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“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

the.scapegoat.dev

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Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#61

Post by jaywalk »

Orothrim wrote: post #10

The issue with this article is how the author is approaching all of these discussions. There is no attempt to see the other person's perspective, or evaluate how the author should be approaching the discussion. This is very common among us Engineers but is a massive failure. If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion, not asking questi…

Yeah, the example about rewriting a page in React really stood out to me for this. He says "I entertained the question in good faith" but he was clearly just asking "gotcha" questions to try and show the manager what a stupid question it was. And it may very well have been a stupid question, but as you said, he didn't even attempt to understand his manager's perspective.

I can totally understand why his manager got frustrated by this.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#62

Post by jackmott »

korijn wrote: post #3

It's interesting to me that all four examples put the blame with the other party. I hope it's just worded poorly or I am reading too much into it. Edit: I'm not saying that invalidates the article's content (in fact I recognize the situations from personal experience), but it doesn't really put a positive spin on it.

Yeah it is either a fantastic bit of art or hilarious lack of awareness of the irony. The guy actually reminds me of a coworker that I like a lot who is on the spectrum. Once in a meeting a manager was describing why we needed to do some task. Autistic coworker: “oh so we need to do it for political reasons”. and manager starts to freak out and backpedal trying to say its more than just political reasons. Autistic coworker, calmly: “oh no its ok, political reasons is fine!”

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#63

Post by trashtester »

Orothrim wrote: post #10

The issue with this article is how the author is approaching all of these discussions. There is no attempt to see the other person's perspective, or evaluate how the author should be approaching the discussion. This is very common among us Engineers but is a massive failure. If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion, not asking questi…

> If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion

For someone having autism, this may be impossible. If they are open about their autism, one could argue that the manager should be the one trying to see the topic from two sides.

One may also need to come up with a shared understanding where the manager has a way to inform the autistic person more explicitly what to do than they would another person (who would get the subtle hints).

This can be pitched as a way for the company to accommodate for having an autistic person on the team (as opposed to firing or not hiring them), in other words that the manager would do this as a way to support the employee, not to be abusive.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#65

Post by bluesign »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #45
gnfargbl wrote: post #25

> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea. That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the…

Could you expand on why you see the OP's position as patronizing? AFAICT, the OP identified a minimal set of questions he thought needed to be asked to give a good answer, and tried to ask them. Are you taking exception to how he sought that information, or something else?

Problem is communication there.

> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it

All questions can be reflected easily.

> Is our checkout page not performing well? > Will a new checkout solve our problem? Will React make our checkout page performing better / improve checkout ?

> Why do they think a technology change is a solution? Can technology change (to React) improve our situation in anyway?

Do they understand the implications of such a switch? > What would be the implications if we switch to React?

Now those questions OP can answer. Manager read a blog post, he obviously don't have answer to this questions, that's why he is asking OP if they should rewrite.

Asking "Why do they think a technology change is a solution?" is making wrong assumption that, manager thinks "technology change is a solution"

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#66

Post by morelisp »

UncleMeat wrote: post #60
larve wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, thanks for reading. That is exactly the first question I would ask. If you ask me to make something better, I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges) and then discuss strategy (amongst which there is technology). If me asking what the goal is is per…

I think that this approach limits leadership. Often people are asked to solve both technical and nontechnical problems. People can reasonably ask you both to define "better" and to achieve it. If you expect requirements for everything then you'll place a limit on your influence.

This is what I was going to say but phrased better. The issue isn't autistic vs. allistic, the issue is that you've decided you don't want to devote any brainpower to questions which are not directly technical. Sometimes that's fine, but it also means you are probably at the apex of your professional development. So do it, but also realize it means you're unlikely to get promoted further, and your opinion about technical topics will (rightly!) get ignored because you weren't in the rooms necessary to see any bigger picture.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#67

Post by gnfargbl »

larve wrote: post #50
gnfargbl wrote: post #25

> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea. That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the…

Author here, thanks for reading. That is exactly the first question I would ask. If you ask me to make something better, I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges) and then discuss strategy (amongst which there is technology). If me asking what the goal is is per…

Well, if you actually asked what the goals of the manager's proposed evaluation/comparison were, great! If you had probed around the context of the discussion a little bit by asking some open questions like "So why did this article pique your interest in relation to our company?" or "That's interesting, I wonder how their approach compares to ours. What do you think?", then even better.

However, that isn't quite what you say in the article: instead you relay that you appear to have shut down the discussion immediately by getting stuck at "this isn't broken and I don't understand why you're asking me to fix it." That is the part that I perceive as patronising, becuase it contains the implicit assumption that your knowledge of the business/tech crossover is superior to your manager's.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#68

Post by larve »

dusted wrote: post #19

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 special, not because I'm wrong)" whenever we get ourselves into situations like the exemplified. I do this A LOT as well, and when people do stick with me for long enough, I often find that I'm either getting my point across by re-framing my explanation, or disco…

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.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#69

Post by larve »

h2odragon wrote: post #58
q-big wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

This is a classic for good reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...

I second this one!

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#70

Post by sascha_sl »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #14

IMO autism causes an absence self-awareness, and because of that inability to recognize and modulate their own behavior, they are naturally defensive when you point out their errant behavior. In a way it's almost cruel. They don't, and can't see themselves the way other people do, and pointing out a flaw just makes things worse. Is it wrong to say that a person with autism can't really help themselves?

That's a bit reductive. I'd say that generally, autistic people have more of an issue getting implicit rules, expectations and social rituals, but that doesn't mean they're not self-aware. In fact I'd argue that they are painfully self-aware, especially when masking - that is actively emulating behaviors expected of them without them being intuitive. It can be pretty stressful to consider the impact of everything you do that other people trivially do automatically.
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