The Reason So Many Autistic Adults Can't Stay Employed

iberator

AI takes jobs faster than cremate new ones.

Arnt

This seems like a good time to mention Adolf Hennecke. People who don't know much history don't know about the campaign that made him famous in the country where he lived. Put briefly, Adolf Hennecke was the poster boy for a productivity campaign like what management tried to effectuate in the story, and that the author thinks has anything to do with neoliberalism. The thing is that Adolf Hennecke didn't live in a neoliberalist country or work for a neoliberalist company, he lived in East Germany and worked for a VEB, which you may translate as "public corporation". He worked for a state-owned company with a duty to general society rather than any shareholders.

mapt

I think a big part of the issue here is the management style that says "Set unreasonable expectations in the hope that you motivate people to achieve reasonable results". That few managers can objectively predict or even evaluate performance and staffing needs, so we'll just fuck their day up a bit and the shit rolling downhill will hopefully wipe out the slackers. You simply can't "do more with less" in the long term by overloading people. There are only 8 hours in the workday. So the ridiculous growth mandates of Jack Welch et al simply create a certain amount of disappointment that needs to be absorbed somewhere in the org chart. Autistics can frequently do the work, but they have difficulty handling this particular trauma of not making the numbers being demanded. Of disappointing their bosses. Demanding unrealistic numbers is an attempt to stress the people at the bottom into staying busy all the time, and if they are already busy all the time, they will show no improvement. Stay on for a few years and you internalize that a certain amount of disappointment is mandated, and should not be taken personally. The "expectations" might be distant goals, but they were never expected. Chasing the sunrise a bit, day by day - you'll never get there. If you're putting in your eight hours, staying busy, you're doing all you can, and you should treat a manager asking for more like you would a new CEO who's completely illiterate - dangerous but not living in the same world, informationally, as you. If you have a manager that isn't completely incompetent, they would rather keep on an employee like OP and not meet goals, than deal with a new hire who will be even worse relative to goals. It is only when management is spineless, incompetent, or corrupt that they give in to this sort of pressure and let go of performers.

artrockalter

“they’ve been folded into Frankenstein positions that demand constant multitasking, social performance, sensory endurance, and emotional labor on top of technical skill” My sense is that this is due to automation, not “neoliberal capitalism” as the author says. It’s much easier to automate a job if it’s a single task that’s done in a deterministic way.

steve1977

In my experience/opinion it also has to do with the artificially inflated complexity of many things in corporate world. Which leads to more people being required (which is the point of course), which leads to more communication (which does not work in favor of autistic people generally). So now you have a three individual contributors, a line manager, a human resource people lead or whatever it's called this year and many many meetings.

pfannkuchen

Meta question: Can anyone comment on why ChatGPT produces such patterned writing? There are structures that it uses in nearly every response, and it’s obvious that much of this article was copy pasted from its output. But the corpus LLMs are trained on don’t have these patterns, at least not nearly at the frequency that I think would be required to produced them so consistently in the output. Does anyone know why this happens?

rekabis

I’m only halfway through the article, and I am forced to turn away and go holy shite, this hits too hard. I’ve got a dual Voltron of Aspergers and ADD. This makes it so that not only do I have cognitive superpowers (the Aspergers), but also that this cassette tape of extraordinary skills has been violently jammed in backwards (the ADD), spooling all the tape out, gumming up the entire mechanism, and making the entire enchilada essentially useless at surviving in today’s economic environment. Like, f*k me.