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This kinda depends on the job though. An office job, there’s always going to be a social side because unless you’re just a flunky, collaboration is a necessary skill for a skilled job in most office settings.
The extent of needed skill at the kind of social interaction you can estimate via interview varies, and a lot of people get stuck and screwed over when they don’t actually need that skill set for the job, but we can’t just pretend that even a minority of office work allows for a person to be an island. You at least have to be able to interact with project managers that keep otherwise unconnected workers synced up.
It helps if you can say that you suck at interviews, but can execute on the job, and can both say it in a useful way, then back up that claim. Not every hiring person will deal with that, which is bullshit imo, but even that is not outside of the range of bare minimum social skills.
When it comes right down to it, we as workers in a capitalist system have to make hard choices unless we want to start a revolution. You either work on the people skills, reject the kind of work that takes interviews and interaction, or you ask for accommodations and hope that works out.
The system as-is sucks for anyone not built for capitalist dreck like cookie cutter interviews, and it needs change.
I work in an office and I’m sure an autistic person could do my job just fine. The degree of socialization in my office is fairly low unless you initiate conversations with everyone intentionally. The real joke is needing to sit in a cubicle when your job can be done entirely remotely.
Just wear comfortable clothes. The old guard is dying off.
Comfortable sure, but not, like, pajamas.
Formal pajamas
Those silk pajamas you see rich people wear in movies from the 80s and prior.
Business casualest.
As a man I’ve interviewed in a button down shirt, a skirt and open toe sandals and gotten a job offer. Only assholes and IBM require a suit and tie these days.
Open-toed sandals with a skirt and button down shirt? If you can’t take fashion seriously, how can I expect you to do your job? Business, business, calves, and then exposed toes? How am I supposed to focus on my job when you do things like that?!
Unpopular opinion: I think jeans are honestly more comfortable than pajamas. Pajamas feel a bit too loose and airy somehow, jeans and a t shirt or something feel a bit closer and thicker and give a reminder that something is between your skin and the outside while still being soft.
More unpopular opinion, jeans are the worst type of pants that I’ve ever had the displeasure of wearing.
Stretchy jeans are infinitely better than classic denim, give them a try before writing off jeans forever.
To some of us, no clothes are comfortable.
Sensory issues are a sonofabitch and literally no neurotypical will ever have sympathy.
Guess I’ll start interviewing candidates in the nude.
You know this is literally harassment but the mods won’t see it that way, and if I respond to you like I REALLY want to, I’ll be the one with the ban.
I think you know this and are doing it on purpose.
I think you’re angry because you are very confused.
No, I’m angry because I was born with EDS and am medically angry nearly all of the time and it’s largely untreatable.
I’m angry at you SPECIFICALLY in the MOMENT for your mockery.
The only confusion is why people like you are so magnificently dedicated to being such assholes to the mentally different and pretending its no big deal.
This is a choice you’re making.
It’s things like this why I do my best to never go out in public because if I had met you in person I would be in jail shortly after.
And I’m sure you find that idea funny and will respond with some neurotypical witticism that seems oh so clever to you but is just a way to punch down with no consequences.
Do you normally go out of your way to harass everyone with disabilities, or only those of us with invisible ones?
haha another neurotypical mocking me for something I have zero control over that makes my life miserable lemmy is so supportive and inclusive.
And all of you ask why I am so angry all the time.
Sorry about your reading comprehension.
Your reply was sarcastic and unrealistic, that is mockery, a textbook definition.
The issue here isn’t my reading comprehension
Maybe an alternate perspective, but I do a lot of interviews for technical roles like developers, product owners, architects, etc.
There’s often a perception that the role can be done isolated at a desk grinding on tasks, but that is often not the case. It’s easy to find people who will do task work, but really hard to find people who are capable communicators and empathizers with the people they will be working with. At the end of the day, we’re trying to fill the roles with someone who we can trust alone in a room with a customer, and not someone who will be alone in a room doing tasks.
True. What the image should say is Capitalism is hell for autistic people. And non-autistic people. And all other people. Capitalism is really only not hell for those born wealthy.
Yea, because non-free-markets don’t require people to get along?
Capitalism hates free markets. Capitalism is all about maximizing profit at all costs. Free markets promote competition, which negatively impacts profit. It’s why so many capitalists seek to monopolize markets.
No, but the difference is you don’t have the threat of starvation and homelessness if you can’t do it.
I’m guessing you weren’t around for the Soviet Union, where every country behind the Iron Curtain was a poverty stricken hellscape (and still hasn’t fully recovered). I’ll take the end-stage capitalism we’re currently enduring over that shit any day of the week.
This is too involved a topic for a thread like this, but the red scare propaganda we learned about the Soviet Union isn’t a complete picture of how things were there. From researching around, it seems like at least on the dietary front, their caloric/nutritional consumption was comparable to the US, although there’s some variation in the estimates of different researchers/institutions. Sure, they didn’t have Macdonalds or Pineapples and stuff like that. But not having shitty unhealthy fast food and a fruit that could only be as widely available as it was in the west through imperialism isn’t exactly what I’d call a poverty stricken hellscape.
As far as recovering even now… there was a really important thing that happened between then and now that’s had an impact on these countries: privatization. Sell off public goods to private interests so they can profit off them at the expense of everyone else. And surprise, like we see everywhere else, private businesses don’t act in the public good and only occasionally, incidentally produce results that are good for everyone.
Like I said though, it’s a really complicated topic that’s worth reading more on if you genuinely want to learn. They didn’t do everything right, but these communist societies managed to rise out of feudal or colonial systems to become modern industrial powers despite all the forces aligned against them.
As for capitalism, even if it can produce great abundance,
a) That isn’t actually benefiting the vast majority of people. It’s hard to overstate how cruel it is to have people going hungry in a country that can produce so much food it throws a lot of it out with only like ~2% of it’s population working on a farm.
b) Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of that abundance isn’t merely from free trade and the ingenuity of industry. A LOT of it is built off the exploitation of other countries and the over-use of resources to the point of causing environmental damage.
Whatever you think society should be like, it isn’t hard to make a less cruel, less environmentally destructive, and more inclusive system than capitalism.
Absolutely. Capitalism categorizes all people as ‘useful’ and ‘useless’, the former really being ‘exploitably productive’.
Lots of folks with tons to offer the world are shunted off to the side because what they can offer isn’t valued by capital. Either that, or their challenges are perceived as too substantial for the accumulationists to bother to see what accommodations could be made.
But why bother when humans-go-in-money-comes-out is the depth of all thinking and concern? It’s not the company’s job to care that people are starving three houses over! Why don’t they just get a job—
because what they can offer isn’t valued by capital
People categorize people as ‘useful’ and ‘useless’. Hell, get down to Biology 101 and mate selection, animals select useful against useless. What do you have to offer?
“I’m having a heart attack! Help!”
“I’m a really nice guy that does wonderful paintings of the local pelicans!”
“Fuck off, I need a skilled physician and I’ll pay anything right now!”
Yes, people get paid more or less dependent upon their use to society. Why would society support you if you have little, or nothing, to contribute? For those of us in first world countries, we’re populous enough and technologically advanced enough to support a wide range of talents. Of course there are plenty of counter examples, but that’s mainly how it goes in any given economic or governmental framework.
tl;dr: We’re social animals with needs. Fulfill needs or GTFO. You don’t have to like it, but you better understand it.
Then you aren’t hiring programmers, you hare hiring client reps, and your final products will reflect this.
It’s always who you blow and not what you know. A “good fit” is better for the office than a “skilled worker.”
Relevant skills for most jobs are both technical and social, I think you’re implying that the decision is often made purely on social skill sets when technical are what matters and I see this differently.
If I’m hiring for an Architect for example, I am expecting them to help grow and guide developers, engineers, analysts, and administrators while collaborating with stakeholders AND possessing relevant domain technical expertise. Only having the domain technical expertise isn’t useful without the social skill set to leverage it.
Similarly if I’m hiring for an engineer, in expecting them to work with other engineers, their architect, their analysts, and their supervisors AND have relevant domain expertise. Again if they only have one half of that they aren’t actually functional.
It does change for entry level roles, and this may be an unpopular take… but for entry level roles I could care less about your technical knowledge… I’m looking for people who are entering this domain and can demonstrate intangibles like initiative, curiosity, and…. social skills. These are much better leading indicators of success as they are harder to teach and train, and frankly if they have those skills I can trust that the senior roles around them will help develop their technical skills.
Interviews are currently the standardized testing of the corporate world.
Now you are the kind of boss I enjoy working with.
There are many jobs where the vast majority of your workforce does not also have to be your sales department. Expecting everyone to do so is ableism.
You’re right about many jobs not being sales, my apologies if I made it sound like my scope of commentary was exclusively oriented to those roles.
Social skills are important more broadly than sales, and I’m mostly talking about how they apply in the organization as someone interacts with other peers.
But I don’t want to be alone in a room with a customer. I specifically avoid customer facing positions.
And I thrive at those positions. Hell, give me an angry customer and I’ll solve their problem, at least move it along for them, legitimately help, and have them apologizing for being an ass.
You sit in the back and crank it out, I’ll cover for you on the front lines!
Sure, just get me hired first ;)
I was just going to say something similar to this. The job application is an assessment for your technical abilities/skills for the job.
The interview is a second assessment to gauge your personality and communication to make sure it’s a fit for the team.
There are VERY few jobs where you can work in isolation. Teamwork, personality and communication are important for almost all jobs. Hench the assessment that gauges those aspects.
I always hated this side of “communication, teamwork, and personality” early in my career. I thought those soft skills were overvalued by people who weren’t good in their technical skill.
Now that I’ve been a senior engineer for a while, I can say the soft skills are just as important as the technical skills. It sucks leading people with bad attitude and those whom we have to babysit all the time.
Lemmy is eat up with kids who downplay soft skills, sometimes acting like those skills are not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Happy to see so many in this conversation talking about their importance!
And us IT nerds are the worst, or were historically. Used to be, you could be antisocial and literally stinky, but hey, we had the arcane knowledge employers had to have. They were forced deal with us weirdo wizards, what with our long hair, holey jeans and beat up Chuck Taylors. Not so any longer. (I’d argue we’ve made huge strides towards a middle ground!)
Reminds me of the return-to-office hate around here. A mandatory, 5-day RTO is a revolting policy that only loses the best employees, plain dumb. But around here we act like there is no benefit to in-person collaboration. It’s obvious to me and I have a dozen examples at hand. Plus, you gonna tell me a group of social animals gains nothing from being social?! Jesus that’s naive.
You know you can be social outside of work, right?
Just because we are ‘social’ animals doesn’t mean we spend every moment picking lice out of each others hair.
But how do I show I am that guy day-to-day but not when it’s a high pressure situation I’ve been playing my head over and over for days?
I’ve found ways around it but never know when you could need this kind of advice.
Let it go.
Seriously. That’s the answer. Don’t worry about the interview. Just see it as another conversation.
I the end, interviews are no better than picking names out of a hat, this from research done by Harvard some 20+ years ago.
I’m not sure I’m capable tbh. My workaround has been to get a temp job somewhere, be myself, then get offered a full time gig. It’s worked multiple times but it’s ironically more effort.
I’ve done that a dozen times. Worst case, you stack your resume. What’s wrong with that?
Just see it as another conversation.
How is this supposed to be better.
The interviewer(s) has no power over your life, not presenting your case to a judge here. You didn’t have the job when you woke up this morning, you may or may not have it when you go to bed. You can’t lose anything, only gain.
Some advice that has stuck with me came from Andrew Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Yeah, modern sensibilities take that old-school title all wrong. It’s a book about the author’s quest to better understand social interactions and document his findings for future people feeling as lost as he did, thereby making himself a better person. It’s the only book I’d recommend to anyone. Give it a spin.
When faced with potentially world shattering change, and an interview is not that, I force myself to take a breath and ask, “What happens if the very worst consequence I can imagine comes true?” Go nuts here, get dark, what’s the worst you can imagine?
The answer is invariably, “I’ll soldier on, somehow survive.” Not like I’m going to blow my brains out, whatever happens. And you won’t either.
“Will I get this job?” is nothing compared to the many difficulties life throws up. I’m on the hunt now, after leaving an employer that treats their employees like gold. In fact, I’m on severance pay ATM, but running out fast. What if I have to go back to an office everyday? What if I only end up getting paid half what I was making? Fuck, what if I end up selling boiled peanuts on a corner downtown to make our mortgage? Well, I won’t die, that’s for sure.
The second thing I’d say, talk to the interviewer just as you would a friend of a friend, an acquaintance that maybe has an opportunity for you. They’re not kings, and you’re not their subject. Approaching them as an equal makes one hell of a difference, exudes sincerity, and that lets them see you as your really are. And isn’t that what you both want?
You can’t lose anything, only gain.
Idk about you, but I value my time. 5 hours spent for an interview process that does not end with an offer is a loss to me.
Working on IT, I see quite the spectrum. One of which was a guy who was socially lacking. He did his job ok, but in office, he didn’t know how to interact with other people. He would bring his own pickles and put them in the fridge, and fish them out for a snack. Then he would get ice for his water, and go back to work. He missed a critical step of using a utensil or washing his hands, and it took a while for everyone to realize why the ice started tasting off.
Then we find that he didn’t wash his hands thoroughly, and I got sick eating chips he had rummaged through earlier.
He did an ok job at his desk, but made other people uncomfortable because he couldn’t pick up on enough social queues to prevent people from disliking him.
He was eventually let go for trying to fix a cable under the desk of the only girl in the office, on the day she wore a skirt. This was far and beyond extreme and I wouldn’t expect most people, no matter where they fall in the spectrum, to behave this way. But the interviews are to try to suss that out. “Culture fit”, I think they’d call it.
I hear you and essentially don’t disagree. But I feel like this might lean a tad toward gaslighting.
- Plenty of people are fine communicators when it comes to genuine collaborative work but still find the “game” of job applications very difficult or impossible.
- Being left alone with a customer is not a thing at all for many roles.
- Embracing diversity in abilities and doing so transparently is a thing that can be valuable for both companies and humanity. Presuming everyone can do all the things is, IMO/IME, damaging. It leads to cutting out people who have something valuable to offer. But also leads to not recognising when people are properly bad at something despite the fact that they really shouldn’t be given their seniority and role.
In the end, a job application/interview is not like the job at all (whether necessarily or not). That there are people in the world who would be disproportionately good at the job but bad the application seems to me an empirical fact given the diversity of humanity. And recognising this seems important and valuable in general but especially for those trying to understand their relationship to the system.
Yes I agree, you make some really valuable points here that I don’t disagree with. There’s a bit of an art to this and it is certainly not a realistic expectation that someone should be universally capable. Somewhere in that gray space between universally capable and walking hr incident is where we all fall.
Well said.
I can mask pretty easy dealing with customers because for the most part the interaction is predefined.
Trying to deal with the doublespeak and lies and unspoken requirements of situations like interviews is hard/impossible.
Because its all nebulous.
I think it’s also nebulously counter- or peri- factual in that it’s looking for signals whose value is often that you know to give that signal. Meanwhile the qualities relatively unique to NDs can be hard or impossible to signal.
but that is often not the case
Is that what you think as a manager or is that the answer I would get from your most introverted dev?
95% of my work is done by me, alone at a desk…
“None of this has anything to do with your ability to perform the desired task” is the major flaw in this. Social interaction is a pretty huge part of any job where you work with people, and so-called “chemistry matches” are often rated as the top thing teams are looking for. This is why so many hiring managers will bring in other team members into interviews.
I’m actually really good at these soft skills. But I can only maintain it for the duration of the interview. I fall apart as soon as I get the jib and thats when the trouble starts.
I met a guy like this. He just changed jobs every year. His past employers said they never got any work out of him, but he just kept leapfrogging, getting better and better jobs at each company advancing his career.
Wow, that sounds suspeciously like me, except for the many periods of unemployment, which mostly come after my burnouts, which happen after half a year in a new job.
Gosh, same. I can do the charisma thing and chameleon whatever I’m supposed to say, and heck, even be good at the damn job…
…too good.
Once it stops being interesting, I start trying to find ways to make it fun, or squeeze in creative projects during downtime, and uptight types don’t like discovering that I’ve still got the spark they sacrificed right out of business school.
Disclaimer: Not claiming to be a genius or anything.
Tip in case you haven’t discovered it yet:
Don’t tell them about your efficiency improvements. They won’t appreciate it. You’ve made their job harder by requiring them to think about something. To them it was already automated and that automation was you.
Instead, just keep producing the same outputs and say nothing. You’ll only get a raise or promotion when you get a new job, so spend the extra time on that. When you do get a new job, give the automation to one coworker, preferably your replacement.
Source: am experienced engineer
Don’t worry, the rest of us don’t like the process either.
“Well-paying”
Yes, there are well paying jobs in the world, specially for things autistic people are stereotypically good at, like programming.
DON’T YOU DARE ARGUE WITH ME
You just have to figure out the ways your autism makes you a good worker and explain it to them. Honestly chatgpt could probably help with the wording if you just explain your autism to it lol
One of the best things you can do to prep is to find someone you can relate to at least a little bit who’s already been through it, ideally someone with a few years under their belt, and do mock interviews with them. Interviewing sucks, it’s not an easy skill and you hopefully won’t need it very much. The first ones are always the hardest.
Protip: The neurotypical world unconsciously hates us and all of these barriers are deliberate to keep us from thriving.
Most of you will just laugh and downvote assuming it can’t be the case.
It is. And the sociopaths have made it this way because we are easily able to spot them and call them out.
I think more than likely the NT world just doesn’t think about people with autism, it’s not hate.
No, no, I definitely feel the hate. It’s real, and for some reason it got WAY worse after covid.
Of course you would think that, but studies prove you wrong. Here’s one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5286449/
TL;DR: Neurotypicals rate autists 30% across the board, even if only exposed to the transcript of their speech.
There is so much ‘I don’t think so’ when the clinical evidence is clear, and that is part of the harassment. Congrats for joining in.
The funny part is they dont even engage you because they fail at disproving you, they just prove your point by downvoting you.
Thanks for standing up for us. I wish there were more people like you.
Thanks, I really needed to hear that after tonight
hope you thrive my friend.
Hope you thrive too. Feel free to hit me up on matrix if you ever wanna chat.
I don’t think they were talking about most of the NT world, just the sociopaths running things. They might be in to something.
The way that autism is used as an insult says otherwise.
Interesting, you just replaced losers and clueless in the gervaise principle
https://thepowermoves.com/the-gervais-principle-summary-review/
Jesus! Although I agree that sociopaths are running things, they are the cancer of this world. The reason why we overproduce for the landfill instead of having only as many people work as really needed due to our high output.
Inventions are made by the smart and driven, not the manipulative. They just steal those inventions and run with them.
Its still kind of interesting that there is someone on the complete opposite who thinks these monsters should actually rule. I think they should be excluded from any position of power since they are proven to be bad leaders, make bad decisions and cover up their mistakes by pointing at someone else.
I’m not inclined to read past the first sentence that labeled my entire class as ‘losers’, welcome to my blocklist elitist asshole.
FUCK even just looking at the charts makes me want to set everything on fire
jeeze, welcome to my blocklist, you sound like an ever furious dickhead who attacks anyone that doesn’t instantly agree with them.
You wave around your peer reviewed social theory, but when someone else presents you a different view on something you already agree with you go “i’m not reading that because i’m too angry”?
chill
The document is literally a guide to class warfare and labels everyone except the owner class as idiots and fools.
This isn’t a different view, it is the statement that sociopaths SHOULD by RIGHT rule the world and anyone who treats that as ‘just another viewpoint’ is a class traitor that can eat every ounce of shit I have ever created.
chill
Fuck every mother in history that contributed to your current existence, including our shared ancestor.
There’s a very small chance that this will make a difference, but I feel compelled to at least try: please seek some kind of therapy. Not for your autism, for your anger. The world isn’t going to change because you’re mad at it. Life is short, please don’t make yourself miserable by focusing on the things that make you mad. Therapy can help.
I will get no accolades for this comment, nor am I trying to hurt you. I have nothing to gain by making this comment, it is truly just an honest request because you seem to be in pain.
I was that more focused and productive person at two jobs. I answered customer emails at a bank and they actually had a meeting about me because my numbers were like 30-50% better than everyone else’s. They thought maybe I wasn’t actually DOING my work. I was, I was just good at it and quick at typing and copying and pasting and using templates. I streamlined all sorts of stuff to make my job easier. “How are you doing so many emails?!” “CTRL C and CTRL V and templates” “oh”
Reminds me of a friend of mine. He was promoted to some sort of engineering metrics analyst. His job it turned out, was to take a bunch of different reporting products and then create a presentation once a week to go over all of the metrics and have them in easy to understand graphs on a specific template.
So of course a month into the job he automates the entire thing and his job now takes a total of 5 minutes because he waits on the actual numbers to be crunched and spit out into the new template.
He’s super bored and asks me if he should tell his boss what he’s done and possibly get another promotion out of it. I said “Sure, if you want to be promoted to the layoff line.”
So his boss gave him some extra tasks and he just keeps blazing through them. His boss wants to know how he’s able to be the most productive person they’ve ever seen in that position. He asks me again, if he should tell the boss and his boss’ boss because they are super impressed. I said “No. Absolutely not. Just shrug and tell them you just do your best every day. They’ll eat that right up.” He does. He gets a promotion a couple of months later to a middle manager of some type. Probably due the Peter Principle.
Don’t ever give out your templates or show your process. If they can hire someone less experienced at a much cheaper rate, they eventually will.
Don’t ever give out your templates or show your process. If they can hire someone less experienced at a much cheaper rate, they eventually will.
I think you’re usually legally obligated to. I mean, crappy boss never ask is one thing, but if they inquire how you do your job, which templates you use etc, the employer owns the templates you created during your paid work time on probably the computer which is also the employers property. You don’t have to throw every detail about how you do your job on the table yourself if no-one asks, but if they do you should or they’ld win any legal dispute and you could be fired on bad (financial) terms. Likely whatever you show and explain is still to “complicated” anyhow.
I’m sure laws on this differ everywhere in the world but I assume you’re talking US. It is doubtful an employer could win a law suit against you for not showing your specific methodology unless you have a contract and that was part of it.
As far as firing goes, there aren’t very many situations that an employer can’t fire you over for cause but obviously also can fire you without cause.
Would they own the templates? Yeah but they’d also have to know to look for them unless you told them. Otherwise they’d probably already have created some templates and expect you to use and perhaps improve them.
Ive done pretty well with being honest and I think I end up with happier positions ultimately than I might otherwise have had. The crap jobs weed themselves out.
This is precisely why I gave up on getting an IT career lmao, fuck interviews
For the brief period when I was a manger, I tried to make interviews more work-related. I was told I couldn’t ask for a writing sample during the interview for a job that required writing clear, concise communications under pressure. This is one of many reasons why I am voluntarily no long supervisory in my field.
“What’s you’re biggest weakness?”
“I’m going to say my honesty”
“Not sure I think honesty is really a weakness…”
“I don’t give fuck what you think.”.
“you’re hired”
Had more or less this exact conversation with the manager during an interview for a promotion I really wanted years ago.
I did not get it.
