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The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

kennethreitz.org

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Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#121

Post by blazarquasar »

jerlendds wrote: post #92
drcongo wrote: post #36

I was reading along with great sympathy until I got to this bit... Schizoaffective disorder carries stigma that depression and anxiety don't. People can relate to feeling sad or worried; they cannot relate to experiencing reality differently. Depression is not "feeling sad" and very much is experiencing reality differently. Flippantly calling something so horrifically painful "feeling sad" is exactly the kind of thin…

Youre right its not just feeling sad but relative to the extreme symptoms of Psychosis, delression is very mild by comparison

These disorders don't exist on the same spectrum. There is no point in comparing the two. Both can be absolutely debilitating. People that feel the need to compare severity of disorders like you do actively contribute to the stigma and invalidation of severe disorders. Tell the families of the more than 700k people that commit suicide every year that "depression is very mild by comparison". An absolutely ignorant comment.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#122

Post by 4ggr0 »

kennethreitz wrote: post #109
4ggr0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an "apology"/response from Keith. https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2023-01-an_overdue_apology "i'm sorry, hope we can continue working together in the future" seems like a very mild response to allegedly fumbling 30k, but what do i know... > the asynchronous landscape within Python's ecosystem failed to meet my expectations, leading me to conclude that Requests should retain its synchronous nature. i concluded…

My name is Kenneth, not Keith.

no idea why i wrote the wrong name, sorry about that, Kenneth!

you personally replying to my comment makes me regret the harsh tone of my initial comment, could've just posted your blog post and fairly criticize it instead of taking the gossipy route...

doesn't make it better that i misnamed you and that this is a comment chain below a post of yours venting about your experiences of others treating you differentely. hope you can find more people like Sarah or just a better work environment in general.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#123

Post by standardly »

alphazard wrote: post #56
standardly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no reason for an employer or professional colleagues to be aware of an employees medical issues. Totally agree, but it can get a bit weird. I struggle with depression, and at times I have felt like I owed my co-workers/manager/boss an excuse as to why I "suck" sometimes. IE; I didn't show up late for the meeting because I am irresponsible, rather because I'm just in a bad spell this week and have brain fog…

The rationalization matters far more to you than it does to your coworkers or boss. I have no opinion on how you should frame it to yourself. However, I think it's genuinely good advice to say that professionally, people are just trying to build a mental model of how reliable you are. The reasoning doesn't really matter to them, and a psychological diagnosis is a predictive theory about how you will behave. Unfortuna…

I believe you are spot on! Thanks for the insight. The rationalization helped alleviate my guilt, but it didn't realistically change anything at work. Might have made things worse, actually.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#124

Post by evanelias »

nemomarx wrote: post #44
bradstewart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically is the LLM verbiage you're seeing here? That reads like a normal sentence to me.

em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing. I see it in several other spots in the essay and it's kind of a "code smell" Of course it's also a normal, polished sentence with good grammar, but it seems a little unrealistic. It's too polished basically.

Earlier today, I read a news article about how a historic 100-year-old family-run farm in my state is closing, but the town is buying the land and supposedly keeping it as farmland. The mayor of the town released a statement that included the sentence "This isn’t just a transaction — it’s a testament to our shared values and vision for the future."

It seems we live in a society where our elected officials can't even be bothered to have a hired PR person write their vacuous statements, let alone writing them personally on their own. A vision for the future indeed...

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#125

Post by jerlendds »

blazarquasar wrote: post #121
jerlendds wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youre right its not just feeling sad but relative to the extreme symptoms of Psychosis, delression is very mild by comparison

These disorders don't exist on the same spectrum. There is no point in comparing the two. Both can be absolutely debilitating. People that feel the need to compare severity of disorders like you do actively contribute to the stigma and invalidation of severe disorders. Tell the families of the more than 700k people that commit suicide every year that "depression is very mild by comparison". An absolutely ignorant com…

Well we agree they exist on different spectrums. The suicide rate is also very bad for psychotic disorders although far fewer people suffer from them. Having faced stigma and invalidation for my issues I suppose I let that rub off on me to the point I stigmatized others. Thanks for pointing that out, I suppose I should be more mindful in the future

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#126

Post by JohnBooty »

squigz wrote: post #80
JohnBooty wrote: post #64

Non-negotiable tenet(s): all human lives are valuable, all humans deserve dignity, and when we as a society can't find a place for a valuable and talented individuals like the author then we have failed in some sense. That said, within the current system... Morally and legally, what are the limits of accommodation? Accommodation, in my uninformed layman understanding, is about accommodating people who can do the job,…

> Non-negotiable tenet(s): all human lives are valuable, all humans deserve dignity, and when we as a society can't find a place for a valuable and talented individuals like the author then we have failed in some sense. This sort of framing assumes the author bears no responsibility at all, and it's just society that has failed. The thing is though, even in an ideal society, it would be not reasonable to expect peopl…

I wholeheartedly agree. Individual responsibility is, really, a crucial pillar of just about anything. Especially this question.

    The thing is though, even in an ideal society, it would be 
    not reasonable to expect people to deal with someone's issues 
    indefinitely
Agree 100%.

Now, in that somewhat narrow perspective, this seems unsolvable. If we accept that communication and collaboration is an essential part of nearly any engineering job then I don't know that many companies are going to be able to accommodate an engineer who can't do those things. That gets back to the fundamental distinction between "is able to do the job, but needs to be able to do it differently" versus "cannot do the job."

Zooming out a bit, though, it's also true that in an ideal society we'd be able to use everybody's talents to their full potential.

Getting to 100.0% of that is surely not achievable but getting as close to it as possible should be our "north star" if you'll forgive the cliched corpo-speak term.

The author has proven himself (unless I am mistaken) to be a valuable and dedicated Python engineer, and creates code that helps others, and it really is a loss to society if those talents cannot be utilized.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#127

Post by blazarquasar »

jerlendds wrote: post #125
blazarquasar wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These disorders don't exist on the same spectrum. There is no point in comparing the two. Both can be absolutely debilitating. People that feel the need to compare severity of disorders like you do actively contribute to the stigma and invalidation of severe disorders. Tell the families of the more than 700k people that commit suicide every year that "depression is very mild by comparison". An absolutely ignorant com…

Well we agree they exist on different spectrums. The suicide rate is also very bad for psychotic disorders although far fewer people suffer from them. Having faced stigma and invalidation for my issues I suppose I let that rub off on me to the point I stigmatized others. Thanks for pointing that out, I suppose I should be more mindful in the future

I appreciate your reply. Psychotic disorders are absolutely debilitating and any stigma and invalidation towards those is just as shameful. I understand your reaction and I apologize if I was being a little too confrontational. I guess we both share a similar history of stigmatization.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#128

Post by bethekidyouwant »

arp242 wrote: post #52
bethekidyouwant wrote: post #3

[flagged]

> Im certain this guy is terrifying when he’s having an episode Why are you "certain" of this? Whatever else can be said about all of this, this seems little more than stereotypical fear-mongering, and is exactly the sort of discrimination the post talks about.

Re-reading my post I would like to clarify, I am not assuming anything physical about the author. he’s clearly hyper intelligent and I meant only psychologically terrifying.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#129

Post by Spooky23 »

evanelias wrote: post #124
nemomarx wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing. I see it in several other spots in the essay and it's kind of a "code smell" Of course it's also a normal, polished sentence with good grammar, but it seems a little unrealistic. It's too polished basically.

Earlier today, I read a news article about how a historic 100-year-old family-run farm in my state is closing, but the town is buying the land and supposedly keeping it as farmland. The mayor of the town released a statement that included the sentence "This isn’t just a transaction — it’s a testament to our shared values and vision for the future." It seems we live in a society where our elected officials can't even…

It’s pretty common to use a dash in that context. It’s weird that you’d be analyzing punctuation so closely in vacuous press releases.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#130

Post by evanelias »

Spooky23 wrote: post #129
evanelias wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier today, I read a news article about how a historic 100-year-old family-run farm in my state is closing, but the town is buying the land and supposedly keeping it as farmland. The mayor of the town released a statement that included the sentence "This isn’t just a transaction — it’s a testament to our shared values and vision for the future." It seems we live in a society where our elected officials can't even…

It’s pretty common to use a dash in that context. It’s weird that you’d be analyzing punctuation so closely in vacuous press releases.

It's not just the dash, it's the specific construct that's an AI smell, as directly mentioned upthread in the comment I was responding to:

> em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing

Literally all of the sibling comments in this subthread are about this specific phrasing, which AI overuses to an absurd degree, especially when combined with hyperbole.

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