With all the discrimination and bullying going around, I think it is good that someone has something nice to say about autistic programmers. Like Ian Murdock who founded Debian and recently committed suicide had Asperger's Syndrome. Despite obvious impressive technical skills, life probably wasn't easy for him.
Most companies favor hiring average programmers that fit the mold over "weird people" even if they are amazing at their work. If Microsoft is doing the opposite and targets autistic programmers, then good for them! I see no reason to complain about that.
And for the record, the "myth" he is dispelling is a common misunderstanding of statistics. I can say that almost all rapists are men. Obviously that doesn't mean that all men are rapists, it means that the probability that a given rapist is a man is very high. It also doesn't mean that females can't be rapists.
In the same way, I can say that a "genius programmer" likely is on the autistic spectrum, without saying that all autists are geniuses and without saying that you can't be a genius programmer without being an autist.
I was pretty surprised by how much time was devoted to rebutting "everyone autistic is a good engineer" when all of the quotes cited (including the infamous ppt) were claiming "every good engineer is somewhat autistic".
I don't buy that latter claim either, and it's worth talking about how the "autistic programming genius" stereotype is harmful to everyone, autistic or not, but writing an article that's centered around committing the base rate fallacy doesn't mean much of anything.
Obviously a tangent, but this strongly depends on how you define rape. Recent CDC studies find that a huge number of men report being "made to penetrate" women against their will. Most normal people would classify this (sex against your will) as rape, but the CDC only classified it as "sexual assault". Unsurprisingly, if you define men being forced to have sex with women as "not rape", then tautologically almost all rapists are men.
I have the feeling that as society moves towards true gender equality, we'll realise this problem is much less gendered than people currently assume.
It's a weird social balance today, between employers and employees.
It used to be that an employee needed to step up to the needs, expectations and social compatibilities of the company they're going into. Certainly that's still much of an expectation today; as you mention employers prefer average & expected, vs exceptional (including all meanings of the word), though there's a bit more two-way action mixed in especially with physical disabilities and discrimination.
But what actionable changes are mentioned in the article, and what are their tradeoffs? Dropping a degree requirement is obviously sensible that benefits pretty much everybody, and has been for a long time. But the biggest issues seem to be social and communicative processes with team development of large projects. How can things change there? Any great ideas need to be presented and gain traction and acceptance in order to be adopted in a larger team environment. So much of design and implementation is not just technical creation of stuff that works, but social championship of gaining consensus so that software works together.
In the high speed development environment of the larger commercial games industry, there's no real place for people to sit off by themselves and code some grand project solo to avoid those issues.
> Most companies favor hiring average programmers that fit the mold over "weird people" even if they are amazing at their work. If Microsoft is doing the opposite and targets autistic programmers, then good for them! I see no reason to complain about that.
Recognizing the strengths of autistic coders is great. Doing it specifically and explicitly because you think they're easier to abuse is a big problem.
I have a friend who was recently hired under Microsoft's autism hiring program, and is still really excited about it. I'm trying to decide if I should show her this article or not. It would almost certainly sour her feelings on the whole deal, and I'm holding out hope that her direct managers are more humane than this "they work like machines" motherfucker.
> I can say that almost all rapists are men. Obviously that doesn't mean that all men are rapists, it means that the probability that a given rapist is a man is very high.
You can't determine the probability of an individual like that, at least without more data. I can say that almost all the people who contract HIV are african american or men who have sex with men, that does not mean that the probability of any given homosexual or black person having HIV is high (greater than 50%). The vast majority of men have never raped a woman and will never rape a woman.
I dont know if autistic people are better programmers, but what I feel that - from 20 years making software - is that people with these personality traits that fit into the spectrum of autism and who happen to end up in the software industry are extremely vulnerable to being exploited by people with certain other personality traits.
Put a narcissistic (or whatever you want to call this type of people - maybe sociopathic? I am not a psychologist) CEO or a manager in a room with autistic software developers and you will could have some great things churned out, but there are probably going to be a couple of heart attacks and maybe worse, if you are unlucky. For sure, there will be some very unhappy people.
> In the ensuing outrage, a PowerPoint presentation written by St. John surfaced which included a slide in which he referred to engineers with Asperger syndrome as being "the holy grail" of hires. "They work like machines," he wrote, "don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs."
Someone needs to send all these people patio11's guides to salary negotiation, and maybe some drug to make them more aggressive and disagreeable. (Modafinil?)
I second this. Having employees that 'never engage in politics and work like a machine' sounds like a recipe for exploitation. I've seen FAR to may managers take advantage of people 1 rung down on the social ladder.
As they say, if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. It's not just that autistics are all different the same way allistics are all different; compared to the breadth of the entire autism spectrum, allistics are all pretty much the same. You never know what you're going to get when picking from the autistic box of chocolates. Maybe a savant, maybe a person of average intelligence but remarkable coping skills, maybe a person with not much of either.
As for "autistic programmers": for those of us with the skill to program, programming is a much better career choice than most, but even that is changing. Since the internet bubble of the mid-late 90s, allistic people have taken up programming in droves. The promise of easy money and prestige made programming a much more palatable career choice for allistics than it had been in the past, and now they've pretty much taken over. Programming is now a social activity. Cubicles are a luxury; the boss insists that seating everybody at long crowded tables with enough room for one laptop per seat, where everybody can hear everybody else's noisy conversations, makes the workplace more "collaborative". You are expected to be interruptible at any moment. Meetings are more frequent. ("Stand-up meetings" have had the effect of increasing the frequency of the weekly meeting to daily, while the original promise that they be short is falling by the wayside.) Some shops have enshrined the doctrine of Extreme Programming to such an extent that you are not permitted to get any work done without another person very close at hand, watching every move you make. Articles for employees state, in a very as-it-should-be manner, that the relevant criterion for determining who gets hired, commended, or promoted is not technical prowess but rather "soft skills", which bears out in reality as the number of tech startups founded by bros and hipsters who only hire "cultural fits" (autistics don't really fit in in any culture) increases. And books and seminars tell the boss that the person who prefers long stretches of working alone because that is how they get their best thinking done, is a danger and a threat to the organization and must be eliminated.
So in the modern workplace, hiring an autistic is indeed a very poor choice. Unless you can tailor the environment to their needs -- which approaches impossible unless you know them personally -- you're probably better off hiring the "cultural fit".
I like your comment about cubicles being a luxury. I don't know why they became a funny cliche of office horror. You don't have to be autistic to be driven mad by the constant interruptions enforced by office culture. When they tried to make pair programming mandatory, most of us decided to ignore it. Can't ignore the daily standup though. It just means I will not be able to concentrate until 10:30 every day. If that's the way they want it, so be it
IMHO it is the problem of trying to make things black and white: either being diseases (or worse: used as an insult) or a super-power (or: an excuse). Usually it's a combination of special skills, and special needs (and things which are just different). As with almost every other psychological "deviation" from the norm. Hence "neurodiversity" not "neurosuperiority", or the traditional medical distinction between "healthy" and "ill" (and nothing beyond).
> Yet, it is good to be aware of the neurodiversity and that other people can have different styles of thinking than ours, with their pros and cons. It’s not a challenge – it’s an opportunity to see word through various lenses! (As long as we respect other’s right to be different.)
An obsessive personality can lead to an individual working 80 hour weeks - not by choice, but by default. They literally don't know any better and are not necessarily competent to make a conscious decision not to this.
I've worked with two suicides, both of which would have scored as Asperger's (a diagnosis in retrospect) and two others that completely broke down from the stress of 80 hour a week software engineering jobs. They didn't need to be taken advantage of, they needed an environment that didn't demand they live under that kind of pressure, and an organization that was in tune to the consequences of applying this kind of pressure to non-neurotypical employees.
I wonder if program's like Microsofts deal with this. These are special needs employees - and its sick to read that business people want to exploit someone's disability to further their own careers.
The social skills issue is often not for want of social connection, but a frustrating inability to be able to participate. Again, this is a disability, not a choice. The social isolation can easily turn to depression and an unintentional withdrawal from society with co-morbid substance abuse problems. Someone else in this discussion mentioned the recent medical examiner findings about Ian Murdock's suicide.
> An obsessive personality can lead to an individual working 80 hour weeks - not by choice, but by default. They literally don't know any better and are not necessarily competent to make a conscious decision not to this.
It gets even worse. Once someone with Asperger's "clicks" into a specific routine, it becomes a pretty challenging endeavor to change it without some external influence. Same with bad eating/sleeping habits. I'm currently in the "works overtime out of habits" phase and it's extremely hard to snap out of it.
I was diagnosed with Aspergers early on in life. For a long time, I tried to ignore it. But there's parts that you can't. It's difficult to make friends when you can't read people's intentions or read between the lines. I don't have a great interest in hanging out with people because I often don't feel like I fit in.
In my teenage years, it meant that I was a loner who went home at the end of a school days, played games by myself, and that was it. In my adult years, it's been much more difficult.
My background is a complete mess. I got a degree in Computer Networking because programming wasn't available, and then later went on to work retail for several years. In the meantime, I kept working on programming projects.
On the programming side, I have a 5 year project where I built everything myself, and a handful of 1 year projects, most of which the source code has been lost for.
Trying to get jobs in the industry is a joke. Take a look at the above, and you'll see someone who isn't normal, isn't average. I send resumes off and I get "We don't think you'll be a good fit" or ignored. That right there is what hurts the most. I could accept getting interviews and failing them, but being outright rejected before being given a chance, that flat hurts.
I've got a lot of traits that come from Aspergers too. I don't have an interest in much besides computers, so I often spend entire days at home and coding or thinking about coding problems. Doesn't bother me to spend 12+ hours in a day just coding.
Horrible at eye contact, and don't know why. Monotone voice? Check. Sometimes I'll mean to say one word and say another without realizing it, or focus on someone's meaning in one part and miss the others. I don't have that rage though. Used to when I was younger. But the computer doesn't care if you get mad, and it's better to just let logic take over.
I've still got my fingers crossed that I'll find a place that will give me a chance. But if I can't find that, then I'll shrug my shoulders and go back to working retail.
I see the "Alex St. John's infamous PowerPoint" image, pasted in the article, as more valuable than the entire article.
St John is harsh an direct, and seems to contain more objective true than the entire article.
Maybe another trait related to high-IQ+autism is a profound disregard for political correctness. Is St.John diagnosed with autism?
Maybe the part of the brain dedicated to social-political "skills", in an Aspergers-diagnosed brain is really dedicated to abstraction processing or pattern recognition?
Of course that the lacking of social-political skill frees your mind to concentrate long hours on complex abstractions. You shun the "social" world, and then concentrate on the mathematical or algorithmic world, where the "entities" have interesting and also predictable behaviour.
Thanks for pointing me to the St.John article, it looks like a good read.
The fact is that people who are actually autistic struggle to gain employment anywhere, including as software developers.
The vast majority of programmers are not autistic. The stereotype that they are is damaging both to programmers (by typecasting them) and to autistic people (by ignoring their real challenges).
St. John's perspective is, to be blunt, idiotic. I work in the game industry, and being effective as a programmer involves a lot of people skills and a lot of communication with other disciplines. It doesn't matter how technically brilliant you are if you can't sell people on your ideas or communicate effectively. If you were to go out of your way to hire emotionally stunted young people like St. John suggests you'd just end up with a miserable place to work.
The funny thing is, all of my friends with autism are fiercely political. If you asked me, I'd probably say people with autism were MORE political than those without. Of course, none of my friends with autism work in software.
St. John's point was that programmers with autism spectrum disorders are easier to take advantage of. Further, ASD's are not a superpower and don't rededicate parts of the brain to other useful tasks.
I think some of the best programmers are very collaborative and not at all introverted. It's just stupid to generalize like that though. When I'm putting together teams I find I get the best results when I have a mix of nut jobs from across the spectrum of programmer personalities... except brogrammers, hate those guys ;)
I don't mind collaborating, and indeed enjoy it. But don't force it upon me by an oppressive open office environment. I need quiet and an environment free from distraction and other people to really dig into my code and produce my best work.
Living in a constant state of interruptibility, observation, and distraction will not get good code out of me, and indeed many other devs. I, like many others, can make do, but why pay us so much money if you're going to put us in an environment guaranteed to make us produce sub-par code and products? Seems like a poor use of capital.
The point at issue doesn't seem to me to be whether autism is conducive to programming ability, but that someone is essentially arguing that a disability is a great means by which to take advantage of someone in a notoriously exploitative industry.
I think article is mixing up cause and effect. It is not that autistic people are good developers, but software development is one of a few good jobs for autistic people. There is zero barrier to enter, study materials are free and it offers great flexibility.
Most developers would love to do some other jobs. But the amount of office politics, backstabbing etc is not possible to handle for some people.
IMO, whether or not it's true that certain traits of autism make for better programmers is actually irrelevant -- it's not useful for that kind of generalization.
Not all high functioning autistics become great programmers, just as not all introverts are necessarily great programmers. And saying that "all" programmers share one or more of those things just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you disenfranchise people who don't think they "fit".
> "The internet has kind of killed my 'autistic pride,' so to speak," says Gillmer. "The constant use of it as an insult makes me want to hide it, so I tend to not bring it up unless it feels like I'm not communicating properly."
I cannot for the life of me understand why I see "aspie" or "spergy" used as insults on both reddit and tumblr.
I find it quite annoying that we can't say "retarded" anymore but "autistic" and "autism" are valid insults. This has a lot to do with high-profile autistic people such as Christian Weston Chandler, who have a whole host of other psychological and emotional damage that has little to do with autism itself. They are the ones who wear their condition on their sleeve and try to use it to excuse all sorts of reprehensible behavior. Until in the public mind the words "autism" and "Asperger's" become associated with cringe.
As far as anti/pro SJWs are concerned, I've mostly seen it as an insult by pro SJWs against white nerdy autistic gamergate basement dwellers.EDIT: which annoys me, since I'm more on the Pro SJW side by default.
We've done such a good job with autism awareness that at this point I'm honestly not even sure that people know what autism actually is. Our idea of "autism" has become less Temple Grandin and more the nerds from Revenge of the Nerds. So, yeah. You should probably want to hire nerds as programmers.
I fail to see the fallacy in the St John's presentation. The Gamasutra editorial seems to widen the discussion to ALL autistics, which is not what the original presentation was talking about. It then goes on to say that not all Autistics match the "holy grail". Well no shit, Sherlock.
As someone who perfectly fits the description of an "Aspergers Programmer" I think this is all spot on. Maybe people don't like it, but I will take some introverted geeks who love to code over all other possible applicants.
The problem is that the criteria for autism is very loose. If you restricted your search to only low functioning autistic savants then it might be harder to find someone like this.
But that doesn't mean there isn't an autistic savant who is a great programmer/computer scientist.
In the end this is a game for monkeys and typewriters.
Given the rate that autism is showing up nowadays, it seems like spectrum disorders are over-diagnosed. People who were once just odd-balls or non-social are now being lumped in with people who have moderate to severe issues, and it's to the detriment of both groups.
As someone on the spectrum I don't see it as a detriment. Despite a seemingly vast difference between a high-functioning engineer and a low-functioning child, the strategies for improving the quality of life are pretty much the same. Routine, sensory stuff, avoiding meltdowns, recognizing emotions, all that stuff - it's as real for a brilliant but eccentric programmer as it's real for a non-verbal kid with no particular talents.
Because in the end, it's about improving the quality of life.
I'm on the "eccentric" end of spectrum; for 27 years I've been told that nothing is wrong with me, that I'm just "too smart". I can tell you I was pretty close to joining the 27 club; the piling problems ended up being too much to handle. I came upon the description of Asperger's purely by accident; no mental health professional would even suspect it because I "seemed normal". Finally being able to understand why I'm losing my ability to speak once in a while or getting violent whenever overstimulated wasn't just a relief. It was a life-saver.
If I didn't realize it's ASD, ignorance and stereotypes could have killed me.
PS. Yes, some people will claim they are "a little bit autistic" out of ignorance or attention seeking. Others will lump clinical cases with weirdos. Both don't change the validity of a proper diagnosis.
[+] [-] bjourne|9 years ago|reply
Most companies favor hiring average programmers that fit the mold over "weird people" even if they are amazing at their work. If Microsoft is doing the opposite and targets autistic programmers, then good for them! I see no reason to complain about that.
And for the record, the "myth" he is dispelling is a common misunderstanding of statistics. I can say that almost all rapists are men. Obviously that doesn't mean that all men are rapists, it means that the probability that a given rapist is a man is very high. It also doesn't mean that females can't be rapists.
In the same way, I can say that a "genius programmer" likely is on the autistic spectrum, without saying that all autists are geniuses and without saying that you can't be a genius programmer without being an autist.
[+] [-] Bartweiss|9 years ago|reply
I don't buy that latter claim either, and it's worth talking about how the "autistic programming genius" stereotype is harmful to everyone, autistic or not, but writing an article that's centered around committing the base rate fallacy doesn't mean much of anything.
[+] [-] klipt|9 years ago|reply
Obviously a tangent, but this strongly depends on how you define rape. Recent CDC studies find that a huge number of men report being "made to penetrate" women against their will. Most normal people would classify this (sex against your will) as rape, but the CDC only classified it as "sexual assault". Unsurprisingly, if you define men being forced to have sex with women as "not rape", then tautologically almost all rapists are men.
I have the feeling that as society moves towards true gender equality, we'll realise this problem is much less gendered than people currently assume.
[+] [-] jackmott|9 years ago|reply
Do they? At my company we half-seriously joke when programmers are too socially well adjusted, that they won't fit in. We prefer a bit of spergy.
I don't have any idea what 'most' companies think, or if large companies even have consistent trends in their own thinking.
[+] [-] white-flame|9 years ago|reply
It used to be that an employee needed to step up to the needs, expectations and social compatibilities of the company they're going into. Certainly that's still much of an expectation today; as you mention employers prefer average & expected, vs exceptional (including all meanings of the word), though there's a bit more two-way action mixed in especially with physical disabilities and discrimination.
But what actionable changes are mentioned in the article, and what are their tradeoffs? Dropping a degree requirement is obviously sensible that benefits pretty much everybody, and has been for a long time. But the biggest issues seem to be social and communicative processes with team development of large projects. How can things change there? Any great ideas need to be presented and gain traction and acceptance in order to be adopted in a larger team environment. So much of design and implementation is not just technical creation of stuff that works, but social championship of gaining consensus so that software works together.
In the high speed development environment of the larger commercial games industry, there's no real place for people to sit off by themselves and code some grand project solo to avoid those issues.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|9 years ago|reply
Recognizing the strengths of autistic coders is great. Doing it specifically and explicitly because you think they're easier to abuse is a big problem.
I have a friend who was recently hired under Microsoft's autism hiring program, and is still really excited about it. I'm trying to decide if I should show her this article or not. It would almost certainly sour her feelings on the whole deal, and I'm holding out hope that her direct managers are more humane than this "they work like machines" motherfucker.
[+] [-] bluedino|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmdrfred|9 years ago|reply
You can't determine the probability of an individual like that, at least without more data. I can say that almost all the people who contract HIV are african american or men who have sex with men, that does not mean that the probability of any given homosexual or black person having HIV is high (greater than 50%). The vast majority of men have never raped a woman and will never rape a woman.
[+] [-] mads|9 years ago|reply
Put a narcissistic (or whatever you want to call this type of people - maybe sociopathic? I am not a psychologist) CEO or a manager in a room with autistic software developers and you will could have some great things churned out, but there are probably going to be a couple of heart attacks and maybe worse, if you are unlucky. For sure, there will be some very unhappy people.
[+] [-] nibs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aab0|9 years ago|reply
> In the ensuing outrage, a PowerPoint presentation written by St. John surfaced which included a slide in which he referred to engineers with Asperger syndrome as being "the holy grail" of hires. "They work like machines," he wrote, "don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs."
Someone needs to send all these people patio11's guides to salary negotiation, and maybe some drug to make them more aggressive and disagreeable. (Modafinil?)
[+] [-] ascotan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bitwize|9 years ago|reply
As for "autistic programmers": for those of us with the skill to program, programming is a much better career choice than most, but even that is changing. Since the internet bubble of the mid-late 90s, allistic people have taken up programming in droves. The promise of easy money and prestige made programming a much more palatable career choice for allistics than it had been in the past, and now they've pretty much taken over. Programming is now a social activity. Cubicles are a luxury; the boss insists that seating everybody at long crowded tables with enough room for one laptop per seat, where everybody can hear everybody else's noisy conversations, makes the workplace more "collaborative". You are expected to be interruptible at any moment. Meetings are more frequent. ("Stand-up meetings" have had the effect of increasing the frequency of the weekly meeting to daily, while the original promise that they be short is falling by the wayside.) Some shops have enshrined the doctrine of Extreme Programming to such an extent that you are not permitted to get any work done without another person very close at hand, watching every move you make. Articles for employees state, in a very as-it-should-be manner, that the relevant criterion for determining who gets hired, commended, or promoted is not technical prowess but rather "soft skills", which bears out in reality as the number of tech startups founded by bros and hipsters who only hire "cultural fits" (autistics don't really fit in in any culture) increases. And books and seminars tell the boss that the person who prefers long stretches of working alone because that is how they get their best thinking done, is a danger and a threat to the organization and must be eliminated.
So in the modern workplace, hiring an autistic is indeed a very poor choice. Unless you can tailor the environment to their needs -- which approaches impossible unless you know them personally -- you're probably better off hiring the "cultural fit".
[+] [-] wobbleblob|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stared|9 years ago|reply
See e.g. http://crastina.se/autistic-traits-science-and-the-nerd-ster..., especially its message:
> Yet, it is good to be aware of the neurodiversity and that other people can have different styles of thinking than ours, with their pros and cons. It’s not a challenge – it’s an opportunity to see word through various lenses! (As long as we respect other’s right to be different.)
[+] [-] lordleft|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salgernon|9 years ago|reply
I've worked with two suicides, both of which would have scored as Asperger's (a diagnosis in retrospect) and two others that completely broke down from the stress of 80 hour a week software engineering jobs. They didn't need to be taken advantage of, they needed an environment that didn't demand they live under that kind of pressure, and an organization that was in tune to the consequences of applying this kind of pressure to non-neurotypical employees.
I wonder if program's like Microsofts deal with this. These are special needs employees - and its sick to read that business people want to exploit someone's disability to further their own careers.
The social skills issue is often not for want of social connection, but a frustrating inability to be able to participate. Again, this is a disability, not a choice. The social isolation can easily turn to depression and an unintentional withdrawal from society with co-morbid substance abuse problems. Someone else in this discussion mentioned the recent medical examiner findings about Ian Murdock's suicide.
[+] [-] kosma|9 years ago|reply
It gets even worse. Once someone with Asperger's "clicks" into a specific routine, it becomes a pretty challenging endeavor to change it without some external influence. Same with bad eating/sleeping habits. I'm currently in the "works overtime out of habits" phase and it's extremely hard to snap out of it.
[+] [-] jesserayadkins2|9 years ago|reply
In my teenage years, it meant that I was a loner who went home at the end of a school days, played games by myself, and that was it. In my adult years, it's been much more difficult.
My background is a complete mess. I got a degree in Computer Networking because programming wasn't available, and then later went on to work retail for several years. In the meantime, I kept working on programming projects.
On the programming side, I have a 5 year project where I built everything myself, and a handful of 1 year projects, most of which the source code has been lost for.
Trying to get jobs in the industry is a joke. Take a look at the above, and you'll see someone who isn't normal, isn't average. I send resumes off and I get "We don't think you'll be a good fit" or ignored. That right there is what hurts the most. I could accept getting interviews and failing them, but being outright rejected before being given a chance, that flat hurts.
I've got a lot of traits that come from Aspergers too. I don't have an interest in much besides computers, so I often spend entire days at home and coding or thinking about coding problems. Doesn't bother me to spend 12+ hours in a day just coding.
Horrible at eye contact, and don't know why. Monotone voice? Check. Sometimes I'll mean to say one word and say another without realizing it, or focus on someone's meaning in one part and miss the others. I don't have that rage though. Used to when I was younger. But the computer doesn't care if you get mad, and it's better to just let logic take over.
I've still got my fingers crossed that I'll find a place that will give me a chance. But if I can't find that, then I'll shrug my shoulders and go back to working retail.
[+] [-] digler999|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucio|9 years ago|reply
I see the "Alex St. John's infamous PowerPoint" image, pasted in the article, as more valuable than the entire article. St John is harsh an direct, and seems to contain more objective true than the entire article.
Maybe another trait related to high-IQ+autism is a profound disregard for political correctness. Is St.John diagnosed with autism?
Maybe the part of the brain dedicated to social-political "skills", in an Aspergers-diagnosed brain is really dedicated to abstraction processing or pattern recognition?
Of course that the lacking of social-political skill frees your mind to concentrate long hours on complex abstractions. You shun the "social" world, and then concentrate on the mathematical or algorithmic world, where the "entities" have interesting and also predictable behaviour.
Thanks for pointing me to the St.John article, it looks like a good read.
[+] [-] morgante|9 years ago|reply
The vast majority of programmers are not autistic. The stereotype that they are is damaging both to programmers (by typecasting them) and to autistic people (by ignoring their real challenges).
[+] [-] overgard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tobold|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] optimuspaul|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjbwork|9 years ago|reply
Living in a constant state of interruptibility, observation, and distraction will not get good code out of me, and indeed many other devs. I, like many others, can make do, but why pay us so much money if you're going to put us in an environment guaranteed to make us produce sub-par code and products? Seems like a poor use of capital.
[+] [-] Qantourisc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithpeter|9 years ago|reply
Does anyone find Belbin's team inventory of any use when setting up teams?
Do people tend to allow teams to form themselves? If so, will those teams tend to have people with complimentary characteristics?
[+] [-] alphonsegaston|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw890|9 years ago|reply
Most developers would love to do some other jobs. But the amount of office politics, backstabbing etc is not possible to handle for some people.
[+] [-] thedz|9 years ago|reply
Not all high functioning autistics become great programmers, just as not all introverts are necessarily great programmers. And saying that "all" programmers share one or more of those things just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you disenfranchise people who don't think they "fit".
[+] [-] afarrell|9 years ago|reply
I cannot for the life of me understand why I see "aspie" or "spergy" used as insults on both reddit and tumblr.
[+] [-] bitwize|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZanyProgrammer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackmott|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielhooper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Paul_S|9 years ago|reply
Oh, games industry, never change. I'm sure people will think this is satire - except the ones who worked in gamedev.
[+] [-] c3534l|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kstenerud|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrale|9 years ago|reply
Also St John's attitude is quite telling of his manipulative tendencies. That's not someone I would want to work with.
[+] [-] justin_vanw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maerF0x0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gravypod|9 years ago|reply
But that doesn't mean there isn't an autistic savant who is a great programmer/computer scientist.
In the end this is a game for monkeys and typewriters.
[+] [-] intopieces|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kosma|9 years ago|reply
Because in the end, it's about improving the quality of life.
I'm on the "eccentric" end of spectrum; for 27 years I've been told that nothing is wrong with me, that I'm just "too smart". I can tell you I was pretty close to joining the 27 club; the piling problems ended up being too much to handle. I came upon the description of Asperger's purely by accident; no mental health professional would even suspect it because I "seemed normal". Finally being able to understand why I'm losing my ability to speak once in a while or getting violent whenever overstimulated wasn't just a relief. It was a life-saver.
If I didn't realize it's ASD, ignorance and stereotypes could have killed me.
PS. Yes, some people will claim they are "a little bit autistic" out of ignorance or attention seeking. Others will lump clinical cases with weirdos. Both don't change the validity of a proper diagnosis.