I'm just visiting this planet

[mdlbear]

The cover article in April 2nd's Computerworld was titled Asperger's and IT: Dark secret or open secret? OK, if you have to ask you haven't been paying attention. It does raise the very legitimate question of "If Aspies are everywhere among us, why isn't the IT industry doing more to support them or even to simply acknowledge their existence?"

High-tech companies, after all, have been at the forefront of supporting workers with nearly every type of social, ethnic, physical or developmental identification. Microsoft, to take just one example, sponsors at least 20 affinity groups -- for African Americans, dads, deaf and hard of hearing, visually impaired, Singaporeans, single parents, and gay/lesbian/bisexual and transgendered employees, to name a few. Just nothing for autistics.

But this isn't a song about Alice Microsoft, or even about IT.

I've noticed that I tend to approach people and relationships almost exactly the same way I approach any other technical problem, for example an unfamiliar piece of software. I don't have the automatic understanding of other people that ordinary humans seem to have: I have to treat each problem analytically.

And, of course, since another symptom of Asperger's is an ability to concentrate on one problem, and a corresponding inability to multitask, this can come across either as a possibly-disturbing intensity of focus, or an annoying inability to drop a subject. Sorry about that; I'm working on it. As a technical problem, of course.

Comments

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Someone I met on LJ with kids on the autistic spectrum told me that they had moved from Minnesota to the PNW to take advantage of Microsoft's amazing support for families with autistic kids.

As a Minnesotan, I'm here to tell you that, if Microsoft does it better, they must be really all that and a bag of chips! Hats off too them!

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that insight; having worked with enough Aspies over time, and having been once married to one (who was not at the time so-diagnosed), I have always wondered about the care and feeding (and daresay nurturance of full potential) of Aspies.

Am curious to ask, though: how many female Aspies have you ever met? I'm drawing a blank, there.

[min0taur.livejournal.com]

Really an interesting question and issue.

My guess is that the corporate world clearly has a use for the strengths of Aspie folks, but no more idea of how to deal with them as people than it has of how to deal with nearly anyone else as people. (I don't hear overweening aggressive ambition or an obsession with "making the numbers" characterized as a syndrome, or Donald Trump diagnosed with a personality disorder. I wonder why. Well, no, not really.)

Quite aside from all the cool stuff we can do with computers these days, I also find it really ironic that the technical field -- computing in particular -- has become such a pervasive source of standards by which we're expected to measure our self-worth. High on my list of those pseudo-standards is "multitasking ability" -- why should we be judged by how well our brains can simulate the behavior of a machine that so crudely mimics such a small part of human intelligence? If it were actually such an alloy of hot sh** and cool beans, then we would have surely have *achieved* the apparent 1990s corporate ideal of a company downsized to one-rich-guy-in-a-roomful-of-computers-with-all-the-tech-support-outsourced. As if. But I digress.

I would rather "immerse" than spin plates on poles any day. And I can relate to the analytic necessity where tacit social signals are concerned. It's a whole other level of communication from straightforward (or even metaphorical) exchange -- a language of camouflaged expectation -- a code. Learnable, sure, but no more intrinsically "obvious" than Mandarin Chinese would be to a Scots-Irish-American suburban kid like me. Guess it's always been up to the "aliens" -- who mean the "earthlings" no harm, after all, and just want to pursue their interests and get along -- to create ways to "pass for earthling." Might as well start from your strengths.

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem is that the older someone gets the harder it becomes to reliably diagnose Aspergers and other forms of high-functioning Autism. I seem to recall that there are no reliable diagnosis standards for adults, mostly because adults have learned to cope in various fashions and their coping mechanisms get in the way of diagnosis. Now, you can still look at people and go 'that sounds vaguely right', but only from a lay person standpoint.

I suspect that more will be done as people officially diagnosed get older and move into the workforce.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

No time for a lengthy post, but a very high percentage of fen are in fact Aspies; I thought everyone knew that . . .

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I've known a bunch of people who have been my friends, over the years, though, whom I suspected of being "different," usually in the vaguely autistic range. A lot of them have been diagnosed with Asperger's lately. But a lot of the self-diagnosed fen who have known them have said of them: "They aren't Aspies, they're just Weird!" Yeah, but they're damned good programmers/waltzers/experts on WWII or French Impressionists, etc. I haven't yet figured out the self-righteous "I'm Asperger's and you're just weird," one yet, though.