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Dell Autism Hiring Program

jobs.dell.com

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Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#111

Post by Waterluvian »

wrnr wrote: post #71

The way our industry treats neuro-diversity is autistic. I am very dyslexic, the other day I misspelled the word TAB as TAP when implementing an event listener in a codebase +100K lines. It took me half a day just to find this bug. At LastCo I heard the project manager and scrum master joke behind my back "we'll just have the autist with OCD do the programming" while referring to me. In their mind lacking a "theory o…

I wonder if that scrumlord is even capable of writing useful code anymore.

At my old school, the worst of managers had just no clue how to dive in and help. Sometimes they'd try and it would make things worse. Their mortgage payments and continued relevance began relying on control, not capability.

This would have been okay of we were the appropriate size for so many manager types but we really needed engineers who could lead.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#112

Post by 4thaccount »

IshKebab wrote: post #109
jmkd wrote: post #99

By maintaining >50% engineering staff for so long, Google has inadvertently created a fascinating study of the interplay between two spectrums: autistic and psychopathic. More on the similarities and differences here, namely aspects related to empathy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826592/ It seems of no coincidence that so many of Google's social products have misfired - due in part to this interplay…

That has nothing to do with why Google+ failed. Or Allo. It's because everyone was already using Facebook and WhatsApp and those have extreme network effects, and Google+/Allo were basically the same thing just owned by a different company. You don't need to invoke autism to explain it.

I found Google+ to be great, but not nearly as many people used it. I'm not on any social network anymore though.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#113

Post by nvr219 »

lelf wrote: post #106
CSMastermind wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've encountered this type of program before. The interviews often include tasks that traditional candidates would find boring and lots of repetition.

Example?

https://hireautism.org/resource-center/interviewing-your-app...

I like the "supply questions ahead of time" - everyone should do this!

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#114

Post by aeredhel »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #80

A recent article posted on HN offering funding to women to study programming sparked a flamewar, with many users claiming that special hiring policies for women in the tech industry discriminate against men. The current article is about a special hiring policy for autistic persons in Dell. Luckily there doesn't seem to be a flamewar this time around. Of course, I wonder why. To be honest, I don't understand why so ma…

Can you please explain this whole American "affirmative action" and "special hiring practices" thing? As I understand it, when given two candidates with equal interview results, the company will choose the female instead of the male one. Am I getting it wrong?

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#115

Post by aeredhel »

justasimpleman wrote: post #105
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #80

A recent article posted on HN offering funding to women to study programming sparked a flamewar, with many users claiming that special hiring policies for women in the tech industry discriminate against men. The current article is about a special hiring policy for autistic persons in Dell. Luckily there doesn't seem to be a flamewar this time around. Of course, I wonder why. To be honest, I don't understand why so ma…

Autists are a tiny minority (2-5% of the population) and mostly male. Affirmative action for autists is hence unlikely to ever achieve a scale at which substantial discrimination can be expected to affect other groups. Women, OTOH, make up ~50% of the population, so affirmative action is going to have substatial side-effects by sheer scale as we are indeed observing in practice. Also, having the man earn more is a su…

I sense traditionalist bullshit.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#116

Post by lesss365 »

amval wrote: post #50
justinclift wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you not classify it as a disability? Why would you classify Aspergers as a disability? It's like saying Superman's (yeah, fiction, but it's to highlight the point) x-ray vision is a disability, just because it's something most people don't have. X-ray vision is clearly not a disability. Aspergers isn't either.

Asperger is a developmental disorder that makes social interaction and nonverbal communication significantly harder. It's not a superpower.

This. Just to add, aspergers isn't something that can be turned on or off at will, unlike x-ray vision.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#117

Post by pvg »

newnewpdro wrote: post #4

Wow, this strikes me as unbelievable. How things have changed since the industry was up in arms over Alex St. John's "Recruiting Giants" PDF [1] where he explicitly called out the "holy grail" employee: Be on the look out for the holy-grail... the undiscovered Asperger's engineer. (usually found on open source forums) * They have no social skills * They generally marry the first girl they date * Can't make eye contac…

This is about an employer making their employment process more accessible, the Alex St. John thing was mostly about the opposite and traded in (to put it charitably) dumb stereotypes. You're probably misreading something if you see this Dell program as a sign of some industry-wide adoption of Alex St. John's views.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#118

Post by badpun »

jmkd wrote: post #99

By maintaining >50% engineering staff for so long, Google has inadvertently created a fascinating study of the interplay between two spectrums: autistic and psychopathic. More on the similarities and differences here, namely aspects related to empathy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826592/ It seems of no coincidence that so many of Google's social products have misfired - due in part to this interplay…

By this theory, given the scale of Facebook’s success, Mark Zuckerberg should be a super-emptathetic person.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#119

Post by [deleted] »

aeredhel wrote: post #115
justasimpleman wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autists are a tiny minority (2-5% of the population) and mostly male. Affirmative action for autists is hence unlikely to ever achieve a scale at which substantial discrimination can be expected to affect other groups. Women, OTOH, make up ~50% of the population, so affirmative action is going to have substatial side-effects by sheer scale as we are indeed observing in practice. Also, having the man earn more is a su…

I sense traditionalist bullshit.

[deleted]

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#120

Post by justinclift »

chrisseaton wrote: post #39
justinclift wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. It's a part of their disabilities website, even featuring "an engineer who has Asperger's syndrome". Wow. :(

I don’t know how it is in the US but in the UK The Autusim Society themselves describe it as a ‘disability’. And what’s wrong with disabilities anyway that makes you go ‘ugh’?

> And what’s wrong with disabilities anyway that makes you go ‘ugh’?

People officially regarded as disabled are often treated as 2nd class citizens, with all kinds of bizarre things done to them. Including sterilisation in some countries, which there are reports of still happening to this day. :(

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