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I read this as being strongly opinionated and egocentric.. I want to call it "ausplaining", this tendency to go "no no, YOU don't understand ME (because I'm sp

• q-big 4y ago
  > The author may also benefit from investing some of their mental capital (I'm not being sarcastic, they're obviously very intelligent) into learning how to play the games I am not aware of any good systematic textbooks on this topic. (of course not the author)
  • h2odragon 4y ago
    This is a classic for good reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...
    • larve 4y ago
      I second this one!
      • bigDinosaur 4y ago
        Hi larve, It can be a bit on the nose, though, larve, to use this book. Best, bigDinosaur -- Seriously, it's very easy to go wrong with How to win friends. IMO a lot of its advice probably worked better back in the day when formality was somewhat more appreciated and knowing when to avoid it more of a skill.
    • cloverich 4y ago
      I still remember reading this and the impact it had on me at the time (I was ~20). Its funny looking back, in a way its such a cheesy and outdated book. I'm sure there are many better ones now. And I don't have problems with the kinds of conversations it talks about there anymore. But I still remember very clearly reading and having an epiphany in that book, and suddenly I could talk to people again. Strangers even. It was a definite turning point in life for me personally. Being able to act a little more normal goes a long way when you can't be normal on your own.
  • dusted 4y ago
    I am also not. But anything that gives me insight into how I differ from others, and how their mind works has helped me. Even books like "The Intelligent Negotiator", "The Intelligent Conversationalist" which superficially seems to be mainly about manipulating and scamming people give interesting insights into how people work. I've also read some books on pedagogy, a subject I hate due to how much childhood trauma its rigid application caused me.. Maybe because of it.. Those books, at least the old ones I read, define the boxes into which children will and must fit, the methods to make them fit, and the reasoning behind those methods.. Very interesting stuff to read for me, because it made it clear why it didn't work on me, and why it would have worked on my peers. They are almost lists of "behaviour X is due to situation Y" which may be true for neurotypical children, but were certainly not for me. I digress, they gave me good insights into how "the others" work.
• starkd 4y ago
  He openly admits his default way of dealing with the miscommunication was to quietly walk out of the room. Looks like he could consider some of his own advice. Also, referring to "allistic communication patterns" might also be another impediment here. Normal people don't talk like that. It's like talking to a robot.
  • shlant 4y ago
    > Also, referring to "allistic communication patterns" might also be another impediment here. Normal people don't talk like that. It's like talking to a robot. why are you assuming they are talking to people IRL like they would write a blog post? Very few people talk in person like they type or behave differently in professional environments vs casual. Seems like a weird critique.
    • starkd 4y ago
      Fair point. He did not explicitly quote his conversations with his colleagues. Still, you have to admit "allistic communication patterns" is an awkward phrase to use for a blog post talking about his personal struggles. It might be something you find in a psychology research text, but he was trying to relate his personal experience.
      • shlant 4y ago
        I think "allistic communication patterns" very effectively conveys what they are referring to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
        • knaik94 4y ago
          Allistic communication patterns aren't homogenous. And I think the phrasing is very clinical. It is effective but the tone is not very welcoming. I think it's a fair critique of the writing. I would have written something like, "Allistic people communicate in a way that causes friction in understanding by autistic people, and vice versa, and this leads to a slowdown in the workplace for everyone."
• larve 4y ago
  Author here, thanks for reading. I didn’t give much information about my life, but I am pretty adept at playing all these games. So much so that I thought there was no way I could be autistic because of how many friends and business relationships I had. Until it hit me that I spent my 20ies doing what you suggest, which is studying the heck out of these things. But it stops at engineering, where I try to be very open-minded and learn as much as I can. I have to readily accept I am wrong on most of my assumptions because I just couldn’t be a good engineer otherwise. I can be perfectly suave and agreeable discussing anything else. That means I probably know how to play the “acquiesce when you should” game quite well. But I’m at work because I am blessed to have a job where I get to do what I care about: good engineering. I deliver great value when people understand my way of thinking, and thankfully I have plenty of colleagues that get it.
  • dusted 4y ago
    Thank you for answering. I very much relate.. I've been so bitter as to keep a small list of "told you so's" that I'd update when my rejected ideas were finally proven to be the better path (though it may have been months or even years after the fact (most agonizing when someone else suggested exactly the same thing, but explained it in other terms,focusing on things I didn't find central to the point). In the end I deleted the file. Some of the "told you so's" were petty things anyway, and.. Now I try and take it as part of my responsibility to work a bit harder at finding arguments against my point of view, as well as work a bit more politically to get it through when I'm ready to put my head on the line that I'm right and everyone else are wrong. P.S. I'm closing in on the big 4-o and I'm still working on myself, still trying to learn politics, how to talk with nontechnical superiors and how to accept that sometimes, we go with the wrong solution because someone else tells so.
    • larve 4y ago
      Thanks! I wish you the best. Being bitter is something I hate, and it's very non-productive. The best way to move forward when I disagree with say, architectural decisions or tech stack decisions (because it's very valid to disagree here, they're just really unknowns that we can try our best to sketch out), is to have us all write down the pros and cons, and depending on the project, timebox it and revisit certain decisions at a latter date. This is acknowledging that either opinion can be right, wrong, in between, and we might never find out, yet a decision needs to be made. In a way, it's a way to do a team-wide "we told us so, so what now?"
• 300bps 4y ago
  I cringed reading the article because of how much it reminded me of my younger self in my software engineering career 30 years ago. For what it’s worth, I think your assessment and advice are both spot-on. I know the original author is far into his career as well but I think especially as we get more senior that humility and valuing other’s perspectives become as important as the technology. Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career were from dismissing the ideas of peers.
  • scotty79 4y ago
    Great. You learned to mask better. But younger people and some older ones are really not keen on doing that anymore. Humility is great, but automatically accepting the blame for somebody's failure to communicate something to you just because they are allistic ... that is not so great.
  • larve 4y ago
    Thanks for reading. I don’t go very much into my day to day workflow, but I actively seek out ideas of my peers and trusting them to do their own mistakes, being at the ready to help out only when things go very wrong. I wrote this article because despite being as humble as I can, these situations still arise. You can get very far doing so, but my biggest mistakes were to not realize that I sometimes actually right.
• Spooky23 4y ago
  I didn’t read it as egocentric. The author cares a lot about correctness and delivering high quality work, but the definition of quality or good is very limited in scope. I don’t doubt the veracity of what the author wrote, but I would guess that if we spoke to the counter-parties, their recollection of certain things would be very different. How people perceive the world and express themselves vary, and some people don’t jive well. I have a developer on my team who is very literal person, if I say “I could kill that guy”, he doesn’t capture the nuance. But he is brilliant, a friend and trusted colleague. A good leader should get that and adjust.
  • knaik94 4y ago
    I believe it is unintentionally egocentric to assume a single individual's perspective is enough to guarantee correctness. I imagine most of the time that individual makes the best call, but that's not less egocentric. It's easy for an individual to qualify the correctness of technical material, but not easy to do the same for soft skills like communication. As a senior developer or leader, you need some egocentricity in order to have a focused project and clear goals.
    • drewcoo 4y ago
      > I know better than to argue intangibles such as coding style or software architecture, but some things in Computer Science are just facts: we can verify them. I don't care much for saying false things to appease someone's ego. In cases like this, I'm not the one who can't acknowledge being wrong. Yes, there's some ego in that. Author won't back down. But clearly, the author isn't the ultimate arbiter of truth. Some things are objectively true.
• scotty79 4y ago
  Wow. The sheer level of disrespect in this comment... You can't appreciate that this person have spent 10h per day for last 23 years at dealing with computer issues. Instead you think it would be better spent learning some office politics. I'm not even sure how to comment on that.
  • cainxinth 4y ago
    There’s a difference between engaging in petty office politics and endeavoring to grow your soft skills. And everyone, including hard core techies, can benefit from learning how to better interact with other people.
    • scotty79 4y ago
      Or hear me out. Maybe allistic people could learn to interact with autistic people since they'll be meeting a lot of them in IT. Those are not hard skills to learn, like patiently responding to questions before jumping to conclusions about what the person you are talking to thinks about this and that.
      • mort96 4y ago
        This is the typical "improve society vs improve yourself" discourse. We should absolutely be in favor of changing society to make neurodivergent people's lives easier. This requires changing education policy, as well as increasing the diversity of communities so that children get more experience communicating with more kinds of people, and it'll probably take a few generations at the least before we start seeing major societal shifts, but it's a worthwhile effort. In the meantime, it's not a bad idea for an individual person to improve their soft skills, just to make their own life easier. For the individual neurodivergent person, learning how to effectively communicate with neurotypical people is a more effective short-term strategy than waiting for all of society to adapt.
        • larve 4y ago
          Author here. I agree, and both approaches are not exclusive. But I think you underestimate how much effort autistic people put into improving our soft skills in order to survive. In fact, I learned to be so good at social occasions that I never thought I could be autistic, given how many colleagues value me and how many friends I have and make. I reflect here upon situations where all these improved soft skills didn’t help however, and try to understand what might be going on.
• smugma 4y ago
  Egocentric: thinking only of oneself, without regard for the feelings or desires of others A lot of challenges with autism can be about not being able to see others’ perspectives
  • dmatech 4y ago
    Egocentrism is definitely not the same as selfishness. It's just an inability to understand that other people differ from you. In fact, it's possible to be highly egocentric and altruistic at the same time. You see this with parents who might deeply love their children but can't understand how their child's perspective might differ from their own. They might think their kids have the same likes and dislikes as they do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egocentrism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egocentrism
• anotherevan 4y ago
  I like the term "ausplaining" as you've defined it, but I don't think I would ever start using it. If feels like it would end up being used dismissively. I also find "allistic" feels like a dismissive or slightly derogatory alternative to neurotypical. (To be clear, I do not thing the author was using it that way at all, it is just the reaction the word engenders in me.)
  • pelagicAustral 4y ago
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• cookiengineer 4y ago
  Re: ausplaining I've learned the hard way that caring too much about work related topics doesn't contribute to your happiness. Company men will replace you if they can do their business math for justification, because they cannot see the technical complexities of the things they are "wanting to be built" for the company. Even when you can see dependencies of complexities that will break the plan a year ahead of time, and you were right in complaining about it, it doesn't effectively help you as a person. Being stuck in the past is just the same waste of energy as being angry about it. Hate and anger are infiltration techniques and should be treated as such. People will always react based upon their own experiences and understanding, and if you actively try to fight the statistics (aka you vs your team) you will just hurt your perception. Being seen as rude by other people gives you a strategival disadvantage for negotiation, and that will hurt the rate of adaption of your own suggestions. The ironic part is that people are even more petty than the "I told you so list" that you mentioned, only that they think subconcious pettiness of system1 isn't "petty" but only "a feeling" even though the mechanics and dynamics of it in a rational context are the same. Work is work, and it will always be "just work". As an autist you have to learn that other people don't care about things as much as you would do (in a utopian star trek world). As a hu-man (literally meaning being that forgets) you have a very limited capacity of memory, computation power and energy. And your efforts are far more efficiently spent outside the world of company politics, where most people are just busy 90% of the time with sidelining or attacking other departments for their own egomaniac benefits. Playing this game is a huge drain on energy (at least for me) and I therefore decided not to play it.
  • sleightofmind 4y ago
    "... strategival disadvantage... " I thought at first you had invented a clever new word combining strategy and survival. Then I realized that v is just very close to c on a qwerty keyboard. Oh well.
    • cookiengineer 4y ago
      Haha, time for an urban dict entry :D Yeah I was typing on mobile and didn't catch it while proofreading. The textarea is so annoyingly small :(
• mcherm 4y ago
  > I want to call it "ausplaining", this tendency to go "no no, YOU don't understand ME (because I'm special, not because I'm wrong)" That's certainly a message I have encountered in some places, and in the first few sentences of this article I thought that's what I might find here. But unlike you, I quickly concluded that that was not at all the article I was reading. Rather than argue that they were special because of their autism, this author listed highly specific, clearly explained ways in which other people they interact with fail to understand them. > If the author reads this, I'd congratulate them on finding the time to do that, but also advice them to maybe read 40 technical books every year, and then read 10 about the topics they clearly do struggle with (social interactions, politics, negotiation, psychology). Did you read the part of the article where the author explained that they do this reading because they find it enjoyable, rather than simply to get ahead?
  • deleted 4y ago
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• Aeolun 4y ago
  > I think the author would benefit from realizing that these things they dismiss as irrelevant (mind games/politics) are actually important and beneficial to understand and master They’re just part of the game. If you want to do well in any position you cannot neglect them.