6 ms·

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

• nibs 10y ago
  We call this dynamic the nerd vs. nerd exploiter dynamic. Jobs and Woz or Allen and Gates are good examples.
  • jackmott 10y ago
    Gates was the nerd and the exploiter at the same time.
    • nibs 10y ago
      Yes. It is definetely possible to be both.
      • mads 10y ago
        Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be? It is an honest question. I really dont know. I am sure he had some great technical insights, but I haven't seen anything that would lead me to believe that he was actually a genius coder or engineer.
        • duaneb 10y ago
          Well gates and Allen wrote the original basic interpreter together.
          • mads 10y ago
            Someone named "Monte Davidoff" seems to have helped them.
            • duaneb 10y ago
              I was referring to the original Microsoft basic, not basic itself. I can understand the confusion.
              • deleted 10y ago
                [deleted]
        • digi_owl 10y ago
          Given that he would sit down, read, and annotate, a technical spec, and then grill the reporter during the next day meeting on technical aspects, yeah he was. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
          • mads 10y ago
            Yes, he could read a spec and I read this before. Dont get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. I just dont see this particular incident as anything special. Bill Gates didn't actually do anything except annotate the spec and throw some ideas out there.
            • serge2k 10y ago
              > I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. Except you question his technical ability, ignore/excuse evidence of said ability, and call him a narcissist.
              • mads 10y ago
                Yeah well, sorry about that.
            • cma 10y ago
              How about this: > In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou[3] gave an upper bound of (5/3)n. This was improved, thirty years later, to (18/11)n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough[4] (Chitturi et al., 2009). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting Not easy to have significant algorithmic-complexity results that have stood as an upper bound for 30 years.
              • thaumasiotes 10y ago
                Hey, that's the official name for what I thought of as "aligning a stack of coins". The Google Code Jam qualification round this year included the problem "write a function to report the minimum number of flips necessary to sort a stack of pancakes". I'm not too pleased to see this in the wikipedia page: > The minimum number of flips required to sort any stack of n pancakes has been shown to lie between ~1.07n and 1.63n (exact boundaries: 15n/14 and 18n/11,) but the exact value is not known.
        • tedks 10y ago
          He wrote FAT on an airplane. Make of that what you will.
          • mads 10y ago
            Sounds very dramatic and something a narcissist would come up with.
            • pjscott 10y ago
              ... Or someone who was understandably proud of having written a basic but serviceable filesystem on an airplane. Please at least consider the boring hypothesis.
          • astrange 10y ago
            I'm surprised his battery lasted that long.
            • mamon 10y ago
              I wouldn't be suprised if he had written the whole thing ON PAPER, and then just re-type it to a computer. Also, there is known story that Gates and Allen wrote BASIC compiler for some obscure microprocessor without having access to an actual thing, just paper spec. So they wrote emulator first, then compiler and guess what? when run on the real processor it worked like a charm from first try.
              • mads 10y ago
                Come on..
        • serge2k 10y ago
          Joel Spolsky certainly thinks so http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
        • wolfgke 10y ago
          > Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be? At least there are strong signs: According to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=727000381 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=... "In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent." According to https://www.quora.com/Who-beat-Bill-Gates-in-math-at-Harvard/answer/Alexander-Moreno-1 https://www.quora.com/Who-beat-Bill-Gates-in-math-at-Harvard... "Christos Papadimitriou, one of the absolute top theoretical CS people in the world (almost certainly top 10 active researchers), told his girlfriend at the time that Bill Gates was the smartest person he had ever met. Bill Gates, advised by Papadimitriou, found a bound on a problem that stood for 30 years."
  • mads 10y ago
    Yes.. Other people might call it some form of synergy and it happens all the time. The problem is that for every Apple and every Microsoft, there are hundreds of "nerd exploiters" ruining nerd lives. It almost sounds like I am turning this into a "nerd lives matter" campaign or something like that. This is not my intention, but it is a real danger for autistic software developers, which may lead them to engage in some extremely unhealthy behaviour.
    • nibs 10y ago
      Indeed. Although eventually nerds learn boundaries in most cases that protect them. Apple and Microsoft worked out pretty well for Woz/Allen without them having to do any sales themselves. So it can be win-win. My Dad, fiance and brother all have psychiatrist-verified Aspergers (pre DSM5). So the nerd and nerd-exploter dynamic plays out in day-to-day lives too. I am a very strong verbal communicator, as is my Mom for my Dad. I think they appreciate our ability to be explicit, direct and do what we say we will. Because people who have opaque motives are too anxiety-provoking for people who cannot see through it.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  • erichocean 10y ago
    Ironically, it's Jobs that has all of the typical Aspy traits, not Woz—right down to deciding on one set of clothes and sticking to it. If you actually read an S. Jobs bio and are familiar with Aspy traits, he's a textbook case. What confuses people (if they are confused) is that most people with Aspergers are not artistic, don't like speaking in front of crowds, or running teams. However, it makes a ton of sense if you understand what the underlying brain differences are. People with Aspergers can be superior at artistic and group endeavors because they can easily ignore human quirks and are able to instead focus on the archetypal aspects. Certainly Jobs did. A handful of extremely successful film writer/directors are also on the spectrum, and I suspect, for similar reasons. All, like Jobs, are considered to be "assholes" by some, and absolutely loved by others.
    • nibs 10y ago
      I have read SJobs bio(s). My father, brother and fiance have Aspergers. My father and brother especially relate more to Woz and are scared of people like Jobs. I relate more to Jobs than Woz, and I am more OCPD. If Jobs is Aspergers, he is also very manic spectrum. My father/brother are strictly unipolar. Here is more on the OCPD thing if you are curious: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/06/business_success_from_mental_illness_steve_jobs_henry_heinz_and_est_e_lauder.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
      • erichocean 10y ago
        Oh for sure, I didn't mean to imply that Jobs was _only_ on the spectrum. I work in film (in addition to tech) and know a lot of people on the spectrum that I think people who only meet autistic programmers would have difficulty recognizing. Even in TFA, one of the descriptors is: > They generally marry the first girl they date Maybe, but in my experience, that's only one specific kind of person with Aspergers (who I agree definitely exists). However, at least in film and other artistic/people disciplines, that wouldn't describe the "typical" person on the spectrum—I think you mainly see that type in tech/engineering circles. (To be fair, that's what the article is focused on.) In my experience, at least in the fields I work in, people with Aspergers are "sigmas" (to use PUA terminology for a moment) and have no difficulty whatsoever dating, meeting people, etc. Certainly they don't do it the "normal" way, but they're very successful. UDPATE: Thinking about it further, most people on the spectrum are not intuitive feelers (in the Myers Briggs taxonomy), they're sensory thinkers. When you find an Aspie who is an intuitive feeler, like Jobs, it's certainly confusing to people: if he's an Aspie, how can he get up in front of crowds? Lead a team? Negotiate? Etc. Unpossible. It's really just "normals" applying their own biases on what a normal person would/could do, without understanding what makes those on the spectrum—especially those that are more emotional/intuitive—tick.
• aab0 10y ago
  > "haven't learned wage-slave mentality yet" > 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?)
  • digi_owl 10y ago
    If you haven't seen an aspie thats aggressive and disagreeable, then you haven't seen an aspie outside his/her comfort zone.
    • aab0 10y ago
      Salary negotiation is outside their comfort zone; yet it doesn't seem to help.
      • wolfgke 10y ago
        Because negotiations (thus salary negotiations) aren't about spreading disagreement, but about making an agreement with which both sides can cope. Thus if you add the personality trait "aggressive and disagreeable" to a typical aspie, you'll get a termination of negotiation instead of a strongly suboptimal (for the aspie) negotiation result.
  • wolfgke 10y ago
    > patio11's guides to salary negotiation Link: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• ascotan 10y ago
  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.