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

I hate repeating myself. But I had to learn to write in such a way to do so because if I don't I end up with 4 sentences when a person further off the spectrum will write an entire page on the subject... or maybe that's my subjective opinion.

You can make all the personal inferences you want but I don't agree; I repeat myself because if I don't I received lower grades and downvotes.

Using the React example, you do not need several minutes to explain why large software projects are a waste of money unless they're pursuing business objectives. It's trivially obvious, just say a slightly more diplomatic version of the previous sentence. The reason I'm not hearing what you're saying is because the question needed a simple two sentence answer, but you turned it into a two-minute rambling monologue involving several anecdotes and then began explaining what Chesterton's Fence is and how the sunk cost fallacy doesn't apply. At that point any reasonable listener would cut into what you're saying with "okay, but back to our shopping cart," and it would be 100% your fault.

Another thing my father is awful at is understanding when something is about general fact-finding vs a specific suggestion. If a manager comes up to you in the kitchenette and says "I've been reading about the new React checkout system at Dunder Mifflin and they say it increased ARR by $200k, do you think we should rewrite?" it's probably not a project proposal. It's a fact-finding question. You don't need to go into attack mode and protect your checkout flow from an unnecessary rewrite. Say "Well, React is a great technology for building really big web apps, but our checkout page is pretty small and not a web app, so we'd have to make sure we were solving real business problems."

I've worked with autistic people who managed not to do either of these things, I don't think it's inherent to the condition, and I have no idea if this is an accurate description of what the author's talking about. They pattern match very closely to experiences I've had before, though.

Thank god I didn't have to encounter an actively hostile person yet, but my big discovery last year was indeed that not everyone at work is motivated by doing a good job. It obviously sounds obvious when put like this, but it is something I wasn't able to put together in my own life. I have since left this job (my immediate colleagues and most people I worked with were great, it takes just a few individuals to really disrupt and dismantle good engineering), and am now in a place where I slowly had to discover how amazingly efficient and productive things can be when I am given trust and enough autonomy. I think I have 2. pretty well figured out. What I don't know how to handle (as evidenced by some comments here) is when to divulge how much I study / what fields I have a lot of experience in. I never understood where the boundary is between people thinking you are a know-it-all and arrogant, and thinking you are an idiot.

Cool, that's a great clarification. I agree with that characterization of "mind games", and its obviously 100% legitimate to stand your ground in those cases.

One reason I think these things happen is because people go straight from school to the corporate world where they expect to be told what to do and never develop their own agency and feedback loops for higher level goals. In a big org it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. Silicon Valley youth worship doesn't help either as it takes time to get enough experience to learn the myriad different ways things can succeed and fail. Young managers often feel they need to have all the answers and control everything rather than realizing the job is really about understanding individual strengths and giving everyone the right incentives and well-defined goals (appropriate to their competence level) to work together and produce output greater than the sum of the parts.

The cost of choosing washing machine A is that it breaks at some distant time. The cost of arguing about washing machines is wasting an hour every week driving to a laundromat and paying $10 a wash, plus the hard-to-quantify strain on your relationship, for an argument you might not even win. In this situation, the hidden third option of dragging out a conflict that you might not even win could end up more costly than choosing a bad option, even if you're right.

In software this happens a lot. You burn opportunity cost trying to argue for a perfect solution instead of aligning behind a flawed solution.