7 ms·
Microsoft seeks to recruit autistic workers
- b08aa8b0dcfce 12y agoSo, they'd bring back Steve Ballmer?
- ExpiredLink 12y agoDevelopers, developers, developers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE
- nickysielicki 12y agoThis is in (somewhat) bad taste. I'm not personally offended (I am not some puritan that cares about jokes on the internet that are in bad taste) but I want to just point it out to you, in case you do not recognize it. You're using/reinforcing connotations that autism is a slur and that to call someone autistic is necessarily a bad thing.
- b08aa8b0dcfce 12y agoA bad taste joke...? Autism a slur...? I'm confused. You may be misinterpreting my post: It has been shown (or speculated?) that Ballmer may be subject to Asperger syndrome (from an article in the Time, a couple years ago.). I don't understand why describing Ballmer as autistic is a bad thing.
- visakanv 12y agoI appreciate this comment very much. More like this, please. This is how we should respond to things. Incredibly constructive, very nice.
- NicoJuicy 12y agoThe autism advantage (from 2012): http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/the-autism-advantage.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/the-autism-advant...
- nickysielicki 12y agoWhat they said: > "Each individual is different, some have an amazing ability to retain information, think at a level of detail and depth or excel in math or code." What they mean: > Each autist we're interested in is exactly the same, they have an amazing ability to be really fucking nerdy and make computers do magic shit. But they're hard to deal with, so we also need to make this a PR move. Seriously. I'm very uncomfortable with this article. There are probably people on the autism spectrum already working at all the big tech places. Why single them out like this? Newsflash: Not all people with autism are genius programmers. Not all genius programmers are people with autism. Treat everyone with respect. Treat everyone as an equal human being. This article doesn't seem to get that. > "just 15% of adults with autism in the UK are in full-time employment." No shit. That's because for every 100 individuals with autism, ~55 are considered mentally disabled (IQ<70) and only ~3 of them turn out to be geniuses (IQ>130). [1] Coupled with social challenges, this means very few individuals with autism are able to be independent into adulthood. [2] This article irritates me. [1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21272389 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21272389 [2]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14982237 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14982237
- gunter 12y agoI'm diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, with an IQ of > 140, and early in my career I worked at Microsoft. This is a PR stunt, but I'm comfortable with it if it helps align people's optics to the idea that autistic traits can indeed be harnessed into a super valuable role in society. You'd be surprised how many people don't think that's the case.
- ThomPete 12y agoThere are already a couple of companies hiring purely autistic people as they seem to be amazingly accomplished QA people.
- tudorw 12y agohttp://specialisterne.com/ http://specialisterne.com/
- Rafert 12y agoOr a Dutch company: http://specialisterren.nl/ http://specialisterren.nl/
- dataker 12y agoI'm autistic and I feel disgusted by such announcement. I have worked hard, gained a PhD and that's why I'd be recruited into one of these companies. If Microsoft could do anything, it should just understand an autistic perspective in the workplace and its often eccentric behavior.
- cheatsheet 12y agoI'm disgusted by your disgust. I wanted a PhD more than anything, but I didn't understand my disorder at the time, and I didn't have the care nor coping skills I needed to get through life on top of achieving what I wanted to in the PhD program. That was three years ago and I still cry almost every other night or so over it, but I am living a much healthier and more understood life, instead of every day being almost constant confusion and stress (on top of difficult school work, being a teaching assistant and a research assistant). It helps when the work environment understands explicitly. I experience heightened stress and chaotic thought patterns in overtly social situations that ripple across months when the situations only last days or hours, and I need to learn to engage in them very slowly at my own pace and be comfortable. If my former school understood this instead of having my professors call me 'aspie', maybe I would have a PhD by now. The one thing I learned from this is that I should not be forced into any situation that makes me experience distress, and I do not care if you think it's ridiculous. I have spent far too much of my life in difficult mental places, and I do not want to live like that anymore, and I won't. I don't force people around me to do graduate level math simply so they can talk to me in a language I understand. We are not always clever and eccentric, 100% of the time. It would help if people stopped looking at us like computers and started remembering we are human too.
- mathgeek 12y agoSo, honest question: how is this not discrimination? Not that I feel discriminated against personally, but it seems like they'd be opening themselves up to a HUGE legal liability. You can't hire someone based on their gender identity or the color of their skin, but you can hire based on a physical difference in the brain?
- army 12y agoUh, it's completely acceptable to "discriminate" against people based on factors that relate to their ability to succeed in the job. I don't think it's controversial that people's social skills or style of social interaction has a bearing on their job performance. You can argue to what extent and so on, but it's bizarre to think that it's not relevant.
- dtech 12y agoAutism is, in some aspects, a handicap, so this is not much different from programmes to help e.g. blind people. Or more neutral a programme to help types of underrepresented people like women or certain races. You could maybe qualify it as positive discrimination, but nowhere it's said that autistic people will have a higher chance of a job so it's not even really that.
- atom-morgan 12y agoIt is and what people consider permissible discrimination is subjective as we see here.
- emodendroket 12y ago"People who do not have a disability" are not a protected class, while people with disabilities are. This seems intuitive enough to me...
- mathgeek 12y agoThe problem with this statement is that you need to define "a disability." You will immediately have to deal with the problem of classifying clinical depression, for example.
- goldenkey 12y agoWhat about those of us with asspergers? We need jobs too...
- M8 12y ago"...understand the 'unwritten rules' of the workplace..." I guess everyone would benefit from writing them down.
- littletimmy 12y agoWhat a repulsive idea. Just hire people based on how well they can do a job. You don't have to pigeonhole people into one of your shitty mental categories and then hire them.
- Lorento 12y agoI used to hold the same opinion about positive discrimination for women and ethnic minorities, but now I realize that it's necessary to overcome people's instinctive prejudice. Most companies don't hire on how well you can do the job, they hire on how well they like you, and that encompasses all their prejudices. People can't just switch off their prejudice but if they're conscious of what it is, they can at least try to look past it.
- Perdition 12y agoI think the point was that current hiring practices filter out many autistic people due to the behavioral testing. Currently autistic people generally have to be good enough at social stuff to pass as "normal" in the interview. The more socially challenged don't get a chance to prove they could do the job.
- nickhuh 12y agoI think what Microsoft is trying to say, and what the article is doing a poor job of communicating, is that the company believes that there are some autistic people who have much to contribute to Microsoft, but they are currently disadvantaged by current hiring processes which rely so heavily upon interviews. The idea of trying to find alternative ways to assess candidates that don't rely so completely on interviews/high pressure social situations seems laudable to me, even if in this article it was poorly expressed.
- VLM 12y ago"don't rely so completely on interviews/high pressure social situations seems laudable to me" There is an obvious competitive advantage to any company that removes arbitrary and unnecessary barriers, aside from whats being discussed. If almost no jobs actually require that arbitrary barrier, the pool of applicants on the other side of the barrier will inherently have individuals better at the job than the pool who made it over the artificial meaningless barrier. Given a big pond, a small random sample of pond water will always have a smaller "biggest fish" than a larger random sample from the same pond, and if the sample size expands to the size of the whole pond, that fisherman will get the biggest possible fish. The fact that this doesn't happen historically or currently despite the obvious financial advantage, shows that hiring and general office culture is obviously more influenced by primate dominance rituals than economic reasons. When you throw in some additional dominance rituals to compensate or rationalize away the reduced hazing rituals and membership rituals to "even things up", its going to be a hellish working environment for the folks who do get in. Mix the above paragraph with the observation of corporate communication always indicates the opposite of what it explicitly claims. So a company that feels the need to say quality is job one actually prioritizes quality dead last after production goals and profit and pretty much everything else. Or a company that issues elaborate press releases about its diversity program invariably actually closes management ranks to all but old white men. You can handle an issue by "doing things" or you can dispose of it by "issue human interest press releases" so press releases mean it was decided nothing will actually be done. So you can assume a corporate communication of opening hiring to autistic people actually means it was completely and utterly closed to them and it'll remain that way but we'll talk nicely about it and issue press releases for the human interest spin on the news. We won't hire them but we'll talk really nicely about them instead. So its kind of a "one step forward two steps back" story. Its actually signalling that autistic people would be better off working anywhere else. Which is a useful observation. And fitting in with the first paragraph, it means MS competitors have an inherent advantage over MS in having superior hiring policies instead of the MS strategy of instead talking about superior hiring policies.
- nervousvarun 12y agoSomeone obviously didn't read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_Dark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_Dark
- ArekDymalski 12y agoI've got only one issue with this article. It should be published in 2016 and state something like "After 1-year pilot program, MS announced that their recruitment process has been redesigned to prevent discrimination against autism and resulted in hiring 1000 new employees which could be otherwise rejected. It all started in 2015 with a small 10 person trial ..." In case of a company with 128k employees, a pilot program for 10 people just isn't news-worthy.
- Lorento 12y agoI think MS is making a good move in our current society. Popular culture isn't mature enough that we all feel we should treat people well by default - we are happy to abuse autistic spectrum people because they're not clearly labelled as being a member of a disadvantaged group. We know we shouldn't abuse people for being black, handicapped, gay, female, etc. But we can still abuse people who don't "understand the unwritten rules of the workplace". So at least this may benefit people who can be labelled as autistic to get protection from that abuse and discrimination. That's going to happen at a job interview, where an otherwise qualified candidate can be discriminated against because they wouldn't be a "good fit for our team". Members of many other disadvantaged groups already get some protection from this - you can't refuse to hire someone because they're a woman and thus wouldn't be a good fit for your all-male team, but you can refuse someone for being unable to understand complex social interactions even when they aren't essential for performing the job. It's not ideal however. Ideally we wouldn't ostracize someone for misunderstanding jokes, trying unsuccessfully to mimic the likable behavior of neurotypicals or failing to make eye contact at the right moments. But our society is still at that level of intolerance where we need some kind of labeling of disadvantaged people to help everyone else stop and think "Oh, I'm not supposed to be mean to him for that, he can't help it".