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>One day the young man’s manager called her in a panic. The manager had asked him if he would like to complete a task that needed doing, and the young man simpl

>One day the young man’s manager called her in a panic. The manager had asked him if he would like to complete a task that needed doing, and the young man simply said, “No.” >Later, when asked why, the young man said he’d been working on another project on a deadline and didn’t think he should take on extra work. Scheiner explained to the manager that he needed to be more specific and directly tell the employee that he wanted him to set aside what he was currently working on and start on the new task. I gotta say, I'm surprised that this needed to be explained to the manager. If someone asks a worker whether they want to do something and the worker say "no", the manager's instinct is to panic and escalate before trying to clarify anything? I guess it's a good example for the article - it's easy to empathize with the person whose manager got confused, and easy to understand how dealing with those kinds of situations on a daily basis ends in the workers quitting or getting fired. Everyone feels uncomfortable when a conversation goes off-script, but we as a society expect the 'abnormal' people to be the ones who bear the consequences of that discomfort whenever it arises. It doesn't seem fair, especially since the 'abnormal' people are expected to bear their discomfort in silence, but that's life for you.

duxup 7y ago
Yeah that's a good observation. I see too many managers are quick to interpret "refusing" for what is often a miscommunication, and after being caught off guard they don't know what to do.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Good managers are hard to find.
  - duxup 7y ago
    And the skills we're talking about aren't highly valued / recognized by their managers often. Soft skills, no matter what the story line a company has, often are undervalued in my experience.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    I imagine you need to train them, just like you have to train any other skill. Yet in most companies it seems to come down to, “Fred seems like he’d be a good manager, let’s promote him.”
  - mrmonkeyman 7y ago
    So are good workers.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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everdrive 7y ago
I think this highlights the other half of the "asperger's problem." A lot of people have bad managers. Someone with normal social function might simply have the soft skills necessary to mitigate their poor management. This does make them a more successful employee in a sense.
- arethuza 7y ago
  I think I'd go even further than that - most people are bad managers and those who are good managers usually have had a fair amount of coaching and mentoring by other good managers. Edit: I should add training to that, while I wouldn't claim to be a good manager I did have some 1-on-1 training that did make me a less bad manager (being videoed in meetings and my interactions with people analysed).
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    > most people are bad managers A lot of people also have a strong anti manager bias. They're predisposed to hate any manager they have, unless proven otherwise.
    - ergothus 7y ago
      Sure, but how many managers are actually trained to do what they do? There's this strange expectation that everyone somehow knows how to be a good manager, when in truth, most of us know (some of) what a manager is supposed to DO, but have only what we've personally experienced to guide us on HOW to do it. And what we've seen is only a sliver of the process - we've likely only seen the managing of others in public, and the managing of ourselves in private. Ee can, at best, know from experience how to manage someone that is just like ourselves, and have an idea of what to say in public to people not like ourselves, but not what to say to them in private. And that's the best case, assuming we've had good managers (and thus have good examples to draw from). More likely, we've seen tolerable managers, plus plenty of bad ones. To your point, how do we even recognize good management when we've seen it? How do we know what to emulate and what to avoid? We're the parents that say "well my parents beat me and I turned out just fine, so....". Management is a skill (or collection of skills) It's not a skillset that most jobs actually train, nor is it one that they do a good job of recognizing. Most of the jobs people have growing up (and beyond) reward managers that push for short-term gains over such things like "morale" or "communication" - these are the managers that are "successful" for the vast majority of experience. Just look at how many places have techies shift into management as a career development path, but don't do anything to train them or say that people are managed any differently than code. There are plenty of reasons for people to be biased against the person (their manager) that tells them what they don't want to hear (such as "take on this extra work" or "your time off request is denied" or "don't implement your idea"), there's also plenty of reasons to expect that most managers legitimately ARE poor managers.
jarofgreen 7y ago
> Everyone feels uncomfortable when a conversation goes off-script, but we as a society expect the 'abnormal' people to be the ones who bear the consequences of that discomfort whenever it arises. This is talked about as the "double empathy" problem.
- mcny 7y ago
  This is the first I've heard of it so I searched Google: > About 4,280 results Clearly not talked about enough! For those who are curious, this website seems pretty legit HTML: https://network.autism.org.uk/knowledge/insight-opinion/double-empathy-problem https://network.autism.org.uk/knowledge/insight-opinion/doub... PDF: https://network.autism.org.uk/sites/default/files/ckfinder/files/The%20double%20empathy%20problem%20(PDF%20Ready).pdf https://network.autism.org.uk/sites/default/files/ckfinder/f... The author of the post quotes: “...right from the start, from the time someone came up with the word ‘autism’, the condition has been judged from the outside, by its appearances, and not from the inside according to how it is experienced.” (Donna Williams, 1996, p.14). I skimmed through it and this part seems like the gist: > Simply put, the theory of the double empathy problem suggests that when people with very different experiences of the world interact with one another, they will struggle to empathise with each other. This is likely to be exacerbated through differences in language use and comprehension. I first started to publish theoretical accounts of this issue in the early 2010s, yet similar ideas can be found in the work of Luke Beardon regarding ‘cross-neurological theory of mind’ and in that of the philosopher Ian Hacking. I imagine this doesn't need to be just about autism. I imagine this is useful when living abroad, for example.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    > I imagine this doesn't need to be just about autism. I imagine this is useful when living abroad, for example. Interesting. Other applications would be to such potential things like "meeting an advanced alien species" or "interactions with a future GAI", etc.
    - philipodonnell 7y ago
Swizec 7y ago
Once upon a time I learned the most useful phrase: "Sure, which of these projects would you like me to deprioritize?" You're still saying no, but you're also saying yes. It gives your manager the opportunity to make the tradeoff. Sometimes they realize their ask really isn't that important and put it on your list for later. And sometimes they decide the new thing is indeed more important than what you're doing, which is a big win. You should always work on the most important thing you can be working on. Your manager's job is to prioritize your work. Let them.
- hobs 7y ago
  And often they say "I need both." and walk away in a huff.
  - wil421 7y ago
    You’re working for a terrible boss if that’s their response. I’ve had good bosses say that in jest but they were never serious.
    - hobs 7y ago
      Absolutely - I have worked for a TON of terrible bosses. As far as I am concerned, they are the majority. I got this advice on how to handle prioritization early in my career and it made a lot of sense to me, so I tried it with every boss I had. For maybe the first 10 years of working never had a boss who answered this question with anything but "figure it out yourself" or "that's your problem" or "both."
      - karmelapple 7y ago
        How many bosses did you have in your first 10 years of working? That sounds awful and I’m sorry you went through that. I used to work at a very large company, and perhaps because of that, when I couldn’t get something done on time, asking for help was something I felt empowered to do. Now that I’m a co-founder of a much smaller company, we don’t have as many people to help if someone gets overworked... but that means we’re much more careful about asking for too much over a given amount of time. Software development comes with all kinds of unknown unknowns when you first begin on a change, so we generally plan for that. Having a small team - and strongly wanting everyone to have a 40 hour week, not a 60 hour week - has helped me understand how essential prioritization is to our success.
wastedhours 7y ago
I'm glad I work somewhere where the humour of "do I want to and can I are two different questions" goes unchallenged. I've found that that sentence alone helps clear up the confusion and helps higher ups (with a bit of jest) think about the prioritisation.
thisisauserid 7y ago
This is almost the plot of Bartleby the Scrivener which often been been said to remind a modern reader of autism.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  Bartleby suffers from clinical depression. The author notes as much in their conclusion, where they explain that Bartleby's soul was crushed slowly and steadily by lonesome work in the dead-letter room of the post office. Bartleby never refuses to do work in such a plain way. He explains himself. "I would prefer not to," he says, and indeed he means it. He's not sure what he would prefer to do other than sigh in malaise and look out the window, but routine paperwork is certainly not it. Remember that Bartleby's job would today be done by a Xerox!
- mlyle 7y ago
  I too have been thinking of Bartleby through this discussion :D
mlyle 7y ago
> Everyone feels uncomfortable when a conversation goes off-script, but we as a society expect the 'abnormal' people to be the ones who bear the consequences of that discomfort whenever it arises. There's a little more going on in the example, I think. It's a common social technique among adults with authority to frame requests as a question-- "Could you please....?" or "Would you like to....?". This is gentler and shows a degree of deference and courtesy from the person with authority to the other person. A blunt "no" effectively comes across as a rejection of that olive branch-- I think that's where the initial internal panic comes from. If you don't understand the employee's autism-- even after working out the problem in this case is a prioritization issue-- it creates a bit of an ongoing question about the employee and their willingness to be a cooperative member of the team.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  To me, "would you like to" is different than "would you". I would like to get paid to spend 24/7 on vacation, not do another work task, but if you're asking me if I would do something you need done, that's different.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    Sure-- the answer for most work tasks would be "no". Let me tell you, though, from experience: when my wife asks "would you like to [go to some event that I clearly wouldn't really like to go to]" --- a blunt "no" is not a good answer to that question, even if it's literally true. ;)
    - __s 7y ago
      There could just as easily be an article "They Get Dumped All the Time. And They Have No Idea Why"
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      My answer is often “Will I? Yes. Would I like to? No.”
crankylinuxuser 7y ago
I explain that I'm working on X, which was conveyed as high priority. And how shall I prioritize this new one? Many times, it's mentioned so you know about it; not to switch tasks to it. It's a delicate balance... And it sucks esp if 'everything' is high priority.
samstave 7y ago
I wprked for an architecture firm in seattle in 1994. It was owned and ran by two brothers, the Yuans. I was making $9 per hour. One would come to me and task me with something. Then later, the other would come tell me to stop doing what i was doing and do his task. Then the prior would come see me not doing his task and yell at me for not doing his task. Then the other would do the same! Super shitty managers. I designed the entire (at the time) fred Hutchinson cancer research center by myself, while dealing with the above dynamic for $9 fucking dollars an hour.
- ErikVandeWater 7y ago
  I'm sure the people undergoing therapy there appreciate your grit to complete the project :)
- univalent 7y ago
  There's this beautiful scene in the movie 'Margin Call' that I liked about engineering and building things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNX7u_8KL7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNX7u_8KL7g Yes, I have also been in shitty situations working with idiots. But the saving grace is, at the end of it all, you have built something that hopefully helps people. In your case, you clearly did and you should be proud of that.
  - samstave 7y ago
    So many of us in the community of HN can have that same feeling. Its the engineering way of saying in rage: "DO YOU KNOW ~~WHO I AM~~ (What I have CREATED)??"
    - samstave 7y ago
      I designe an entire fucking cancer fesearch center for $18,000 a year. Do you know long it took me? 3 fucking months. Lets look at some other ENTIRE hospitals i have designed; 1. El camino hosptal (tech implementation designer and lea 2. Zuckerberg SF general (he hadnt bought the naming right yet) but i was primary tech designer to that new tower - funny story about hout the cfo fucked that building for being earthquake compliant/resistant Nome alaska hospital Sequioa hospital (was only on the ips team) UCSF.... And many others So fuck! Off! With! Your! Downvotes! Design me a fucking hospital. And then opertionalize it. Ever had three surgens and ten nurses intabate a patient in a space 10x10 with all equip? Yeah thats fun.
rayiner 7y ago
I mean, the question is a poor one regardless of who you are talking to. It's phrasing a command as a question.
dqpb 7y ago
> It doesn't seem fair, especially since the 'abnormal' people are expected to bear their discomfort in silence The key to manipulation is to always make the other person feel like the abnormal one.
tofflos 7y ago
> I gotta say, I'm surprised that this needed to be explained to the manager. If someone asks a worker whether they want to do something and the worker say "no", the manager's instinct is to panic and escalate before trying to clarify anything? It's possible those attempts were left out of the story for narrative reasons - it is, like you said, a good example for the article. But let's pretend they weren't and that is how it actually went down: The manager is human and will not navigate every given situation optimally. Hopefully organizations will become increasingly aware of this over time and continuously improve the methodology for selecting and training future managers.
longtom 7y ago
Being on the spectrum myself that is a level of not thinking social things through that I hope I am well above and beyond of. Socializing a chore for me even though I am a philantropist, but if there is a conflict of information I am not shy about pointing it out immediately, or, at worst. in a follow-up email. That individual was just not thinking it through that information can be incomplete, and it helps kinda quickly dumping some mildly conflicting information from several stack frames deep, even if it can be awkward briefly. If this was not a singular occurrence I can understand why he was fired: He was not up for the job or not taking it seriously enough.
vinbreau 7y ago
Just last week I received an email from a manager saying "Never do (this), especially with US customers." Three days after that email I ran into (this) situation and emailed him asking what I am to do. He said frustratingly that I should do (this) since it wasn't a US customer. I emailed him both his quotes, the ones that said never do (this) and the one that said, of course, you should do (this). I pointed out that was confusing. He said it was my fault for being confused and to email him when I am. Middle management is often desperately trying to justify their job by creating purposeful confusion. I swear he's trying to trip me up looking for reasons to put marks on my record.
- shredprez 7y ago
  > Middle management is often desperately trying to justify their job by creating purposeful confusion. I swear he's trying to trip me up looking for reasons to put marks on my record. Or he, like most of us, is primarily self-interested and is mostly concerned with not looking like a self-contradictory idiot (and keeping marks off his own record). Never ascribe to malice, etc.
  - jdc 7y ago
    I don't think he's saying it's malice - just very one-sided self-interest.
  - anon44 7y ago
    That is malice.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - ozim 7y ago
    Never ascribe to malice for people you don't know and for things it is easy to explain with incompetence. If someone is your manager for some time and you can reasonably expect competence, that is different thing. If someone is self interested and his actions say so, this is malice, not just incompetence.
dlphn___xyz 7y ago
autistic or not - who would willingly add more work on their already packed schedule? this is setting yourself up for failure
musicale 7y ago
Usually this is how it goes down: B: Stop working on X and work on Y immediately. E: If I work on Y it will prevent me from completing X before critical deadline T. Can anyone else help out with Y and/or X? B: No. You need to complete X and Y before deadline T or you will be fired. Have a nice day.
- wst_ 7y ago
  Hm, I can't imagine conversation like this in my job. Unless, this marked with a tint of sarcasm which I've failed to notice.
ezoe 7y ago
If a person's job is to assign tasks to the workers and that person don't keep track of the current assigned tasks the worker has and keep assigning tasks without priority, a person is incompetent. If a person don't have the information of the assigned tasks of the workers. the entire work place is incompetent. Either way, just quit is the best course of action since allowing the existence of incompetent manager or lack of tracking in the work place is usually cannot be changed easily. Unless there exists a huge reward for fixing the root issue, a hired worker should just switch the employee.
- kaitai 7y ago
  This is very simplistic. Managers often expect employees to be able to prioritize a bit; many managers consider it to be an important trait. Moreover, many managers say things like, "Do you wanna do the TPS reports now?" while they mean, "It is time to do the TPS reports now." It is a colloquial way of speaking that non-Aspie/non-autistic folks generally pick up on. That is the point of the article. There is no reason to posit incompetence.
celticmusic 7y ago
> Everyone feels uncomfortable when a conversation goes off-script, but we as a society expect the 'abnormal' people to be the ones who bear the consequences of that discomfort whenever it arises. It doesn't seem fair, especially since the 'abnormal' people are expected to bear their discomfort in silence, but that's life for you. Reminds me of something I say a lot. There are some people that will point to geeky developers (as an example stereotype) and say they have poor social skills while believing they have good social skills. When in truth it's always easy to get along with people you have things in common with. Good social skills is getting along with people you don't have a lot in common with. Meaning: If you find yourself struggling to get along with those geeky developers, you don't have great social skills either.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  It's totally possible to get along with people that you would describe as 'having poor social skills'. It sounds like you're conflating "getting along with" with "thinking highly of their social skills".
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    I think you may have misunderstood the post.
    - lazyasciiart 7y ago
      I don't think so. You're implying that people who say "they have poor social skills" are in fact giving away their own poor social skills. I am saying that is not true.
      - adjkant 7y ago
        As someone reading along: > Meaning: If you find yourself struggling to get along with those geeky developers, you don't have great social skills either. Identifying their poor social skills does not give away their own. Being unable to get along with them does. Essentially I read this as "if you have good social skills, you can diagnose what's going wrong in the current setting and if the other person is unlikely to change their actions, you can adjust your social interactions to fix the communication issue". In this case, that means not freaking out when a subordinate says no and calmly asking "Why not?", which would then lead to this information and an opportunity to explain that X is more important, and everyone moves on happily with their day. The manager's failure to go through that highlights the issues in their own social skills.
zwayhowder 7y ago
My first day at a big4 consulting firm I was given the best advice I've ever received. "You need to get comfortable saying no to requests that aren't important". It's so easy to drown in consulting by trying to please everyone. Sometimes you just need to say "no, I can't do that now I'm too busy.".
jrace 7y ago
As a manager part of your job is to get your workers to do tasks. "NO" does not mean "I cannot take on that task right now" it means "No, I will not do what you ask" A good manager should understand their workers idiosyncrasies....but when a worker outright refuses a task, what are they supposed to do?
TheOperator 7y ago
Life is indeed not fair. If a person has to interact with two equally good people, but one needed accomidation, they would prefer the company of the other. Some get some value out of accomidating others but even then you end up in a relationship with an inequal power dynamic. You either minimise the burdens you create for others and maximize your strengths or you live a lonely unemployed life dependant on others. Just solving even one communication issue can earn you goodwill with every single person you interact with.

duxup 7y ago

Yeah that's a good observation. I see too many managers are quick to interpret "refusing" for what is often a miscommunication, and after being caught off guard they don't know what to do.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Good managers are hard to find.
- duxup 7y ago
  And the skills we're talking about aren't highly valued / recognized by their managers often. Soft skills, no matter what the story line a company has, often are undervalued in my experience.
- mikeash 7y ago
  I imagine you need to train them, just like you have to train any other skill. Yet in most companies it seems to come down to, “Fred seems like he’d be a good manager, let’s promote him.”
- mrmonkeyman 7y ago
  So are good workers.
deleted 7y ago
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deleted 7y ago
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everdrive 7y ago

I think this highlights the other half of the "asperger's problem." A lot of people have bad managers. Someone with normal social function might simply have the soft skills necessary to mitigate their poor management. This does make them a more successful employee in a sense.

arethuza 7y ago
I think I'd go even further than that - most people are bad managers and those who are good managers usually have had a fair amount of coaching and mentoring by other good managers. Edit: I should add training to that, while I wouldn't claim to be a good manager I did have some 1-on-1 training that did make me a less bad manager (being videoed in meetings and my interactions with people analysed).
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  > most people are bad managers A lot of people also have a strong anti manager bias. They're predisposed to hate any manager they have, unless proven otherwise.
  - ergothus 7y ago
    Sure, but how many managers are actually trained to do what they do? There's this strange expectation that everyone somehow knows how to be a good manager, when in truth, most of us know (some of) what a manager is supposed to DO, but have only what we've personally experienced to guide us on HOW to do it. And what we've seen is only a sliver of the process - we've likely only seen the managing of others in public, and the managing of ourselves in private. Ee can, at best, know from experience how to manage someone that is just like ourselves, and have an idea of what to say in public to people not like ourselves, but not what to say to them in private. And that's the best case, assuming we've had good managers (and thus have good examples to draw from). More likely, we've seen tolerable managers, plus plenty of bad ones. To your point, how do we even recognize good management when we've seen it? How do we know what to emulate and what to avoid? We're the parents that say "well my parents beat me and I turned out just fine, so....". Management is a skill (or collection of skills) It's not a skillset that most jobs actually train, nor is it one that they do a good job of recognizing. Most of the jobs people have growing up (and beyond) reward managers that push for short-term gains over such things like "morale" or "communication" - these are the managers that are "successful" for the vast majority of experience. Just look at how many places have techies shift into management as a career development path, but don't do anything to train them or say that people are managed any differently than code. There are plenty of reasons for people to be biased against the person (their manager) that tells them what they don't want to hear (such as "take on this extra work" or "your time off request is denied" or "don't implement your idea"), there's also plenty of reasons to expect that most managers legitimately ARE poor managers.

jarofgreen 7y ago

mcny 7y ago
This is the first I've heard of it so I searched Google: > About 4,280 results Clearly not talked about enough! For those who are curious, this website seems pretty legit HTML: https://network.autism.org.uk/knowledge/insight-opinion/double-empathy-problem https://network.autism.org.uk/knowledge/insight-opinion/doub... PDF: https://network.autism.org.uk/sites/default/files/ckfinder/files/The%20double%20empathy%20problem%20(PDF%20Ready).pdf https://network.autism.org.uk/sites/default/files/ckfinder/f... The author of the post quotes: “...right from the start, from the time someone came up with the word ‘autism’, the condition has been judged from the outside, by its appearances, and not from the inside according to how it is experienced.” (Donna Williams, 1996, p.14). I skimmed through it and this part seems like the gist: > Simply put, the theory of the double empathy problem suggests that when people with very different experiences of the world interact with one another, they will struggle to empathise with each other. This is likely to be exacerbated through differences in language use and comprehension. I first started to publish theoretical accounts of this issue in the early 2010s, yet similar ideas can be found in the work of Luke Beardon regarding ‘cross-neurological theory of mind’ and in that of the philosopher Ian Hacking. I imagine this doesn't need to be just about autism. I imagine this is useful when living abroad, for example.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > I imagine this doesn't need to be just about autism. I imagine this is useful when living abroad, for example. Interesting. Other applications would be to such potential things like "meeting an advanced alien species" or "interactions with a future GAI", etc.
  - philipodonnell 7y ago

Swizec 7y ago

Once upon a time I learned the most useful phrase: "Sure, which of these projects would you like me to deprioritize?" You're still saying no, but you're also saying yes. It gives your manager the opportunity to make the tradeoff. Sometimes they realize their ask really isn't that important and put it on your list for later. And sometimes they decide the new thing is indeed more important than what you're doing, which is a big win. You should always work on the most important thing you can be working on. Your manager's job is to prioritize your work. Let them.

hobs 7y ago
And often they say "I need both." and walk away in a huff.
- wil421 7y ago
  You’re working for a terrible boss if that’s their response. I’ve had good bosses say that in jest but they were never serious.
  - hobs 7y ago
    Absolutely - I have worked for a TON of terrible bosses. As far as I am concerned, they are the majority. I got this advice on how to handle prioritization early in my career and it made a lot of sense to me, so I tried it with every boss I had. For maybe the first 10 years of working never had a boss who answered this question with anything but "figure it out yourself" or "that's your problem" or "both."
    - karmelapple 7y ago
      How many bosses did you have in your first 10 years of working? That sounds awful and I’m sorry you went through that. I used to work at a very large company, and perhaps because of that, when I couldn’t get something done on time, asking for help was something I felt empowered to do. Now that I’m a co-founder of a much smaller company, we don’t have as many people to help if someone gets overworked... but that means we’re much more careful about asking for too much over a given amount of time. Software development comes with all kinds of unknown unknowns when you first begin on a change, so we generally plan for that. Having a small team - and strongly wanting everyone to have a 40 hour week, not a 60 hour week - has helped me understand how essential prioritization is to our success.

wastedhours 7y ago

I'm glad I work somewhere where the humour of "do I want to and can I are two different questions" goes unchallenged. I've found that that sentence alone helps clear up the confusion and helps higher ups (with a bit of jest) think about the prioritisation.

thisisauserid 7y ago

This is almost the plot of Bartleby the Scrivener which often been been said to remind a modern reader of autism.

lidHanteyk 7y ago
Bartleby suffers from clinical depression. The author notes as much in their conclusion, where they explain that Bartleby's soul was crushed slowly and steadily by lonesome work in the dead-letter room of the post office. Bartleby never refuses to do work in such a plain way. He explains himself. "I would prefer not to," he says, and indeed he means it. He's not sure what he would prefer to do other than sigh in malaise and look out the window, but routine paperwork is certainly not it. Remember that Bartleby's job would today be done by a Xerox!
mlyle 7y ago
I too have been thinking of Bartleby through this discussion :D

mlyle 7y ago

> Everyone feels uncomfortable when a conversation goes off-script, but we as a society expect the 'abnormal' people to be the ones who bear the consequences of that discomfort whenever it arises. There's a little more going on in the example, I think. It's a common social technique among adults with authority to frame requests as a question-- "Could you please....?" or "Would you like to....?". This is gentler and shows a degree of deference and courtesy from the person with authority to the other person. A blunt "no" effectively comes across as a rejection of that olive branch-- I think that's where the initial internal panic comes from. If you don't understand the employee's autism-- even after working out the problem in this case is a prioritization issue-- it creates a bit of an ongoing question about the employee and their willingness to be a cooperative member of the team.

bcrosby95 7y ago
To me, "would you like to" is different than "would you". I would like to get paid to spend 24/7 on vacation, not do another work task, but if you're asking me if I would do something you need done, that's different.
- mlyle 7y ago
  Sure-- the answer for most work tasks would be "no". Let me tell you, though, from experience: when my wife asks "would you like to [go to some event that I clearly wouldn't really like to go to]" --- a blunt "no" is not a good answer to that question, even if it's literally true. ;)
  - __s 7y ago
    There could just as easily be an article "They Get Dumped All the Time. And They Have No Idea Why"
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    My answer is often “Will I? Yes. Would I like to? No.”

crankylinuxuser 7y ago

I explain that I'm working on X, which was conveyed as high priority. And how shall I prioritize this new one? Many times, it's mentioned so you know about it; not to switch tasks to it. It's a delicate balance... And it sucks esp if 'everything' is high priority.

samstave 7y ago

I wprked for an architecture firm in seattle in 1994. It was owned and ran by two brothers, the Yuans. I was making $9 per hour. One would come to me and task me with something. Then later, the other would come tell me to stop doing what i was doing and do his task. Then the prior would come see me not doing his task and yell at me for not doing his task. Then the other would do the same! Super shitty managers. I designed the entire (at the time) fred Hutchinson cancer research center by myself, while dealing with the above dynamic for $9 fucking dollars an hour.

ErikVandeWater 7y ago
I'm sure the people undergoing therapy there appreciate your grit to complete the project :)
univalent 7y ago
There's this beautiful scene in the movie 'Margin Call' that I liked about engineering and building things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNX7u_8KL7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNX7u_8KL7g Yes, I have also been in shitty situations working with idiots. But the saving grace is, at the end of it all, you have built something that hopefully helps people. In your case, you clearly did and you should be proud of that.
- samstave 7y ago
  So many of us in the community of HN can have that same feeling. Its the engineering way of saying in rage: "DO YOU KNOW ~~WHO I AM~~ (What I have CREATED)??"
  - samstave 7y ago
    I designe an entire fucking cancer fesearch center for $18,000 a year. Do you know long it took me? 3 fucking months. Lets look at some other ENTIRE hospitals i have designed; 1. El camino hosptal (tech implementation designer and lea 2. Zuckerberg SF general (he hadnt bought the naming right yet) but i was primary tech designer to that new tower - funny story about hout the cfo fucked that building for being earthquake compliant/resistant Nome alaska hospital Sequioa hospital (was only on the ips team) UCSF.... And many others So fuck! Off! With! Your! Downvotes! Design me a fucking hospital. And then opertionalize it. Ever had three surgens and ten nurses intabate a patient in a space 10x10 with all equip? Yeah thats fun.

rayiner 7y ago

I mean, the question is a poor one regardless of who you are talking to. It's phrasing a command as a question.

dqpb 7y ago

> It doesn't seem fair, especially since the 'abnormal' people are expected to bear their discomfort in silence The key to manipulation is to always make the other person feel like the abnormal one.

tofflos 7y ago

> I gotta say, I'm surprised that this needed to be explained to the manager. If someone asks a worker whether they want to do something and the worker say "no", the manager's instinct is to panic and escalate before trying to clarify anything? It's possible those attempts were left out of the story for narrative reasons - it is, like you said, a good example for the article. But let's pretend they weren't and that is how it actually went down: The manager is human and will not navigate every given situation optimally. Hopefully organizations will become increasingly aware of this over time and continuously improve the methodology for selecting and training future managers.

longtom 7y ago

Being on the spectrum myself that is a level of not thinking social things through that I hope I am well above and beyond of. Socializing a chore for me even though I am a philantropist, but if there is a conflict of information I am not shy about pointing it out immediately, or, at worst. in a follow-up email. That individual was just not thinking it through that information can be incomplete, and it helps kinda quickly dumping some mildly conflicting information from several stack frames deep, even if it can be awkward briefly. If this was not a singular occurrence I can understand why he was fired: He was not up for the job or not taking it seriously enough.

vinbreau 7y ago

Just last week I received an email from a manager saying "Never do (this), especially with US customers." Three days after that email I ran into (this) situation and emailed him asking what I am to do. He said frustratingly that I should do (this) since it wasn't a US customer. I emailed him both his quotes, the ones that said never do (this) and the one that said, of course, you should do (this). I pointed out that was confusing. He said it was my fault for being confused and to email him when I am. Middle management is often desperately trying to justify their job by creating purposeful confusion. I swear he's trying to trip me up looking for reasons to put marks on my record.

shredprez 7y ago
> Middle management is often desperately trying to justify their job by creating purposeful confusion. I swear he's trying to trip me up looking for reasons to put marks on my record. Or he, like most of us, is primarily self-interested and is mostly concerned with not looking like a self-contradictory idiot (and keeping marks off his own record). Never ascribe to malice, etc.
- jdc 7y ago
  I don't think he's saying it's malice - just very one-sided self-interest.
- anon44 7y ago
  That is malice.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ozim 7y ago
  Never ascribe to malice for people you don't know and for things it is easy to explain with incompetence. If someone is your manager for some time and you can reasonably expect competence, that is different thing. If someone is self interested and his actions say so, this is malice, not just incompetence.

dlphn___xyz 7y ago

autistic or not - who would willingly add more work on their already packed schedule? this is setting yourself up for failure

musicale 7y ago

Usually this is how it goes down: B: Stop working on X and work on Y immediately. E: If I work on Y it will prevent me from completing X before critical deadline T. Can anyone else help out with Y and/or X? B: No. You need to complete X and Y before deadline T or you will be fired. Have a nice day.

wst_ 7y ago
Hm, I can't imagine conversation like this in my job. Unless, this marked with a tint of sarcasm which I've failed to notice.

ezoe 7y ago

If a person's job is to assign tasks to the workers and that person don't keep track of the current assigned tasks the worker has and keep assigning tasks without priority, a person is incompetent. If a person don't have the information of the assigned tasks of the workers. the entire work place is incompetent. Either way, just quit is the best course of action since allowing the existence of incompetent manager or lack of tracking in the work place is usually cannot be changed easily. Unless there exists a huge reward for fixing the root issue, a hired worker should just switch the employee.

kaitai 7y ago
This is very simplistic. Managers often expect employees to be able to prioritize a bit; many managers consider it to be an important trait. Moreover, many managers say things like, "Do you wanna do the TPS reports now?" while they mean, "It is time to do the TPS reports now." It is a colloquial way of speaking that non-Aspie/non-autistic folks generally pick up on. That is the point of the article. There is no reason to posit incompetence.

celticmusic 7y ago

> Everyone feels uncomfortable when a conversation goes off-script, but we as a society expect the 'abnormal' people to be the ones who bear the consequences of that discomfort whenever it arises. It doesn't seem fair, especially since the 'abnormal' people are expected to bear their discomfort in silence, but that's life for you. Reminds me of something I say a lot. There are some people that will point to geeky developers (as an example stereotype) and say they have poor social skills while believing they have good social skills. When in truth it's always easy to get along with people you have things in common with. Good social skills is getting along with people you don't have a lot in common with. Meaning: If you find yourself struggling to get along with those geeky developers, you don't have great social skills either.

lazyasciiart 7y ago
It's totally possible to get along with people that you would describe as 'having poor social skills'. It sounds like you're conflating "getting along with" with "thinking highly of their social skills".
- celticmusic 7y ago
  I think you may have misunderstood the post.
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    I don't think so. You're implying that people who say "they have poor social skills" are in fact giving away their own poor social skills. I am saying that is not true.
    - adjkant 7y ago
      As someone reading along: > Meaning: If you find yourself struggling to get along with those geeky developers, you don't have great social skills either. Identifying their poor social skills does not give away their own. Being unable to get along with them does. Essentially I read this as "if you have good social skills, you can diagnose what's going wrong in the current setting and if the other person is unlikely to change their actions, you can adjust your social interactions to fix the communication issue". In this case, that means not freaking out when a subordinate says no and calmly asking "Why not?", which would then lead to this information and an opportunity to explain that X is more important, and everyone moves on happily with their day. The manager's failure to go through that highlights the issues in their own social skills.

zwayhowder 7y ago

My first day at a big4 consulting firm I was given the best advice I've ever received. "You need to get comfortable saying no to requests that aren't important". It's so easy to drown in consulting by trying to please everyone. Sometimes you just need to say "no, I can't do that now I'm too busy.".

jrace 7y ago

As a manager part of your job is to get your workers to do tasks. "NO" does not mean "I cannot take on that task right now" it means "No, I will not do what you ask" A good manager should understand their workers idiosyncrasies....but when a worker outright refuses a task, what are they supposed to do?

TheOperator 7y ago

Life is indeed not fair. If a person has to interact with two equally good people, but one needed accomidation, they would prefer the company of the other. Some get some value out of accomidating others but even then you end up in a relationship with an inequal power dynamic. You either minimise the burdens you create for others and maximize your strengths or you live a lonely unemployed life dependant on others. Just solving even one communication issue can earn you goodwill with every single person you interact with.