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

Just fyi:

> In 2013, the DSM-5 replaced Autistic Disorder, Asperger’s Disorder and other pervasive developmental disorders with the umbrella diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.

Yeah I failed to qualify that my comment comes from my context which is an expert in a field that has painstakingly pursued excellence for more than a decade, and I frequently am out maneuvered (politically) by people who make choices they do not own the consequences of[1]

[1]: for example I've warned my employer once that an implementation was brutally inefficient and will cost both opex and velocity, but they told me "what's your solution" to which I could only reply "give me a week to design it like you gave the principal engineer and I'll give you a better solution". They laughed and said they dont have a month. The choice has cost the business >$1M in excess PaaS fees and has had multiple subsequent major projects to attempt to remediate the costs (granted the opex costs have come down significantly since multiple rounds of refinement). But the point still stands -- I roughly knew a better path to not need 6+ months of refinement, and save >$1M in opex overspend, but they wouldn't spare the time and disparaged me for not being a team player.

When you know you know better it's best not to submit. Perhaps it's worth realizing it's a bad culture though.

On the topic of filesystems: for me, hardware storage systems, file systems, operating systems, user library, filesystem caching, file formats, persistence guarantees, recovery, that stuff is really complicated. I just can't say that it's simple, because to me it never will be. Maybe it's simple for the other person, but I don't understand why "giving in" helps any of us in this case. I just won't say "writing a file is simple", even if you threaten to fire me. That's fine by me, I might change my mind if my survival depends on it, but it really is not what I'm here for.

We can go ahead writing your file-based persistence layer, and I"m fine supporting and maintaining it too. But I won't say that "it's simple".

> Err, no: "A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React [...]"

This in no way contradicts what I said. This is a normal way of asking for opinions on a decision that needs to be made. And organizationally the decision IS the manager's. In practice a wise manager will take (and usually follow) advice from their developers. But still it is the manager's call.

> This is literally their first question: "Is our checkout page not performing well?". The manager should have simply said "the problem is not performance, but X" instead of assuming that the developer is rejecting their idea.

Based on my personal experience of people on the spectrum, I doubt that things happened as described. My best guess is that it was exactly what dusted described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32410505.

Namely, early in the conversation, the person on the spectrum got caught up on some irrelevant point. That they couldn't let go of. Which they kept going back to explain how right they were. Eventually the conversation got derailed having gotten no further. And, rather than dropping it, the person went on the internet to explain to the whole world how right they were.

I've been part of such conversations. (Thankfully minus the whole world bit.) The first few times you can hope that a simple clarification will get the conversation back on track. After a while you learn otherwise.

As a parent, what I've found most useful is to set a rule that the person on the spectrum is not allowed to argue that they are right. Ever. Even attempting to make the argument gets shut down. If breaks are needed to finish the conversation, then OK. This resulted in a lot less arguments, and a lot more moments of, "Oh...."

> It is interesting that you, like the manager, assume that they dismissed the idea.

No. I was doing something rather different.

The thread to this point brought up the importance of learning how to play social games. With the poster saying that they had learned to do so, were good at it, and didn't bother any more.

My experience of people on the spectrum says that the poster didn't learn nearly as much about social rules as they think, and they discount the impact more than they should. Since the factors that I described did not occur to the poster, and several focused on social rules, there is a good chance that they seem like BS.

> I disagree. If the manager is not able to clarify the specifics of their question (remember, it was a question of whether they should do X) they are in the wrong.

It takes 2 to communicate. There clearly was a communication failure here. While that failure could be the manager's fault, the odds really are in favor of it being the fault of the person with a condition that makes communication hard (autism), rather than the person whose got promoted into a job that is all about communication skills (the manager).

And yes, it really sucks for autistic people that a failure to communicate by default gets blamed on them. What sucks even harder is that it is true. Which is why it is doubly important for them to work on their communication skills.

And guess what simple change most improves communication skills for most people on the spectrum?

Hopefully you figured it out. It is to stop arguing that they are right. Ever. Not because they are usually wrong. But because they tend to wind up arguing that they are right when they are missing something basic, and the fact that they are arguing makes it impossible to figure out what they are missing.

This is surprisingly hard advice to take. And it is harder for people on the spectrum than neurotypical people. But it makes a huge difference.

Obviously true.

However there is a long path from first getting the idea of a rewrite to actually undertaking it. And the conversation in question happened because the manager had just read an article about such a rewrite, so it was very early in that journey.