the author's position either. I'd prefer to believe both were acting in good faith but with completely misaligned goals.)
I like where you’re coming from, it’s just this specific example - should we rewrite stuff in react - really strikes me as something an engineering manager shouldn’t be asking. “I heard about this implementation detail and wonder if we should be doing it like that.” Just much prefer a boss who can parse those questions himself
I guess it depends on the kind of manager it was; it might or might not be an EM, or a highly technical EM might or might not have been appropriate. If you have 25 years of experience, even if you're still an IC you should probably have some direct relationships with non-technical managers, especially if you're working in frontend and B2C. You might not even have a technical manager depending on the company size.
I have fielded plenty of similar questions from technical EMs, and even CTOs, when it's way outside their area of expertise.
I've also seen ICs give similar answers to the author to the mild shock of the manager, who then has to gently respond with something like "well, John mentioned in the standup today that he noticed 10s p99 spikes on the cart page, while investigating what Paula from the BI team reported in the planning meeting yesterday, that abandoned items are up 30% in the past month..."
I am not sure why the manager should be shocked if an engineer asks for these kinds of clarification. Those are exactly the info I need to point out that this might very well be a problem with service XYZ, and that we might need to scale up the database instead of rewriting the frontend in react.
My react frontend is made up, but my actual example is the CTO (no background in software) suggesting we move our embedded product from linux to android because "our updater is broken and i read that android has a great updater," while the issue was faulty flash chips where the brownout protection bit could not be set.
(Moving from linux to android for an embedded product means you basically have to rewrite absolutely everything since the userland is different, for a stack that is under the control of a single company, and is rarely used outside of mobile devices and automotive. And it still won't fix broken flash chips).
This is an order of magnitude more egregious than the react example I transformed it into, and also why I left the company. If I can't present my expertise and get listened to for such an important decision, there really is nowhere for me to go.
my actual example is the CTO (no background in software)
You seem to be very dismissive of people when they opine outside of where you think they are qualified to have opinions, and yet you give opinions where you might not have sufficient perspective.
Moving from linux to android for an embedded product means you basically have to rewrite absolutely everything...
Great, that is information the CTO needs to know.
for a stack that is under the control of a single company, and is rarely used outside of mobile devices and automotive.
Here the CTO has more perspective then you do. Is the company about to sign a partnership with an Android shop? Is the company contemplating moving into a new product area? Yes, the ultimate problem would not have been fixed by moving to Android, but that does not make your opinion somehow factually right. Before reacting, try assuming the person making suggestions has valid reasons for making them and try to figure out what those reasons are.
I think I often do #1, but the point is to get acknowledgment whether I am understanding things correctly, by rephrasing them. The point is not to undermine the train of thought, but rather confirm the agreement before the train of thought leaves to some distant land.
I can’t imagine dedicating this much time analyzing whether or not I can acknowledge when I’m wrong. It’s almost like this entire piece is an elaborate rationalization the author is making rather than admitting they are wrong.
When you notice your self-perception is out of alignment with how other people perceive you, especially on an axis you value (e.g., intellectual humility in the author's case), I think that's a great occasion to spend some time analyzing how much truth there is to each perception.
If you discover your self-perception is wrong, the next step might be thinking about how you can change your behavior and clarify your own judgement. If you determine that others misperceive you, the next step might be thinking about how to change that.
The author didn't get far into a next step, but the first step is critical and valuable as far as it goes, IMO.
Imagine you hear throughout your life that you can't admit you're wrong or that your _kind of person_ can't admit they're wrong. Wouldn't it be a sign of healthy introspection to dedicate time to analyze whether that's correct?
And a fundamental requirement to admit to being wrong is, well, actually being wrong. If you analyze a situation and find that you're factually correct, you haven't failed to admit to being wrong.
> Wouldn't it be a sign of healthy introspection to dedicate time to analyze whether that's correct?
I wonder if Author is in fact autistic. It seems (not sure if I've got this right) that author wasn't diagnosed until his forties. I'd have expected a diagnosis of autism to occur pre-teen.
Hmm, that sort of assumes that there's essentially no undiagnosed autism. After some very quick googling, it seems like undiagnosed autism is very common, and it seems more common the farther back in time you go. It doesn't surprise me one bit that someone with a milder form of autism born in the 70s/80s might not get diagnosed.
How could one tell how common undiagnosed autism is? All you can do, surely, is divide the number of autism diagnoses by the number of - autism diagnoses.
OK, so you can presume that an autism diagnosis represents some undiagnosed history of autism. But that's presumption. Or I suppose you can make other presumptions - like, this guy's diagnosed autistic, and he functions well; so many other people who function well are probably also autistic. But that's also presumption.
The DSM diagnostic criteria for autism look pretty shaky to me. I'm not saying I don't think autism exists; I think it does exist. But if you want to chuck around statistics about autism, then you have to stick to some strict definition. "Undiagnosed autism" isn't strict, on any criteria. The DSM doesn't define undiagnosed anything.
[Edit] I'm not at all surprised that some people are diagnosed in their middle age; 40 years ago, autism was a pretty exotic diagnosis, few doctors knew much about it or were experienced with it.
Mental health diagnoses pretty much only happen when the patient's life is impacted enough to convince the people involved in their life that there's a problem and figuring it out is necessary. If you get good enough grades, have a non-zero amount of friends, have a family and career that accommodates your random foibles, and generally manage your life well, then you can be as textbook mentally ill as you want without ever getting mental health professionals involved in your life.
As a relatively famous example, take Bill Gross, aka the "Bond King". He only realized he had Asperger's in his seventies when it was randomly the topic of a psychiatrist he was having dinner with. And why would he seek out some kind of diagnosis? He's happily married and running fantastically successful bond funds.
I questioned the "autism" thing because author seems to be able to express himself clearly, seems to have empathy, and seems to care. I only mentioned the (assumed) late diagnosis because it seems to lend weight to my question.
It's been suggested to me that I might have Asperger's (I believe the suggestion was hostile; it was my ex-wife, who is a trained psychotherapist). If I have Asperger's, it's only in the sense that everyone has a little bit of Asperger's. But I worried about it for several years. Vague psychological diagnoses are harmful.
Another good finance example is Michael Burry. He completed medical school and largely completed specialist neurology and pathology training without realizing he was autistic. It wasn't until years later, after his son was diagnosed with autism, when he got his diagnosis.
I was wondering the same thing, the author exhibits many traits that I didn't consider someone who is traditionally diagnosed as autistic as capable of having.
I feel like the author might lie somewhere on the spectrum but I was pretty sure being actually autistic was a separate and vastly more serious diagnosis.
Unless the author is correct 100% of the time, it should be easy to point to examples where the author admits they’re wrong, which would trivially negate the hypothesis that autistic people can’t admit they’re wrong. Instead of providing examples, the author choose to write many hundreds of words that basically boil down to “I’m not wrong, everyone else is wrong.” That doesn’t sound like healthy introspection to me. It sounds like rationalizing.
> If you analyze a situation and find that you're factually correct, you haven't failed to admit to being wrong.
Ah, but here's the thing: if your interlocutor has some motive other than truth-seeking then they will demand you admit error regardless of whether you are actually in error. This means to them you can fail to admit error even when no error occurred.
It's circumstances like this that the author is analyzing by taking "I was right" as a hypothesis - the article doesn't claim this is always the case but wants to make some particular conclusions about cases where no error was made.
> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it.
> In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question. Is our checkout page not performing well?
> However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.
If this is what actually happened, the manager is terrible and unprofessional. I feel I run into situations like this as well, where I ask a simple question and because the person asking is treating me like an NPC in a game they're playing but not telling me, I don't get the question answered and furthermore I get something attributed to me (e.g. refusal, uncooperativeness, etc.) that isn't true at all.
I wish there was some way to easily communicate universally that "I mean the literal meaning of these words, nothing more, nothing less."
The issue with this article is how the author is approaching all of these discussions. There is no attempt to see the other person's perspective, or evaluate how the author should be approaching the discussion. This is very common among us Engineers but is a massive failure. If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion, not asking questions that would make you make the same suggestion they made.
I get what you're saying, but at the same time that is exactly what the author is trying to do, just that they are doing it in their own way, which just so happens to feel adversarial to the manager.
There is no right or wrong here. Asking the engineer to "think logically" in terms of how what they're saying might be interpreted is stupid. They are autistic, and you cannot reasonably expect them to do the exact thing autism prevents them from doing.
Asking the manager to try to understand is probably more efficient, but the manager might be geared to think the engineer is adversarial already, possibly because of demeanor, or past experiences getting similarly confused. In this case the manager is probably more able to reason logically that their counterpart is autistic and is probably genuinely asking, but that is not a default, and probably requires some diversity training.
> If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion
Isn't that exactly what the author did, at least in the React discussion? They tried to establish what potential benefits the manager hoped to get from the React rewrite. It was the manager who immediately gave up on the discussion, not the author.
The problem is with the (interpreted) subtext of the question. The question "Is our checkout page not performing well?" might be just a question, but in the context the author was put in, it usually has different implications. Many people would ask such question in order to imply that changing the framework was unnecessary and that the checkout page is already performing well enough. This seems to be how the manager interpreted the question.
There are different ways of asking the same question, with different subtext. He could had started, for example, by saying "We should analyze how our checkout page's performance could improve if we switch to React". This way he would be able to ask essentially the same questions he intended to, but without accidentally implying that the switch is undesirable and unnecessary.
Now, someone working with someone with autism should understand they have trouble with this kind of subtext, and give them more leeway. But most people don't know how to do this, as they're not used to such interactions.
Thank you for reading. I think this is a salient point. How do I know how the manager is going to perceive the question based on what order I put the words in? My intent is to get the information I need, because I trust the manager to know it when I don’t. This of course is an edited example of a conversation in real life, and in fact my first draft had the question phrased as “we should analyze our performance and need metrics”. This honestly could have just as easily been perceived as patronizing.
If anything, and I probably glossed over it too quickly, I do spend a lot of effort being very candid and open and agreeable when having these discussions, because it is so hard to make sure our intents and definitions are aligned. We can be talking about checkout and react and then after 2 h realize that we actually both care about better conversion of mobile users, and now we are talking and can put the react decision into context.
I wrote this article about these situations: when my approach breaks down and I get blamed for not accepting being wrong, yet I’m actually trying my best to avoid exactly that.
Yeah, the example about rewriting a page in React really stood out to me for this. He says "I entertained the question in good faith" but he was clearly just asking "gotcha" questions to try and show the manager what a stupid question it was. And it may very well have been a stupid question, but as you said, he didn't even attempt to understand his manager's perspective.
I can totally understand why his manager got frustrated by this.
I didn't read them as "gotcha" questions. They looked like straightforward and sensible questions. I wonder if the manager was expecting some kind of kickback, and was braced to be adversarial. Perhaps there's some history here, between author and his manager.
From a purely technical standpoint, of course they are valid questions. But from a political standpoint, when you know that your manager just read a blog post about React, I think the discussion needs to be framed differently. Starting out with something like "Oh, yeah. I'm familiar with React. What were some of the positive aspects of it that stood out to you?" will help to understand their perspective.
Again, I fully acknowledge that a React rewrite could very well be a complete waste of time and effort in this scenario. But his manager obviously thought it could be worthwhile, or he wouldn't have asked about it.
The manager is such a blank slate in this story it's almost useless to discuss, but what stood out for me was:
"A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React... in order to make an informed decision, I needed to understand a few things: ... Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Do they understand the implications of such a switch?"
What problems such a switch might solve and what the implications are is what the manager is asking you. Why would you direct exactly those questions back to them?
> But from a political standpoint, when you know that your manager just read a blog post about React, I think the discussion needs to be framed differently.
The author only got to ask one question before he was shut-down: why do you want to do this?
That's not a criticism, it's a completely reasonable question, given that rewriting something using React is going to be expensive, and might introduce major new risks. Maybe author asked the wrong way, or in the wrong tone of voice.
If it were my manager, and he was proposing that I rewrite something that works fine in a new language, and I had real work to do, then I think my question "Why do you want to do that?" might come across as angry - because I'd be angry.
I am curious how these are gotcha questions? To me they are the proper questions to ask, as a manager, they probably don’t care about react or vue or any other framework, they care about conversions and revenue and other metrics. That’s exactly what I want to understand, so that I can contextualize and see if React might or might not make sense.
Reasons why React might actually make sense, to show I didn’t just cherry-pick this as a “well duh obviously it’s stupid”:
- we use shopify as a backend, and they published a nifty new react checkout widget that we could replace our convoluted checkout with
- all our web developers are actually coming from react, and hate the current jquery mess, and really want to change. It would be time-intensive, but team morale would skyrocket,
- another department is planning to move to react as well
After a long time in tech, I really have learnt to not really care about technology that much (as you might see in my article about PHP and JS :).
Everything you said here makes the response you put in the blog post even more strange. If you already knew about all of the positive aspects of switching to React in this instance, why on Earth did you start off with "Is our checkout page not performing well?"
Obviously there are also drawbacks, but you immediately started off from an adversarial position as if it was just a completely off the wall idea. Clearly that's not the case.
Which is why I think this article is misleading. It has nothing to do with self diagnosed autism spectrum but unwilling to acknowledge arrogance due to willful lack of self-awareness or selfishness. It can't be autism spectrum because he or she is aware of insight and intent.
The more I read through OP's comments the more I see this as a compensation for the inherent inferiority complex he/she struggles with. Trying to pin this on autism spectrum is just another method of deflecting blame or removing any real or perceived risk.
I suspect some type of trauma where OP felt inferior to others in some way, usually intelligence, especially if they've been brought up in a highly academia focused family environment and were often held in comparison to others.
Ever since that popular Korean drama took off "Weird Attorney Woo Yong Woo" everyone is self diagnosing or trying to use superficial tidbits they picked up to deflect social mishaps.
"It cant be my fault because im on the spectrum" is a trend I am seeing more and more online and this article did a good job of demonstrating but far too many words and irrelevant points.
I phrased this badly, none of these situations applied, they were just situations where I would recommend using React, to show I'm not opposed to React as such.
The problem I think is that you think me asking a question is adversarial, while I'm just... asking a question in good faith. I'm not considering it a completely off the wall idea at all, I want to know why they think it's a good idea, because I don't understand. This is where the autism comes in, I think. You think I'm being adversarial and dismissive, I think I am open and engaged.
I put a tremendous amount of effort into being socially pleasant, but there still are situations where I think I am doing my best to fully engage with the other person, yet there is a whole game of subtext I am not getting. This is very different from me not accepting I am wrong.
I would love to get the subtext, trust me, and I work hard at it. But it's playing a game that I don't have the rules to. Hopefully what I'm writing will help someone just maybe pause, and think, "did they actually ask this question to be dismissive? or do they just ask because they want to help you solve your problem?." Social grace and empathy goes both ways.
you seem to be very uncharitable to the author. Why would you assume some sort of maliciousness? Why is it that "he was clearly just asking "gotcha" questions to try and show the manager what a stupid question it was"? What are you basing this on?
> If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion
For someone having autism, this may be impossible. If they are open about their autism, one could argue that the manager should be the one trying to see the topic from two sides.
One may also need to come up with a shared understanding where the manager has a way to inform the autistic person more explicitly what to do than they would another person (who would get the subtle hints).
This can be pitched as a way for the company to accommodate for having an autistic person on the team (as opposed to firing or not hiring them), in other words that the manager would do this as a way to support the employee, not to be abusive.
But in this case an obvious solution might be to do what your manager suggests simply because he is your manager.
As a non-autistic person I don’t find it difficult to voice my concerns about a particular course of action and then do it anyway if that’s what the boss wants. (I realize the sticking point is “voice my concerns” — doing that in a manner that doesn’t come off as confrontational or undermining can be hard.)
> I realize the sticking point is “voice my concerns”
But in an interaction between an engineer and a manager, anything less than voicing your concerns is an abdication of responsibility. If the manager switches off at the first expression of concern from an engineer, then I imagine that's a team that's bound to failure.
No one says the manager switches off. They may have a host of reasons, possibly non-technical, why they don't agree with you. It's certainly fair to ask what they, but the point is it's not a debating society. There needs to be some amount of trust that a manager is operating in good faith, on a rational basis, and while perhaps not an expert some degree of competence in the area.
> But in this case an obvious solution might be to do what your manager suggests simply because he is your manager.
I hope more Autistic and non-Autistic people don't put up with this kind of argument. I'm sure most people have an example of a manager making a technical decision (many times due to ego) and being wrong and then the engineering team has to clean up the mess. There should at least be room for discussion which in the example given, the manager does not seem to be interested in.
the purpose of me making that point was "therefor, a manager shutting down discussion is not something that should just be accepted" not "managers are the only ones who are wrong"
What I've seen is that engineering departments tend to be engineers all the way down, so you often end up in a situation where the roles are reversed: the IC is neurotypical and the manager is autistic (especially asperger's).
And then, there is a lot of difficulty for the non-neurotypical to see anything beyond their "literal place on the totem pole", or their title. They lean on their experience to say what is right or wrong, even though they have far less context and the IC is trying not to ruffle feathers or hurt people's feelings.
Autism and related disorders may in some (possibly most cases) be factors that turn an otherwise good employee into an incompetent manager. This would be one of many factors that a company might want to take into account when promoting to or hiring managers.
If someone is hired into a manager position they cannot perform well for such reasons, a healthy organization should either modify their role or let them find another job.
People with such conditions MAY also be able to learn about their own limitations, and avoid seeing such positions in the first place.
Then there are those who can be quite successful as managers, despite such challenges, either due to side-effects of their systems-oriented thinking or for unrelated reasons. Such people may be difficult to be around, and may require some quite robust people as direct reports, but if the value they generate is sufficient, it may still be good for the company.
> There is no attempt to see the other person's perspective, or evaluate how the author should be approaching the discussion
The whole point of the article is to provide the perspective of the Autistic. Why are you assuming "There is no attempt to see the other person's perspective"? Why are you demanding the subject of the article be about what you want it to be or for it to cover the other side of the interaction? There are certainly interactions where there is a misunderstanding on the side of the non-autistic and that is what this article is attempting to provide insight into.
It's called narcissistic entitlement to expect the whole world to change their behaviour because of ones own inability to fit in.
I'm not saying it is fair. Life is never fair. The only one who has the ability to influence those situations is oneself. You can't rely on other to change - it won't work anyways. You have to be the one that improves those interactions. For your own good.
Neuro diverse people can't necessarily change their behaviour because it's how their brain is wired. It's like asking a visually impaired person to just see better. Many neuro diverse people have to force themselves to "fit in" causing untold stress and trauma. That's not for their own good, it's forcing their brains to work in a way that they don't.
That is essentially saying that autistic people can't learn. That's not really the case.
Furthermore everyone has to adjust to the people around them, often causing untold stress for everyone. This is one of the aspects of the neurodivergency movement I am less impressed by because I feel it's just handwaving away any issues as "suck it up, not my problem, deal with it". I've worked with a few people like this over the years, which also caused untold stress for the entire team.
To give an example from this post, "is our checkout page not performing well?" to the React rewrite manager comes off as a rather dismissive "why would you want to do that?" While certainly a valid question – and I wasn't there and I don't know if it was phrased like that exactly – but I'm sure those questions could have been asked in a way that came off as less challenging and dismissive, resulting in a more constructive conversation. You really can learn these things.
Or, maybe the manager was just an asshole/idiot and the unconstructive interaction is all completely unrelated to the author's autism. Could be too.
The first point – "the non-autistic person is not hearing what I'm saying" – sounds like the author might benefit from trying to understand why that is, and adjusting the way they say things. Sometimes small changes can make large differences, and it really doesn't need to cause untold stress. Effective communication is hard and also something everyone has to learn.
> That is essentially saying that autistic people can't learn. That's not really the case.
Autists cannot just learn to act more like an NT in the exact same way that a blind person cannot just learn to see better. Your rejection of this extremely basic fact is an all-too-common combination of ignorance and/or bigotry.
Seeing how many people object to this first question that I think is just... perfectly fine (I talked a lot about it to my wife) unlocked something. I wasn't aware that a question like "do you think our checkout is not performing well?" can be construed as dismissive while another question like "what are you looking to achieve?" wouldn't.
In fact, I would have thought that asking them clarifying details about exactly the topic they are asking about is the good thing to do. I think I know the checkout pretty well, and it doesn't seem to be causing trouble, so clearly there is a piece of information I am missing. While I would think that asking "what are you looking to achieve" is the impolite thing to do, since they just told me what they are looking to achieve, i.e. "making the checkout perform better by rewriting it in react."
I think a good topic for another article is showing what "learn some social skills" and "you need to be aware of the context and you come across" looks like for me.
Because I don't have the mental setup to intuit all the myriads of things that can make a question ok or not ok (words? silence? rhythm of speech? voice level? eye contact? clothes? past interactions? tone of voice? posture? mood of the other person? my mood? temperature? background noise? eyebrows?), and because no social situation ever repeats, the best I can do is figure out some very rigid scripts and then practice them. Why one question is ok and another is not is never going to be intuitive for me. Often, learning to do something better will result in even more awkwardness at first.
For example, my script for speaking to people at conferences is something like:
- say hi
- ask where they come from and what they do
- say "oh that's cool, tell me more about X"
- listen and ask follow-up questions
- try to regularly establish eye contact, but not more than a few seconds
- mimic their posture
- when the first pause comes up, say one or two sentences about what you do
- then continue asking questions about them and listen
- go for a 20% talk / 80% listen ratio. people like to talk about themselves.
- don't talk about any of your real interests because you might lose track of the rules and start going on forever
- don't forget to mimic their posture
- and eye contact!
- don't rock on your chair!
- rinse repeat until there is a longer pause, or they look away, or 20 minutes have elapsed.
That's about the level of complexity I can manage. I practiced this and other scripts so much that I don't have to think about them most of the time, but when I am tired, I do have to execute it like a little robot.
This is clearly not true. I was diagnosed with autism in high school, struggled with many things for many years, and nearing 40 now I've learned a great many things since then. My previous comment you're replying to was very much written from personal experience. I didn't mention this because I didn't think it's necessarily all that relevant.
Of course not everyone is the same, and things are different for other people; everyone is different. Some people may struggle more, or may have a hard time learning some things. But a blanket "you can never learn anything, full stop" is just not true.
It's hard to explain, but as a first response it implies "the current code is fine", or "we don't need to do this". That is, you risk it being perceived as a challenge to the idea ("rewrite it in React"), rather than a question to explore the goals.
Note that I wouldn't mind such a question at all myself, but others can be more sensitive to such things. Actually, I think "Why? Is the current code not working?" is a perfectly valid engineering question for rewriting or refactoring anything, but not everyone has this kind of engineering mindset.
I would phrase it more open-ended, such as "Okay! What goals would you like to achieve?"
Making these kinds of judgments is exactly why autism is a disability.
I understand from the comments and my life experience that there is something there, I learned to smile, be engaging, mirror body posture, ask questions instead of going into statements too quickly, but what are you describing just makes no sense to me. How is "what goals would you like to achieve?" not dismissive, but "do you think our checkout is not performing well?" is?
One is a pretty vague question about something they already stated (they want to ask me my opinion about rewriting the checkout in react because company X improved their checkout), the other one is something I need input on to be able to do that. It's literally the most efficient question I can think of so that I can avoid wasting their time.
I described in another comment how it never "really" occurred to me that a question could be perceived as dismissive. If I wanted to dismissive I would... just say so?
The thing is, saying it is dismissive, getting upset, and shutting me down helps exactly no one here. What could help is to realize I am not actually trying to be dismissive, point out that my question might be interpreted as such, and then move on. Trust me that I don't let this kind of advice go to waste.
Sure, I get all of that. As I touched on in my other comment[1] I had to learn this, too. I think me-from-ten-years-ago would have posted a very similar comment as yours.
Even if it's completely learned scripted behaviour that you don't really understand, that's still a win for everyone involved. But I think that with time and effort a sizeable part (not everyone) of autistic/neurodivergent folk can understand these things at least to some degree too. At least, I was able to and I know some other folks who were too.
> What could help is to realize I am not actually trying to be dismissive, point out that my question might be interpreted as such, and then move on.
Yes, I fully agree; I try hard to look past people's failings in general and not to get upset too quickly at things that don't really matter. But ... people have emotional responses that aren't really rational, and not everyone has that kind of attitude.
And the end of the day – and this really applies to a lot of things – I can't really control other people's behaviour, feelings, or attitudes. The only thing I am in control of is me. So I focus on that, rather than saying "other people need to adjust", because you will have very limited success with that at best.
(This of course doesn't mean we should accept wildly inappropriate or harmful behaviour like, say, racism or other forms of blatant discrimination, just that vague "emotional feelings" like a response to a well-intentioned question are not likely to get "fixed" any time soon across all of society, as these kind of emotions are part of "the human condition").
I'm not 100% sure if you are asking for further explanation of why it would seem dismissive, but I'll try to break it down a bit from an NT perspective, in case that is illuminating.
The query "Do you think..." can sometimes backfire if the other party is feeling defensive or vulnerable. It can imply that you've already decided to frame the conversation as exploring their problematic beliefs rather than objective facts.
The negative phrasing "not performing well" unfortunately echoes another idiom where the non-negated statement is assumed to be true and the negated question bears a tone of incredulity. These questions all probe the same fact but carry different emotional baggage: "Should we try to improve the performance of X?" "Does X perform well?" "Does X have performance problems?" "Is X not performing well?" Slight differences in vocal tone or emphasis can dramatically increase these differences too.
Then, by jumping to specifics (about performance), it can also imply that you are assuming that this is the only reasonable motivation for the work in question, rejecting other avenues. A safe way to avoid this type of interpretation would be to start off more broadly and neutrally to establish common ground before diving into such details. That's why "What are the goals?" types of question are seen as positive and cooperative. That you would like to engage in dialog and explore ideas together.
You put all those elements together in one question, and I can easily see how the other party would feel that they are being blocked. It's almost like some martial arts move where a precise combination of movement and posture is turning the conversational momentum against itself.
I'd also like to point out an ironic twist in your closing lament that "getting upset and shutting me down helps exactly no one here". Unfortunately, such implied tone and emotional content is decoded subconsciously and immediately. The emotion hits concurrently or even before the denoted factual information is fully understood. It can be just as difficult for an NT person to _not_ perceive some of these signals as it is for you to recognize they are being sent. Frustratingly, the same experience between two NTs, if chronic, might be seen as abusive or where the idea of "gaslighting" would come up to describe the perverse torture where the one feeling hurt is told they are mistaken in their feelings.
No, that's not what I'm essentially saying. Of course autistic can learn - it's called "masking". Masking causes trauma. Not just "finding co-worker annoying" but "not being able to go outside, not sleeping for 4 days in a row, stimming to the edge of self-harm, etc". Trauma. Not just being "stressed".
Neurodivergency isn't a movement, in the same way that blindness isn't a movement. Or deafness isn't a movement. It's not a choice. It's an invisible difference, one that society finds it hard to understand. I avoid "disability" because that suggests that neurotypical society is the only right way and anyone else that doesn't fit into it is just wrong somehow. They can't help it any more than a blind person can.
The way their brains are wired aren't their fault and yes, the rest of society is going to have to change. Autistic people exist, so it's up to the rest of us to learn how to deal with it.
Properly understanding the difficulties faced by the neurodiverse is a journey I thoroughly recommend. It's coming, get ahead of the curve and maybe you can be part of the team's stress relief.
> Neurodivergency isn't a movement, in the same way that blindness isn't a movement. Or deafness isn't a movement.
It absolutely is, it's a particular view and outlook on things. Blind or Deaf people have different takes and "movements" too. Deaf people in particular where some consider deafness to be core part of their identity and and a culture, rather than a disability to be "fixed", whereas others do merely see it as a disability they would like to see "fixed". Cochlear implants are something of a controversial issue among deaf people for example.
> Properly understanding the difficulties faced by the neurodiverse is a journey I thoroughly recommend.
The thing about the autistic masking causing trauma thing is that I haven’t really seen high quality evidence for the theory. It just sounds intuitively correct.
You're reading more into this piece than is there. The author never advocates that the rest of the world should change. This post only claims that these miscommunication scenarios between experts on the autistic spectrum and allistic people HAPPEN.
They happen to me too.
Understanding the nature of the miscommunication is the first step towards averting it in the future.
And me. I'm not autistic. I don't think I have any kind of Asperger's either.
I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism; it just sounded like a normie, perhaps with an autism diagnosis, who is fretting about communication with their boss.
There seems to be quite a few commenters here making critical comments, as if author is failing to communicate effectively. I wonder if they'd have been so critical, if author hadn't self-identified as autistic. I wonder if some of these commenters have a bad attitude to self-identified autistics.
I've never known an autistic person well; but I worked closely in an office with an autistic developer. I found his code over-complex and hard to follow. Pair-coding with this guy was a waste of time; he couldn't explain what he was doing. Author, however, seems to be able to explain himself fine.
what is the point of dismissing someones Autism purely based on a single blog post and one person you knew? Are you actually trying to convey something helpful here?
I'm not dismissing anyone's anything. I believe autism exists.
> one person you knew?
I've only known one person who was diagnosed autistic. It's a rare condition; I've known a dozen people with bipolar, and half-a-dozen diagnosed schizophrenics (either I'm attracted to psychotics, or they're attracted to me!)
My point was simply that author's account could be anyone's account, apart from the author's self-identification as autistic. Without that, this entire thread would just be about how to deal with a crap boss.
>>I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism
You very much are dismissing someone's something.
Worse, I don't think the author explicitly stated they were autistic in the piece...So, you're assuming someone's something just so you can dismiss it?
This doesn't read to me as dismissing the author's autism. It reads to me as observing that a non-autist could have written substantially the same article (minus making it about autism), and they then went off to observe that this comment section would likely have looked very different in that case.
It's an interesting thought experiment, and at least to me it feels like you're the one who is reading dismissal into it for no good reason.
It's not a secret that autistic people have trouble communicating in the workplace. This is not a post about my life's story and me self-diagnosing as autistic. This is me relating my experience explicitly in response to someone saying something about autistic people.
Self-diagnosis is widely accepted in the autistic community for a number of reasons, I am also in the process of pursuing a more "traditional" diagnosis.
It's great that you think this post applies to everybody, it however is very much in response to someone stigmatizing autistic people.
I find the term "spectrum" problematic. Is Asperger's part of the spectrum? Wikipedia says it's an invalid diagnosis. So did all those people with Asperger's just get dumped in the "Autistic Spectrum" bucket?
DSoes the spectrum run from ultra-violet to infra-red? Is this a spectrum for which every behaviour pattern has a slot? Does that mean we're all "on the spectrum"?
If that's what it means, then that seems like dismissing Autism as just being one extreme of being an awkward person.
I think a lot of devs wind up working with people who are awkward. They don't like it (who would?) Some of those awkward people self-identify as autistic. So the devs decide they don't care much for autistic people. I think that's a kind of bigotry; they should really dislike working with awkward people, whatever the reason for their awkwardness.
[Awkward: apparently this is related to upward, downward, northward, etc. "Awk-" signifies "at an unusual angle". I know of no other word that starts with "awk-"]
> Is Asperger's part of the spectrum? Wikipedia says it's an invalid diagnosis. So did all those people with Asperger's just get dumped in the "Autistic Spectrum" bucket?
This is explicitly what happened. The DSM-V explicitly automatically gives you an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis if you had an Asperger’s diagnosis. I think it’s hilariously how blatantly political this criteria is.
As for the legitimacy of spectrum disorders, the only thing I have to say about the subject is the parable of Chesterson’s fence. Think about the problems people were trying to solve with the concept of autism spectrum disorder.
>is this a spectrum for which every behaviour pattern has a slot
You aren’t far off but are missing th forest for the trees. It’s part of a diagnostic system where every disorder is meant to be discrete and non-overlapping and you either have it or you don’t and other good traits you would want in a diagnostic nosology. The spectrum is an artifact of it having to bend to describe what are actually several distinct similarly presenting conditions. It doesn’t have to describe EVERYTHING, it has to fit a hole in the nosology. Asperger’s was depreciated in large part because of the overlap with autism.
If you want something to criticize take a few steps back and look at mental health and psychiatry as a whole. A lot of the assumptions underpinning autism underpin more of mental health.
> take a few steps back and look at mental health and psychiatry as a whole.
Indeed.
Consider, for example, the diagnostic criteria for bipolar. There seems to be half-a-dozen conditions wrapped up in that term, not all of which have poles. Not all people with bipolar are psychotic (that is really important; if you're dealing with someone with bipolar, it makes a huge difference if they are subject to delusions or paranoia).
I believe (might be wrong) that "schizophrenia" is now a discredited diagnosis. Even depression is a fuzzy target. How do you distinguish ordinary sadness from depressive illness? Anti-depressant pills seem to work on both. And there's no "chemical imbalance" theory of depression that hasn't been discredited.
My sense is that we haven't progressed much in understanding mental illness since Victorian times, with their diagnoses of "melancholy".
> It's called narcissistic entitlement to expect the whole world to change their behaviour because of ones own inability to fit in.
Is it not exactly what allistic people are doing?
Autistic people communicate just fine with other autistic people. It's allistic people that don't fit in and want to change everybody around them because they can't suffer a bit of diversity in thinking and communication.
I think in the end people who are different (no matter if autistic, bipolar, whatever) need to learn to get along with each other. Whenever one side says: "I am right, I don't move a bit to accomodate anyone else", he is doing the opposite. This piece reads exactly like that. It calls people who communicate and think differently indistinctly bullies.
If you claim to be a complex thinker, you also consider people in your analysis, then that should also apply first hand, not just as a part of the solutions you propose. If you are unable to do that: fine, nobody is expected to be perfect. But don't claim to be perfect.
> expect the whole world to change their behaviour
Who is saying this? The article provides a perspective that is not discussed very often as a way of helping people understand these situations from a vantage point they might not have considered. Nobody is demanding anything.
Source: have worked with many smart and not so smart autistic people over the years. Have many friends “neuro atypical” and think I’m probably somewhere on the spectrum (aren’t we all?).
Autistic people have what seems like a much higher tolerance for bullshit both in the context of wanting to argue a point to finality or to obsess over a particularly detail until they’ve reached a shared plateau of understanding. Many times this is actually a very satisfying method of conversation, at least for me. Other times it can feel like talking to a wall.
> think I’m probably somewhere on the spectrum (aren’t we all?).
That, right there, is one of the least helpful things that can ever be said in these kinds of circumstances. It's understandable, and it's common, so this doesn't lay blame on you, but on the underlying cultural assumption.
"Aren't we all?"
Those who have truly neuro-atypical behaviours, to where it can be assessed as placing them somewhere else on the spectrum, will receive less helpful responses when people think along those lines. Their concerns are more easily pushed aside, and the things that can help bridge the gap are less easily implemented.
It may sound accepting, but it's a trivialising statement. It makes things harder, for everyone.
That poster was just trying to be inclusive, not trivialize. You are still part of a society composed of other humans.
I think less division and more inclusivity in spite of differences is a good place to be, while still acknowledging the struggles / addressing problems of minorities without making them “special” aka outcasts.
Ultimately, you choose how you react to something. You can choose to be offended and look at the surface level of what a person is saying, or you can dig into the essence of the essence and determine the nature, intention, and purpose of a statement.
Most people barely have their own lives in order, and I mean that in a neurological sense. Expecting others to also simultaneously keep track of nuanced triggers which are also not universally applicable, more individual situations, when they are operating in good faith is more counterproductive for everyone.
Would you tell a war veteran you understand them because you don't like loud noises? An amputee that you comprehend their pain because your knees feel old? Those are obviously not acceptable, and incredibly insensitive things to state. That is what this attempt at inclusivity does.
Everyone on this thread is making a lot of assumptions about my mental state. None of you know whether I am or am not autistic.
It's called a spectrum because there's a range. Some people are further out on the spectrum than others. Some people are autistic in one way but not another. One form of autism might be absolute pitch (distinct from perfect pitch in that you can hear semi-tones; Jacob Collier has this but might not choose to describe it as autism). It is a spectrum.
My point was that we are all somewhere on the spectrum. I don't pretend to be able to identify with anyone else's mental state, all I can narrate are my projections and the projections I receive back from others.
> Everyone on this thread is making a lot of assumptions about my mental state. None of you know whether I am or am not autistic.
I'm sorry that you feel that I have done so, that wasn't my intention. I haven't commented directly on you, but on a common statement that is used in many places around the world. It's something said by the many, which is why I have commented on it within that context - as a cultural norm.
That common statement produces harm, by trivialising the experiences of some, which makes it harder for them to seek or gain accommodations. It produces an assumption of comprehension in some, where they realistically have none. People like those in HR, or team managers, can surreptitiously begin to believe that they fully understand, and so feel justified in denying more things.
That is all that I have sought to point out. Everyone may be on the spectrum, in the same manner that everyone is human, but that's not a helpful distinction.
IMO autism causes an absence self-awareness, and because of that inability to recognize and modulate their own behavior, they are naturally defensive when you point out their errant behavior. In a way it's almost cruel. They don't, and can't see themselves the way other people do, and pointing out a flaw just makes things worse.
Is it wrong to say that a person with autism can't really help themselves?
That's a bit reductive. I'd say that generally, autistic people have more of an issue getting implicit rules, expectations and social rituals, but that doesn't mean they're not self-aware. In fact I'd argue that they are painfully self-aware, especially when masking - that is actively emulating behaviors expected of them without them being intuitive. It can be pretty stressful to consider the impact of everything you do that other people trivially do automatically.
I'm autistic and it definitely doesn't cause a lack of self-awareness. If anything I'm more aware than most neurotypical folks.
I can't speak for every autistic person, but at least in my experience when people do point out our mistakes it often tends to be lacking context. Indeed we don't see ourselves the way others do, but what is sometimes flaw in communication with a neurotypical person is exactly what I would want to do with another autistic person. Pointing out mistakes of this nature in a blunt way is unpleasant, and I've often been expected to be able to intuit the feelings of neurotypical people in these situations even though I literally think and feel differently.
It can be quite frustrating, and I've found that many autistic people will become defensive about personal qualities because of past poor experiences in giving/receiving feedback.
I wish neurotypical folks could see the other side and experience what it's like to be around mostly autistic people. I have no doubt many would become defensive when they've been told again and again that they're being too loud, that they're not discussing they're ideas in enough depth, that they're not being calm enough, or whatever autistic predisposition they'd end up accidentally bumping up against. Thinking and feeling differently from the majority of folks is difficult, but it's even more difficult when folks expect you to know and understand where there mind is at.
> I wish neurotypical folks could see the other side and experience what it's like to be around mostly autistic people.
Personally I suspect (without too much evidence) that what would happen if such an experiment were honestly tried is that the autists would "route around" the NT socially rather than trying to change them. The game of trying to squash individuality isn't terribly appealing to autists for obvious reasons, albeit historically contingent ones.
What if you try to get along with others instead of looking at their logical mistakes and fallacies and verbalising them and see where you can both work together.
I read this as being strongly opinionated and egocentric..
I want to call it "ausplaining", this tendency to go "no no, YOU don't understand ME (because I'm special, not because I'm wrong)" whenever we get ourselves into situations like the exemplified.
I do this A LOT as well, and when people do stick with me for long enough, I often find that I'm either getting my point across by re-framing my explanation, or discover that what I'm pursuing as oh_so_important is in fact not important for the question at hand (then I feel even more stupid, because, not only did I find this of paramount importance, but everyone else didn't even consider it (because it so clearly didn't matter)).
> Because I value learning, I read about 50 technical books every year
If the author reads this, I'd congratulate them on finding the time to do that, but also advice them to maybe read 40 technical books every year, and then read 10 about the topics they clearly do struggle with (social interactions, politics, negotiation, psychology)..
The opinion reads as "I'm right and the world is wrong" to me, maybe because I can strongly relate (except the parts about reading tons of books and being really smart).
I think the author would benefit from realizing that these things they dismiss as irrelevant (mind games/politics) are actually important and beneficial to understand and master (I am not saying it should be that way, but merely point out that it is, in fact that way).
The author may also benefit from investing some of their mental capital (I'm not being sarcastic, they're obviously very intelligent) into learning how to play the games, to figure out neurotypicals enough to communicate with them on their level/terms.
Yes, workplaces need to be accommodating, but in the end, no matter who we are, it's our ultimate responsibility, to ourselves, to learn how to function in this world.
As for the situation where the other party is factually wrong.. Well, yes.. I always imagine this situation, where I have the right of way on my bicycle, and it's the semi-truck that must yield.. There are a fair number of times where being right does not matter.
> The author may also benefit from investing some of their mental capital (I'm not being sarcastic, they're obviously very intelligent) into learning how to play the games
I am not aware of any good systematic textbooks on this topic.
It can be a bit on the nose, though, larve, to use this book.
Best,
bigDinosaur
--
Seriously, it's very easy to go wrong with How to win friends. IMO a lot of its advice probably worked better back in the day when formality was somewhat more appreciated and knowing when to avoid it more of a skill.
I still remember reading this and the impact it had on me at the time (I was ~20). Its funny looking back, in a way its such a cheesy and outdated book. I'm sure there are many better ones now. And I don't have problems with the kinds of conversations it talks about there anymore. But I still remember very clearly reading and having an epiphany in that book, and suddenly I could talk to people again. Strangers even. It was a definite turning point in life for me personally. Being able to act a little more normal goes a long way when you can't be normal on your own.
But anything that gives me insight into how I differ from others, and how their mind works has helped me.
Even books like "The Intelligent Negotiator", "The Intelligent Conversationalist" which superficially seems to be mainly about manipulating and scamming people give interesting insights into how people work.
I've also read some books on pedagogy, a subject I hate due to how much childhood trauma its rigid application caused me..
Maybe because of it.. Those books, at least the old ones I read, define the boxes into which children will and must fit, the methods to make them fit, and the reasoning behind those methods..
Very interesting stuff to read for me, because it made it clear why it didn't work on me, and why it would have worked on my peers. They are almost lists of "behaviour X is due to situation Y" which may be true for neurotypical children, but were certainly not for me. I digress, they gave me good insights into how "the others" work.
Ribbonfarm is better than anything else for non-neurotypical people. The examples are real and accurate although it does kind of spiral into odd places at the end.
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene is a good place to start. Even if you don't want to turn to the dark side, this book will at least reveal to you how some of your competition is thinking and maneuvering.
And if you have any interest in the history of power struggles, the 48 Laws of Power is an incredible historical reference of the thinking, attitudes and abilities available to the elite power brokers throughout the ages.
The reason I like Carnegie more than Greene is that Carnegie is not cynical, and beyond the clickbait title of the book actually presents compassion, curiosity and integrity as core values, which resonates strongly with me. Thus, applying its advice doesn’t feel like “playing a game”, it feels as “well directed efforts in line with my values”.
The entire field of business and professional communications - there is an entire college for the topic, with multiple disciplines. A College of Communications is not just where the radio, film and journalist majors go, the college has courses that go into professional career depth the nature of communicating ideas to audiences that are not necessarily receptive. I know several communications graduates, my wife was a cinematography major.
The communications and language tools taught in a communications program are comprehensive, which makes a lot of sense when one considers how many of the communications careers require complex ideas and complex collaboration to create the delivery of these ideas as audio, motion picture, and prose compositions - the collaborators have to be great communicators or these projects will never deliver.
I didn’t give much information about my life, but I am pretty adept at playing all these games. So much so that I thought there was no way I could be autistic because of how many friends and business relationships I had. Until it hit me that I spent my 20ies doing what you suggest, which is studying the heck out of these things.
But it stops at engineering, where I try to be very open-minded and learn as much as I can. I have to readily accept I am wrong on most of my assumptions because I just couldn’t be a good engineer otherwise. I can be perfectly suave and agreeable discussing anything else. That means I probably know how to play the “acquiesce when you should” game quite well.
But I’m at work because I am blessed to have a job where I get to do what I care about: good engineering. I deliver great value when people understand my way of thinking, and thankfully I have plenty of colleagues that get it.
I very much relate.. I've been so bitter as to keep a small list of "told you so's" that I'd update when my rejected ideas were finally proven to be the better path (though it may have been months or even years after the fact (most agonizing when someone else suggested exactly the same thing, but explained it in other terms,focusing on things I didn't find central to the point).
In the end I deleted the file. Some of the "told you so's" were petty things anyway, and.. Now I try and take it as part of my responsibility to work a bit harder at finding arguments against my point of view, as well as work a bit more politically to get it through when I'm ready to put my head on the line that I'm right and everyone else are wrong.
P.S. I'm closing in on the big 4-o and I'm still working on myself, still trying to learn politics, how to talk with nontechnical superiors and how to accept that sometimes, we go with the wrong solution because someone else tells so.
Thanks! I wish you the best. Being bitter is something I hate, and it's very non-productive. The best way to move forward when I disagree with say, architectural decisions or tech stack decisions (because it's very valid to disagree here, they're just really unknowns that we can try our best to sketch out), is to have us all write down the pros and cons, and depending on the project, timebox it and revisit certain decisions at a latter date. This is acknowledging that either opinion can be right, wrong, in between, and we might never find out, yet a decision needs to be made.
In a way, it's a way to do a team-wide "we told us so, so what now?"
A thing to consider is that it is often not just about the facts. Often it is also about social convention and other things.
If (for example) that one struggling colleague is shining in front of a superior and you are the guy who rains on his parade by nitpicking some detail he said, you might be technically right, but you end up being perceived as an asshole because you acted like one.
If if that example you strictly need to be right for some reason, you could also just talk to the guy afterwards etc.
And this is what all of it essentially boils down to: It is good to be right, as long as the way you communicate it is adequate for the situation.
If people have a low effort chit chat and don't want to go too deep into things, it might not be wise to get all excited and monologoue about how everything they know is wrong.
If someone shows you something they have been working on for weeks, maybe it is wiser to aknowledge the good things first, before going into the bad things.
Generally it is better to have others discover facts themselves than spitting them out in front of them. Sure, if the boat is literally sinking and they claim punching more holes will help, this might be a good moment for a statement without nuance — but such statements have their time and place and should not be used everywhere.
We are talking about accepting that you are wrong, not incessantly pointing out that others are wrong on some minor thing. Resisting people who do the later is perfectly healthy.
Given the headline, I thought it would be an article about what it looks like when you acknowledge that you are wrong and why people might not understand that you are, in fact, acknowledging when you are wrong.
Instead, it was an entire article that not once acknowledged that you could be wrong, nor what it looks like when you do acknowledge it. It detailed about how, actually, you're not usually wrong.
This article appears to underscore the accusation.
Thanks for reading. I agree, this article is about the times when things escalated, and I didn’t think I was wrong, or more precisely, didn’t even get to the point where I could be wrong.
When I’m wrong I just say “oh you’re right, good point” and move on. It’s very easy to do.
I have a girlfriend who believes herself to be on the autism spectrum, and I cannot over years ever recall her admitting that she was wrong or apologizing at any time for anything. We do get along despite that, but I was kind of hoping for insight.
Well, that's interesting. My ex-wife also never once admitted she was wrong or genuinely apologized to me for anything. Her brother was diagnosed Asperger's and I strongly suspected both her parents were as well.
Sadly I don't have much to share in the way of insight.
Pretty disappointed to see these boomer-style "wife bad" jokes on HN.
Have you considered that being comfortable admitting fault is a skill which some people never learned while growing up, regardless of gender? And can you imagine a world where men do the same thing, but you don't gripe about it because you're not in a relationship with them?
Once upon a time I too was upset when people found things funny that I did not. But, I've come around since then. Not to finding things i don't like funny, but to the idea that humor is complicated. Essential. Necessary. People offset anxiety and tensions with humor, and not laughing leads to problems more often than laughing does.
And, tbf, "the wife is never wrong" encodes some wisdom, same as does the saying "Happy wife means happy life" or, from White Men Can't Jump, "Always listen to the woman".
I have many autistic (actually diagnosed) friends and I've heard most of them say they're wrong multiple times. It comes with knowing people for years. If you know someone for years and they've never said they're wrong, that has nothing to do with autism. They're just an asshole.
The problem is that you come across as the very stereotype of a person who is so focused on arguing about an irrelevant detail that there is no point in having the conversation with it. From my experiences with people on the spectrum, I would bet that you are arguing based on YOUR misunderstanding of the situation. And so your blog post can be summarized as, "Person who is convinced that they are right refuses to admit that they could have been wrong."
Let's take the React checkout example that you gave. Your self-illusion is that you were engaged in holistic thinking. And, in fact, you couldn't even see the whole for the first irrelevant detail that caught your attention. This is the opposite of holistic thinking!
First, it is not your job to make that kind of technology decision. You can offer advice, but it is your manager's job. Your job is to make sure that your manager is well-informed. You failed at that job.
If you believe otherwise, then you're wrong. You probably believe you are better equipped to make that decision than your manager. You may well be right about that. (Though, as a rule, we tend to think that we are smarter than we are, and our managers are stupider than they are. But that is a side point.) But you are still wrong about the important point. Which is that it is still your manager's responsibility to make that decision.
You wanted to frame the entire conversation around, "Does this checkout form have a concrete problem that needs fixing?" Your manager's thinking is going to be about very different looking questions. Such as:
- Will switching to React make hiring and training future developers easier?
- Do my existing programmers have the necessary skills to test this technology out?
- Will this technology choice make future projects faster to develop? (For example, do we get wins from a better toolchain, etc.)
- Will this be an interesting project that helps me keep existing employees motivated?
- Are the other claimed wins in the blog post actually going to work out that way?
Your manager needs to think about these things. You may dismiss them as bullshit, but they are not. Companies live and die on such considerations.
Your manager learned absolutely nothing about these things. Your manager may have come away with the impression that you have no idea if there is a problem with the checkout page. But by misunderstanding your role and responsibility, you failed to carry out your actual responsibility within the team. And wound up so upset about it that you wrote a blog post with a strong undertone of, "Here is the kind of stupid I have to deal with at work."
And that AGAIN puts you in the wrong. It literally takes under a minute to go from your blog to your name to where you work. Any coworker who recognizes the blog now knows you're unhappy. Which poisons your work atmosphere. And if this comes to your manager's attention, your manager has to now deal with the fallout from THAT.
Yes, yes. You consider it bullshit. But it is bullshit that can easily get you fired. For good cause. And the fact that you do this AGAIN puts you in the wrong. And your considering it bullshit DOESN'T STOP YOU FROM BEING WRONG. It just means you won't admit it was a mistake.
> First, it is not your job to make that kind of technology decision. You can offer advice, but it is your manager's job.
Err, no: "A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React [...]"
> You wanted to frame the entire conversation around, "Does this checkout form have a concrete problem that needs fixing?" Your manager's thinking is going to be about very different looking questions.
This is literally their first question: "Is our checkout page not performing well?". The manager should have simply said "the problem is not performance, but X" instead of assuming that the developer is rejecting their idea.
> You may dismiss them as bullshit, but they are not.
It is interesting that you, like the manager, assume that they dismissed the idea.
> And that AGAIN puts you in the wrong.
I disagree. If the manager is not able to clarify the specifics of their question (remember, it was a question of whether they should do X) they are in the wrong.
> Err, no: "A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React [...]"
This in no way contradicts what I said. This is a normal way of asking for opinions on a decision that needs to be made. And organizationally the decision IS the manager's. In practice a wise manager will take (and usually follow) advice from their developers. But still it is the manager's call.
> This is literally their first question: "Is our checkout page not performing well?". The manager should have simply said "the problem is not performance, but X" instead of assuming that the developer is rejecting their idea.
Based on my personal experience of people on the spectrum, I doubt that things happened as described. My best guess is that it was exactly what dusted described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32410505.
Namely, early in the conversation, the person on the spectrum got caught up on some irrelevant point. That they couldn't let go of. Which they kept going back to explain how right they were. Eventually the conversation got derailed having gotten no further. And, rather than dropping it, the person went on the internet to explain to the whole world how right they were.
I've been part of such conversations. (Thankfully minus the whole world bit.) The first few times you can hope that a simple clarification will get the conversation back on track. After a while you learn otherwise.
As a parent, what I've found most useful is to set a rule that the person on the spectrum is not allowed to argue that they are right. Ever. Even attempting to make the argument gets shut down. If breaks are needed to finish the conversation, then OK. This resulted in a lot less arguments, and a lot more moments of, "Oh...."
> It is interesting that you, like the manager, assume that they dismissed the idea.
No. I was doing something rather different.
The thread to this point brought up the importance of learning how to play social games. With the poster saying that they had learned to do so, were good at it, and didn't bother any more.
My experience of people on the spectrum says that the poster didn't learn nearly as much about social rules as they think, and they discount the impact more than they should. Since the factors that I described did not occur to the poster, and several focused on social rules, there is a good chance that they seem like BS.
> I disagree. If the manager is not able to clarify the specifics of their question (remember, it was a question of whether they should do X) they are in the wrong.
It takes 2 to communicate. There clearly was a communication failure here. While that failure could be the manager's fault, the odds really are in favor of it being the fault of the person with a condition that makes communication hard (autism), rather than the person whose got promoted into a job that is all about communication skills (the manager).
And yes, it really sucks for autistic people that a failure to communicate by default gets blamed on them. What sucks even harder is that it is true. Which is why it is doubly important for them to work on their communication skills.
And guess what simple change most improves communication skills for most people on the spectrum?
Hopefully you figured it out. It is to stop arguing that they are right. Ever. Not because they are usually wrong. But because they tend to wind up arguing that they are right when they are missing something basic, and the fact that they are arguing makes it impossible to figure out what they are missing.
This is surprisingly hard advice to take. And it is harder for people on the spectrum than neurotypical people. But it makes a huge difference.
It seems that this is an issue that is close to your heart ("As a parent ...") so I apologize if this comes off as harsh: you should take a closer look at the assumptions you are making about @larve, a person whom you have never met.
> The problem is that you come across as ...
> And the fact that you do this AGAIN ...
> My experience of people on the spectrum says that the poster ...
I do not know precisely when, but it seems that at some point you started ranting to your child.
No competent manager would undertake a rewrite without new functional requirements at hand. Feature parity may well be the first milestone, but without an idea of what future projects might be, it's impossible to choose the best tools to facilitate them. Commercial companies are there to serve customers, make a living for employees and generate returns for owners/shareholders, not for funsies, save that for a hobby github project. Any managers not willing to listen to engineering concerns / articulate their own and any coworkers who expect others at work to be happy about every single aspect of their employment need help.
However there is a long path from first getting the idea of a rewrite to actually undertaking it. And the conversation in question happened because the manager had just read an article about such a rewrite, so it was very early in that journey.
You misunderstand. The author _laments_ that the conversation got hung up on the first question. The points you raise (e.g. "do my existing programmers have the necessary skills", "will this make future projects faster to develop") fall squarely into the categories the author mentions reasoning in (e.g. "teams", and "feedback loops", respectively).
Yes, these can be framed as concrete problems. But people usually don't start with much clarity in their thought, so it is unlikely that they will be handed to you in such a way.
As for not producing a single concrete reason to try the new framework, there is no reason to believe that the manager didn't. According to the article the manager had just read a blog post on it, that caught the manager's attention enough to spark a conversation. SURELY there was SOMETHING in that article about why it might be a good idea to try React?
We aren't told what points were made, likely because they seemed irrelevant. But I'd bet good money that some were made.
Let's be serious for a second. If the manager has those questions why did he ask about an unrelated rewrite of existing software into react?
The second question is quite literally just a "Have you experience with React?" which doesn't require additional questions for clarification. The manager would be expecting a "yes/no, but ..." type of answer. Honestly your questions would be asked in a meeting with as many developers and even non developers as possible to save time, not in a one to one conversation.
Honestly this whole topic is way too similar to the Dilbert comic where Dilber asks his boss what colour he wants his database in, to test whether he understands what a database is.
shoutout to the MVP of "studied a bunch of books on human interaction in their 20s" techniques: disarming a criticism by undefensively agreeing with it
It's oh so hard to relate a conversation you were involved in in a manner that's transparent enough for making a proper assessment, especially since I know I am actually missing a lot of subtext.
That said, I have a coach that helps me with this, and I work on my writing a lot. I am currently at a job where I never run into this particular problem, yet I have thorny discussions with lots of "disagreements" all the time. This really helped me understand that it's not just me.
I’m pretty sure I’m autistic on some level, I can look back on my life and point at the many clear signs (which go well beyond socially awkward behaviour). What I do try to do though is not let that be a part of my identity. I hate identity politics in general, and the title rubbed me the wrong way. Firstly, who even says that? You? Like one person you met, or an article you read somewhere? It’s a pretty outlandish thing to say regardless of who is saying it, so the article feels like you’re basically teeing up and easy ball to hit. Just my thoughts, take them for what you will
I was watching the netflix documentary about rubik's cube on netflix with my wife, and you see this autistic kid (rubik's cube champion), who doesn't speak until he's three, being friend with a much more socially accomplished other champion, and you can see him over the documentary looking at his friend and learning. I saw that and I suddenly realized that my whole twenties, that's exactly what I did. I read books and copied other people and wrote notes about social rules and practiced and practiced. I also started speaking at age 3 or 4 (my parents weren't really worried because I grew up bilingual and apparently it's common for bilingual kids to speak late).
I did take a few autism tests here and there, but always thought "oh they're just meant to make you feel special when you score high, that doesn't mean anything. plus i make good friends everywhere I go". When I told my wife she was like "who thinks that scoring high on an autism test is something people want", and we both took some of these tests. On one of the more widespread one (https://embrace-autism.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/ ), I scored 43, while she scored something like 12. My mind was absolutely blown. I started reading a few books and joining a few autism communities, and it might sound trite, but it's the first time in my life that I felt like I joined "my" community. So many of the stories and anecdotes I would read were like "finally I read something I can relate to".
I am looking for an official diagnosis (not simple) without too much effort, because I find most of the value in now being able to articulate so many of the things that puzzle me, or the conflicts I might have with my wife, or behaviours of mine, and mostly not being ashamed anymore. It's been extremely liberating, and it provides me with better words and verbs to tackle difficult situations.
Wow 43 out of 50 is rather high. I fell under the the suggested threshold of 32 and got 29.
I have similar memories of my 20s trying to learn how to behave in a social setting. But I also remember things clicking at some point and that part of the world stopped requiring so much effort.
Thank you for sharing. I hope you're able to get your diagnosis.
there is an interesting theory put forth that Quidditch is a metaphor for life. Harry is a seeker that ignores the entire game say for hyperfocusing on catching that little golden ball thingy (sorry, not a potterhead). The rest if the players play the game by all these rules, but each player has 1 seeker ignoring everything but that one Northstar, that super fast gold annoying thingy.
I like to akin your choice as choosing to assume the role of seeker. its lonely, its challenging, and everyone else seems to not care to play THAT game (some may say is a metaphor for divinity). But the reward is YOU WIN THE GAME. significantly better payout.
I share the metaphor to say that A) I understand you, B) I share your feelings and choice on the matter of identifying and managing Real Politik and C) congratulate you for identifying your true north star and having the strength to pursue in in spite of it not being rhe standard for others.
You sound like the "asperger's" person who we are in the process of offboarding from our team.
One can have asperger's and still be nice to people. These things are not mutually exclusive. I see too many people who find it convenient to be a toxic, rude bully, and don't know that they are, and use their condition as an excuse to be a jerk.
It could also be in between: Their actions are interpreted as way more of a rude behaviour than they intend them to be, and they don't know how to come across in a better manner.
From my experience, it's usually not a problem to be pretty forward with people on the spectrum, if you are meaning well. My wife told me there is absolutely no problem with telling me to stop going on about a topic bluntly, and it is something I quite often do with my friends too. Same for pointing out that a certain way of phrasing something didn't come across well, in fact I really appreciate receiving these pieces of advice. What hurts is the "NT" way of communicating these things, hoping that I'd catch up on them. I don't.
> In 2013, the DSM-5 replaced Autistic Disorder, Asperger’s Disorder and other pervasive developmental disorders with the umbrella diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
It's still widely used as a term, given the people diagnosed with it retain their diagnosis. There's also a lexical lacuna without it for "autistic, but close to neurotypical-presenting", so it fills a need there in a way "autism" and even "high functioning autism" don't.
He openly admits his default way of dealing with the miscommunication was to quietly walk out of the room. Looks like he could consider some of his own advice. Also, referring to "allistic communication patterns" might also be another impediment here. Normal people don't talk like that. It's like talking to a robot.
> Also, referring to "allistic communication patterns" might also be another impediment here. Normal people don't talk like that. It's like talking to a robot.
why are you assuming they are talking to people IRL like they would write a blog post? Very few people talk in person like they type or behave differently in professional environments vs casual. Seems like a weird critique.
Fair point. He did not explicitly quote his conversations with his colleagues. Still, you have to admit "allistic communication patterns" is an awkward phrase to use for a blog post talking about his personal struggles. It might be something you find in a psychology research text, but he was trying to relate his personal experience.
Allistic communication patterns aren't homogenous. And I think the phrasing is very clinical. It is effective but the tone is not very welcoming. I think it's a fair critique of the writing.
I would have written something like, "Allistic people communicate in a way that causes friction in understanding by autistic people, and vice versa, and this leads to a slowdown in the workplace for everyone."
Author here, thanks for reading. I was a bit torn about the “allistic” word, and decided to include it because it does encode what I was talking about in a very technical manner. In fact, if I regret one thing, it is to edit this blog post to shreds. It used to be much more conversational at around 2000 words, and probably conveyed more nuance.
I like the form it currently has too, but it requires taking every word at face value, and not assuming any subtext. For example, I don’t blame anybody, thus I really mean I am not blaming anybody. This is an examination of how things have played out and why they might have played out the way they did. Nothing more.
Hi Bedon, can you contact me at wesen - at - ruinwesen.com and I can forward you the longer drafts I have, if you are interested. Thanks for following up.
The post was perfectly fine. Don't be too hard on yourself. It was a minor criticism. I only proffered it because I thought it offered a useful insight. I've noticed many people tend to use this higher abstract language rather than "real" more relateable terms. I tend to do this myself, when I spend countless time editing words only to find it can be more easily said with much more basic language. This is a commonplace, I think.
I cringed reading the article because of how much it reminded me of my younger self in my software engineering career 30 years ago.
For what it’s worth, I think your assessment and advice are both spot-on.
I know the original author is far into his career as well but I think especially as we get more senior that humility and valuing other’s perspectives become as important as the technology. Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career were from dismissing the ideas of peers.
Great. You learned to mask better. But younger people and some older ones are really not keen on doing that anymore.
Humility is great, but automatically accepting the blame for somebody's failure to communicate something to you just because they are allistic ... that is not so great.
Thanks for reading. I don’t go very much into my day to day workflow, but I actively seek out ideas of my peers and trusting them to do their own mistakes, being at the ready to help out only when things go very wrong.
I wrote this article because despite being as humble as I can, these situations still arise. You can get very far doing so, but my biggest mistakes were to not realize that I sometimes actually right.
I didn’t read it as egocentric. The author cares a lot about correctness and delivering high quality work, but the definition of quality or good is very limited in scope.
I don’t doubt the veracity of what the author wrote, but I would guess that if we spoke to the counter-parties, their recollection of certain things would be very different.
How people perceive the world and express themselves vary, and some people don’t jive well. I have a developer on my team who is very literal person, if I say “I could kill that guy”, he doesn’t capture the nuance. But he is brilliant, a friend and trusted colleague. A good leader should get that and adjust.
I believe it is unintentionally egocentric to assume a single individual's perspective is enough to guarantee correctness. I imagine most of the time that individual makes the best call, but that's not less egocentric. It's easy for an individual to qualify the correctness of technical material, but not easy to do the same for soft skills like communication. As a senior developer or leader, you need some egocentricity in order to have a focused project and clear goals.
> I know better than to argue intangibles such as coding style or software architecture, but some things in Computer Science are just facts: we can verify them. I don't care much for saying false things to appease someone's ego. In cases like this, I'm not the one who can't acknowledge being wrong.
Yes, there's some ego in that. Author won't back down.
But clearly, the author isn't the ultimate arbiter of truth. Some things are objectively true.
Wow. The sheer level of disrespect in this comment...
You can't appreciate that this person have spent 10h per day for last 23 years at dealing with computer issues. Instead you think it would be better spent learning some office politics. I'm not even sure how to comment on that.
There’s a difference between engaging in petty office politics and endeavoring to grow your soft skills. And everyone, including hard core techies, can benefit from learning how to better interact with other people.
Or hear me out. Maybe allistic people could learn to interact with autistic people since they'll be meeting a lot of them in IT.
Those are not hard skills to learn, like patiently responding to questions before jumping to conclusions about what the person you are talking to thinks about this and that.
This is the typical "improve society vs improve yourself" discourse. We should absolutely be in favor of changing society to make neurodivergent people's lives easier. This requires changing education policy, as well as increasing the diversity of communities so that children get more experience communicating with more kinds of people, and it'll probably take a few generations at the least before we start seeing major societal shifts, but it's a worthwhile effort.
In the meantime, it's not a bad idea for an individual person to improve their soft skills, just to make their own life easier. For the individual neurodivergent person, learning how to effectively communicate with neurotypical people is a more effective short-term strategy than waiting for all of society to adapt.
Author here. I agree, and both approaches are not exclusive.
But I think you underestimate how much effort autistic people put into improving our soft skills in order to survive. In fact, I learned to be so good at social occasions that I never thought I could be autistic, given how many colleagues value me and how many friends I have and make. I reflect here upon situations where all these improved soft skills didn’t help however, and try to understand what might be going on.
>This is the typical "improve society vs improve yourself" discourse.
Nah, it's more "improve society & improve yourself". ND people realize being "vs" and wiring their brains differently is not achievable, so NDs try to "soften the blow" to their own mental health by trying to make allistic people know how they work. Sharing is the first step towards understanding.
I didn't intended to signal disrespect the author, and I don't disrespect them, I think the article they wrote is very interesting and insightful, and a great topic for discussion indeed. I also feel that I have had much the same experience through my life, both personally and especially, professionally.
Thing is, programming computers and solving technical problems is fun to me, I enjoy it, and it's a perfectly spent time for me, as I believe it is to them.. I don't enjoy office politics, I hate them, I don't like a lot of how society is structured with regards to social convention and politics in general..
But the universe does not care about my opinion that technical problems are worthier pursuits than learning how to handle people, especially people with vastly different (and/or inferior by whatever standard you need) skills, because at the end of the day, the cost is going to be greater to me than to the multinational megacorp.
Egocentrism is definitely not the same as selfishness. It's just an inability to understand that other people differ from you.
In fact, it's possible to be highly egocentric and altruistic at the same time. You see this with parents who might deeply love their children but can't understand how their child's perspective might differ from their own. They might think their kids have the same likes and dislikes as they do.
I like the term "ausplaining" as you've defined it, but I don't think I would ever start using it. If feels like it would end up being used dismissively.
I also find "allistic" feels like a dismissive or slightly derogatory alternative to neurotypical. (To be clear, I do not thing the author was using it that way at all, it is just the reaction the word engenders in me.)
I've learned the hard way that caring too much about work related topics doesn't contribute to your happiness.
Company men will replace you if they can do their business math for justification, because they cannot see the technical complexities of the things they are "wanting to be built" for the company.
Even when you can see dependencies of complexities that will break the plan a year ahead of time, and you were right in complaining about it, it doesn't effectively help you as a person.
Being stuck in the past is just the same waste of energy as being angry about it. Hate and anger are infiltration techniques and should be treated as such.
People will always react based upon their own experiences and understanding, and if you actively try to fight the statistics (aka you vs your team) you will just hurt your perception.
Being seen as rude by other people gives you a strategival disadvantage for negotiation, and that will hurt the rate of adaption of your own suggestions. The ironic part is that people are even more petty than the "I told you so list" that you mentioned, only that they think subconcious pettiness of system1 isn't "petty" but only "a feeling" even though the mechanics and dynamics of it in a rational context are the same.
Work is work, and it will always be "just work". As an autist you have to learn that other people don't care about things as much as you would do (in a utopian star trek world). As a hu-man (literally meaning being that forgets) you have a very limited capacity of memory, computation power and energy.
And your efforts are far more efficiently spent outside the world of company politics, where most people are just busy 90% of the time with sidelining or attacking other departments for their own egomaniac benefits. Playing this game is a huge drain on energy (at least for me) and I therefore decided not to play it.
I thought at first you had invented a clever new word combining strategy and survival. Then I realized that v is just very close to c on a qwerty keyboard. Oh well.
> I want to call it "ausplaining", this tendency to go "no no, YOU don't understand ME (because I'm special, not because I'm wrong)"
That's certainly a message I have encountered in some places, and in the first few sentences of this article I thought that's what I might find here.
But unlike you, I quickly concluded that that was not at all the article I was reading. Rather than argue that they were special because of their autism, this author listed highly specific, clearly explained ways in which other people they interact with fail to understand them.
> If the author reads this, I'd congratulate them on finding the time to do that, but also advice them to maybe read 40 technical books every year, and then read 10 about the topics they clearly do struggle with (social interactions, politics, negotiation, psychology).
Did you read the part of the article where the author explained that they do this reading because they find it enjoyable, rather than simply to get ahead?
> I think the author would benefit from realizing that these things they dismiss as irrelevant (mind games/politics) are actually important and beneficial to understand and master
They’re just part of the game. If you want to do well in any position you cannot neglect them.
This article does give me a little more insight into working with divergent thinkers. However, this one part gave me pause:
"Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic."
I would have to disagree here. Authority structure is useful and sometimes there are multiple good options. Not "giving in" every now and then can lead to analysis paralysis.
Thanks for reading. I did indeed think a lot about leaving this sentence in / writing it like this. What I think you mean is that compromising is necessary to move forward in a team. That is 100% true, in fact most (if not all?) technical decisions are just not based in fact, as much as I would like them to. What matters is that everybody understands why a compromise has been made, and what the pros and cons were that led to that decisions.
I am fine shipping the most horrible code if we all agree that we discussed the pros and cons. This also makes it easy to avoid the “I told you so”-trap which further degrades work climate. Instead, we can go back to the original design document, see that a con we expected has happened, and pick the discussion up from there.
“giving in” without forming a compromise and making sure everybody agrees on what the compromise is however is just appeasing a bully (say “we do it this way because I’m the manager and you’re not” or “we do it this way because I have 10 years of experience and you don’t”).
I should probably have given it a bit more context.
> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.
That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal.
In other words, they weren't saying that the checkout page was bad, they were asking the author's professional opinion as to whether it could be better.
Also a common trope, playing out the "manager" or "business person" as an idiot when in fact often times there are bigger things at play. Looking down on people who aren't like you is not generally a positive. Understanding them is the source of empathy.
OP, if you're still reading, please don't take anything I wrote here as an attack on you. Instead, it was meant to be a reflection on your situation from someone who struggles with many of the same communication issues, in many of the same ways.
I am sympathetic towards OP's situation and made similar mistakes when I was younger, but telling people what they want to hear is not helping them and isn't actually empathetic. I've spent most of my life around non-neurotypical people, and this does seem pretty self-inflicted. People like this don't need to read any more technical books or learn any more about software engineering.
They would be more effective in every facet of their life if they spent some time reading history, philosophy, and psychology... or just talking to people. No one exists on an island, and the issue is almost always that they don't find things external to the self "interesting" because they are self-centered. Notice that all three subjects I mentioned above are about other people.
Yes. OP is being raked over the coals for this, and people are working hard to assume many things about him, be uncharitable. Once that is done, people circle around and then accuse OP of arrogance/narcissism/know-it-all-ness.
Some people want OP to have proven that he knows how to take criticism in his article - a strange ask, given that many seem to not even have finished reading the article in the first place.
It looks like many people here dont know what makes them tick - the things they accuse the OP of, are things they can see themselves do, and so see it in the OPs behavior.
Maybe it is simply that people cant imagine the world OP inhabits.
> It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal.
Then why didn't the manager ask that instead of mentioning some article some other company?
> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it
All questions can be reflected easily.
> Is our checkout page not performing well?
> Will a new checkout solve our problem?
Will React make our checkout page performing better / improve checkout ?
> Why do they think a technology change is a solution?
Can technology change (to React) improve our situation in anyway?
Do they understand the implications of such a switch?
> What would be the implications if we switch to React?
Now those questions OP can answer. Manager read a blog post, he obviously don't have answer to this questions, that's why he is asking OP if they should rewrite.
Asking "Why do they think a technology change is a solution?" is making wrong assumption that, manager thinks "technology change is a solution"
If the manager has no clue then why are they bringing the ideas? They could spend all day long pitching dog shit that engineering has to bat away, is that the managers job to be the ideas guy?
From what I understood, manager in this context is not technical at all. They read somewhere their competitor using a new technology, and asking if it makes sense if they use that too.
Author here, thanks for reading. That is exactly the first question I would ask.
If you ask me to make something better, I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges) and then discuss strategy (amongst which there is technology).
If me asking what the goal is is perceived as patronising, when I’m just trying to do my best, then sure I can work on that. But that requires good faith on the side of the manager. It’s not my decision to shut things down.
I think that this approach limits leadership. Often people are asked to solve both technical and nontechnical problems. People can reasonably ask you both to define "better" and to achieve it. If you expect requirements for everything then you'll place a limit on your influence.
This is what I was going to say but phrased better. The issue isn't autistic vs. allistic, the issue is that you've decided you don't want to devote any brainpower to questions which are not directly technical. Sometimes that's fine, but it also means you are probably at the apex of your professional development. So do it, but also realize it means you're unlikely to get promoted further, and your opinion about technical topics will (rightly!) get ignored because you weren't in the rooms necessary to see any bigger picture.
I thought it was. The alistic manager wanted to plug into the social gravity of React and the autistic employee wanted an explanation for his labor he could understand. All people regardless of autistic or allistic are usually self-interested and not consciously aware of what motivates their desires. For example, I doubt the manager was capable of explaining what attracted him to React any more than the OP could understand why being part of a famous community might benefit them. Only thing that helps in these situations is for one side to know the other side better than they know themselves. It's easier to work with people if you can mentally model what motivates their desires. That's called empathy and whether or not you've got it distinguishes senior from junior engineers. It should also be a hard requirement for managers.
Thank you for commenting. I love working at the intersection of business/product/technology, and as much as I love new frameworks and shiny ideas, the best technology is usually the one that is already there. If you ask me about exactly that intersection, I do need to understand the bigger context.
Otherwise my answer would just be “yes we can rewrite the checkout in React” which doesn’t really help anybody.
As for motivation, it is of course very hard to understand one’s own motivations, and even more so other people’s motivations. It took me (please don’t laugh) 30 years to realize that I could get paid being an engineer (because I just assumed I would never be worth anything seeing how much I didn’t know about software). And only at age 40 did it dawn on me that most people are not motivated by building the best product they can, but instead do care about money, career, social prestige.
It’s ironic that this is then framed as a one-sided “can’t understand other people”, when really many people don’t understand my motivations either. And seeing how carelessly dismissive some of the comments here are, don’t even care to.
It wouldn't matter if a person just cares about status if the environment incentivizes them getting it by building a better product. Also understanding is power. If Person A can peer into the motivations of Person B and predict what they'll do, while Person B thinks Person A is a mysterious and enigmatic black box, then which one would you say is more senior?
Well, if you actually asked what the goals of the manager's proposed evaluation/comparison were, great! If you had probed around the context of the discussion a little bit by asking some open questions like "So why did this article pique your interest in relation to our company?" or "That's interesting, I wonder how their approach compares to ours. What do you think?", then even better.
However, that isn't quite what you say in the article: instead you relay that you appear to have shut down the discussion immediately by getting stuck at "this isn't broken and I don't understand why you're asking me to fix it." That is the part that I perceive as patronising, becuase it contains the implicit assumption that your knowledge of the business/tech crossover is superior to your manager's.
I agree. I am pretty good at being social and suave in the workplace (so well I never would have thought I was autistic until age 40), but of course I can be in a bad mood or phrase something wrong. But even if that is the case, shutting down a business conversation because you think your engineer sounds patronizing is just… not great business/tech crossover, to be honest.
I understand and empathize with your angle. But it is important to know -- nobody likes being patronized. Whether it is actually happening, or only perceived to be happening, this is a universal truth of social interactions. The vast majority of people in all social settings -- professional or otherwise -- will not collaborate with someone who is patronizing unless forced, even if it will be mutually beneficial. This is something you cannot change.
I know quite well. This article is in many ways me trying to figure out how to do just that. I know I can't just say "I know a lot about this, trust me and just answer my question." But if just asking the plain question is perceived as patronizing, how can I move on? Sometimes, getting some maneuvering room and empathy from the other side helps tremendously.
I legitimately do not know what patronizing is. I have an abstract understanding of it, and it baffles me why anybody would do something like that. Yet it is an abstract force with very real consequences I have to deal with.
Perhaps the developer shouldn't have the entire burden of interpreting everything way more charitably and coming up with far fetched questions. Perhaps some of that "social lubricant" burden should be on the manager as well. I think it was a perfectly acceptable question. The manager could have easily said "well, it's not underperforming per se, I'm just evaluating our current tech stack vs newer tech stacks"
> it contains the implicit assumption that your knowledge of the business/tech crossover is superior to your manager's.
This might be the core of article.
Some things are knowable and don't need to be assumptions. In these cases, the author expects to have conversations that probe into what is true and what is false.
But some managers are offended by questions that challenge their assumptions. They feel their position gives them authority to overrule the deductive reasoning of their reports.
"Allistic" people sense this, and "up-manage" the egos and sensibilities of managers, without being aware they do it.
> I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges
I think you have answered your own conscience.
You say you don't care about the goals. The only thing you care about is whether the tech is interesting to you or not, which is purely subjective.
Your manager probably already knows this. He knows you are asking a question to which you completely don't care about the answer. It's just that you're not interested.
There is a clear difference between asking questions to learn — and trolling. This is easily visible to any human.
I'll be honest: If you are expecting 100% fulfillment, then it most likely means you have an impossibly high opinion of yourself. If you really wish that, become a freelancer, then go ahead and reject everything you hear. At work, nobody needs to convince your heart and soul for every single thing. Deal with it.
I am not sure why you are so aggressive, nor reading my words charitably. I do care about solving the technical challenges to fulfill the goals in the best way possible. I don't care what the goal is "about," if the business wants to target a specific vertical or wants to grow internationally or wants to prioritize backend tooling. I care about knowing the goal and then doing the best work possible. This is the opposite of trolling.
It's disengenuous to say that a manager came one random day, asked a question about react and immediately dismissed you in the first sentence and went away. And all that just by reading an article overnight, as you want to believe.
There is something missing in your story. For example, how long is too long for continuing your questioning, how you deal with rest of your obligations if you don't agree with the answers, how you collaborate with others, whether others in your team agree with you or not, etc.
We programmers are so privileged that we are blind to our privilege.
Thank you for reading. Of course, this is a highly edited hypothetical situation, and not what happened. I try very hard to understand how I can phrase differently so that we can answer these questions and work together. I think in other comments it became clear that the intent of the questions are not the problem. In fact, I am asking them because I trust the manager to have good answers.
Now, if I come across as patronizing and this leads to a negative outcome (as in, no progress is made in advancing the company’s goals), two things can happen:
- I can work at getting better at communication. The last 2 years, better writing has been my main focus, and this article is part of that. Writing good documents has been tremendously effective. It also only goes so far if someone doesn’t want to engage. In this particular situation, I spent the next week studying React (it wasn’t React in the actual situation) reading 3 books on the chapter and building a toy React prototype, and then wrote up what I thought was a concise report on what was good about it, and what was not so good. I don’t think this document was read.
- The manager can actually put some effort into hearing me out, and understand that I am trying my best here. Maybe I don’t know intuitively what words they want me to use for the questions, but it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext.
If anything, it is easy because I really don’t care about subtext, or patronizing people. Where is the fun in that, compared to the fun of solving problems.
> it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext
Has it occurred to you that just as it is difficult for you to adapt to the communication styles and thought patterns of allistic people, your manager experiences the same difficulty adapting to those of autistic people?
While I believe organizations and managers should try to accommodate neurodiversity and help all types of people be successful in the workplace, it's not unreasonable to expect you to expend some effort adapting as well.
In all your follow-up comments you seem to have some excuse or clarification for why you don't need to adjust your behavior and the problem is obviously that your manager isn't trying hard enough.
When your manager asks a casual question, he is not asking for a formal document describing pros, cons. He's looking for you to make a judgment call, express an opinion, or for you to say "hmmm, I might spend some time this week looking in to that."
Reacting to a two-sentence exchange by spending a week working on a doc is a communication anti-pattern.
> It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently
Yes, this is more likely. But autistics expect communication to be true and relevant. When it is not, it sounds like incompetence and dishonesty to an autistic.
If anything, allistic people allow a certain benefit of doubt in communications before assuming incompetence/dishonesty. And then they generally play along with incompetent/dishonest people if the social context requires it.
I'm diagnosed and have adopted a sort of "default wrong" approach in situations like these because I realized, well, I am often wrong! Starting from the stance of "This could be wrong but.." and then jointly building upon and testing my hypothesis (that, in the past, I may have declared to be inarguable!) seems to result in far more pleasant interactions and consensus.
> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.
Let's be honest, that's what happened here. There are many reasons to overhaul a frontend, and performance is just one of them. Maybe the existing checkout is a mess that only OP understands how to maintain. Maybe engineers and designers want to find better common ground to work together and this change could facilitate that. I'm sure you can think of other reasons.
The narrow thinking is on OPs side here. They straight up assumed that this change was just chasing shiny new things (and, well, React isn't that shiny anymore), that all changes had to serve the user and not also organizational goals and then shut it down with the nearest plausible excuse.
> "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic.
This doesn’t sound right. You are not going to agree with 100% of someone else’s decisions. No matter how much you discuss something, no matter if you understand all the ramifications, everything there could possibly be. Sometimes you’re just not going to agree with the direction someone else is taking, and you’re going to have to accept it.
And that’s okay. It’s not toxic to disagree with someone, or to accept that even though you might disagree, they’re going to do X their way (or that you’re going to have to do X their way because that’s what they want). That’s not office politics, that’s life.
What I’ve found useful is to dig until we understand why we disagree. Assuming the other person reasoned their self into a reasonable position, then if we have different answers then we probably came from different starting points.
Usually we can work backwards and discover that we have different starting assumptions or work forwards and discover that we have different goals. Those pieces tend to be more ambiguous and much easier to “agree to disagree”. And it’s why both people can be 100% that they are correct - because in each of their frames of reference they are.
This was a big red flag for me, too. There’s a reason the term “bike-shedding” exists among developers.
You want to keep the bikes dry, and what color you paint the shed, or whether you call the paint “tan” or “beige,” matters not at all. Labeling people who disagree with you about the paint color as “bullies,” and fighting them to the death, is profoundly useless. Just ask yourself what really matters, and let the rest go.
If not agreeing means "let's agree to disagree" then that's fine and healthy.
If not agreeing means "I need to pretend I agree even when I have good reason to disagreee because this person needs to be appeased" that is not healthy and contributes to a toxic workplace.
I’ve acknowledged I was wrong countless times - often readily. I don’t find it inherently difficult or uncomfortable. There have also been many times I’ve refused to concede even a little, because that would have been a white lie (in my mind) even though I knew full well it would smooth things over immediately. Those people probably perceived me as incapable of admitting fault. That’s what they usually yell at me, after all. And I get told I’m arrogant about once a week. I never reply to that, but I’m always thinking in my head, “I never tell anybody that they’re anything (negative). Why is it so easy for other people to tell me I am this that and the other……”. Am autistic.
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[ 11.8 ms ] story [ 379 ms ] threadI hope it's just worded poorly or I am reading too much into it.
Edit: I'm not saying that invalidates the article's content (in fact I recognize the situations from personal experience), but it doesn't really put a positive spin on it.
Interestingly, as I’ve grown more experienced, it has become much easier to realize that I don’t know jack about anything really, and that it is so easy to go out and look for answers with the resources we have nowadays.
These are my thoughts on why differences of opinions get phrased as “autistic people just can’t admit when they are wrong”, when myself and most autistic people I know in fact readily admit when we are wrong and move on all the time. I don’t think of blaming anybody here, that is you reading things into it. I just need explanations and strategies to handle these situations.
Alright, thanks for responding directly to that.
In my personal experience, people don't typically conclude that I would refuse to admit I'm wrong. The only conclusion drawn in my experience (usually) is that we're unable to get our points across, in both ways, and we should probably try to come back to the same topic again later and maybe prepare a little bit better.
We need to be careful, though, to not adopt black and white thinking even around "facts." Often, multiple contradictory factual things can be true at the same time and all pass verification.
Illusions are a lighthearted example of this that helped me appreciate this point. For example, the Yanni/Laurel audio illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) where people on both sides argue, in good faith, that the sound is one or the other. And even if you analyze the underlying audio in depth, neither side is factually wrong because that is how they experience it and isn't merely based around an opinion :-)
This example does not add much. If it is how people experience, then the only fact they can derive is, that they personally experienced it that way. There is no point in fighting about "what it really is", when all you have is a personal exerience. Anyone saying it objectively is this one or that one, only based on personal experience, is not accounting for the fact, that others can experience differently, which is silly.
In this light I assume, that you put quotes around "facts" as a means of saying, that they are not really facts, because if they were, then there would truly only be black and white.
I think this sharing of my perspective may help the conversation to move forward in a more productive manner.
Thank you for putting this information out there! I hope it helps other people understand autistic communication and intentions a little bit better.
What follows is not really directed at you but rather reflecting on this whole comment section, I hope you forgive me :)
IN the article, the only case where I insist on being right is in scenario #4, where I can actually demonstrate that a fact is true. In fact, it's not me being right, it's the result of the experiments I propose. Otherwise, I'm either asking questions, trying to actually state my opinion in the first place, or not willing to say something I don't agree with because it goes against my values.
Agreeing or defusing the situation is necessary for personal relationships, but this is the workplace, and while it's good to be nice, it has to go both ways. The easiest way to deal with conflicting opinions in personal relationships is just to be curious, a good listener, and not (or rarely) state any opinions of your own. That might sound a bit sad, but I have plenty of fun debating opinions on my own, no need to involve other people.
However, I'm not at work to read your mind and guess how you might interpret my words. I am at work to be an engineer and produce results, and I am an engineer because I love technology, not to make money and have a career. I also really don't want to antagonize people or prove my superiority or brag or retaliate, I legitimately just like solving problems to the best of the team's capabilities.
Because I don't have an intuitive sense of how to react in a given situation, extending some empathy my way helps a lot. And for that, it's worth communicating my point of view: that I am not being patronizing; I am just asking questions I think are necessary.
It's like asking a blind person to navigate around potholes. They might be able to do it, but it's also nice to understand they're not tripping on them on purpose.
Your post reads extremely arrogantly. It's a "I am very smart" type of communication style.
None of the points you bring up are specific to autistic individuals. I'm allistic (as you put it) and, realistically, not that intelligent, but I experience the first two of your points on a regular basis. But I've learned to modify my handling of these types of situations so that, most of the time, I get a positive/productive response.
Now I obviously can't know how you communicate outside your blog posts. But it may be prudent to think about it – if you come across as arrogant or a "know it all", then the "you don't acknowledge when you're wrong" is just a nicer way of saying it.
And when people get a “vibe” of arrogance/know-it-all-ness from a person, they will be much less willing to accept, well, anything. And for good reason. This especially applies to corrections, "let's play 20 questions" and long-winded explanations of context (especially if you explain something they already know, even partially).
The question is, when and how do I communicate that best without coming across as arrogant.
If you start from your own set of priors and are getting nowhere, you probably want to consider there might be a more relevant fact (for that person, opinion alert!) that you don't know about and aren't considering.
Ended up that he told manager we could do it, manager was nuts and so signed us up, I left the team, they missed it by about two years. But he had fun, apparently.
This attitude is exactly what [neurotypical] people generally mean when they say "[some] autistic people can't acknowledge when they're wrong".
Not that autistic people are so convinced of their own rightness that they stare at the compiler saying "my code is flawless, the compiler must be bugged" because there is literally no circumstance in which they will ever update their worldview. But that when it comes to cases where [multiple] people suggest that the question they asked or the tone they asked it in might have been suboptimal for the situation, they are likely to rationalise it as just unverifiable opinion or status games which can't be learned from (but nevertheless, the difference of opinion probably results from misreading by the other party)
I mean, that judgment is literally a matter of opinion. If they had behaved the same in an office full of autistic people like them, or with people of another culture, the outcome would have been totally different. That said, sometimes opinions matter, like say, the legal rights of fetuses when it comes to abortion, to pick a recent example.
So concluding something is a "difference of opinions" is not the end of the story, sometimes such differences need to be resolved.
Alternative, one can avoid that reasoning and rationalise not discarding consistently failing conversational stratagems because the cause of the failed outcome of a conversation is a person's opinion which lacks the same consistency as mathematics (and therefore more effective conversational stratagems can - at best - only be supported evidentially by inductive reasoning). But that just leads to the wrong outcome more often.
At the moment it feels like it takes for granted that you're good at resolving situations where you're objectively wrong, so it's only addressing situations where there was a difference of opinions.
I'm not implying that you're bad at the former, of course. However, it's entirely possible for people to have trouble engaging you when there's a difference of opinion and for you not to be able to acknowledge when you're objectively wrong - i.e. that all of the issues you've identified in the article are happening, but that the title quote is still actually true.
I don't think an article providing a couple examples of how one individual was willing to admit they were wrong is providing much in terms of discussion or new perspectives. "See, I can admit I'm wrong!" would be a pretty shallow way of addressing what could often be a misunderstanding. Instead, the post is attempting to offer some insight into the different opinions people might have about interactions with an autistic and explanations for what is going on behind the scenes.
For every “you can’t admit you are wrong” discussion, I must have a 1000 discussions where I just go “oh you’re right” and move on. My default operating mode is being wrong and knowing I am, or knowing that alternative approaches are just as valid, or sometimes less valid but still bring value to the table. This was not easily learnt, but it just leads to better engineering so it’s a no brainer. I brush over it in a single sentence, and this is not enough, as evidenced in some comments here.
I had a much longer first draft, much less focused, and edited it down to crystalline precision. The next article I write about the topic, I will chose the other approach, and see how that resonates.
Thanks!
To give an example, if someone who is less technical asks you a question that does not give enough background information to give a precise technical answer on, the wrong thing to do is respond by first simply asking questions back at them. Particularly if the questions could be difficult for them to immediately see how it relates to answering their initial question. It doesn't matter that it's because you think holistically or they don't have as deep an understanding, or anything else. The right thing to do is try to stay with people in conversation. Explain your thinking, make sure they understand why you need to ask these questions before you can answer, or give them a range of possibilities that are dependent on these unknowns.
And asking somebody to explain their reasoning and justification for their question before you begin to answer it is very rude, so that's wrong too. It's reasonable to expect more justification as requests become more time-intensive, but an initial response to a question should have some degree of good faith and politeness. Clearly they don't understand all the implications, which is why they asked for your opinion. So asking whether they understand all the implications of what they are asking is a rhetorical question and is basically calling them a moron.
"Should we rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React?"
This question might sound like your manager is expecting a yes or no answer, but they aren't. They want some "conversation". They want your opinion, some explanation for it, an opening to continue the conversation. Even if you could answer with an unqualified "no" without further clarification and be correct on a technical basis, that response is wrong in this social interaction.
"It's possible react could help with performance but it would be quite a lot of work. I don't think we should at this point unless we're seeing performance problems."
Something like that would be a better answer.
If it is a question: "Should we do X?" They are asking for an opinion about if it should be done or at least some sort of conversation. Not asking for you to make a decision. Just state an opinion based on what you know and follow up. "I doubt it, it would be a large investment of resources that may not lead to noticeable improvements. Why?"
Is it rude to ask why someone is asking though? Understanding context can be good. It might be fine to ask something like "Why do you ask?" to get it started, before answering. Then, if relevant, follow up with those in depth questions. But just jumping into technical details feels like they are meant to shut the initiator down.
If they come to you and say: "I think we should do X." Then those questions make more sense. "Why?" is still probably enough though. Let them elaborate on their thought process. And if it really is just they say something about it in a blog. You can explain the trade offs and guide them with your knowledge.
I know this sounds blind, but it literally goes against my values. To say something I just made up without clarifying is not honest: it is playing a game. Because if I decide to play a game, where do I stop? What are the rules? I can't rely on my intuition and gut feeling, as we already established.
I thought writing things would be a better avenue, and in many ways, it is. But a document that shows "I engaged with your question for hours, for days, and these are my conclusions, along with backing-up research" is often perceived as even more dismissive or passive-aggressive, while it is literally the opposite.
You are wrong about that though. In the way you are asking, anyway.
> I can't just make up an answer (say, that performance is what they are thinking about) and then riff on that.
It wasn't making up an answer or presupposing his intention. He asked whether you should switch, giving an answer that's essentially "no" but colored with a possible reason for switching is not making anything up.
I do think this is a strategy to try, although I'm pretty sure it's really not about the words, but about body language, timing, whatever... But it is really puzzling to me that you shouldn't ask questions because people will think you are asserting something, while making random assertions in order to probe for answers is the accepted way. I know it's probably how it works, but it will never really make sense to me, and I wish these games were just a little bit easier to play if people did see things from the other side more often, instead of throwing words like "asshole" around (as you can see in comments around here).
This remains true even if allistics are generally better at such guessing.
I can definitely imagine a manager who might (unhelpfully) say "Should we rewrite in React?" to mean "I want the team to move to React for reasons I can't [or don't feel I have to] rigorously justify, I expect you to defer to me here, and now is your chance to alert me of big gotchas that we'll have to handle in the process".
Such a manager has failed to communicate what they actually want, and unless they can "correct" the listener to the desired interpretation, they're going to be frustrated when said listener takes their surface level meaning seriously. It sounds like that's what the OP was doing here (as the listener).
In contrast, the manager just seems to be flailing around, unable to clarify. That is not correctable.
Only one of these people was ruining the interaction and thus needed advice.
And that's what I was responding to. I'm not going to respond to the manager because he's not reading this.
> your advice was that he should have replied to one "correct" interpretation that was not explicit.
No that was not my advice. I gave an example of a response which acknowledges the question, provides an answer "no", and gives the opportunity for the manager to come back with something if they really did have some valid case it might help. All in fewer words flailing about with a bunch of questions that still didn't answer the original.
My example remains valid even if the interpretation of the question and whether it matched the manager's intention was wrong, it still works.
The correctness I'm talking about is not in the answer to the technical question, it is how to go about having a polite interaction with others, which is what the author's stated goal was and what they got wrong.
> In contrast, the manager just seems to be flailing around, unable to clarify. That is not correctable.
I don't know what you mean by "not correctable". Correcting the behavior corrects it.
> Only one of these people was ruining the interaction and thus needed advice.
No, both do, and the manager isn't here, hence my comment.
What doesn't come across in your article is that you can be wrong about factual things. It is unclear or unmentioned that you actually can be wrong sometimes.
These communication patterns make sense with what I know about people. I don't doubt that they happen relatively frequently, and can result in a situation where it seems like you can't accept the wrong answer. But I would ask you to re-read the piece and find a single part where you admit that you can be wrong. I can only find one, and it's in the first paragraph. It also barely qualifies as admitting you can be wrong.
None of this is to detract from the content of the piece. I just wish that it had been framed differently so that people could appreciate the insight without it coming across as egotistical.
Your remark is something I have been thinking about. For me, it’s patently evident that I’m wrong about 90% of the time when discussing facts. In fact, “truth” is one of my core values, and the only way I can honor that (and be a good engineer) is to question my every statement. That’s why I write unit tests, run experiments, read so many books, etc…
When I know something is true, I tend to only state it once, because why would I need to repeat it. I am starting to realize this doesn’t work out that well :)
These articles are in themselves a series of experiments to see how I can convey these thoughts.
The point I'm making is that you didn't state this once. You kind of stated it in the first paragraph, but not in a way that implies that you can be wrong for reasons that aren't miscommunications.
>For me, it’s patently evident that I’m wrong about 90% of the time when discussing facts.
I think that's the part that wasn't clear from the article. When you title an article "Autistic people can't acknowledge when they're wrong," then spend an article talking about how this is due to misunderstandings, it comes across like the exact rationalizations that your article strikes back against.
Answers to this question might be "No, we already use Angular which provides similar benefits to React", "Yes, switching to React from MooTools (I'm old) would simplify the design, increasing our velocity and probably resolve some annoying rendering bugs", or even "I'm not sure. Perhaps we should meet and discuss the weaknesses of that page and figure out if React is the right tool to resolve them".
Instead they got back the questions they were hoping you'd answer for them.
Many long years ago the CIO at a company I worked for asked if we could use machine learning to improve our data analytics. I responded with "I don't know, what kinds of questions are you hoping to answer?". We went back and forth on this several times, with me insisting you couldn't just throw machine learning at data without some idea of what your hoping to get back. This wasn't resolved until they brought in a vendor claiming to provide turnkey machine learning solutions, they ran it against our data and came up with the stunning insight that the biggest predictor of dollars sold was.... units sold. To be fair they did provide other data points, but it was all things we either already knew, or didn't care about and if we ever did could find out quickly.
I failed to recognize that the question I was asking was a big part of what I was being asked. If I had realized this and provided some insight into the kinds of questions machine learning could answer, and why we didn't need sophisticated machine learning algorithms for the ones the business cared about I could have saved everyone some time. Instead I kept rephrasing the question back at him, with neither of us having the insight to realize we were actually asking the same question.
What do they think the weaknesses of the page are? Do they think rewriting the checkout will solve these problems? How much of the technical tradeoffs do they understand or care about?
To recap:
Otherwise I won't be able to assess if react makes sense or not. It makes sense for some reasons, not for others. If I don't know why they think we should consider it, I can't provide a valuable answer. These are exactly the points you are bringing up as well: I don't know, and I need your input to clarify what we are trying to do.I understand there is a communication problem, but I'm most definitely not refusing to accept I am wrong.
I haven't even stated anything that could be wrong. And because I have fully put the blame on myself, after this particular interaction, the fact that I am able to work perfectly fine at a very strategic level with other stakeholders in my new job shows me that it's not just about me.
From my interpretation of the conversation, you thought the question was: "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React, yes or no?" And responded with "Why do you want to rewrite it in React?" (paraphrasing)
Meanwhile the manager thought they were asking: "Please discuss the reasons why we should and should not rewrite the checkout page in React, including your recommendation on a course of action" And you responded with "Why do you want to rewrite it in React?"
Spelled out like that it's hopefully a little clearer that the "why React" was part of the question. They don't know if the page is performing "well" or whatever that means (even from an engineering standpoint it's hard to define, render time? bandwidth? server CPU?). They might know if users are complaining about checkout being slow, but even then users tend to leave rather than complain. If you were to tell them that the checkout page was performing "poorly" and React could fix it, that's the kind of information they were hoping to obtain from this conversation.
Similarly in my machine learning question, my CIO was actually asking me "how do you think machine learning can benefit this business?" And I responded with "how do you think machine learning can benefit the business?" He didn't know, he was asking me. He had just heard about the wonders of machine learning and was fishing for how it could benefit this business. Just like your manager had heard about React and was fishing for how it could benefit the business.
If your manager were here replying to comments I'd advise them to remember that engineers in general (spectrum or not), tend to be the literal sort, and if you aren't getting the answers your looking for it's often useful to examine the words you used and ask if you are actually asking the question your hoping to get answered or relying on subtext. But for the engineer's side of this conversation, it's important to ask if the question your answering is actually what they are asking, or if you failed to parse their intentions.
I think my point in the article is to say:
I am autistic, and I might not communicate the way you are expecting. If I am asking questions, it is for what I think is a good reason. What I am not doing is rejecting your question and not acknowledging I am wrong. If I wanted to reject your opinion, I would reject it, not mess around asking oblique questions.
It's great that everybody seems to think this is my problem alone to solve, and I'm somehow doing this on purpose. I am not, I am trying very hard to get better, part of which is to share my experiences. Yet, that also seems to be criticized ("who puts so much effort into analyzing these situations?").
I have very productive relationships with other engineers and product managers and business owners, so clearly this can work out just well, but that's not what I wanted to cover here. I will in the future however, and I covered a tiny aspect of "digging deep into business questions, as an engineer" here: https://dev.to/wesen/worse-ux-for-a-better-product-how-to-th...
TL;DR Autism is what you've got, not who you are.
It's just a semantic game that is only making communication more verbose for no meaningful gain, as if everyone didn't already understand "autistic" to mean "person with autism".
"How can this make our checkout page better?" "What benefits do other companies get from using React?" "Is it feasible to change technology at this time?" "There might be implications if we switch, like..."
You are not understanding why they should consider it; you are subtly asking them to justify why they are bothering you.
Respectfully, I disagree: _to you_, the "questions instead sound like you are doubting him".
Maybe it even sounds that way to most people. It doesn't to me.
I have been in very similar situations, and having experienced the frustration of communications failure, I've tried to take other approaches.
A few times I've prefaced my questions with something along the lines of: "In order to answer your question I'm going to have to ask some questions; a few of them may not make sense to you, but it's just the way I function".
It has not helped. One time it was met with a kind of "gee, here you go again, giving a lecture on how special you are."
The crux of the matter is that I _need_ to do that if I am going to give a helpful answer to the question that I was asked. Either the manager's question is important and warrants a thoughtful reply, or it's unimportant, in which case almost any kind of reply is ok.
I think the problem, in a nutshell, is neurotypical people's absolute refusal to acknowledge when they're wrong -- for example about what a normal way for an employee to respond to the question: "should we switch to React?" is.
There _is_ no normal way. But neurotypical people, stereotypically, labor under the incorrect assupmtion that there is one. And the discussion in this thread has, in my opionion, made that extremely evident.
Also, something that's normal (in the sense of 'most common') in, say, the US is not necessarily normal in, say Norway or Thailand or Zambia.
To the engineer, they've been asked a specific question "should we rewrite in React?". They assume the manager's has a specific motivation for asking, because the engineer would have a specific motivation for asking, and are asking questions to try to get at that motivation and determine if React will fill the manager's needs. The engineer is having a reasonable conversation.
To the manager, they've asked an open ended question "should we rewrite int React? What are the reasons why and why not? What issues could it address? What are the drawbacks? Any guess on time-frame? Cost?". The question "what issues is the site having that React could address?" is contained in the manager's question. The manager is also having a reasonable conversation.
The breakdown happened when both sides fail to realize that the other person is having a completely different conversation than they are. To the manager turning around and asking them "what issues are you hoping to address with React?" is the same as if someone asked "does this truck have a lot of horsepower?" and I replied "I don't know, how much horsepower does this truck have?" I'm echoing the question back at them. It's confusing and they don't understand why I'm doing it, and it's naturally going to make them feel uncomfortable and agitated. Meanwhile the engineer doesn't understand why they someone is getting agitated over their reasonable fact-finding questions and start getting... well confused and agitated.
In general, I actually blame the manager more for this breakdown in communication, and that's where I'd put the majority of my coaching efforts. After all, probably 95% of a manager's job is communication, and I view understanding how to change your communication to establish a rapport with other people working outside your framework to be part of the job (this kind of breakdown can happen a hundred different ways, it's not just neurotypical vs non). Sadly, most managers never getting any kind of training on this, and many (most?) are abysmal at it.
But the fact is both sides of this conversation failed to understand the conversation the other person was having. No one is "wrong" or everyone is.
I brought this example up because clearly there is a problem here. But, no one is wrong, and shutting down the conversation as "you just can't admit when you are wrong" is not productive for anyone (since no one is wrong). Maybe the conversation will go nowhere, and because I might be completely oblivious to that fact (I try to be, but it's a lot of work), it helps if the manager, whose job it is to facilitate communication, becomes aware of what is going on, and says "I know you are trying to establish context, but it sounds like you are just echoing my questions back at me. I actually want a list of reasons why YOU think it is a good or bad idea. I won't mind if you assume things; we can clarify that later". I have absolutely no problem being interrupted that way; that makes a lot of sense and helps everybody. Once I know people won't mind me riffing without making absolutely sure we are talking about the same thing, I can go with that just fine.
This assumes good faith and open-mindedness on both sides. Assuming I am being arrogant, dismissive, know-it-all, won't back off, can't admit I am wrong, when I am trying not to, helps nobody.
"The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying."
"I care more about doing good work than office politics."
"The person underestimates how much I know about the topic."
These are statements that, when read on their face, seem to apply to disagreements that you have had with individuals. None of them seem to complain about (or even address) the ways clusters of people behave as a group.
I don't think this blog post is actually about autistic people, or allistic people, at all. I think this post is about one person, and some other people that the person had conflict with. If the author is reading this, I think it would do you well to slightly reframe things in that light.
The first is, "Can autistic people admit they are wrong when they themselves know deep down that they are?"
The second is, "Can autistic people be easily convinced that they are wrong?"
I'd say most commenters are expressing a "no" to #2, but your replies retreat to #1. I.e. you say that once you know you are wrong, you find it easy to admit it. However, given the content of your article, I'd speculate that it is very difficult to actually convince you that you are wrong in the first place.
If anything, the ratio of “you can’t acknowledge you’re wrong” to “oh i’m wrong” situations is about 1:1000. In future articles, I will spread and repeat things out a bit more, instead of editing an article like I would a strategy document.
I hate repeating myself. But I had to learn to write in such a way to do so because if I don't I end up with 4 sentences when a person further off the spectrum will write an entire page on the subject... or maybe that's my subjective opinion.
You can make all the personal inferences you want but I don't agree; I repeat myself because if I don't I received lower grades and downvotes.
There's nothing else in my comment. You are reading too much into my comment.
I don't need it repeated over and over. That's overkill, not concise, and adds nothing of value to the conversation. Based on the comments I've seen in this thread, it seems clear that this point never made it across, or barely made it across.
This is unfortunate because the actual content of the piece is great. It highlights the ways that people with autism and people without autism can miscommunicate.
You are telling me I shouldn't miscommunicate in an article where I try to explain what it feels like when you have a disability that leads people to think you miscommunicate. I understand that I probably should have somehow expanded on the "I am wrong daily" part, but to me, I wrote a clear sentence: "I am wrong daily, it's absolutely no big deal, in fact, I enjoy it and seek it out."
This is the problem I am trying to highlight. I think I state something as clearly as I can, then people think I am lying, or wrong, or deceiving, or arrogant, or not clear enough, or overexplaining, or not explaining enough, and frame the rest of the article in that light. If i say "I am not trying to be arrogant", people will take that as even more evidence, so I don't even try. This is literally what I try to explain in this article.
So many people in this comment section apparently being blessed with the infinite power of nuance, mind theory, social grace, empathy and linguistic intuition could maybe try to be charitable in light of this.
Or maybe the specific scenario presented in the article triggers some sort of a "it's not me, it's them autists!" reflex in people who visualized themselves on the other side of these interactions; I honestly don't know any more. I'm not (diagnosed to be) autistic, but fucking hell, I'm having a ridiculously hard time empathizing with these reactions, so maybe I should get that checked out...
Is the rudeness excusable? I guess. Especially if I understand where it's coming from. Otherwise it's just rudeness.
And I guess that the point of the article, but you need to get to know people before you can make the judgement of why someone is how they are. That takes time.
Very often in software engineering, people use abstract words that have been overloaded with meanings in many different ways, and it can be easy to think the other person is suggesting something completely different. I love using diagrams because they remove a lot of the “words”.
An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1]
The comments in this blog post don't just apply to autistic people, but apply equally to people that are simply less wrong than average.
An observation I made is that some people make correct statements approximately 90% of the time. This is waaaay above the typical, which is more like 30-40%.
Typical people assume that everyone else is typical, because that's what typical means. Average people are average, and the Bell curve is the tallest in the middle. So when they encounter someone who isn't typical (not just autistic), they assume that their behaviour is arrogant, because someone who is right 35% of the time and talks like they're right 90% of the time must be arrogant!
Someone who is right 90% of the time faces an endless series of accusations of being overbearing, arrogant, self-important, not-a-team-player, or not "giving in" as in the blog post. Being contrary, argumentative, or not taking the blame to a sufficient degree are commonly said as well.
Speaking of giving in, most people follow the ten-thousand-year-old[2] tradition of doing whatever the grey-haired tribe leader says. Authority over correctness. Toe the line. Know your place. Keep your head down. Don't rock the boat. Part of the team.
The thing is, being old doesn't mean much, especially in a time of exponential change. In fact, the older you are, the more wrong your rules-of-thumb are, often exponentially wrong. This leads to endless fun conflicts of opinion where the young inexperienced buck is actually entirely correct in disregarding decades of experience[3]. But that leads to ostracism and exclusion, because we're all human, which is to say that we're basically strategically shaved gorillas in suits.
[1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in.
[2] Did I say ten kiloyears? I meant megayears. Sorry. This is what we've been doing since before we were human. It's wired into us deep.
[3] A random example from very recently is that I had to explain with pictures to senior management that upgrading the WAN links for one hundred sites from 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps and locking in that telco contract for 5 years is a mistake three zeroes in size.
I guess I'm in the bottom half, then; I thought the average was that quantity for which half are below, and half are above.
Mean, median and mode. Though it's true that people usually mean 'mean' when they say 'average'.
That said, the GP is just being obtuse. I'm not sure if he meant intelligence is non bell-shaped or some other reasons and I'm dumb too :-).
A distribution which is biased towards high-side outliers (such as wealth or income) will generally have more than half of the population below the mean.
It's not at all obvious to me that general intelligence has such a distribution (and I can think of plenty of physical mechanisms [injury, disease, malnutrition during development] by which the opposite could easily be true).
I wouldn't say that. Most population statistics--think "average" wages and the like--tend to use median. And when we're talking about intelligence, this isn't something that is readily quantifiable with a number. IQ is explicitly normalized so that 100 is median, and 110 is one standard deviation above median. "mean IQ" isn't a meaningful concept. Given that we can't even measure "mean intelligence", average intelligence tends to mean median intelligence in practice.
While reading the article, I had the distinct feeling the author was not, in fact, autistic, but merely had a lack of social practice.
It was... fun to watch him take university lecturers down a peg or two.
The linked article is by someone who is clearly very knowledgeable about specific topics in the same way.
How many IT people do you know who attend conferences?
I dont think I was being dismissive of anyone, but is it really necessary to call all of life's difficulties some kind of disorder? Does making it a disorder some how legitimize someone's struggles? I don't think so.
I think doubting someone is Autistic based on virtually no information would be considered pretty dismissive
You tell me, when I grew up being called autistic I tried to hide the disorder and get my teachers to not know I had it. It was everybody else who insisted on the names disorder, and it did legitimize it in their eyes. It meant a LOT of funding money, an extra teacher in the classroom, overall favourable treatment relative to other students. It was alternatively used as a pretence to discriminate against me. It was used to guarantee me accommodations. It was used as a means of getting a poor family money.
Lots of people have lots of different motivations for using that word. What I do know is there isn’t really any scientific basis for the idea that only severe autism is somehow real though.
The word autism does legitimize one’s struggles though, and people recognize that legitimacy. It’s pretty sick.
Asperger's was removed from the DSM for somewhat opaque reasons, and then, contemporary Discourse being what it is, some people decided the term was offensive, and we no longer use it.
Which is good for the people [citation needed] who are autistic and find the string "Asperger's" offensive, but bad for discourse, since one must either specify "high functioning autism" or "autism as highly-intelligent nerds are likely to encounter it in a professional context", and if you leave it out, someone will be along to point out that this condition shares a name with adults who wear helmets when they leave the house.
If it were me, I wouldn't categorize my peers in the same category as adults who wear helmets and diapers. It just doesn't seem like the same thing. But, fortunately, categorizing mental diversity and pathology is not my job.
The reason "Spectrum" is in the name is because there is a wide range of ways it can manifest - from very severe on one end to less impactful (and in some ways beneficial depending on context) on the other. People who used to be referred to as having Asperger Syndrome for example are normally highly intelligent and capable individuals, many of whom you'd have no idea had Autism if you met them.
Please do not continue to spread this kind of thinking - it is very antiquated. I also don't know why you would doubt someone is Autistic based on a single blog post.
This is not to diminish anyone's suffering. There's also a danger of taking false refuge in a syndrome that can be equally demoralizing and even paralyzing. No one should be defined by their diseases or medical conditions.
>> [1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in.
I don't know why more than half. Can you explain?
You can't be stupider than a rock, but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence.
Hence the IQ curve isn't a Gaussian. It isn't symmetric. The average is dragged upwards by very-high-IQ people, above the median.
This is like a billionaire moving to some tiny country town. The average income suddenly becomes much higher, but the typical (median) income doesn't budge.
Rich people is a useful analogy to the point I'm trying to make.
When I was on holidays in Vietnam, my chauffeur was horrified to hear that I was too tired and that I wanted to skip a pre-paid dinner reservation at a "fancy" restaurant and that I preferred to simply go to my hotel and crash. That fancy dinner was something like $20. To him that's a lot of money. To me it's nothing. Meanwhile I hear about rich Saudis abandoning italian supercars because they're "broken" in the same way my kid throws away broken toys.
Intelligence and wealth are vaguely similar. People used to a certain level just can't wrap their heads around how people at different levels do things.
I assure you this does not seem to be the case.
There is an observed, and inexact, upper limit on human intelligence, just as there is with human height, and for broadly similar reasons: gravity, in the case of height, and for intelligence some much more hand-wavey limit to the amount of neurons and dendritic links a human body can construct inside a skull which has to fit through hips which are capable of bipedal motion.
(Some of you are curious, and yes, there is a real correlation between skull volume and measured intelligence, but let's not bust out the calipers because it's a bad proxy for something we can measure more accurately with tests).
Hence the IQ curve is, in fact, Gaussian, just as human height is, despite the fact that you can't be shorter than a mushroom, and the Empire State Building is an existence proof of very tall things.
But to conclude from this that most are below average, wouldn't you have to know that the high IQs pull the average up more than the low IQs pull it down? I don't see how the mere assumption that there's no upper limit gets you there (not to mention that this assumption is bound to be wrong anyway). But as you say, maybe there's a reason I'm in the big half...
I often feel like saying: "normal people don't want to think about the details of a question." They grab for the quickest way to stop thinking and label it right or wrong depending on how much they like it.
This is of course an oversimplification.
If your boss (anyone, really!) comes to you with an idea and he misunderstands the first thing out of your mouth as a rejection, then you probably should work on how you communicate that thing. Or just surround yourself with smarter people.
Also if your boss doesn't know anything about technology and comes to you and says "I heard about someone doing this on a podcast, what if we made this arbitrary tech choice that doesn't apparently add any value?" then consider shopping for a new boss. Autism really is orthogonal to that situation sucking.
The boss is doing absolutely the right thing here! Asking a trusted domain expert for an opinion about whether some technical investment would benefit the business.
The alternatives are a) the boss hears the podcast and the next day "rewrite it all in React" is at the top of the backlog, or b) the boss never polls the team about the technical state of things and everyone grumbles there's never enough time for paying down technical debt or experimenting with new ideas.
Sure, that's good management - ask the expert.
But this manager didn't want to clarify the question, so that the expert could give a considered answer.
Perhaps the manager already knew what answer he wanted?
There's this estimating technique: it's called "Guess the number the manager wants you to give". It's much less career-limiting than giving an honest answer.
Conversely, if I ask a colleague, however smart, a question but their response is "first I need a 10min infodump on things many of which I should already be aware of", I'm just going to say "nevermind then, thanks" and go ask the colleague who can communicate in a more focused and proactive way. (It's not a very charitable reading of the author's position either. I'd prefer to believe both were acting in good faith but with completely misaligned goals.)
I have fielded plenty of similar questions from technical EMs, and even CTOs, when it's way outside their area of expertise.
I've also seen ICs give similar answers to the author to the mild shock of the manager, who then has to gently respond with something like "well, John mentioned in the standup today that he noticed 10s p99 spikes on the cart page, while investigating what Paula from the BI team reported in the planning meeting yesterday, that abandoned items are up 30% in the past month..."
My react frontend is made up, but my actual example is the CTO (no background in software) suggesting we move our embedded product from linux to android because "our updater is broken and i read that android has a great updater," while the issue was faulty flash chips where the brownout protection bit could not be set.
(Moving from linux to android for an embedded product means you basically have to rewrite absolutely everything since the userland is different, for a stack that is under the control of a single company, and is rarely used outside of mobile devices and automotive. And it still won't fix broken flash chips).
This is an order of magnitude more egregious than the react example I transformed it into, and also why I left the company. If I can't present my expertise and get listened to for such an important decision, there really is nowhere for me to go.
You seem to be very dismissive of people when they opine outside of where you think they are qualified to have opinions, and yet you give opinions where you might not have sufficient perspective.
Moving from linux to android for an embedded product means you basically have to rewrite absolutely everything... Great, that is information the CTO needs to know.
for a stack that is under the control of a single company, and is rarely used outside of mobile devices and automotive.
Here the CTO has more perspective then you do. Is the company about to sign a partnership with an Android shop? Is the company contemplating moving into a new product area? Yes, the ultimate problem would not have been fixed by moving to Android, but that does not make your opinion somehow factually right. Before reacting, try assuming the person making suggestions has valid reasons for making them and try to figure out what those reasons are.
Its poor communication from the person who should be good at communicating.
The alternatives you’ve outlined are simply worse management - a threat that things could be worse, therefore the least is sufficient.
If you discover your self-perception is wrong, the next step might be thinking about how you can change your behavior and clarify your own judgement. If you determine that others misperceive you, the next step might be thinking about how to change that.
The author didn't get far into a next step, but the first step is critical and valuable as far as it goes, IMO.
And a fundamental requirement to admit to being wrong is, well, actually being wrong. If you analyze a situation and find that you're factually correct, you haven't failed to admit to being wrong.
I wonder if Author is in fact autistic. It seems (not sure if I've got this right) that author wasn't diagnosed until his forties. I'd have expected a diagnosis of autism to occur pre-teen.
How could one tell how common undiagnosed autism is? All you can do, surely, is divide the number of autism diagnoses by the number of - autism diagnoses.
OK, so you can presume that an autism diagnosis represents some undiagnosed history of autism. But that's presumption. Or I suppose you can make other presumptions - like, this guy's diagnosed autistic, and he functions well; so many other people who function well are probably also autistic. But that's also presumption.
The DSM diagnostic criteria for autism look pretty shaky to me. I'm not saying I don't think autism exists; I think it does exist. But if you want to chuck around statistics about autism, then you have to stick to some strict definition. "Undiagnosed autism" isn't strict, on any criteria. The DSM doesn't define undiagnosed anything.
[Edit] I'm not at all surprised that some people are diagnosed in their middle age; 40 years ago, autism was a pretty exotic diagnosis, few doctors knew much about it or were experienced with it.
As a relatively famous example, take Bill Gross, aka the "Bond King". He only realized he had Asperger's in his seventies when it was randomly the topic of a psychiatrist he was having dinner with. And why would he seek out some kind of diagnosis? He's happily married and running fantastically successful bond funds.
It's been suggested to me that I might have Asperger's (I believe the suggestion was hostile; it was my ex-wife, who is a trained psychotherapist). If I have Asperger's, it's only in the sense that everyone has a little bit of Asperger's. But I worried about it for several years. Vague psychological diagnoses are harmful.
I feel like the author might lie somewhere on the spectrum but I was pretty sure being actually autistic was a separate and vastly more serious diagnosis.
Ah, but here's the thing: if your interlocutor has some motive other than truth-seeking then they will demand you admit error regardless of whether you are actually in error. This means to them you can fail to admit error even when no error occurred.
It's circumstances like this that the author is analyzing by taking "I was right" as a hypothesis - the article doesn't claim this is always the case but wants to make some particular conclusions about cases where no error was made.
> In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question. Is our checkout page not performing well?
> However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.
If this is what actually happened, the manager is terrible and unprofessional. I feel I run into situations like this as well, where I ask a simple question and because the person asking is treating me like an NPC in a game they're playing but not telling me, I don't get the question answered and furthermore I get something attributed to me (e.g. refusal, uncooperativeness, etc.) that isn't true at all.
I wish there was some way to easily communicate universally that "I mean the literal meaning of these words, nothing more, nothing less."
There is no right or wrong here. Asking the engineer to "think logically" in terms of how what they're saying might be interpreted is stupid. They are autistic, and you cannot reasonably expect them to do the exact thing autism prevents them from doing.
Asking the manager to try to understand is probably more efficient, but the manager might be geared to think the engineer is adversarial already, possibly because of demeanor, or past experiences getting similarly confused. In this case the manager is probably more able to reason logically that their counterpart is autistic and is probably genuinely asking, but that is not a default, and probably requires some diversity training.
Isn't that exactly what the author did, at least in the React discussion? They tried to establish what potential benefits the manager hoped to get from the React rewrite. It was the manager who immediately gave up on the discussion, not the author.
There are different ways of asking the same question, with different subtext. He could had started, for example, by saying "We should analyze how our checkout page's performance could improve if we switch to React". This way he would be able to ask essentially the same questions he intended to, but without accidentally implying that the switch is undesirable and unnecessary.
Now, someone working with someone with autism should understand they have trouble with this kind of subtext, and give them more leeway. But most people don't know how to do this, as they're not used to such interactions.
If anything, and I probably glossed over it too quickly, I do spend a lot of effort being very candid and open and agreeable when having these discussions, because it is so hard to make sure our intents and definitions are aligned. We can be talking about checkout and react and then after 2 h realize that we actually both care about better conversion of mobile users, and now we are talking and can put the react decision into context.
I wrote this article about these situations: when my approach breaks down and I get blamed for not accepting being wrong, yet I’m actually trying my best to avoid exactly that.
I can totally understand why his manager got frustrated by this.
I didn't read them as "gotcha" questions. They looked like straightforward and sensible questions. I wonder if the manager was expecting some kind of kickback, and was braced to be adversarial. Perhaps there's some history here, between author and his manager.
Again, I fully acknowledge that a React rewrite could very well be a complete waste of time and effort in this scenario. But his manager obviously thought it could be worthwhile, or he wouldn't have asked about it.
"A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React... in order to make an informed decision, I needed to understand a few things: ... Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Do they understand the implications of such a switch?"
What problems such a switch might solve and what the implications are is what the manager is asking you. Why would you direct exactly those questions back to them?
The author only got to ask one question before he was shut-down: why do you want to do this?
That's not a criticism, it's a completely reasonable question, given that rewriting something using React is going to be expensive, and might introduce major new risks. Maybe author asked the wrong way, or in the wrong tone of voice.
If it were my manager, and he was proposing that I rewrite something that works fine in a new language, and I had real work to do, then I think my question "Why do you want to do that?" might come across as angry - because I'd be angry.
I am curious how these are gotcha questions? To me they are the proper questions to ask, as a manager, they probably don’t care about react or vue or any other framework, they care about conversions and revenue and other metrics. That’s exactly what I want to understand, so that I can contextualize and see if React might or might not make sense.
Reasons why React might actually make sense, to show I didn’t just cherry-pick this as a “well duh obviously it’s stupid”:
- we use shopify as a backend, and they published a nifty new react checkout widget that we could replace our convoluted checkout with - all our web developers are actually coming from react, and hate the current jquery mess, and really want to change. It would be time-intensive, but team morale would skyrocket, - another department is planning to move to react as well
After a long time in tech, I really have learnt to not really care about technology that much (as you might see in my article about PHP and JS :).
Obviously there are also drawbacks, but you immediately started off from an adversarial position as if it was just a completely off the wall idea. Clearly that's not the case.
The more I read through OP's comments the more I see this as a compensation for the inherent inferiority complex he/she struggles with. Trying to pin this on autism spectrum is just another method of deflecting blame or removing any real or perceived risk.
I suspect some type of trauma where OP felt inferior to others in some way, usually intelligence, especially if they've been brought up in a highly academia focused family environment and were often held in comparison to others.
Ever since that popular Korean drama took off "Weird Attorney Woo Yong Woo" everyone is self diagnosing or trying to use superficial tidbits they picked up to deflect social mishaps.
"It cant be my fault because im on the spectrum" is a trend I am seeing more and more online and this article did a good job of demonstrating but far too many words and irrelevant points.
The problem I think is that you think me asking a question is adversarial, while I'm just... asking a question in good faith. I'm not considering it a completely off the wall idea at all, I want to know why they think it's a good idea, because I don't understand. This is where the autism comes in, I think. You think I'm being adversarial and dismissive, I think I am open and engaged.
I put a tremendous amount of effort into being socially pleasant, but there still are situations where I think I am doing my best to fully engage with the other person, yet there is a whole game of subtext I am not getting. This is very different from me not accepting I am wrong.
I would love to get the subtext, trust me, and I work hard at it. But it's playing a game that I don't have the rules to. Hopefully what I'm writing will help someone just maybe pause, and think, "did they actually ask this question to be dismissive? or do they just ask because they want to help you solve your problem?." Social grace and empathy goes both ways.
For someone having autism, this may be impossible. If they are open about their autism, one could argue that the manager should be the one trying to see the topic from two sides.
One may also need to come up with a shared understanding where the manager has a way to inform the autistic person more explicitly what to do than they would another person (who would get the subtle hints).
This can be pitched as a way for the company to accommodate for having an autistic person on the team (as opposed to firing or not hiring them), in other words that the manager would do this as a way to support the employee, not to be abusive.
But in this case an obvious solution might be to do what your manager suggests simply because he is your manager.
As a non-autistic person I don’t find it difficult to voice my concerns about a particular course of action and then do it anyway if that’s what the boss wants. (I realize the sticking point is “voice my concerns” — doing that in a manner that doesn’t come off as confrontational or undermining can be hard.)
That is career suicide (unless you make sure to get it in writing every single time).
As a knowledge worker you are paid to not just be a yes man automaton, you are paid to evaluate and push back as needed.
Why would you ever expect your managers to trust us if you don't trust them?
Like changing a framework for an already fully working product, just to have done it.
You don't want to end up holding the bag for that choice when they claim you said it would work when it invariably overruns.
But in an interaction between an engineer and a manager, anything less than voicing your concerns is an abdication of responsibility. If the manager switches off at the first expression of concern from an engineer, then I imagine that's a team that's bound to failure.
Jump ship.
I hope more Autistic and non-Autistic people don't put up with this kind of argument. I'm sure most people have an example of a manager making a technical decision (many times due to ego) and being wrong and then the engineering team has to clean up the mess. There should at least be room for discussion which in the example given, the manager does not seem to be interested in.
I'm sure most people have an example of making a technical decision (many times due to ego) and being wrong
And then, there is a lot of difficulty for the non-neurotypical to see anything beyond their "literal place on the totem pole", or their title. They lean on their experience to say what is right or wrong, even though they have far less context and the IC is trying not to ruffle feathers or hurt people's feelings.
If someone is hired into a manager position they cannot perform well for such reasons, a healthy organization should either modify their role or let them find another job.
People with such conditions MAY also be able to learn about their own limitations, and avoid seeing such positions in the first place.
Then there are those who can be quite successful as managers, despite such challenges, either due to side-effects of their systems-oriented thinking or for unrelated reasons. Such people may be difficult to be around, and may require some quite robust people as direct reports, but if the value they generate is sufficient, it may still be good for the company.
The whole point of the article is to provide the perspective of the Autistic. Why are you assuming "There is no attempt to see the other person's perspective"? Why are you demanding the subject of the article be about what you want it to be or for it to cover the other side of the interaction? There are certainly interactions where there is a misunderstanding on the side of the non-autistic and that is what this article is attempting to provide insight into.
Even better idea: use your neural plasticity and get some empathy.
Furthermore everyone has to adjust to the people around them, often causing untold stress for everyone. This is one of the aspects of the neurodivergency movement I am less impressed by because I feel it's just handwaving away any issues as "suck it up, not my problem, deal with it". I've worked with a few people like this over the years, which also caused untold stress for the entire team.
To give an example from this post, "is our checkout page not performing well?" to the React rewrite manager comes off as a rather dismissive "why would you want to do that?" While certainly a valid question – and I wasn't there and I don't know if it was phrased like that exactly – but I'm sure those questions could have been asked in a way that came off as less challenging and dismissive, resulting in a more constructive conversation. You really can learn these things.
Or, maybe the manager was just an asshole/idiot and the unconstructive interaction is all completely unrelated to the author's autism. Could be too.
The first point – "the non-autistic person is not hearing what I'm saying" – sounds like the author might benefit from trying to understand why that is, and adjusting the way they say things. Sometimes small changes can make large differences, and it really doesn't need to cause untold stress. Effective communication is hard and also something everyone has to learn.
Autists cannot just learn to act more like an NT in the exact same way that a blind person cannot just learn to see better. Your rejection of this extremely basic fact is an all-too-common combination of ignorance and/or bigotry.
In fact, I would have thought that asking them clarifying details about exactly the topic they are asking about is the good thing to do. I think I know the checkout pretty well, and it doesn't seem to be causing trouble, so clearly there is a piece of information I am missing. While I would think that asking "what are you looking to achieve" is the impolite thing to do, since they just told me what they are looking to achieve, i.e. "making the checkout perform better by rewriting it in react."
I think a good topic for another article is showing what "learn some social skills" and "you need to be aware of the context and you come across" looks like for me.
Because I don't have the mental setup to intuit all the myriads of things that can make a question ok or not ok (words? silence? rhythm of speech? voice level? eye contact? clothes? past interactions? tone of voice? posture? mood of the other person? my mood? temperature? background noise? eyebrows?), and because no social situation ever repeats, the best I can do is figure out some very rigid scripts and then practice them. Why one question is ok and another is not is never going to be intuitive for me. Often, learning to do something better will result in even more awkwardness at first.
For example, my script for speaking to people at conferences is something like:
- say hi - ask where they come from and what they do - say "oh that's cool, tell me more about X" - listen and ask follow-up questions - try to regularly establish eye contact, but not more than a few seconds - mimic their posture - when the first pause comes up, say one or two sentences about what you do - then continue asking questions about them and listen - go for a 20% talk / 80% listen ratio. people like to talk about themselves. - don't talk about any of your real interests because you might lose track of the rules and start going on forever - don't forget to mimic their posture - and eye contact! - don't rock on your chair! - rinse repeat until there is a longer pause, or they look away, or 20 minutes have elapsed.
That's about the level of complexity I can manage. I practiced this and other scripts so much that I don't have to think about them most of the time, but when I am tired, I do have to execute it like a little robot.
Of course not everyone is the same, and things are different for other people; everyone is different. Some people may struggle more, or may have a hard time learning some things. But a blanket "you can never learn anything, full stop" is just not true.
Could you explain why? I don't see it that way and would like to learn your perspective.
Note that I wouldn't mind such a question at all myself, but others can be more sensitive to such things. Actually, I think "Why? Is the current code not working?" is a perfectly valid engineering question for rewriting or refactoring anything, but not everyone has this kind of engineering mindset.
I would phrase it more open-ended, such as "Okay! What goals would you like to achieve?"
I understand from the comments and my life experience that there is something there, I learned to smile, be engaging, mirror body posture, ask questions instead of going into statements too quickly, but what are you describing just makes no sense to me. How is "what goals would you like to achieve?" not dismissive, but "do you think our checkout is not performing well?" is?
One is a pretty vague question about something they already stated (they want to ask me my opinion about rewriting the checkout in react because company X improved their checkout), the other one is something I need input on to be able to do that. It's literally the most efficient question I can think of so that I can avoid wasting their time.
I described in another comment how it never "really" occurred to me that a question could be perceived as dismissive. If I wanted to dismissive I would... just say so?
The thing is, saying it is dismissive, getting upset, and shutting me down helps exactly no one here. What could help is to realize I am not actually trying to be dismissive, point out that my question might be interpreted as such, and then move on. Trust me that I don't let this kind of advice go to waste.
Even if it's completely learned scripted behaviour that you don't really understand, that's still a win for everyone involved. But I think that with time and effort a sizeable part (not everyone) of autistic/neurodivergent folk can understand these things at least to some degree too. At least, I was able to and I know some other folks who were too.
> What could help is to realize I am not actually trying to be dismissive, point out that my question might be interpreted as such, and then move on.
Yes, I fully agree; I try hard to look past people's failings in general and not to get upset too quickly at things that don't really matter. But ... people have emotional responses that aren't really rational, and not everyone has that kind of attitude.
And the end of the day – and this really applies to a lot of things – I can't really control other people's behaviour, feelings, or attitudes. The only thing I am in control of is me. So I focus on that, rather than saying "other people need to adjust", because you will have very limited success with that at best.
(This of course doesn't mean we should accept wildly inappropriate or harmful behaviour like, say, racism or other forms of blatant discrimination, just that vague "emotional feelings" like a response to a well-intentioned question are not likely to get "fixed" any time soon across all of society, as these kind of emotions are part of "the human condition").
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32424668
The query "Do you think..." can sometimes backfire if the other party is feeling defensive or vulnerable. It can imply that you've already decided to frame the conversation as exploring their problematic beliefs rather than objective facts.
The negative phrasing "not performing well" unfortunately echoes another idiom where the non-negated statement is assumed to be true and the negated question bears a tone of incredulity. These questions all probe the same fact but carry different emotional baggage: "Should we try to improve the performance of X?" "Does X perform well?" "Does X have performance problems?" "Is X not performing well?" Slight differences in vocal tone or emphasis can dramatically increase these differences too.
Then, by jumping to specifics (about performance), it can also imply that you are assuming that this is the only reasonable motivation for the work in question, rejecting other avenues. A safe way to avoid this type of interpretation would be to start off more broadly and neutrally to establish common ground before diving into such details. That's why "What are the goals?" types of question are seen as positive and cooperative. That you would like to engage in dialog and explore ideas together.
You put all those elements together in one question, and I can easily see how the other party would feel that they are being blocked. It's almost like some martial arts move where a precise combination of movement and posture is turning the conversational momentum against itself.
I'd also like to point out an ironic twist in your closing lament that "getting upset and shutting me down helps exactly no one here". Unfortunately, such implied tone and emotional content is decoded subconsciously and immediately. The emotion hits concurrently or even before the denoted factual information is fully understood. It can be just as difficult for an NT person to _not_ perceive some of these signals as it is for you to recognize they are being sent. Frustratingly, the same experience between two NTs, if chronic, might be seen as abusive or where the idea of "gaslighting" would come up to describe the perverse torture where the one feeling hurt is told they are mistaken in their feelings.
Neurodivergency isn't a movement, in the same way that blindness isn't a movement. Or deafness isn't a movement. It's not a choice. It's an invisible difference, one that society finds it hard to understand. I avoid "disability" because that suggests that neurotypical society is the only right way and anyone else that doesn't fit into it is just wrong somehow. They can't help it any more than a blind person can.
The way their brains are wired aren't their fault and yes, the rest of society is going to have to change. Autistic people exist, so it's up to the rest of us to learn how to deal with it.
Properly understanding the difficulties faced by the neurodiverse is a journey I thoroughly recommend. It's coming, get ahead of the curve and maybe you can be part of the team's stress relief.
It absolutely is, it's a particular view and outlook on things. Blind or Deaf people have different takes and "movements" too. Deaf people in particular where some consider deafness to be core part of their identity and and a culture, rather than a disability to be "fixed", whereas others do merely see it as a disability they would like to see "fixed". Cochlear implants are something of a controversial issue among deaf people for example.
> Properly understanding the difficulties faced by the neurodiverse is a journey I thoroughly recommend.
I understand them because I face them myself too.
They happen to me too.
Understanding the nature of the miscommunication is the first step towards averting it in the future.
And me. I'm not autistic. I don't think I have any kind of Asperger's either.
I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism; it just sounded like a normie, perhaps with an autism diagnosis, who is fretting about communication with their boss.
There seems to be quite a few commenters here making critical comments, as if author is failing to communicate effectively. I wonder if they'd have been so critical, if author hadn't self-identified as autistic. I wonder if some of these commenters have a bad attitude to self-identified autistics.
I've never known an autistic person well; but I worked closely in an office with an autistic developer. I found his code over-complex and hard to follow. Pair-coding with this guy was a waste of time; he couldn't explain what he was doing. Author, however, seems to be able to explain himself fine.
> one person you knew?
I've only known one person who was diagnosed autistic. It's a rare condition; I've known a dozen people with bipolar, and half-a-dozen diagnosed schizophrenics (either I'm attracted to psychotics, or they're attracted to me!)
My point was simply that author's account could be anyone's account, apart from the author's self-identification as autistic. Without that, this entire thread would just be about how to deal with a crap boss.
>>I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism
You very much are dismissing someone's something.
Worse, I don't think the author explicitly stated they were autistic in the piece...So, you're assuming someone's something just so you can dismiss it?
"I have read similar experiences by other autistic people" suggests that the author considers themself to be autistic.
> You very much are dismissing someone's something.
...And that's that, I guess. Can you please clarify what I am dismissing, and how? I don't want to dismiss anyone's anything.
It's an interesting thought experiment, and at least to me it feels like you're the one who is reading dismissal into it for no good reason.
Self-diagnosis is widely accepted in the autistic community for a number of reasons, I am also in the process of pursuing a more "traditional" diagnosis.
It's great that you think this post applies to everybody, it however is very much in response to someone stigmatizing autistic people.
DSoes the spectrum run from ultra-violet to infra-red? Is this a spectrum for which every behaviour pattern has a slot? Does that mean we're all "on the spectrum"?
If that's what it means, then that seems like dismissing Autism as just being one extreme of being an awkward person.
I think a lot of devs wind up working with people who are awkward. They don't like it (who would?) Some of those awkward people self-identify as autistic. So the devs decide they don't care much for autistic people. I think that's a kind of bigotry; they should really dislike working with awkward people, whatever the reason for their awkwardness.
[Awkward: apparently this is related to upward, downward, northward, etc. "Awk-" signifies "at an unusual angle". I know of no other word that starts with "awk-"]
This is explicitly what happened. The DSM-V explicitly automatically gives you an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis if you had an Asperger’s diagnosis. I think it’s hilariously how blatantly political this criteria is.
As for the legitimacy of spectrum disorders, the only thing I have to say about the subject is the parable of Chesterson’s fence. Think about the problems people were trying to solve with the concept of autism spectrum disorder.
>is this a spectrum for which every behaviour pattern has a slot
You aren’t far off but are missing th forest for the trees. It’s part of a diagnostic system where every disorder is meant to be discrete and non-overlapping and you either have it or you don’t and other good traits you would want in a diagnostic nosology. The spectrum is an artifact of it having to bend to describe what are actually several distinct similarly presenting conditions. It doesn’t have to describe EVERYTHING, it has to fit a hole in the nosology. Asperger’s was depreciated in large part because of the overlap with autism.
If you want something to criticize take a few steps back and look at mental health and psychiatry as a whole. A lot of the assumptions underpinning autism underpin more of mental health.
Indeed.
Consider, for example, the diagnostic criteria for bipolar. There seems to be half-a-dozen conditions wrapped up in that term, not all of which have poles. Not all people with bipolar are psychotic (that is really important; if you're dealing with someone with bipolar, it makes a huge difference if they are subject to delusions or paranoia).
I believe (might be wrong) that "schizophrenia" is now a discredited diagnosis. Even depression is a fuzzy target. How do you distinguish ordinary sadness from depressive illness? Anti-depressant pills seem to work on both. And there's no "chemical imbalance" theory of depression that hasn't been discredited.
My sense is that we haven't progressed much in understanding mental illness since Victorian times, with their diagnoses of "melancholy".
Is it not exactly what allistic people are doing?
Autistic people communicate just fine with other autistic people. It's allistic people that don't fit in and want to change everybody around them because they can't suffer a bit of diversity in thinking and communication.
If you claim to be a complex thinker, you also consider people in your analysis, then that should also apply first hand, not just as a part of the solutions you propose. If you are unable to do that: fine, nobody is expected to be perfect. But don't claim to be perfect.
Who is saying this? The article provides a perspective that is not discussed very often as a way of helping people understand these situations from a vantage point they might not have considered. Nobody is demanding anything.
Autistic people have what seems like a much higher tolerance for bullshit both in the context of wanting to argue a point to finality or to obsess over a particularly detail until they’ve reached a shared plateau of understanding. Many times this is actually a very satisfying method of conversation, at least for me. Other times it can feel like talking to a wall.
Your mileage may vary.
That, right there, is one of the least helpful things that can ever be said in these kinds of circumstances. It's understandable, and it's common, so this doesn't lay blame on you, but on the underlying cultural assumption.
"Aren't we all?"
Those who have truly neuro-atypical behaviours, to where it can be assessed as placing them somewhere else on the spectrum, will receive less helpful responses when people think along those lines. Their concerns are more easily pushed aside, and the things that can help bridge the gap are less easily implemented.
It may sound accepting, but it's a trivialising statement. It makes things harder, for everyone.
I think less division and more inclusivity in spite of differences is a good place to be, while still acknowledging the struggles / addressing problems of minorities without making them “special” aka outcasts.
Ultimately, you choose how you react to something. You can choose to be offended and look at the surface level of what a person is saying, or you can dig into the essence of the essence and determine the nature, intention, and purpose of a statement.
Most people barely have their own lives in order, and I mean that in a neurological sense. Expecting others to also simultaneously keep track of nuanced triggers which are also not universally applicable, more individual situations, when they are operating in good faith is more counterproductive for everyone.
It's called a spectrum because there's a range. Some people are further out on the spectrum than others. Some people are autistic in one way but not another. One form of autism might be absolute pitch (distinct from perfect pitch in that you can hear semi-tones; Jacob Collier has this but might not choose to describe it as autism). It is a spectrum.
My point was that we are all somewhere on the spectrum. I don't pretend to be able to identify with anyone else's mental state, all I can narrate are my projections and the projections I receive back from others.
I'm sorry that you feel that I have done so, that wasn't my intention. I haven't commented directly on you, but on a common statement that is used in many places around the world. It's something said by the many, which is why I have commented on it within that context - as a cultural norm.
That common statement produces harm, by trivialising the experiences of some, which makes it harder for them to seek or gain accommodations. It produces an assumption of comprehension in some, where they realistically have none. People like those in HR, or team managers, can surreptitiously begin to believe that they fully understand, and so feel justified in denying more things.
That is all that I have sought to point out. Everyone may be on the spectrum, in the same manner that everyone is human, but that's not a helpful distinction.
there are useful distinctions, and this is not one of them.
there are socially inept people that miss a requisite threshold of social cues.
Is it wrong to say that a person with autism can't really help themselves?
I can't speak for every autistic person, but at least in my experience when people do point out our mistakes it often tends to be lacking context. Indeed we don't see ourselves the way others do, but what is sometimes flaw in communication with a neurotypical person is exactly what I would want to do with another autistic person. Pointing out mistakes of this nature in a blunt way is unpleasant, and I've often been expected to be able to intuit the feelings of neurotypical people in these situations even though I literally think and feel differently.
It can be quite frustrating, and I've found that many autistic people will become defensive about personal qualities because of past poor experiences in giving/receiving feedback.
I wish neurotypical folks could see the other side and experience what it's like to be around mostly autistic people. I have no doubt many would become defensive when they've been told again and again that they're being too loud, that they're not discussing they're ideas in enough depth, that they're not being calm enough, or whatever autistic predisposition they'd end up accidentally bumping up against. Thinking and feeling differently from the majority of folks is difficult, but it's even more difficult when folks expect you to know and understand where there mind is at.
Personally I suspect (without too much evidence) that what would happen if such an experiment were honestly tried is that the autists would "route around" the NT socially rather than trying to change them. The game of trying to squash individuality isn't terribly appealing to autists for obvious reasons, albeit historically contingent ones.
Hopefully this will bring you peace.
I want to call it "ausplaining", this tendency to go "no no, YOU don't understand ME (because I'm special, not because I'm wrong)" whenever we get ourselves into situations like the exemplified.
I do this A LOT as well, and when people do stick with me for long enough, I often find that I'm either getting my point across by re-framing my explanation, or discover that what I'm pursuing as oh_so_important is in fact not important for the question at hand (then I feel even more stupid, because, not only did I find this of paramount importance, but everyone else didn't even consider it (because it so clearly didn't matter)).
> Because I value learning, I read about 50 technical books every year
If the author reads this, I'd congratulate them on finding the time to do that, but also advice them to maybe read 40 technical books every year, and then read 10 about the topics they clearly do struggle with (social interactions, politics, negotiation, psychology)..
The opinion reads as "I'm right and the world is wrong" to me, maybe because I can strongly relate (except the parts about reading tons of books and being really smart).
I think the author would benefit from realizing that these things they dismiss as irrelevant (mind games/politics) are actually important and beneficial to understand and master (I am not saying it should be that way, but merely point out that it is, in fact that way).
The author may also benefit from investing some of their mental capital (I'm not being sarcastic, they're obviously very intelligent) into learning how to play the games, to figure out neurotypicals enough to communicate with them on their level/terms.
Yes, workplaces need to be accommodating, but in the end, no matter who we are, it's our ultimate responsibility, to ourselves, to learn how to function in this world.
As for the situation where the other party is factually wrong.. Well, yes.. I always imagine this situation, where I have the right of way on my bicycle, and it's the semi-truck that must yield.. There are a fair number of times where being right does not matter.
I am not aware of any good systematic textbooks on this topic.
(of course not the author)
It can be a bit on the nose, though, larve, to use this book.
Best,
bigDinosaur
--
Seriously, it's very easy to go wrong with How to win friends. IMO a lot of its advice probably worked better back in the day when formality was somewhat more appreciated and knowing when to avoid it more of a skill.
But anything that gives me insight into how I differ from others, and how their mind works has helped me.
Even books like "The Intelligent Negotiator", "The Intelligent Conversationalist" which superficially seems to be mainly about manipulating and scamming people give interesting insights into how people work.
I've also read some books on pedagogy, a subject I hate due to how much childhood trauma its rigid application caused me..
Maybe because of it.. Those books, at least the old ones I read, define the boxes into which children will and must fit, the methods to make them fit, and the reasoning behind those methods..
Very interesting stuff to read for me, because it made it clear why it didn't work on me, and why it would have worked on my peers. They are almost lists of "behaviour X is due to situation Y" which may be true for neurotypical children, but were certainly not for me. I digress, they gave me good insights into how "the others" work.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Greene however just makes me feel icky.
I didn’t give much information about my life, but I am pretty adept at playing all these games. So much so that I thought there was no way I could be autistic because of how many friends and business relationships I had. Until it hit me that I spent my 20ies doing what you suggest, which is studying the heck out of these things.
But it stops at engineering, where I try to be very open-minded and learn as much as I can. I have to readily accept I am wrong on most of my assumptions because I just couldn’t be a good engineer otherwise. I can be perfectly suave and agreeable discussing anything else. That means I probably know how to play the “acquiesce when you should” game quite well.
But I’m at work because I am blessed to have a job where I get to do what I care about: good engineering. I deliver great value when people understand my way of thinking, and thankfully I have plenty of colleagues that get it.
I very much relate.. I've been so bitter as to keep a small list of "told you so's" that I'd update when my rejected ideas were finally proven to be the better path (though it may have been months or even years after the fact (most agonizing when someone else suggested exactly the same thing, but explained it in other terms,focusing on things I didn't find central to the point).
In the end I deleted the file. Some of the "told you so's" were petty things anyway, and.. Now I try and take it as part of my responsibility to work a bit harder at finding arguments against my point of view, as well as work a bit more politically to get it through when I'm ready to put my head on the line that I'm right and everyone else are wrong.
P.S. I'm closing in on the big 4-o and I'm still working on myself, still trying to learn politics, how to talk with nontechnical superiors and how to accept that sometimes, we go with the wrong solution because someone else tells so.
In a way, it's a way to do a team-wide "we told us so, so what now?"
If (for example) that one struggling colleague is shining in front of a superior and you are the guy who rains on his parade by nitpicking some detail he said, you might be technically right, but you end up being perceived as an asshole because you acted like one.
If if that example you strictly need to be right for some reason, you could also just talk to the guy afterwards etc.
And this is what all of it essentially boils down to: It is good to be right, as long as the way you communicate it is adequate for the situation.
If people have a low effort chit chat and don't want to go too deep into things, it might not be wise to get all excited and monologoue about how everything they know is wrong. If someone shows you something they have been working on for weeks, maybe it is wiser to aknowledge the good things first, before going into the bad things.
Generally it is better to have others discover facts themselves than spitting them out in front of them. Sure, if the boat is literally sinking and they claim punching more holes will help, this might be a good moment for a statement without nuance — but such statements have their time and place and should not be used everywhere.
Instead, it was an entire article that not once acknowledged that you could be wrong, nor what it looks like when you do acknowledge it. It detailed about how, actually, you're not usually wrong.
This article appears to underscore the accusation.
When I’m wrong I just say “oh you’re right, good point” and move on. It’s very easy to do.
Sadly I don't have much to share in the way of insight.
Have you considered that being comfortable admitting fault is a skill which some people never learned while growing up, regardless of gender? And can you imagine a world where men do the same thing, but you don't gripe about it because you're not in a relationship with them?
And, tbf, "the wife is never wrong" encodes some wisdom, same as does the saying "Happy wife means happy life" or, from White Men Can't Jump, "Always listen to the woman".
Let's take the React checkout example that you gave. Your self-illusion is that you were engaged in holistic thinking. And, in fact, you couldn't even see the whole for the first irrelevant detail that caught your attention. This is the opposite of holistic thinking!
First, it is not your job to make that kind of technology decision. You can offer advice, but it is your manager's job. Your job is to make sure that your manager is well-informed. You failed at that job.
If you believe otherwise, then you're wrong. You probably believe you are better equipped to make that decision than your manager. You may well be right about that. (Though, as a rule, we tend to think that we are smarter than we are, and our managers are stupider than they are. But that is a side point.) But you are still wrong about the important point. Which is that it is still your manager's responsibility to make that decision.
You wanted to frame the entire conversation around, "Does this checkout form have a concrete problem that needs fixing?" Your manager's thinking is going to be about very different looking questions. Such as:
- Will switching to React make hiring and training future developers easier?
- Do my existing programmers have the necessary skills to test this technology out?
- Will this technology choice make future projects faster to develop? (For example, do we get wins from a better toolchain, etc.)
- Will this be an interesting project that helps me keep existing employees motivated?
- Are the other claimed wins in the blog post actually going to work out that way?
Your manager needs to think about these things. You may dismiss them as bullshit, but they are not. Companies live and die on such considerations.
Your manager learned absolutely nothing about these things. Your manager may have come away with the impression that you have no idea if there is a problem with the checkout page. But by misunderstanding your role and responsibility, you failed to carry out your actual responsibility within the team. And wound up so upset about it that you wrote a blog post with a strong undertone of, "Here is the kind of stupid I have to deal with at work."
And that AGAIN puts you in the wrong. It literally takes under a minute to go from your blog to your name to where you work. Any coworker who recognizes the blog now knows you're unhappy. Which poisons your work atmosphere. And if this comes to your manager's attention, your manager has to now deal with the fallout from THAT.
Yes, yes. You consider it bullshit. But it is bullshit that can easily get you fired. For good cause. And the fact that you do this AGAIN puts you in the wrong. And your considering it bullshit DOESN'T STOP YOU FROM BEING WRONG. It just means you won't admit it was a mistake.
Err, no: "A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React [...]"
> You wanted to frame the entire conversation around, "Does this checkout form have a concrete problem that needs fixing?" Your manager's thinking is going to be about very different looking questions.
This is literally their first question: "Is our checkout page not performing well?". The manager should have simply said "the problem is not performance, but X" instead of assuming that the developer is rejecting their idea.
> You may dismiss them as bullshit, but they are not.
It is interesting that you, like the manager, assume that they dismissed the idea.
> And that AGAIN puts you in the wrong.
I disagree. If the manager is not able to clarify the specifics of their question (remember, it was a question of whether they should do X) they are in the wrong.
This in no way contradicts what I said. This is a normal way of asking for opinions on a decision that needs to be made. And organizationally the decision IS the manager's. In practice a wise manager will take (and usually follow) advice from their developers. But still it is the manager's call.
> This is literally their first question: "Is our checkout page not performing well?". The manager should have simply said "the problem is not performance, but X" instead of assuming that the developer is rejecting their idea.
Based on my personal experience of people on the spectrum, I doubt that things happened as described. My best guess is that it was exactly what dusted described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32410505.
Namely, early in the conversation, the person on the spectrum got caught up on some irrelevant point. That they couldn't let go of. Which they kept going back to explain how right they were. Eventually the conversation got derailed having gotten no further. And, rather than dropping it, the person went on the internet to explain to the whole world how right they were.
I've been part of such conversations. (Thankfully minus the whole world bit.) The first few times you can hope that a simple clarification will get the conversation back on track. After a while you learn otherwise.
As a parent, what I've found most useful is to set a rule that the person on the spectrum is not allowed to argue that they are right. Ever. Even attempting to make the argument gets shut down. If breaks are needed to finish the conversation, then OK. This resulted in a lot less arguments, and a lot more moments of, "Oh...."
> It is interesting that you, like the manager, assume that they dismissed the idea.
No. I was doing something rather different.
The thread to this point brought up the importance of learning how to play social games. With the poster saying that they had learned to do so, were good at it, and didn't bother any more.
My experience of people on the spectrum says that the poster didn't learn nearly as much about social rules as they think, and they discount the impact more than they should. Since the factors that I described did not occur to the poster, and several focused on social rules, there is a good chance that they seem like BS.
> I disagree. If the manager is not able to clarify the specifics of their question (remember, it was a question of whether they should do X) they are in the wrong.
It takes 2 to communicate. There clearly was a communication failure here. While that failure could be the manager's fault, the odds really are in favor of it being the fault of the person with a condition that makes communication hard (autism), rather than the person whose got promoted into a job that is all about communication skills (the manager).
And yes, it really sucks for autistic people that a failure to communicate by default gets blamed on them. What sucks even harder is that it is true. Which is why it is doubly important for them to work on their communication skills.
And guess what simple change most improves communication skills for most people on the spectrum?
Hopefully you figured it out. It is to stop arguing that they are right. Ever. Not because they are usually wrong. But because they tend to wind up arguing that they are right when they are missing something basic, and the fact that they are arguing makes it impossible to figure out what they are missing.
This is surprisingly hard advice to take. And it is harder for people on the spectrum than neurotypical people. But it makes a huge difference.
> The problem is that you come across as ...
> And the fact that you do this AGAIN ...
> My experience of people on the spectrum says that the poster ...
I do not know precisely when, but it seems that at some point you started ranting to your child.
However there is a long path from first getting the idea of a rewrite to actually undertaking it. And the conversation in question happened because the manager had just read an article about such a rewrite, so it was very early in that journey.
> - Will this technology choice make future projects faster to develop? (For example, do we get wins from a better toolchain, etc.)
> - Will this be an interesting project that helps me keep existing employees motivated?
> - Are the other claimed wins in the blog post actually going to work out that way?
But... These are (or can be framed as) concrete problems.
> - Do my existing programmers have the necessary skills to test this technology out?
If you can't produce a single concrete reason why to try a new framework, why should I discuss about testing it?
(this as someone who may be on the spectrum and for whom the original article hit a bit too close..)
As for not producing a single concrete reason to try the new framework, there is no reason to believe that the manager didn't. According to the article the manager had just read a blog post on it, that caught the manager's attention enough to spark a conversation. SURELY there was SOMETHING in that article about why it might be a good idea to try React?
We aren't told what points were made, likely because they seemed irrelevant. But I'd bet good money that some were made.
The second question is quite literally just a "Have you experience with React?" which doesn't require additional questions for clarification. The manager would be expecting a "yes/no, but ..." type of answer. Honestly your questions would be asked in a meeting with as many developers and even non developers as possible to save time, not in a one to one conversation.
Honestly this whole topic is way too similar to the Dilbert comic where Dilber asks his boss what colour he wants his database in, to test whether he understands what a database is.
https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Database%20Mauve
That said, I have a coach that helps me with this, and I work on my writing a lot. I am currently at a job where I never run into this particular problem, yet I have thorny discussions with lots of "disagreements" all the time. This really helped me understand that it's not just me.
I did take a few autism tests here and there, but always thought "oh they're just meant to make you feel special when you score high, that doesn't mean anything. plus i make good friends everywhere I go". When I told my wife she was like "who thinks that scoring high on an autism test is something people want", and we both took some of these tests. On one of the more widespread one (https://embrace-autism.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/ ), I scored 43, while she scored something like 12. My mind was absolutely blown. I started reading a few books and joining a few autism communities, and it might sound trite, but it's the first time in my life that I felt like I joined "my" community. So many of the stories and anecdotes I would read were like "finally I read something I can relate to".
I am looking for an official diagnosis (not simple) without too much effort, because I find most of the value in now being able to articulate so many of the things that puzzle me, or the conflicts I might have with my wife, or behaviours of mine, and mostly not being ashamed anymore. It's been extremely liberating, and it provides me with better words and verbs to tackle difficult situations.
I have similar memories of my 20s trying to learn how to behave in a social setting. But I also remember things clicking at some point and that part of the world stopped requiring so much effort.
Thank you for sharing. I hope you're able to get your diagnosis.
I like to akin your choice as choosing to assume the role of seeker. its lonely, its challenging, and everyone else seems to not care to play THAT game (some may say is a metaphor for divinity). But the reward is YOU WIN THE GAME. significantly better payout.
I share the metaphor to say that A) I understand you, B) I share your feelings and choice on the matter of identifying and managing Real Politik and C) congratulate you for identifying your true north star and having the strength to pursue in in spite of it not being rhe standard for others.
One can have asperger's and still be nice to people. These things are not mutually exclusive. I see too many people who find it convenient to be a toxic, rude bully, and don't know that they are, and use their condition as an excuse to be a jerk.
From my experience, it's usually not a problem to be pretty forward with people on the spectrum, if you are meaning well. My wife told me there is absolutely no problem with telling me to stop going on about a topic bluntly, and it is something I quite often do with my friends too. Same for pointing out that a certain way of phrasing something didn't come across well, in fact I really appreciate receiving these pieces of advice. What hurts is the "NT" way of communicating these things, hoping that I'd catch up on them. I don't.
> In 2013, the DSM-5 replaced Autistic Disorder, Asperger’s Disorder and other pervasive developmental disorders with the umbrella diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
why are you assuming they are talking to people IRL like they would write a blog post? Very few people talk in person like they type or behave differently in professional environments vs casual. Seems like a weird critique.
I would have written something like, "Allistic people communicate in a way that causes friction in understanding by autistic people, and vice versa, and this leads to a slowdown in the workplace for everyone."
I like the form it currently has too, but it requires taking every word at face value, and not assuming any subtext. For example, I don’t blame anybody, thus I really mean I am not blaming anybody. This is an examination of how things have played out and why they might have played out the way they did. Nothing more.
For what it’s worth, I think your assessment and advice are both spot-on.
I know the original author is far into his career as well but I think especially as we get more senior that humility and valuing other’s perspectives become as important as the technology. Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career were from dismissing the ideas of peers.
Humility is great, but automatically accepting the blame for somebody's failure to communicate something to you just because they are allistic ... that is not so great.
I wrote this article because despite being as humble as I can, these situations still arise. You can get very far doing so, but my biggest mistakes were to not realize that I sometimes actually right.
I don’t doubt the veracity of what the author wrote, but I would guess that if we spoke to the counter-parties, their recollection of certain things would be very different.
How people perceive the world and express themselves vary, and some people don’t jive well. I have a developer on my team who is very literal person, if I say “I could kill that guy”, he doesn’t capture the nuance. But he is brilliant, a friend and trusted colleague. A good leader should get that and adjust.
Yes, there's some ego in that. Author won't back down.
But clearly, the author isn't the ultimate arbiter of truth. Some things are objectively true.
You can't appreciate that this person have spent 10h per day for last 23 years at dealing with computer issues. Instead you think it would be better spent learning some office politics. I'm not even sure how to comment on that.
Those are not hard skills to learn, like patiently responding to questions before jumping to conclusions about what the person you are talking to thinks about this and that.
In the meantime, it's not a bad idea for an individual person to improve their soft skills, just to make their own life easier. For the individual neurodivergent person, learning how to effectively communicate with neurotypical people is a more effective short-term strategy than waiting for all of society to adapt.
But I think you underestimate how much effort autistic people put into improving our soft skills in order to survive. In fact, I learned to be so good at social occasions that I never thought I could be autistic, given how many colleagues value me and how many friends I have and make. I reflect here upon situations where all these improved soft skills didn’t help however, and try to understand what might be going on.
Nah, it's more "improve society & improve yourself". ND people realize being "vs" and wiring their brains differently is not achievable, so NDs try to "soften the blow" to their own mental health by trying to make allistic people know how they work. Sharing is the first step towards understanding.
Thing is, programming computers and solving technical problems is fun to me, I enjoy it, and it's a perfectly spent time for me, as I believe it is to them.. I don't enjoy office politics, I hate them, I don't like a lot of how society is structured with regards to social convention and politics in general..
But the universe does not care about my opinion that technical problems are worthier pursuits than learning how to handle people, especially people with vastly different (and/or inferior by whatever standard you need) skills, because at the end of the day, the cost is going to be greater to me than to the multinational megacorp.
A lot of challenges with autism can be about not being able to see others’ perspectives
In fact, it's possible to be highly egocentric and altruistic at the same time. You see this with parents who might deeply love their children but can't understand how their child's perspective might differ from their own. They might think their kids have the same likes and dislikes as they do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egocentrism
I also find "allistic" feels like a dismissive or slightly derogatory alternative to neurotypical. (To be clear, I do not thing the author was using it that way at all, it is just the reaction the word engenders in me.)
I've learned the hard way that caring too much about work related topics doesn't contribute to your happiness.
Company men will replace you if they can do their business math for justification, because they cannot see the technical complexities of the things they are "wanting to be built" for the company.
Even when you can see dependencies of complexities that will break the plan a year ahead of time, and you were right in complaining about it, it doesn't effectively help you as a person.
Being stuck in the past is just the same waste of energy as being angry about it. Hate and anger are infiltration techniques and should be treated as such.
People will always react based upon their own experiences and understanding, and if you actively try to fight the statistics (aka you vs your team) you will just hurt your perception.
Being seen as rude by other people gives you a strategival disadvantage for negotiation, and that will hurt the rate of adaption of your own suggestions. The ironic part is that people are even more petty than the "I told you so list" that you mentioned, only that they think subconcious pettiness of system1 isn't "petty" but only "a feeling" even though the mechanics and dynamics of it in a rational context are the same.
Work is work, and it will always be "just work". As an autist you have to learn that other people don't care about things as much as you would do (in a utopian star trek world). As a hu-man (literally meaning being that forgets) you have a very limited capacity of memory, computation power and energy.
And your efforts are far more efficiently spent outside the world of company politics, where most people are just busy 90% of the time with sidelining or attacking other departments for their own egomaniac benefits. Playing this game is a huge drain on energy (at least for me) and I therefore decided not to play it.
I thought at first you had invented a clever new word combining strategy and survival. Then I realized that v is just very close to c on a qwerty keyboard. Oh well.
Yeah I was typing on mobile and didn't catch it while proofreading. The textarea is so annoyingly small :(
That's certainly a message I have encountered in some places, and in the first few sentences of this article I thought that's what I might find here.
But unlike you, I quickly concluded that that was not at all the article I was reading. Rather than argue that they were special because of their autism, this author listed highly specific, clearly explained ways in which other people they interact with fail to understand them.
> If the author reads this, I'd congratulate them on finding the time to do that, but also advice them to maybe read 40 technical books every year, and then read 10 about the topics they clearly do struggle with (social interactions, politics, negotiation, psychology).
Did you read the part of the article where the author explained that they do this reading because they find it enjoyable, rather than simply to get ahead?
They’re just part of the game. If you want to do well in any position you cannot neglect them.
"Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic."
I would have to disagree here. Authority structure is useful and sometimes there are multiple good options. Not "giving in" every now and then can lead to analysis paralysis.
I am fine shipping the most horrible code if we all agree that we discussed the pros and cons. This also makes it easy to avoid the “I told you so”-trap which further degrades work climate. Instead, we can go back to the original design document, see that a con we expected has happened, and pick the discussion up from there.
“giving in” without forming a compromise and making sure everybody agrees on what the compromise is however is just appeasing a bully (say “we do it this way because I’m the manager and you’re not” or “we do it this way because I have 10 years of experience and you don’t”).
I should probably have given it a bit more context.
As many other things you may never actually do it, but it’s good to have that option.
That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal.
In other words, they weren't saying that the checkout page was bad, they were asking the author's professional opinion as to whether it could be better.
Famous last words.
OP, if you're still reading, please don't take anything I wrote here as an attack on you. Instead, it was meant to be a reflection on your situation from someone who struggles with many of the same communication issues, in many of the same ways.
They would be more effective in every facet of their life if they spent some time reading history, philosophy, and psychology... or just talking to people. No one exists on an island, and the issue is almost always that they don't find things external to the self "interesting" because they are self-centered. Notice that all three subjects I mentioned above are about other people.
Some people want OP to have proven that he knows how to take criticism in his article - a strange ask, given that many seem to not even have finished reading the article in the first place.
It looks like many people here dont know what makes them tick - the things they accuse the OP of, are things they can see themselves do, and so see it in the OPs behavior.
Maybe it is simply that people cant imagine the world OP inhabits.
Then why didn't the manager ask that instead of mentioning some article some other company?
AFAICT, the OP identified a minimal set of questions he thought needed to be asked to give a good answer, and tried to ask them.
Are you taking exception to how he sought that information, or something else?
> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it
All questions can be reflected easily.
> Is our checkout page not performing well? > Will a new checkout solve our problem? Will React make our checkout page performing better / improve checkout ?
> Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Can technology change (to React) improve our situation in anyway?
Do they understand the implications of such a switch? > What would be the implications if we switch to React?
Now those questions OP can answer. Manager read a blog post, he obviously don't have answer to this questions, that's why he is asking OP if they should rewrite.
Asking "Why do they think a technology change is a solution?" is making wrong assumption that, manager thinks "technology change is a solution"
If me asking what the goal is is perceived as patronising, when I’m just trying to do my best, then sure I can work on that. But that requires good faith on the side of the manager. It’s not my decision to shut things down.
As for motivation, it is of course very hard to understand one’s own motivations, and even more so other people’s motivations. It took me (please don’t laugh) 30 years to realize that I could get paid being an engineer (because I just assumed I would never be worth anything seeing how much I didn’t know about software). And only at age 40 did it dawn on me that most people are not motivated by building the best product they can, but instead do care about money, career, social prestige.
It’s ironic that this is then framed as a one-sided “can’t understand other people”, when really many people don’t understand my motivations either. And seeing how carelessly dismissive some of the comments here are, don’t even care to.
Asking questions as "in what way do you hope to improve it?" will help the manager understand. Just giving the explanation will sound rude.
However, that isn't quite what you say in the article: instead you relay that you appear to have shut down the discussion immediately by getting stuck at "this isn't broken and I don't understand why you're asking me to fix it." That is the part that I perceive as patronising, becuase it contains the implicit assumption that your knowledge of the business/tech crossover is superior to your manager's.
I legitimately do not know what patronizing is. I have an abstract understanding of it, and it baffles me why anybody would do something like that. Yet it is an abstract force with very real consequences I have to deal with.
Is that not an invitation to explain the business goal? What is so patronizing about a direct statement of need?
This might be the core of article.
Some things are knowable and don't need to be assumptions. In these cases, the author expects to have conversations that probe into what is true and what is false.
But some managers are offended by questions that challenge their assumptions. They feel their position gives them authority to overrule the deductive reasoning of their reports.
"Allistic" people sense this, and "up-manage" the egos and sensibilities of managers, without being aware they do it.
I think you have answered your own conscience.
You say you don't care about the goals. The only thing you care about is whether the tech is interesting to you or not, which is purely subjective.
Your manager probably already knows this. He knows you are asking a question to which you completely don't care about the answer. It's just that you're not interested.
There is a clear difference between asking questions to learn — and trolling. This is easily visible to any human.
I'll be honest: If you are expecting 100% fulfillment, then it most likely means you have an impossibly high opinion of yourself. If you really wish that, become a freelancer, then go ahead and reject everything you hear. At work, nobody needs to convince your heart and soul for every single thing. Deal with it.
There is something missing in your story. For example, how long is too long for continuing your questioning, how you deal with rest of your obligations if you don't agree with the answers, how you collaborate with others, whether others in your team agree with you or not, etc.
We programmers are so privileged that we are blind to our privilege.
Edit: grammar
Narcissists love to deflect blame and assume the world is against them because they believe that the world should revolve around them.
(1) Unfortunately that would be challenging for us because X.
(2) We've been talking about that for ages, because X, Y, and Z. I'd love it if we could make time for a rewrite next quarter.
(3) Hmm, interesting. Can you share the blog post? (Buys me time to think and follow up later).
What neither of us have time for is for me to walk him through my thought process via the Socratic method.
Hilarious.
Now, if I come across as patronizing and this leads to a negative outcome (as in, no progress is made in advancing the company’s goals), two things can happen:
- I can work at getting better at communication. The last 2 years, better writing has been my main focus, and this article is part of that. Writing good documents has been tremendously effective. It also only goes so far if someone doesn’t want to engage. In this particular situation, I spent the next week studying React (it wasn’t React in the actual situation) reading 3 books on the chapter and building a toy React prototype, and then wrote up what I thought was a concise report on what was good about it, and what was not so good. I don’t think this document was read.
- The manager can actually put some effort into hearing me out, and understand that I am trying my best here. Maybe I don’t know intuitively what words they want me to use for the questions, but it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext.
If anything, it is easy because I really don’t care about subtext, or patronizing people. Where is the fun in that, compared to the fun of solving problems.
Has it occurred to you that just as it is difficult for you to adapt to the communication styles and thought patterns of allistic people, your manager experiences the same difficulty adapting to those of autistic people?
While I believe organizations and managers should try to accommodate neurodiversity and help all types of people be successful in the workplace, it's not unreasonable to expect you to expend some effort adapting as well.
In all your follow-up comments you seem to have some excuse or clarification for why you don't need to adjust your behavior and the problem is obviously that your manager isn't trying hard enough.
When your manager asks a casual question, he is not asking for a formal document describing pros, cons. He's looking for you to make a judgment call, express an opinion, or for you to say "hmmm, I might spend some time this week looking in to that."
Reacting to a two-sentence exchange by spending a week working on a doc is a communication anti-pattern.
Yes, this is more likely. But autistics expect communication to be true and relevant. When it is not, it sounds like incompetence and dishonesty to an autistic.
If anything, allistic people allow a certain benefit of doubt in communications before assuming incompetence/dishonesty. And then they generally play along with incompetent/dishonest people if the social context requires it.
Let's be honest, that's what happened here. There are many reasons to overhaul a frontend, and performance is just one of them. Maybe the existing checkout is a mess that only OP understands how to maintain. Maybe engineers and designers want to find better common ground to work together and this change could facilitate that. I'm sure you can think of other reasons.
The narrow thinking is on OPs side here. They straight up assumed that this change was just chasing shiny new things (and, well, React isn't that shiny anymore), that all changes had to serve the user and not also organizational goals and then shut it down with the nearest plausible excuse.
This doesn’t sound right. You are not going to agree with 100% of someone else’s decisions. No matter how much you discuss something, no matter if you understand all the ramifications, everything there could possibly be. Sometimes you’re just not going to agree with the direction someone else is taking, and you’re going to have to accept it.
And that’s okay. It’s not toxic to disagree with someone, or to accept that even though you might disagree, they’re going to do X their way (or that you’re going to have to do X their way because that’s what they want). That’s not office politics, that’s life.
Usually we can work backwards and discover that we have different starting assumptions or work forwards and discover that we have different goals. Those pieces tend to be more ambiguous and much easier to “agree to disagree”. And it’s why both people can be 100% that they are correct - because in each of their frames of reference they are.
You want to keep the bikes dry, and what color you paint the shed, or whether you call the paint “tan” or “beige,” matters not at all. Labeling people who disagree with you about the paint color as “bullies,” and fighting them to the death, is profoundly useless. Just ask yourself what really matters, and let the rest go.
If not agreeing means "I need to pretend I agree even when I have good reason to disagreee because this person needs to be appeased" that is not healthy and contributes to a toxic workplace.
This post is talking about the latter scenario.
Wrong on a social thing, agree. Anything with fluid changing rules and subtle context clues will drive them insane