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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

#21

Post by zdragnar »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #4

"Schizoaffective disorder is a mental health condition that is marked by a mix of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression, mania and a milder form of mania called hypomania. Hallucinations involve seeing things or hearing voices that others don't observe. Delusions involve believing things that are not real or not true." I'm not sure this is an empl…

It is a condition that is employable in the abstract, as symptoms are as varied as individuals are.

The difficulty begins with the treatment- the medications can be extremely unpleasant, and it is not uncommon for patients to cease taking them.

Unfortunately, people with the condition can be unreliable narrators, so to speak, and so any deviation from perfectly normal becomes suspicion of medication refusal, as the author noted in the article. Even when they are perfectly honest and accurate, just having a rough day will mean being met with distrust at best.

The thing that struck me as odd in the article is the repetition of fear as a reaction in others. There's not enough information to understand if this is accurate or not. One of my friends growing up had a cleft lip; his low self image had him constantly assuming the worst in others despite it (from my observations) contributing far less to people's reactions than he'd imagined.

So, we are left wondering: is the author of the post a reliable narrator, or are their symptoms coloring their perception of the interactions with others in a way that they are misjudging?

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

#22

Post by sfn42 »

481Jqgat wrote: post #18
sfn42 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This blog I found seems to support your view https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

Written by Nathaniel Smith, who also got Oliphant out of the NumPy Steering Council? And that linked post was approved by the CoC compliant Python Steering Council, a later version of which canceled and defamed Tim Peters? Maybe Smith is right on the facts here, but the methods are despicable.

I don't know any of these people, I just thought this blog post seemed credible and painted a very different picture of Reitz than he presents in his own blog.

I do not know the truth, i just thought people might appreciate another perspective.

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

#23

Post by nemomarx »

sfn42 wrote: post #16
runjake wrote: post #10

The Python community didn’t exclude Kenneth because of his condition, at least directly. They excluded him because of his actions and history of shady, manipulative behaviors. And while workplaces should be accommodating, there’s a point where it gets to be too much. I worked at a place with a person with similar behaviors and it destroyed that company because they refused to acknowledge reality: this was a business,…

This blog I found seems to support your view https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

> I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups.

This is interesting. I can imagine that going both ways - maybe he feels like he's lost control over the project and that worsens his other reactions?

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

#24

Post by stewartbracken »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #3

[flagged]

I agree, I would not willingly suffer certain behaviors of coworkers with severe mental disorders.

However, most of the time people with severe mental health disorders are not a danger to others, unlike what pop culture tells us. It’s only ‘terrifying’ because of general lack of understanding and empathy which is what the post is about. We are capable of emotional regulation— jumping straight to ‘terrified’ and fear serves no one, including us, and shuts us off from a potentially great coworker (John Nash, anyone??) or community member.

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

#25

Post by squigz »

I imagine I could write a similar blog post about my experience in the field while suffering from autism and severe depression.

But the thing is, if you asked my employers, I'm sure they'd give very good reasons as to why I was let go.

I wonder what some of those 20 companies he's worked for would say if they were allowed to share their side.

I'm not trying to blame Kenneth here, but things are not often as clear cut as he is implying here.

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

#27

Post by squigz »

rlmcdonald wrote: post #20

All the comments here about how it's okay that he got excluded because he did the bad things fall right in line with what he's describing. Mental health awareness is easy when you just throw away all the people who make you uncomfortable! I thought it was a pretty good read and I'm not discounting it because it was written by someone struggling with mental illness.

I don't think anybody is dismissing it. But what are you suggesting? That a company should just ignore mental health issues that affect other members of the company, potentially in a very serious way?

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

#28

Post by gedy »

rlmcdonald wrote: post #20

All the comments here about how it's okay that he got excluded because he did the bad things fall right in line with what he's describing. Mental health awareness is easy when you just throw away all the people who make you uncomfortable! I thought it was a pretty good read and I'm not discounting it because it was written by someone struggling with mental illness.

I think there’s just a practical matter of if you have a person in this situation, you need to consider the others around him - as they may just leave to easier situations instead of dealing with it.

I agree that "Companies tout their mental health benefits and neurodiversity initiatives" really should not do this token performative crap without fully understanding what they are implying.

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

#29

Post by nemomarx »

rlmcdonald wrote: post #20

All the comments here about how it's okay that he got excluded because he did the bad things fall right in line with what he's describing. Mental health awareness is easy when you just throw away all the people who make you uncomfortable! I thought it was a pretty good read and I'm not discounting it because it was written by someone struggling with mental illness.

I feel pretty sympathetic, but I also feel sympathetic when I imagine working with someone who has outbursts. The details of how he responds to "routine workplace stress" and the actual symptoms are pretty absent from this piece.

I'm not sure how to resolve the interests of everyone involved - I just know that when I've had to work with a colleague who was volatile or prone to yelling at me it made my own life and mental health much worse.

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

#30

Post by morleytj »

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent.

On another note though:

"This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience."

I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.

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