Helping Autists Get Useful Work/Contribute to the World

[I was writing this rambly essay, and I saw <this story about a man's son who despite (1) a great degree in computer science and (2) the desperation of firms for talent, he cannot get hired anywhere he goes in the Valley>(https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/25/brian-jacobs-started-moai-capital-to-invest-in-autism-employment.html), which is a very familiar story that you hear over and over for those...who are autistic. 

Which seems very...relevant. So I'm including this bracketed section, and publishing the [rough] rant/ramble of thoughts about this topic below--with some "lite" editing/changes given that article matter.]

Now I'm someone with autistic traits enough that everywhere I go, some coworker who speaks with me always asks, 

"are you autistic? My cousin/uncle/daughter/son/etc. is autistic, and you're like [that person]." 

I'm not diagnosed. I'm not even CERTAIN it's a genetic thing for me (may be acquired, which is suspected by me and a neurologist for other reasons--but it may also be that you must be on the edge of the spectrum or "susceptible" to acquire it in the way that this may have occurred), but it's sufficient that if I read about and follow advice for autistics (masking, learning patter/small talk, strategies about "austistic minds vs. normal minds" and their conceptualizations of the world, etc.), my life gets extraordinarily better, quickly.

I've been employed despite myself and find (in company including e.g. Peter Thiel or Elon Musk--controversial people, but both people who point-out that they prefer in many cases to hire autistics over non) that "Normal" dynamics are so filled with intrigues and egos they're literally toxic for everyone--but especially for autistic people. It has been a real struggle...despite that any time I'm in a job with valid metrics I do, and this is a quote, "impossible" things. e.g. in an IT position with an ISP I had CSAT scores that "according to our twenty years of data should not be possible", and so had accusations, praise, and a lot of confusion out of management (across various companies, the telehelp company that provided co-employment staff, the ISP, the actuarial-type/analyst mathematicians who made such determinations about numbers for these firms...) 

Yet whether there, or in companies with "performance evaluations" and "personal reviews", regardless of measurable good, I've constantly suffered attacks, put-downs, and other "Issues" with the supervision... 

Autistic people are either bullied or persecuted in the dynamics of "normal" with today's culture.

Basically, in a world of tribes and teams, autistics have to go it alone: to do so therefore we wrap ourselves in logic and reason (and the process documents of a company, and language like "does you ordering me around/harming me like that improve or harm shareholder EVA, sir?"), and go to profound lengths to keep hostiles off our backs... We're sorta the magnet for punches that brings out the so-called "toxic masculinity" (women in management prove endlessly kind and more creative).

Only once I was within a truly subjective environment that was very hierarchical and very lacking in accountability for members of that hierarchy, with everything needing to go "through your supervisor", did I really begin to personally see and understand (possibly due to abstractive impairments--also something common to autistics) what certain people may validly mean (vs. politically abuse terms to mean) by certain terms. (e.g. toxic masculinity, exploitation, etc.). 

One example of those "wrap in logic and reason" kinds of self-defenses (that you must know, often through past sorrowful experiences) to do I simply call "logging everything": 

In one role I didn't just create a logging system to prevent errors and losses to aerospace materials and equipment being transported around, but logs OF THE STATE OF THE LOGS to prevent false claims about what was or was not delivered to pickup locations at given times...and a method of permanently preserving log state with a third party efficiently as I moved about...and a code for those logs of logs to be able to encode it (key left with a good supervisor) such that only those involved in the movement of these critical and expensive goods could possible read any of it.  (And that is just one role I filled.)

When the loner (you) becomes the scapegoat, you go "nope, I have a log for that." I've upset supervisors immensely trying to find someone (they don't like) to blame with this habit, to the point that I've had shouted at me STOP KEEPING LOGS very recently, after a "you did such and such" followed by me pulling-out a couple inches of paper logs...

(That last one was when I was being told I was "losing" things in the inventory by mis-placing them, but my inches of hand-written, detailed logs of everything I had touched (outside of the electronic logging system they keep) showed "um, no.")

The culture produced both managerially in B-School and of the labor or employed class however they happen to be educated are such, that likeability and other personable and subjective opinions, not objective and professional factors of competence and performance, now rule the roost--almost everywhere.

The design--if you're like MOAI and you want to help autistics--should perhaps be to help autistic not just avoid, but escape such employers, who have gotten such employment. If I could go back to my self before I came into this company...I would equip him (my younger self) with MORE logging/self-protection habits, but let myself proceed because you can only learn via experience in many cases (and often only--or better--through failure), but I'd have saved some sanity and suffered a lot less cortisol damage: so much so that if it was ANOTHER person like me about to enter I' would warn him or her away--as you never know what happens if they break-down (and it's likely they would).

Right now though, "such employers" are the norm not exception--I've talked to similar guys about the same and they tell me "yeah, it's been that way a few decades, that is why I had to leave the workforce and strike out on my own, but when I talk to friends 'still in' they only tell me 'culturally it keeps getting worse and worse, less scientific and less professional, and I'm glad I'm near retirement--I'm thinking of going early." A common theme among the autistics (i.e. the ones who actually know the technical do-dads and how to do things) is "it's like a slow rolling train wreck, we're all on that train, watching and panicking from the cars behind things, but management is atop the roofs having tea and congratulating themselves on how swimmingly it is all proceeding."

Helping autistics escape is THE big help: after all, they too tend to have to keep working, but suffer immensely for it: just look at the statistics, many autistics are dead very early in life, and often by suicide. 

Another bit of help is to counsel and mentor so they can get some catharsis but also acquire skills to deal and get to know "the inside" of "normal" (dysfuction) so when they leave they can still "interface" (e.g. trade with, sell to, help., etc.) later. THIS is perhaps the BIG need of YOUNG autistics.

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And I'm actually treated as an oddball even among my friends and acquaintances (nearly all who are on or very near to being on the spectrum and if not diagnosed, are undergoing examinations now or shortly) because I seem to have this odd constitution that even when I'm severely damaged...I want to persist among "the normies" to learn more from them, keep working on skills, keep practicing.... Several I've come to know have become so traumatized through the years that they gave-up and become permanent wards of the state on "disability", and validly so, but that's sooo limiting when you want to...make the world a better place. It's just not for me. When I describe to any of them (including those who are still working) what I go through they just can't really "get" why I can...be okay rather than losing it.

I say this as someone who is diagnosed PTSD literally because two supervisors in a row feel "threatened" and "scared" (warnings about them by engineers in one room over!) because...things that they have in some cases (management overall, not necessarily these two) talked about in their "meetings" for TWENTY YEARS (according to a 4-decade lifer-peer at my current aerospace firm) are things I go "oh, if we do x,y,z we can solve that in about five minutes!" Before finding out that "yeah, you just put a target on your back" (the four-decade lifer telling me in private after that volunteering of insight). 

But perhaps THE big problem we have in employment, besides these kinds of "that guy knows waaaaaaaay too much for his position/for working under me, I'm gonna be rid of him!" situations that autistics face (repeatedly/constantly, and get constantly persecuted for), is also that people completely mis-read us. So we induce paranoia one moment...and in the next the guy who has been threatening is mentoring...then he's frantically trying to elicit information ("Remind me who in HR you were working with again?). 

I was researching what in the world is wrong with people recently and stumbled into a succinct explanation of difference that goes a long way in explanatory power: normal people have heuristics (which you might connect and be correct to "cognitive biases") they're operating from (usually unwittingly), and autistic people have...none. Or almost none. On average. (Maybe this is behind the behavior commonly seen in high functioning autistics (HFAs) that has been described as being "infovores" and "information mongers" and "obsessive classifiers." e.g. I created logographic writing assembling radicals into symbols (numbering several thousands) before I was in middle school,  because this made more sense (being that if you had meaningful things and combined them to make more meaningful things, you could make logical consistently of writing and neatly classify and organize it, rather than have the large random assemblage of "words" we have now). I used to keep tens of thousands of link organized...and notebooks (referencing notebooks) of info, articles found useful, etc... everyone who is like me that I talk to has similar tendencies.)

But that lack of heuristics does mean that someone who has been constantly toyed with (to the point of inducing PTSD) as an autistic may, for example, give chances over and over "because they still have value/things you can learn from them!" (all true) yet they're predatory/causing you severe pain/stress/treating you with extreme hostility, making things toxic, trying to put you into constructive or managed failure (then write you up as though you're at fault), subject you to all kinds of "illegal" much of the time... All the normal people I know who get treated with even a percent of such disrespect or disdain tend to come to devalue those acting toward them in that way--I feel bad if I even come close to thinking "well, I might finally be forced to report him" and think about what GOOD I've actually been able to glean and gain from cooperating/dealing with that person. It is like a gut-punch. (Statements like "the Obstacle is the way" have a LOT of value if you listen to them.) 

In one sense this is a great advantage: if I'm put among a bunch of people working together, despite that I'll be ostracized/left out all day and often beaten-on like this...whereas others around me are getting hurt egos and placing people as convenient to their own career ambitions and "visionary leadership..." I'm taking notes what I can learn from people and where they would actually be excellent (vs. where HR has put them in that given company), in the optimal way for maximal effect for the mission of the firm, and for optimizing their place in the world: I know people who are literally terrible people as managers who are almost godlike as mentors and counselors...and oh yeah, they're also treated like poo by everyone around them as Supervisor I's, so everyone under them gets it raw, harder.

Part of my philosophy is "the normal people can't help it and explaining it to one of those responsible is like trying to explain water to a fish...or perhaps why you shouldn't prey on people to a predator..." So why worry about that part when you could possibly re-arrange things and bring out the best of people, despite that people can be the worst? (A common finding in things like "sensitivity" and "bias" training is...it makes things worse. So sometimes the best battle won really is the one not fought and losing, even hard, is better than being shot in the head. In connection with this, however, is that you see the biases serve a purpose and can, again, be arranged such that the normies can be tremendous in their contributions...but nobody among them seems to see this macro kind of view of people as valuable regardless of how awful their bad sides are.) 

But again, this heuristic-void is also why so many autistics suffer immense traumas, bullying, exploitation, and even get murdered. Now that I am realizing how serious this really is (because the trauma/treatment/bullying is just sooo constantly bad through life), I'm considering going back and doing neurology/psychology just to equip myself with some defense....and to learn to flow and roll and redirect the often-hostile and crazy energy.

Normal people build-up feelings about people and collaborate or work against based on past history...autistics are not thinking personally but going "are they competent in what they do/what I have to work with them on?" 

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One suggestion I have about businesses for autistics (for the people I've reached out to and shared this link with):

Instead of having them simply start new things hoping to scale or strike big riches (though I noticed in the article, it's stated that is not your goal!), 

if you can help autistics be hired...

to go into existing businesses by investors, or used to examine acquired businesses while pretending to be normal employees and not anybody special, 

(much like that show that sends executives into the lower rungs of their organizations to spy out what is going on in their business)

then you're helping them leverage their "lack of heuristics aka cognitive biases" and keen attention to detail toward amazing things:

if any given area relates to interests of the autistic, the keen attention to detail and their immense overload-all-the-time collection of details means they can make optimal decisions without the interference of normal cognitive biases and social motivation like reputation management and politicking. 

e.g. I've had, several times, world-class people (such as one of the interns on the team behind Unix in Bell Labs) that I've shared something with, and gotten a reply that went something like "well you just solved a general problem in computer/process science, and it would save us 100s of 1000s or million$ of dollars per day, but we'll never ever get it approved through all the hands that would have to touch it." 

This kind of block arises from in modern "democratic" (but hierarchical! a conundrous contradiction that's very real) businesses lacking any true "principal" either in ownership or in oversight. (The Principal-Agent problem.) And often it simply doesn't matter: the normal people would never see the simple way forward regardless.

I'm not sure how generalizable the following is but...in cases like mine I find the details overwhelming (so understand why management has been talking for 20 years rather than fixing the darn problems) and personally am energy limited...so I look for very salient/important points, and I solve those, or better put, "instead of improvement through addition, how about substraction?" 

Which, as it turns out (I've checked), is not just hyper-rare and unusual for any human mind, but apparently extraordinarily difficult for human beings to do...therefore, for normal people to understand or not get upset about. "You know all those 'me too' suggestions for features? No ta damn one! Let's figure-out how to build a layer-cake, rather than spaghetti bowl, THEN we can consider where your feature goes, okay?"

Eliminate all the nonsense/distraction/extraneous and you constantly find these elegantly simple (and powerful) solutions to troubling problems and drags on the business. 

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Beyond this kind of thing for autistics: if you want to help, just help them stand-up simple things they can optimize the hell out of until they have a revenue stream to support them and...they'll then focus on their interests. If their interests related to problems in the world, an autistic will never stop until they have solved that thing: then you just help them spread the solution. 

The unique thing about them is they'll focus and do ANYTHING to continue and solve: I once stayed awake for like a week and a half with only black-out minutes here and there, devouring books on javascript and bug reports to hack a browser to get an overlay to work for a company with a limited budget that needed to use a service in a way that required directly interacting with the service javascript from the browser despite the browsers' security wall between local and page javascript, for example.

As another example, I recently learned about "state machines" being immensely faster than recursion and found a paper whose examples use the C programming language (ANSI 1989)...so I'm now learning the C programming language from the 2nd (ANSI) Edition of Kernighan and Ritchie and hope some day to swap-out the implementation of recursion in certain systems (e.g. Python) for Regex using their plan9 library rewritten or leveraged to do the same using those state machine and reduce the cost or an immensity of code (often used in Data science, finance, and AI) and if someone else did this tomorrow...I'd still continue doing this so I could get this all under my belt. 

If the paper I found hadn't been translated to use C from the original, which used machine code of an ancient computer from many decades ago, I'd be on eBay finding a working version of that machine and its manuals, and then finding old materials on that machine code, so I could read the original paper...I've never run into "normal" people who are willing to "abuse" themselves like this over interests.

And I do that all despite having very badly broken memory (though finally found the specialists to begin helping me rehab properly!) and problems (all the time) relative to other people, soul (and health) crippling stress due to toxic treatment at work (illegal, but if I bitch or complain too much I could lose the opportunity to learn from people, and practice interacting with, people), and due to work, a lack of control of my time: while I could, for a while, I'd learn by just staying-up to 3am each night (couldn't sleep anyway, so why not?). (These days I find (now that I've figured-out how to get to sleep) it's worth a lot more sleeping, because maybe you have less time, but you remember more.) 

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One key differentiator might be a quality, or degree of a quality: you notice that you help some autistics and they'll proceed to behave as that old school description went (autistic psyhopaths): I've kept some "code artists" alive (literally) by checking-in on them and making sure they had food and water (or when hit by a car, making them go to a hospital rather than walking to and from the houes and going back to their code), but once they had all they needed they have been aloof--busy with just enough work to pay for...games and interests that solve nothing. 

Of course, there is also just the reality that a lot of people like this aren't truly psycho/cold etc., they're just ABSORBED in whatever they're doing...and if that's towards a solution of a hard problem, God help anyone who bets against them.

You want people who do actually have a larger interest in the world and not just exclusively in...games or other things that have no impact. And the neuroatypicality to simply refuse to give up "come hell or high water".