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I hired someone with Asperger's – now what?

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Re: I hired someone with Asperger's – now what?

#31

Post by mosselman »

The posed question is kind of offensive and arrogant if you think of it. It is kind of along the lines of 'Will/do you hire someone who is a woman/foreign/handicapped/ugly?' Suddenly the proposed properties are super offensive. "Women are smart", "Women think differently", etc. "Dave Wellman has managed several employees who were women." Eh what?

How about asking "Will/do you hire someone who is good for the job?". The question asked here though is more along the lines of "Will/do discriminate in your hiring process and how much?"

Furthermore the article is pretty biased, for example: "Aspies are intelligent -- and independent".

I have met dumb 'aspies'. I don't know about figures, but I would argue that there are both dumb and intelligent 'aspies'.

Re: I hired someone with Asperger's – now what?

#32

Post by tobylane »

pessimizer wrote: post #30

Asperger's doesn't particularly exist. IIRC it is being removed from the DSM-V; 99.5% of sufferers are self-diagnosed with information that they found on the internet, and sometimes have confirmed with helpful psychiatrists. The criteria seems to be that one has a terrible personality, is simultaneously high-maintenance and inconsiderate of others, thinks very highly of one's self, but lacks any other connection with…

You're mixing in two different things, self diagnosis according to Internet reading, and professional diagnosis which use the DSM for insurance payments. Don't confuse them like this. Professional diagnosis may well be growing faster than you like, but the same is true for prison population which is also based on a very good but imperfect system (juries and trials).

Re: I hired someone with Asperger's – now what?

#33

Post by michaelochurch »

This brings me to one of the ways in which humans fail. People understand that ethical character is important-- far more important than talent-- but it's also hard-to-impossible to assess at an individual level based on real-world imperfection of information, so they fall back on social polish and low-signal bullshit that might even be negatively correlated with genuine moral decency, autism and psychopathy being opposites of a certain spectrum.

People just don't have the tools to assess others' intentions or real character. Instead of admitting that their machinery for doing this is error-prone, they come up with stories about other people that have no basis in reality. The socially marginal or unskilled get screwed.

If anything, I think that people with Asperger's are, on average, slightly better (morally speaking) than the general population. Most people get stuck at Kohlberg's Stage 3 of moral development (although, in the corporate world, they speak a Stage 4 language, dressing social smears up as "performance problems"). People with Asperger's tend to skip Stage 3 (because they fundamentally don't get it) and land early in 4, which means they have an above-normal likelihood of progressing to 5-6.

Re: I hired someone with Asperger's – now what?

#34

Post by peteysd »

pessimizer wrote: post #30

Asperger's doesn't particularly exist. IIRC it is being removed from the DSM-V; 99.5% of sufferers are self-diagnosed with information that they found on the internet, and sometimes have confirmed with helpful psychiatrists. The criteria seems to be that one has a terrible personality, is simultaneously high-maintenance and inconsiderate of others, thinks very highly of one's self, but lacks any other connection with…

Wow. I really wish that I had the karma to downvote this incorrect and totally insensitive comment.

Re: I hired someone with Asperger's – now what?

#35

Post by pmelendez »

danneu wrote: post #25
catzhang wrote: post #8

Don't worry. Asperger's syndrome will be removed from DSM-5 next month. So next month, the person won't have the syndrome anymore...The syndrome won't even exist anymore... http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/12/04/aspergers-syndrome-to-be-...

Much of the DSM is toxic legacy from the dark ages of psychiatry -- an era that we've yet to transcend. Meanwhile, your conclusion doesn't seem to fit with the text of the article you linked. You say: > Asperger's syndrome will be removed from DSM-5 next month. > So next month, the person won't have the syndrome anymore... > The syndrome won't even exist anymore... From the article: > DSM-V, will come out in May and…

Currently there are several disorders inside the spectrum for high functioning autism (PDD-NOS, Asperger, High functioning classic autism) and the line between them most of the time is very thin, on the other hand therapies for treatment are the same, so DSM just took the obvious decision of put them together in one big umbrella.

Re: I hired someone with Asperger's – now what?

#36

Post by miles_matthias »

A kid in my CS program and my dorms in college had Asperger's and I'd probably hire him, depending on the company. He is an absolutely brilliant person who would read a textbook in a night and immediately have all of it committed to memory and able to use in a problem. He would program in classes because he already knew everything the professor was lecturing on, only stopping to raise his hand and correct the teacher when they flubbed up or weren't totally clear. (By the end of our program teachers were trying to make sure they didn't have him in their classes.)

He did a few jobs during school and a buddy of mine worked with him at a software development shop. He said that they put him (my co-student with Asperger's), in an office by himself with a computer and a desk phone and gave him assignments of things to code. His code was awesome, but whenever he wanted to ask someone about a project he was working on, people rarely answered him. Being the genius that he was, he figured out how to hack his office phone to be able to transmit his voice through every office speaker in the entire office without anyone having to pick up their phone. They quickly started answering him more.

So my $.02 are the same with working with any individual - understand who they are, what they care about, and give them what they need. My co-student with Asperger's was a total genius in CS (actually he was a CE double major now that I think of it), but ultimately had trouble getting people to just listen to him.

Re: I hired someone with Asperger's – now what?

#37

Post by tfb »

fein wrote: post #9

I find it rather annoying that people like myself get lumped into this as well when such broad definitions are being used. Do I prefer to be alone/ in a small group most of the time? Hell yes! It's more exclusive and I get more work done. In a social situation, less people means more signal, less noise. Do I sometimes completely avoid social situations? Of course! But it's solely due to the fact that sometimes, I jus…

You really hit the nail on the head here and said exactly what I (and probably others here) have been thinking.

As much as it's a very humanly thing to do, I think it's ridiculous to try to lump people into categories, especially when the differences are so minute that it's almost as if there's one way that people should be, and if someone doesn't fit that mold exactly, they must be classified as different. This leads to unnecessary (and unintentional) segregation and gives common folk more reason to disproportionately view and treat certain individuals differently.

Re: I hired someone with Asperger's – now what?

#39

Post by pmelendez »

p6v53as wrote: post #12

"I have Asperger's: I am just like you" Um, not to hate or anything, but there is a reason it is called autistic syndrome. Autistic people lack the ability to form a "theory of brain", which means they just do not understand other people's intentions that well. You can't ignore this fact and hope it will go away.

Like everything in the physical life, it's all about degrees. As a matter of fact, people with a high ASQ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_Spectrum_Quotient) are very common in software industry.

There is even an online test

http://psychology-tools.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/

I scored one point less than the minimum to be considered in the Asperger spectrum, and I hadn't had any "symptom" in my infancy, so I wouldn't be surprise if you already had hired an Aspie without knowing.

Re: I hired someone with Asperger's – now what?

#40

Post by davidroberts »

hh22 wrote: post #13
Osmium wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agreed. I found the article mildly infuriating. Aside from the fact that it manifests in many different ways, I wouldn't even think of Aspergers as a disability in the "traditional" sense; people with Aspergers are just different , it's not like they function any less well than people without Aspergers. I don't have Aspergers myself but a good friend of mine does, and the casual stigma and misinformation I…

I agree completely about the "disability" description - I think that I became used to calling it that because in situations where I did need to get support for it in college (ie. requesting a single room, which seems to be a natural human need and not just an aspberger issue) it always had to be done through the disability services office, and maybe that definition stuck in my mind. It's good to be aware of how burea…

Bureaucracy thrives on classification. If something does not fit in a pigeonhole, it will either be pounded until it does fit or discarded as useless.
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