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

the.scapegoat.dev

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

#21

Post by xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE »

korijn wrote: post #3

It'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.

So you want them to prepend every paragraph with "I know I'm wrong sometimes"? What does that achieve? The article is nice, concise, and gets the point across beautifully. Everybody's wrong sometimes, but some people are genuinely very rarely wrong in their area of expertise, and I'm willing to believe this guy is one of them. I'm glad he doesn't give in to the petty workplace politics, and I wish more people would.

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

#23

Post by protonbob »

This article does give me a little more insight into working with divergent thinkers. However, this one part gave me pause:

"Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic."

I would have to disagree here. Authority structure is useful and sometimes there are multiple good options. Not "giving in" every now and then can lead to analysis paralysis.

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

#25

Post by gnfargbl »

> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.

That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the author had reviewed the technology stack recently and considered whether it was still optimal.

In other words, they weren't saying that the checkout page was bad, they were asking the author's professional opinion as to whether it could be better.

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

#27

Post by [deleted] »

korijn wrote: post #3

It'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.

[deleted]

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

#28

Post by stkni »

korijn wrote: post #3

It'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.

This was my take too. The break-down in communication might not be WHAT is being said but HOW it's being said. This is certainly my experience of being a dev and a manager, sometimes people just seem a bit rude and it's hard to get past.

Is the rudeness excusable? I guess. Especially if I understand where it's coming from. Otherwise it's just rudeness.

And I guess that the point of the article, but you need to get to know people before you can make the judgement of why someone is how they are. That takes time.

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

#29

Post by petercooper »

I'm diagnosed and have adopted a sort of "default wrong" approach in situations like these because I realized, well, I am often wrong! Starting from the stance of "This could be wrong but.." and then jointly building upon and testing my hypothesis (that, in the past, I may have declared to be inarguable!) seems to result in far more pleasant interactions and consensus.

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

#30

Post by sascha_sl »

> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.

Let's be honest, that's what happened here. There are many reasons to overhaul a frontend, and performance is just one of them. Maybe the existing checkout is a mess that only OP understands how to maintain. Maybe engineers and designers want to find better common ground to work together and this change could facilitate that. I'm sure you can think of other reasons.

The narrow thinking is on OPs side here. They straight up assumed that this change was just chasing shiny new things (and, well, React isn't that shiny anymore), that all changes had to serve the user and not also organizational goals and then shut it down with the nearest plausible excuse.

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