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Dell Autism Hiring Program

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Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#121

Post by cotelletta »

watwut wrote: post #64
BadassFractal wrote: post #10

I'm curious to see what's going to happen when an employee, secretly part of a neurodiversity hiring program, says something that makes someone uncomfortable and that gets reported to HR. Will someone's comfort levels take precedence over the desire to employ someone with difficulty with social cues? Or will we visibly "tag" employees who are neurodiversity hires so that you know that if they somehow offend you, that…

Jerk and someone with asperger is not the same. Some jerks do like to pretend the reason they just can't stop insulting others is asperger, especially on discussion forums. It is not same as the one with asperger. First, you can actually communicate with people who have asperger and tell them that this or that thing is insulting. They are able to follow the rules typically even is they don't understand them. They als…

Tbh it seems like a pretty big jerk move to think that just because you give someone feedback, they should do what you say or otherwise they're jerks.

Aspies are often told they have done something wrong, only to find that others can get away with doing the same thing. This naturally leads to trying to discover the real rules instead of the ones people try to make others obey. That's where the friction really occurs.

It's not that it's impossible to understand, it's that is impossible to take seriously once you see through it. And the insistence on superficial token demonstrations of decency, instead of actually decent application of principle, makes it tedious af.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#122

Post by buttcoinslol »

loriverkutya wrote: post #79
rimliu wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm. I usually call other humans “they”. How else I am supposed to call them?

Sorry I was not clear, please do not refer autistic people as “group”, autism is a spectrum and each autistic individual can be very different. Not all of us are emotionally unstable. This kind of generalisation is pretty harmful.

Again, the OP was not using a collective noun to refer to autistic people as a group, their post was about a single individual with autism.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#123

Post by DanBC »

loriverkutya wrote: post #62
ndnxhs wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I used to work with someone who ticked every one of those boxes. Incredibly knowledgeable and spent all of their free time reading spec documents and programming. Unfortunately they could be emotionally unstable at times which was had to work around.

Please don’t call autistic people as “they”, we are human and please remember if you met one autistic person, you met only one autistic person. We are as different as neurotypical persons are different.

Parent poster is using "singular they". This is a well established correct English usage, but it may be confusing to people speaking English as a second language.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#124

Post by eigenstuff »

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.

This reads like watered down incel talking points, complete with referring to women as "females."

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#125

Post by zachruss92 »

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…

That is just sad. Even if you weren’t dyslexic everyone messes up by misspelling a word and spending much more time than they should debugging. As a manager I would spend my time trying to figure out how we can help you reduce the likelihood of this happening again and not make fun of you for a mistake that everyone makes.

As an example, my first hire was an immigrant from Africa. He can speak English, but his spelling is not ideal - and because English is not his first language his naming structure for things like variable and classes needs improvement. To help with this I implemented specific standards for how naming should work and gave him a ton of concrete examples of how I would name something in a number of scenarios. Now that he’s been working for me for a while, I only actually have to give feedback on naming conventions maybe once a week.

Edit: spelling.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#126

Post by chrisseaton »

justinclift wrote: post #120
chrisseaton wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :(

If you're already going around forcefully sterilising people then I don't think you're going to be convinced to skip someone because they don't self-define as disabled.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#127

Post by zikzak »

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 make little mistakes like this all the time in a massive code base. What I do is do a diff on the code to see what's changed. Much easier than hunting through. This applies any time it "should work" but does not.

Also, I am sorry you have to work in an environment like that.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#128

Post by ThrowawayP »

EnderWT wrote: post #5

Microsoft has a similar program. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/c...

> Microsoft has a similar program

My, um, psychic powers for predicting the future tells me anybody with autism issues or even just introversion who goes there will be penalized heavily in the stack rankings (which they no longer formally do, but informally...) at performance review time for lack of "visiblity" year after year and eventually be washed out of MS as "good attrition".

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#129

Post by jmkd »

badpun wrote: post #118
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.

Ha, but that wasn't quite the theory I espoused...

1. Facebook was social at the core, and succeeded while still small. 2. Their efforts in this space were proactive 3. Google tried to add social much later, while already massive. 4. Their efforts were reactive.

I was referring to large companies initiating projects in response to perceived market conditions.

What I saw in 5 years at Google was engineers who didn't know what people wanted, and managers who didn't care what people wanted, hence my crude allusion to these comparable spectrums of behaviour.

Of course there were countless exceptions to this, however there were enough impactful examples of both for it to be noticeable and troublesome to me.

Buzz is the ultimate example.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#130

Post by ThrowawayP »

jedberg wrote: post #21
BadassFractal wrote: post #10

I'm curious to see what's going to happen when an employee, secretly part of a neurodiversity hiring program, says something that makes someone uncomfortable and that gets reported to HR. Will someone's comfort levels take precedence over the desire to employ someone with difficulty with social cues? Or will we visibly "tag" employees who are neurodiversity hires so that you know that if they somehow offend you, that…

Imagine someone with an obvious physical disability. Like being in a wheelchair. They can't really hide that, and we (hopefully) make accommodations for them. People are generally pretty great if you know the accommodations necessary. And if they hit you with their wheelchair by accident, you probably will feel bad for getting in their way instead of reporting them to HR for workplace violence. So I imagine if you ha…

> So I imagine if you have a hidden disability, if you need accommodation, it's in your best interest for people to know that, so they can accommodate you.

In my experience, even if it is made known, people are less forgiving of non-visible disabilities and some that interact with the disabled individual less frequently may even forget that it exists. One may have to actively "display" their disability, even if they'd rather appear to be as normal as possible.

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