I'm not sure I understand what this has to do with autism. Eg the "should we use React" situation - I have quite a few colleagues too (presumably not all of them autistic) who tend not to answer directly the questions that they're being asked until they can reframe them in a clean way going back to first principles. I think it serves them well in some instances like systems design where this kind of behavior is particularly useful, and it's very counterproductive in other settings such as dealing with higher level execs, who tend not to ask the "right" questions because they don't have all the context, but feel like they're being stonewalled when asking what (to them) sounds like a simple question. Balancing this is a communication challenge for everyone.
“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
341–350 of 521 posts
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#342It'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.
thanks for reading, author here! the article is very much a response to a blame already expressed. People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions. These are my thoughts on why differences of opinions get phrased as “autistic people just can’t admit when they are wrong”, when myself and most autistic people I know in fact readily admit when we are wrong and mov…
It looks like you are overfitting a couple cases of individuals mistreating you into a set of rules which are not true to reality. The reality of sociology and group psychology is a rich, vast tapestry of anthropological progression that numbers over 7B individuals today and countless others of their ancestors over the past 500M years; from when we began as apes and progressed into hominids and then sapiens.
"The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying."
"I care more about doing good work than office politics."
"The person underestimates how much I know about the topic."
These are statements that, when read on their face, seem to apply to disagreements that you have had with individuals. None of them seem to complain about (or even address) the ways clusters of people behave as a group.
I don't think this blog post is actually about autistic people, or allistic people, at all. I think this post is about one person, and some other people that the person had conflict with. If the author is reading this, I think it would do you well to slightly reframe things in that light.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#343You might be right about the ultimate outcome, but I think the questions you ask may be wrong. In the example of changing the checkout to React I might ask myself would it increase development trajectory and look for numbers related to that. Things like how many features were delivered last quarter and what was the scope size of those features? How might these things fit into a react framework and does it improve delivery times on our future project plans? Is our system a proprietary one and how long would it take to onboard a new developer vs hiring someone that knows React and can add value within a week?
It's easy to decipher that nothing is wrong with the checkout page as it exists from performance. What's really being proposed here is an attempt to get ahead of it before it becomes a problem. Keeping the growth needs of an engineering team in mind you have to remember nobody wants to work on a technical stack that uses ancient technology and hasn't been updated because "it's not broken". The evaluation just seems like it's too narrow of a focus the way it's worded here. Just my 2 cents though.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
A thing to consider is that it is often not just about the facts. Often it is also about social convention and other things. If (for example) that one struggling colleague is shining in front of a superior and you are the guy who rains on his parade by nitpicking some detail he said, you might be technically right, but you end up being perceived as an asshole because you acted like one. If if that example you strictl…
We are talking about accepting that you are wrong, not incessantly pointing out that others are wrong on some minor thing. Resisting people who do the later is perfectly healthy.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#345[deleted]
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#346Wow, I am floored at so many comments painting an egocentric view of the author. I find it highly ironic that supposedly high EQ neurotypicals would not be able to take one small step back and evaluate what is written with a modicum of assumed good intent.
Take this example:
> 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.
> [...]
> In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question.
My reaction to this is, yes obviously an engineer should be asking these questions, and it's a huge red flag that the manager didn't entertain even the first one. Obviously we don't have that managers side of the story, so I take it with a small grain of salt, but on the other hand the issue is articulated very clearly, and it is decidedly not personal or egocentric. In fact the questions are exactly what I as an EM expect my senior ICs to be asking. This demonstrates ownership and good thinking about the overall cost and impact of resourcing decisions. Good systems can not be built by managers dictating things without buy in from the expert ICs who actually build and maintain them. Therefore I think it's completely bass-ackwards that we would ding the IC for a communication gap (regardless of neurotype)—I've seen far too many cases of teams just doing what they're told and driving off a cliff because everyone prioritized agreeability and had a very narrow view of their own responsibilities. When the shit hit the fan everyone just throws their hands in the air and says "not my job".
So let me first say, kudos to you larve, you are the type of engineer I want on my team.
Now that said, some feedback. Describing office politics as "playing mind games" does you no favors in terms of being understood. I know what you mean—office politics often involved bending over backwards and dancing around issues to avoid offending people. This is not my idea of fun either. That said, morale matters, and this song and dance is a big part of how morale is managed for allistic people. Furthermore, there is a fundamentally difficult issue which is if you have 100 smart people, building consensus through complete understanding is impossible. At some point owners need to be identified, decisions made, and progress begun. Some people will need to "disagree and commit" with partial understanding. Given your experience I don't expect you would disagree with that in any way, but when folks are short with you, consider the difficulty of reaching such consensus. I don't think it's an excuse for shortcuts, but this is the art of technical management, and it requires hard work and a commitment to building trust and understanding from all parties to have any hope of realizing large scale technical achievements.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#347As an aside, can anyone recommend a subreddit or community for parents of children with autism?
I feel like it may be a good place to consolidate strategies.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Quoted post unavailable.
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Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
thanks for reading, author here! the article is very much a response to a blame already expressed. People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions. These are my thoughts on why differences of opinions get phrased as “autistic people just can’t admit when they are wrong”, when myself and most autistic people I know in fact readily admit when we are wrong and mov…
The tricky piece of this is that people can be right about the facts and still be wrong, or at least in complete disagreement with each other. This is because there is a latent opinion in each fact, which is that the fact matters and is relevant for the conversation at hand. If you start from your own set of priors and are getting nowhere, you probably want to consider there might be a more relevant fact (for that pe…
One time I was in an argument about whether something could be done within a six month timeframe, and when a manager dropped in and asked a few clarifying questions it became clear that the other guy was working from the underlying opinion that nobody cared at all about the deadline and they were really just arguing about whether they wanted to do it. The timeline was clearly literally impossible, but he did want to do it.
Ended up that he told manager we could do it, manager was nuts and so signed us up, I left the team, they missed it by about two years. But he had fun, apparently.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#350I 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…
How did you learn you were autistic? I've always thought I might be but I've not invested the time in finding out.