A lot of the behaviors this seems to force I don't understand - like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not. I am well aware that for kids with autism frequently there are feeding issues, but what's going on in the "simulation" is very not clear to me.
Similarly, I don't understand the decisions related to the driving environment: it appears to be a personal vehicle, surely you, as the owner, can make the interior environment something that's as close to personally comfortable as possible? Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.
Related, what is or isn't masking seems very confused. To begin with, it's not just code for "hiding or not hiding behaviors that appear socially irregular." But it's also not the case that deciding whether to participate in a non-working-hours event is or isn't masking in of itself.
Presenting behavior in a socialized way when necessary is a skill that's harder (as I understand it) for those on the autism spectrum, but I don't think that makes every application equivalent to masking.
> A lot of the behaviors this seems to force I don't understand - like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not. I am well aware that for kids with autism frequently there are feeding issues, but what's going on in the "simulation" is very not clear to me.
I lost interest after the breakfast question. For someone who’s physically fit (which this person likely is) skipping breakfast shouldn’t cause a noticeable drop in energy. If it does, then there may be more going on than just autism.
you also don't fall asleep at your desk as a response to a birthday party in the office early in the morning after a good nights' sleep, but if you play a one-sided game in this that's what happens.
it's not a reality simulator, incredibly few video games are.
the whole thing seems like a conflicted struggle between "I want to make a game" and "I need to get my points across", often to the detriment of the game-part.
You don't feel it immediately. Notice the bar doesn't reset the next day. You don't feel breakfast immediately but your workout later in the day and tomorrow will be affected by this.
You have definitively diagnosed yourself as not being on the spectrum.
Hard to describe, but there is a tendency to self-sabotage (for lack of a better term) that you have to take into account. Sure, it may be my car, and I may have control of the radio, but I don't always act upon the need to adjust my environment.
This is correlated with the amount of energy and attention you have to give to processing your environment, much like the health bars in the game UI.
> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.
I can relate to this in that I barely have any energy in the mornings to do anything no matter how early I set my alarm, then end up skipping everything except the bare minimum to function, or maybe less depending on if I happen to have more energy that day.
Autism has become a culturally dominant force that's displaced other kinds of neurodiversity almost completely. All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family.
The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.
I understand where you're coming from, and I would even agree with the denotation of every sentence in your first paragraph, but I think you're missing a lot.
Being "culturally dominant" is not a good thing for autistic people: it's not autistic voices that dominate, but mostly eugenics groups, with the occasional well-meaning (but usually uninformed) activist group trying to oppose the narrative. If you're familiar with the kind of "anti-racist" corporate training that's mostly just white guilt with a few racial stereotypes thrown in, then you know how far "well-meaning" can take you.
While we can draw many analogies to autistic masking, autistic masking is qualitatively different to the examples you've listed. We have other words for the other things (e.g. "talking white" is a special-case of "situational code-switching", and "staying closeted" is a special-case of something that I don't know a name for). You're skirting (and, I think, crossing) the line between analogy and appropriation in your first paragraph. (See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440873, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45441925)
I'm not really sure what you mean by your "actually does the opposite" remark in the second paragraph, unless you're automatically treating this interactive description of autism made with care, by someone with personal experience of being autistic, as the kind of rubbish that's made by "well-meaning" ignorants for low-quality corporate training.
People with other flavours of neurodivergence have produced similar "simulators" (a kind of RPG, really). You might be familiar with Spoon Theory, originally devised to describe the psychological burden of living with lupus? That simulator is a TTRPG.
Ya, I'm curious about this as well. I'm not a morning person, and certainly am always just-scraping-by until about 1 pm. But is this some mild autism? Or is this just how I am? Or is there even a sensible distinction between those two phrases?
Everyone seems to self-diagnose as slightly autistic these days. “I’ve noticed that I have personal quirks. Must be autism. Couldn’t be that everyone has their own personal stuff to deal with.”
I think this is maybe related to imposter syndrome. “There are people who can easily do this thing that I struggle with. Maybe I’m not qualified./Maybe I’m autistic.”. This thought process assumes others aren’t struggling and also tends to look to those who excel rather than the average so it’s biased anyway.
> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.
If you're talking about what happens after the first day, I think it's not due to any of the "stats" but rather because your first day is long and so you're running late on the second day, and for whatever reason you have nothing ready-to-eat at home. (Might be related to that option to go to the grocery store that you probably didn't take.)
In other words, it's seemingly a narrative-driven obstacle.
> it appears to be a personal vehicle, surely you, as the owner, can make the interior environment something that's as close to personally comfortable as possible? Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.
Could be a rental car. Though my guess here is that the author actually comes from a place where the combination of culture and socioeconomics means they commute via public transit; and so they're actually trying to translate their experiences of the social impingement of public transit into analogous experiences when driving.
(Personally, I think a better translation would be being stuck in gridlock, or getting on a highway via an onramp where you keep getting cut off, etc, where there's an autistic itch there to get the other human drivers to realize that, when driving, they should "realize they're all cogs in a global optimization problem and so drive as predictably as possible, in order to decrease burstiness and so increase throughput, even at the expense of their individual perceived end-to-end latency.")
> Related, what is or isn't masking seems very confused. To begin with, it's not just code for "hiding or not hiding behaviors that appear socially irregular." But it's also not the case that deciding whether to participate in a non-working-hours event is or isn't masking in of itself.
AFAICT the "masking" gauge seems to be some rolled-up combination of 1. an odd domain-specific form willpower ("spoons" but you can only spend them on masking-related tasks, and when depleted you can't mask even if you still have motivation to do other things), with 2. a measure how close others are to deducing from your behavior that you are in fact on the autistic spectrum. (As if that's something you could ever expect to keep your coworkers and boss from realizing about you over years of continuous interaction.)
I say this because of the interaction I encountered about coming to a charity event, where literally being explicit about how you have a problem dealing with that kind of social situation... decreases the "masking" gauge. If it was purely #1, I'd expect the gauge to go up. It's only under interpretation #2 where it would go down.
(Or maybe you could describe the "masking" gauge in classical D&D terms as a WIS stat where masking attempts are Will-based saving throws?)
Honestly, I'd like to just see the source code for this. I'm surprised it's not linked; I feel like reading the source (hopefully with a lot of code comments about why the given heuristics were chosen) is the obvious "next step" to the game communicating what it wants to communicate.
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
Why do both eating a proper breakfast and skipping breakfast affect your masking negatively? No one is around, what difference does it make?
This is because autistism advocacy groups misuse the word mask. It is supposed to refer to extra work you have to do playing a specific persona. E.g. at a party pretending to be a character from a movie or a book. And especially trying to force yourself to become that persona to fit in.
A lot of people in the advocacy space use it to mean basic things like being well behaved or being nice to people. Everybody has to be well-behaved at work. Everybody has to consider the feelings of others etc.
The idea of "wearing a mask" in the sense of being polite is older than the notion of masking in autism. For example, P. G. Wodehouse used it a few times in the 1920s to refer to the social expectations made on aristocratic families. E.g. from 1922:
> I didn’t like the chap, but we Woosters can wear the mask. I beamed a bit.
In this sense everyone masks. In fact they mask almost all the time from the time they get up until maybe the time they go to bad. Masking in autism originally referred to something different that was specific to autism.
The way it's used now it essentially just means "it's harder for me to fit in." Which is true but doesn't tell you anything about autism from a psychological point of view beyond the obvious fact that it's harder for us to fit in.
I've mentioned to relevant people a couple of times in the past that I generally feel like I am "acting" in most social situations. Like I have an idea as to who/how I need to be in that moment and act accordingly. I'm used to it and it's not really something very conscious in the moment, but if the event lasts a long time it gets kind of draining since you have parallel tracks going - reading the room, predicting what reaction someone expects at any time, issuing that reaction, etc. It's not that I don't enjoy the events, but I can "fill up" on interaction quickly and want to go home early to recharge.
> people in the advocacy space use it to mean basic things like being well behaved or being nice to people
Thank you for this comment. As a family member of a young AuDHD person I am continually battered by a combination of their behavior (which directly and un-ignorably degrades the experience of everyone around) and by various 'advocacy' ideas that use phrasing like that to not-so-subtly imply that it's actually our bad for daring to expect to "not be hit," or to not be forced to constantly base our whole lives on one person's preferences, etc.
It's tough sometimes to figure out what's real, what's a fair expectation, what's something that can be learned/unlearned, and what's just inevitable.
Having had personal experience with this problem, there is actually a simple but difficult solution to your problem:
Focus in the effect if the person's action on you, and set hard boundaries for yourself.
Note that boundaries are in this specific form:
"If you do X in Y situation, I will do Z"
The consequence to the instigating person (the Z part) is important. The person you described likely has a deficit in empathy, so feedback on actions has to happen to modify behavior.
Note that I'm not saying to hit back. Consequences are generally best when withdrawing something of value than adding something of negative value.
For example: "If we're watching a movie and you are physically rowdy, you will have to leave the living room and entertain yourself in your room".
Focua on how things affect you, and what actions you can take in response to boundary breaking behavior. Then be ruthlessly firm and consistent about it.
> The person you described likely has a deficit in empathy
Sorry, but I have to correct this because it's a common misunderstanding. It's actually a name collision.
People on the autism spectrum struggle with theory of mind, which is also called "cognitive empathy." We can have difficulty understanding the mental states and emotions of others.
On they other hand, we're often higher than average on what's called "emotional empathy" or "affective empathy." Many autistic people get very distressed when others are unhappy or are suffering. For example, autistic folks are over-represented in the animal rights movements and other movements to reduce suffering.
Somebody who lacks empathy in the everyday use of the word is someone who does not care if others are suffering. That is not a symptom of autism, and never has been going back to the start of research on the topic.
Yeah I like to think of it as active roleplaying instead of having to put in an effort. Most people have to put in some effort in social situations, heck I catch myself saying unproductive things to my partner if I slip completely into passive mode.
If you feel like this, you may be on the spectrum (not an insult btw).
Masking for neuro typical people is very easy, even if emotionally draining. My wife is the perfect example - her personality is to be nice to everyone and to connect with people. A lot of times this leads to prolonged conversations with people, which then she complains about, but its basically like saying you are tired after going on a long bike ride - there is some enjoyment in the activity.
Whereas for neuro-spicy people, masking is the equivalent of spilling seeds on the floor and having to pick up each one with tweezers to put them back. Its both exhausting and not enjoyable.
No, parent is right: everybody "masks" at work. Call it putting on a persona, playing a role, whatever - but as you said, it's less effortful for some than others.
I wouldn't even say its less effort. Its a whole different kind of effort. A social neurotypical person willingly engages in interactions and "masks". A person on the spectrum only engages because they have to.
Everybody has a social battery, but while some are working with a USB PD 240W monster you can't take on an airplane, others have to get by with an iPhone Air (and they can't disable background refresh).
It's true that different people require different amounts of effort to do and approach it with different tactics, but fundamentally almost nobody streams their inner monologue straight out of their lips, and I think when it does happen is actually much more associated with TBI and inhibition disregulation than ASD. (Which is not to say that it doesn't require a different approach or more effort for those with ASD.)
Yeah this is a thing that gets me. Everyone has to mask because otherwise there'd be a more conflict over shit that doesn't matter then there likely already is during meetings and stuff.
Some of the messaging too is just... off-putting/patronizing. "Brave the grocery store"? I know social situations can be tough on people but it's not you're being asked to kill the chicken and process it or grow the veggies. Is resiliency so low that it's a battle to go pick up necessities?
Maybe I was blessed to grow up in a poor, not exactly stable household at least for a while.
Yep... If I didn't mask while at work and home, I'd probably be annoying my family and coworkers with state and local land use politics issues all the time.
Skipping breakfast reduces the caloric energy you have. Eating a full breakfast is basically going against your instinct. Optimal thing for autistic people would be a energy bar that is both healthy, has good texture, and makes you feel full.
The game puts the "masking" definition right in the start page, no need to deduce. I also dislike how any form of self care reduces your masking even if you're alone.
It's designed to make you lose in a couple of days, which would imply you're not a highly functional autist, and hence I wonder how the heck did you get a job without others noticing your autism?
For example, self care with video games would be different. I think the author was just trying to demonstrate that self care in the normal sense isn't the same to spectrum folks
I was surprised to find that skipping my medication which causes drowsiness instantly caused my energy to crash to zero and lose the game. I think this is well intentioned but weirdly designed.
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
Isn't that just part of everyday life as a grown-up?
Some people find this process intuitive to the point they don't realize they're doing it, and others have to be actively thinking about it or it doesn't happen at all. Those with autism are more likely to tend towards the latter.
This seems in the same direction as "doesn't everyone get sad?" for folks with depression. It's not a matter of this not being an experience for others, as much as it is how much energy it takes to get through it.
"Energy" in this case as a stand-in for willpower, for emotional regulation, for actual physical energy.
For some people it comes easier than for others. I personally don't feel like I mask all the time, only sometimes when I want to tell my colleague that he's a moron, but I don't.
> Isn't that just part of everyday life as a grown-up?
Yes it is.
The question isn't if you mask, it's what you are masking and to what extent.
There is a big difference between having sense enough not to wear your favorite gimp suit to work and not knowing how to make small talk and have to do it as performance everyday when you are at work.
Yes, but it's more intense for people who find eye contact distracting or outright unpleasant on a visceral level, or who are suppresssing stimming urges that a 'normal' person doesn't experience in the first place.
I don't like the premise of this game. If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine. They can find other people to spend time with.
You can probably find a good community where you are, and if not just move to SF which is something like the autism homeland. Being autistic there is valorized and even imitated in sort of amusing ways.
Masking is a kind of hell, living someone else's life. Unmasking and living as yourself feels scary at first but the people who will love you that way can only find you if you live that way.
Masking doesn't (only) mean presenting as 100% neurotypical with the goal of others not even realizing you're autistic. It's also what you call any amount emotional labor you go through, trying to decrease the amount of emotional labor that other people have to expend on dealing with the ways you would, if not masking, approach interactions/tasks/etc differently.
If you imagine neurotypical and autistic as two "languages", then masking is when an autistic person is going to the effort to speak the neurotypical language, so as to remove the burden from neurotypical people of having to parse the autistic language. Most of the time, unless the interaction is very short and one-shot, the autistic person will still come off as speaking the neurotypical language "as a second language" rather than speaking it "fluently"; but it is the lived experience of many autistic people that this is still less disruptive in mixed company than just letting go and going full native autistic and expecting neurotypical people to be the ones to adapt. (Even in SF, a randomly-selected group of people often contains a few people visiting from elsewhere, who have never interacted with [non-masking] autistic people before, and so have never learned to "speak" autistic.)
Which is not to say that it isn't nice to find other autistic people to hang out with, where you can just let your hair down and "speak your native language" together! But it's not like this is something people avoid doing, if they get the chance. It's just that in most places in the world, you're rather unlikely to stumble into groups consisting solely of autistic people. (Except maybe in engineering-led tech companies!)
> If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
No thank you. I very much prefer to remain employed.
I get enough accommodations as it is; society is built on give-and-take and I’ve found a stable medium. My masking is part of that compromise. Without it I would just be entitled.
For clarity, I am not autistic (as far as I am aware) but I do have personality traits and quirks that absolutely have made my life challenging. As I have gotten older I have learned to mask those traits and it has led to far more success in life. While I still have trouble maintaining relationships, I at least can curate a professional reputation that has granted me benefits.
I am not saying this to claim that those with autism should mask, but I think the advice in this comment could be misinterpreted. While we should all be able to live as authentic selves, the reality is that this comes with trade-offs. We should evaluate those trade-offs independently and determine which of our personality traits are worth masking and which are not.
I'm audhd in real life and I've been unable to get to day 3 in this game after 5 tries. I don't know what that says about me, the spectrum, this way, or the way I live my life, but I think I also don't like the premise much either.
I’ve played it in real life and lasted 300+ days a few times and I don’t recommend that experience at all. The nice thing about a game, at least, is that losing doesn’t matter.
I have aspergers (not sure the term is even used anymore) and eye contact is very uncomfortable, but I try to do it (or fake, it as I have to wear glasses and can take them off) because in day to day life not having eye contact when having a conversation is seen as rude and the last thing I want is for everyone that I have a one time conversation with to think I'm rude.
I strongly agree. Masking is a maladaptive strategy and it's described that way in the literature.
But you do have to figure out who you are and what matters to you. A lot of autistic people spend much of their youth trying to be other people and only really figuring out what they like when they're in their 30s, 40s, or older.
In the context of this game world, that circumstance manifests as the player getting fired from their job. Perhaps a person would like to keep their job and so does things they otherwise wouldn't like to do.
IDK if it says something about me, but my first couple tries at the game I misunderstood what masking was.
I thought when my Masking score went down, it meant I was showing my true colors too much and exposing myself as autistic (to the detriment of my career). Took me a minute to realize it was the opposite.
I first learned that it was possible to intentionally act "normal" when I was 12 (I'm now 47). So I spent a lot of years studying people to figure out how to do those things they did automatically but I had to do manually.
Later I learned it's called masking and a lot of people like yourself think of it as bad.
But it made my life immeasurably better.
I hated how I acted and how people reacted to me when I was young.
I wouldn't even know how to turn off the "masking behavior" now and I never would have become who I am without it.
Maybe it's because I was young and didn't know any other people like me but I don't think labelling this survival technique as hell is right for everybody.
> If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
What does “masking” mean to you? Because when I search for autistic masking I get a really wide range of behaviors from suppressing physical rocking to attempting to learn social skills.
Some masking might be counterproductive or even harmful. Some of the stuff I’m finding listed as masking is just basic being an adult stuff, though. If “don’t mask” means “don’t try to improve yourself” then it’s terrible advice.
Yikes. I suppose "Just stop masking" is great advice if you're in a highly privilege position where you don't have to worry about losing your job. But that does track with suggesting autistic people "just move to San Francisco," where my crippling disorder is "imitated" in "amusing" ways.
Screw that. There’s nothing inherently good about authenticity. Be yourself when it’s good to be yourself. Don’t when it’s not. Try to change “yourself” when it’s beneficial to do so.
That's an interesting take. Most humans have a viscerally negative reaction to unmasked autistic behaviours, in the same way they might react to a strange spider. A mix of fear and disgust. You quite literally cannot build a life for yourself without masking unless you're already financially independent. Once you have enough power and F-U money, sure, go for it. In the meantime it's not really a realistic solution.
This is a really privileged perspective. Most people have to be professional abuse takers if they want to make rent.
I do agree that “masking is bad” is sometimes taken too far. It doesn’t justify being harmful to other people. But the chronic toxic positivity that workplaces demand, because people want to delude themselves into believing it isn’t corrosive to sell one’s time and dignity for survival, is exhausting and unsustainable for autistic people.
> believing it isn’t corrosive to sell one’s time and dignity for survival
It's possible to survive without doing that - start your own business.
It's just tremendously more work to come up with a good and working business plan, and to find a funding source to help actualize that plan, when you're too good to "sell your time and dignity" to at least get seed money.
I don't get this mindset that the whole idea of working for someone else is degrading. Working for someone else is outsourcing a very tough part of business -- the strategy and funding -- to someone else. In exchange for this turnkey arrangement, you receive far less money than would a sole proprietor who managed to hatch the idea and deliver the same value on their own, successfully, but you also make far more money than the (zero or negative $) you would in the 90% likely scenario where your business fails.
Nobody is being forced to work for others -- but to get money you do have to provide value worth paying for to someone. Extreme self-sufficiency, owing nothing to anyone, is also an option -- you can get a loan and buy a few acres of farmland for less than a car and do your own thing there.
In my opinion the entire structure of scrum and sprints is structured to help people with autism and adhd. Most workplaces that produce creative output are much more focused on soft power, networking, and hard deadlines—things that really don’t work for the “au-dhd” crowd.
It’s easy to remove the locus of control by saying “this environment wasn’t built for me” but do appreciate how much it actually /is/ created for you.
My experience has been 100% the opposite. Daily public status check-ins, top-down decisions, every work interaction mediated through artificial structure? The points are made up, the deadlines are obviously fake, but everyone acts as if they are real? Except when they're not?
That, on its own, would make it clear the environment wasn't built for me.
The fact that the environment was very obviously built for management—for information to flow up so that decisions can flow down—but also that nobody is willing to acknowledge that? That just makes it even clearer.
I've worked in an environment that did feel like it was built for me, and it was pretty much the opposite of scrum/agile/etc. I had real trust with a clearly defined area of ownership. I was responsible for managing the interfaces and interaction points around my area and, occasionally, for real deadlines (with real context!), not a slog of fake short-term deadlines that exist just to create pressure. I didn't have to break down or justify my work in terms of bite-sized tasks that could roll up into somebody's spreadsheet.
And the best part? We got more done, faster, than conventionally managed teams.
If the culture hadn't been totally ruined by a reorg, I'd still be there. I'm still sad I haven't been able to find anything similar since. But, having experience that, I am only more confident that scrum et al are absolutely not built for me.
Of course the environment was built for management. But if you have ever been in management you know that getting useful updates on progress is like suqeezing blood from a stone.
I didn’t say that anyone liked the process, but I assure you that the average autistic engineer would actually do worse in a more feeeform environment. They would like it more though.
It is sometimes difficult to get progress reports because it's difficult for the people who are doing the work to figure out where they are in the process. For example, imagine that you have some tickets; "Add create method, "Add delete method", "Add list method". You take the first ticket, and decide to add the RPC server, and the authentication infrastructure, and the test harness, and the CLI wrapper. What do you say on the progress update? "You've been working on this for a week, why isn't at least one of those done?" The answer is because the tickets are pieces of value that the business wants to ship (you can ship without delete, I guess), but it's not actually how the software is assembled. What happens is that someday, you say "I'm done with create" and then 2 hours later say "I'm done with delete and list". That makes execs feel like they're being misled, but it's true.
Of course, if you actually enumerate the "how" and not just the "what" in your ticketing system, you can get a much more realistic view. "Add foobar RPC server", "Hook auth into the foobar RPC server", "Add foobar subcommand to CLI", ...
I think everyone does better with a clear set of expectations, autism or not. That's why we do design docs, design reviews, and try to put a realistic set of work into the ticket tracker. I would say personally, though, 99% of the time I don't really need to do that to get a good result out of myself. I can just say "by next Tuesday I will have this subsystem done". Typically this is done with heroics rather than good planning (Monday becomes a longer-than-average workday), so I try to avoid it, but I definitely understand why people want a more freeform environment.
And some management type will say when you're halfway through 'add' that they'll cut 'delete', but it's impossible to automate anything without a delete option, so you implement it anyway during your testing and then they get mad.
Scrum is pretty bad for au-dhd crowd. It misses proper checks on business interference, which makes things even worse. It is constant pushing the worthless points (why not a time unit), kpi is about scoring points or useless improvements which have to happen anyway (merciless refactoring, yeah!). Devs could simply atomize every task and win this stupid game, but then you lose oversight and we get to lie number whatever. Everyone should be responsible, most people ain't generalists. They are specialists often.
Kanban gives more flexibility. Scrum seems to fall apart like that eventually leaving a power vacuum for tasks out bound of scrum. Active products have constant support questions.
Then you have SAFE, which is even worse. Waterfall but then even worse. Coordination seems to be very complex, the diagram is close to unreadable. Looks like a badly designed production street for its purpose.
The story points people won the battle against time units, claiming that "complexity" can be measured and quantified better than "hours" could, but in every place I've worked, people just treat them as though they're actually some unit of time. Product managers and my bosses always believe you can do arithmetic with that (multiply engineers assigned to project by 2 to cut time in half right? Sum up 25 points and be confident 5 engineers can complete them all in a week right?)
Then we occasionally have to pretend to really care why our "velocity" isn't arbitrarily higher or why it's less than it once was, when all of the tasks have estimates from 1-5 with at least a 1-point margin of error. There's so much noise that no amount of smoothing yields useful data that you can use to achieve "certainty" -- such as that X project will be done in Y number of sprints, which is what senior management craves most, but can never safely be promised unless you have a death wish.
Basically I'm convinced at minimum like half of teams that "do agile" or "do scrum" are just cargo-culting and derive no particular benefit from it. I don't think I'd even do estimation of any kind if I ran a software team as I saw fit.
Scrum is literally a scam though. It was invented by some guy not even worth remembering who sold it to both sides (buyers and sellers of software). On the buyer side, the incentive was to encourage the seller to use scrum to communicate progress. On the seller side, they are encouraged to use scrum because the buyer wants it, and it "proven" to be an effective management tool.
There are too many unknowns to deal with to actually make use of it, and managing the unknowns is a whole other aspect of management outside scrum. This is why most scrums essentially devolve into ad hoc work per sprint with very loose planning.
Its not so much as estimation as a whole work style, but
Make it work -> Make it right -> Make it fast
is arguably the best way to go about things, then structure your work around that.
Ive done this with greenfield projects when I used to work for Amazon (while still ironically operating under scrum), and was able to get SD2-SD3 promo within 2 years (entering an an SD2).
In terms of planning work, you basically allocate people as necessary. The first part deals with a lot of unknowns, so estimation is pointless - basically everyone is on board in terms of getting software up and running and talking to other software.
Once you have that, making it right is a lot easier to estimate because you can do a lot more fine grained planning (like for example, a certain team member that worked on a feature can add all the correctness and unit testing way faster than someone who has not)
Then making it fast is basically just optimizations, which can be done by a subset of team members while the rest work on adding features (and adding features needs to be done in the same way - make the feature just work, make it correct for all use cases, and then make it optimal)
Just rank by date needed order on a kanban board and work your way through everything in order. If it's constant fight to meet deadlines it will be clear enough that things are backed up.
In my opinion the entire structure of scrum and sprints is structured to help people with autism and adhd.
No, it’s the opposite. Daily performance check-ins are exhausting and humiliating. The cops show up at your house every day with guns drawn.
A trap autistic people fall into is believing things will get better if a metric is imposed. “Oh, now I just have to beat the metric, not worry about being well-liked.” No, now you have to do both. New written rulers don’t make the shitty unwritten ones go away. It just became monotonically easier to get fired and monotonically harder to get promoted.
When management imposes a metric or quota, it’s time to get a union. Unfortunately, this is not something we have the skills to do alone, but it is a way to fight back against those who hate us.
I think higher management likes to believe that those things (sprints, scrum, Jira and standups) provide a safety net against lazy employees not working hard enough, so they cling to them. Of course, they actually do little and are pretty easy to game. Their failure to magically make all software work predictable and deterministic and all developer time fungible actually means that you still need a manager involved and close to the work to identify people who BS their way through everything and take way longer than they should.
I'd rather be in an environment where you are given access to simple tools like kanban to prioritize and track work, and for people who don't deliver, the manager just fires them (maybe with one warning).
This, it is costly, certain personal walks away. Proper roles seem to emerge anyway.
The cost of control and the costly overhead has everything to do with atomizing the work load. Just like in a distributed system. The synchronization mechanisms get more complicate.
The more layers, the less trustable the organization, since every manager under their manger, is a potentially corruptable.
This makes the communication lines unclear and makes people over promise. Also distributing the workload has diminishing returns.
I wonder how much of this is company- or team-dependent. I don't mind sprints, but I also choose what to put on them myself with very rare (like twice-yearly, tops) requests from my manager.
I've been in the software business since 2007, which was also when I first met Jira and Scrum (at least something with 14 days sprints).
My first encounter with Scrum (or whatever it was) was good. It felt good to work in cycles and reprioritize twice a month.
Since then I have seen various versions of working systems and various versions of broken systems.
The two last projects have been extremely agile, the current project has exactly 5 mandatory meetings in an average week:
- 3 x stand ups that typically take <10 minutes and never more than 15.
- 1 stand up plus planning (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 20 minutes)
- 1 stand up plus voluntary demo + retro (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 30 minutes)
The previous project had a lot more structure but also worked well.
Common themes:
- Communication is 2 way
- Both teams are friendly and competent
- Customer care about results and leave programming to us
- Clear communication about what they hope, but without stress. Especially the first project were the stakes were serious: if we manage to hit the deadline we knew we would save the organization millions, but if not, nobody was in trouble. It was an actual challenge, not a scary thing.
Have I seen dysfunctional Scrum and Agile as well? Yes!
Some examples:
- endless estimation meetings which not only eats programmer hours but also mean that everyone feel they have to match the estimates
- one way communication (in a loop from customer - ux - programmer - tester - customer). Doesn't help if there are 14 days sprints when every sprint is a mini waterfall
- taking time of the project to do agile workshop after agile workshop while continuing to be absolutely rigid
- "release" after "release" but no actual customer
- "finish one thing" taken to mean that styling has to be perfect even on placeholder pages
It’s built to make upper management happy with the facade of productivity, middle management employed, while they squeeze the most out of the workforce and keep up the constant pressure (endless sprints).
It’s not built for the product team (devs, designers, QA).
In some cases, coincidentally, it might be good for some neurodivergent folks, I guess…
…as long as they don’t mind the constant bugging for updates, interruptions, and constant pressure… I’m sure it’s an environment where people with ADHD etc shine.
As someone with ADHD, I am orders of magnitude more productive when I do freelancing than in an SCRUM based corporate environment and much happier. And I mean orders of magnitude, I am not being dramatic. (Though that only works if I work on something I am interested in otherwise my lows are even lower.)
Task switching is a typical issue for both ADHD as autism people and SCRUM has so much. Just the damn dailies are complete murder for my mental health and productivity.
The problem with SCRUM is that it focuses on everyone being a cog in the machine. Everyone replaceable. At best it allows teams to self-organize (in theory, seldom in practice) but does not acknowledge individual needs of team members.
I love it, I have been meaning to put together a similar simulation to demonstrate the effects of interruptions and context switches on developers.
Something like the following:
- a game or puzzle which requires working memory, like matching pairs or some puzzles that need a lot of working memory and/or flipping between screens
- this gets interrupted by fullscreen interruptions of someone's face, and text asking questions, or announcing something, and you have to pick an answer or a reaction (multiple choice)
- it could start with questions like 'hi, are you busy?' or 'can I ask you a question?'
- answers which tries to end the conversation quickly could lead to even more demanding reactions or questions
- interruptions stating there is an emergency can lead to a lot of questions and answers which then leads you to discover than it is in fact not an emergency
- once one of these engagements finish you can return to the game and try to complete it
- you'll get multiple interruptions like this
- other interruptions can also flash up, like a notification that a meeting is due in x minutes
- it could then have a short simulated meeting, perhaps just a line by line scroll of dialogue between others, where you need to say nothing
- however, at some point someone will ask you directly about one of the items discussed, and you will be given a set of fairly ambiguous multiple choice answers which you will have to try out until you get to the 'correct' one
- at the end of the meeting you return to the working memory task/game
- this gets interrupted by someone then asking you about the action points in the meeting
- return to the game
- get notifications about the end of your work day coming up
- more interruptions, etc.
I tried this -- I am undiagnosed, but my kids are diagnosed. On one hand I thought parts over-dramatized, on the other hand I thought parts were watered down.
Misophonia for me does not give me any choice. Either the noise stops or I am leaving. If necessary I will explain later. If the noise stops I am possibly leaving anyway in case it starts again. Fortunately in my case the trigger is pretty obscure, like nails on a chalkboard type of rarity -- people don't actually do that so often.
The explanations I thought were dramatized. One of the challenges I think people with autism have is trying to explain their reactions and coming up with things that neurotypical people cannot relate to. It is more like reflexes. I'd be slack-jawed if my co-worker asked me to explain why my leg moved when the doctor hits my knee, "it just does that when you hit it that way", "probably something to do with ligaments, or tendons? IDK". Could you make an "undiagnosed" mode where your scores just go up and down?
And the options -- when the people team came through at $bigcorp and announced tiny hotdesking, I filed all the necessary paperwork, gave constructive feedback, worked with my manager etc, but started looking for new work immediately and noped out at the first opportunity. The people team was happy to close the file which was growing fat with demerits like not hanging my coat the right way, but my peers and reports were upset. well done people team! This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
I am not autistic in any way afaik, but "tiny hotdesking" sounds like a torture come up in the seventh circle of hell.
> This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
No company is supportive of neurodivergence, if it actually causes a difference. They are supportive if your issue is you need to wear noise cancelling headphones, and they can put your photo on the careers page about how they support neurodivergence.
Something I am not quite able to compute is why they are so rigid. I paid for a house with enough rooms that I turned one into a generous office. My peers tell me my hobby productivity is off the charts. There is / was no price at which I could solve for an acceptable office environment at this company. At any company I have worked with or heard of.
I get that there is back biting and intensive score-keeping, resentment etc, but the act of putting everything on a synchronized linear scale (with sub linear progression) seems cruel. Some people like tchotchkies, some people don't like those esoteric office snacks, some people like mouthwash and shoe polish and fancy towels in the restroom. Why gatekeep it all and shove the same exact bundle of goods down everyone's throats?
If they were really minimaxing your next unit of work, this is not an optimal strategy. It's just lazy, a children's tale of how an office might be.
Because for most people, someone reacting with disinterest for the thing they care about is a rare and upsetting event, not their entire life's experience. That's what it means to be "normal", you align better with your peers. Most people don't need what you need. Most people can work with what you can not. You are choosing to be the exception. You chose to be like this, so unchoose it and stop being a problem.
Of course... That's the quiet part. The out loud part is just dismissing everything you say and passing you over for promotion.
The objections you have raised, the things you have said. I really understand what you mean. There's evidence all around that the aspects of our experience isn't alien at all. Why can't others see that? At this point I think that not seeing it is necessary mental infrastructure for some people. It's a bridge over an abyss that for us broke.
I think the solace I get is that this line of work tends to funnel people of our disposition into it. So we find ourselves less alone than we normally would.
> This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
It's easy to mouth slogans, and modern companies employ teams of specialists in that department. You can't trust their words, which should be assumed to be lies, only their actions (especially their actions when they're under some pressure).
Here's an absurdly clear example: I recently listened to these podcasts about Saudi Arabia's Neom project. It is hyper-dysfunctional and was run by a guy who literally bragged about treating his subordinates as slaves trying to work them to death. But all the responses from the project are pitch-perfect corporate "we value our employees," "we follow best practices," etc.
If a company professes to be supportive of neurodivergence, it means either (1) they're supportive of neurodivergence; or (2) they are hostile to neurodivergence and have gotten into trouble for it, so have strong motivation to claim that they are supportive. There will probably be written policies and strongly-worded emails that are supportive of neurodivergence, which enable them to continue being hostile to neurodivergence.
I would guess there's far more of (2) going around than (1).
This is an overly polarized view -- what does "supportive" even mean? What forms are actually deemed permissible? -- but it's probably more right than wrong.
It's like the schools with posters everywhere declaring "Zero tolerance for bullying" or "Bully free zone". Except that there is no (1) at those places. Those signs mean they have a problem with bullying and haven't come up with any solutions.
I’ve realised in recent years that I’m quite far on the spectrum. Very obvious when I was young but am exceptionally good at masking now so most people don’t realise.
Nowadays I experience misophonia in “attacks” that just come on. Recently I was on public transport and the noise was suddenly so unbearable that I had to get the hell out of there, hadn’t really felt like that since I was a kid. Fight or flight feeling. When I was a kid I had a lot of hearing tests as a result, ASD was not on anyone’s radar.
I carry silicone putty ear plugs with me pretty much all the time.
They are very squishy and I can place then in my ear and depending on how thick I make them, they have varying levels of blocking out sound. Super useful if I want extra blocking or just a little light blocking so I can still hear things around me, but dampened.
They have been a life changer for me. The best kind I've found are Mack's. Maybe they would help you too.
This is a question out of genuine curiosity and not intended to minimize misophonia in any way:
I do not see any examples of a "naturally occurring" sound there. Is the sound supposed to be human generated in some way? That would feel a bit incongruent with my understanding of it as a pure stimulus response situation.
Yes, natural sounds do trigger it (for me). The difference is that if it is a natural sound, it becomes a problem to be solved - intermittent dripping from taps, the noise of the wheel in my daughters hamster enclosure, or something tapping a window are specific cases I can cite. Those incidents resulted in a) me learning how to replace a leaking faucet assembly (the taps and faucet were one unit) , b) upgrading to a better, quieter hamster wheel, and c) trimming a tree.
When people are the cause it becomes more challenging. People feel attacked when you tell them they are chewing loudly, or they think you are weird when you complain about the sound of the specific pen they are using makes when they are writing on the paper bothers you. Couple misophonia reactions with ADHD justice sensitivity and the emotional reaction can overload my rational comprehension that it is quite normal to make, tolerate, and ignore those sounds to make the stupid fucking meat between my ears feel like I am being targeted by whoever is making the noise. 95% of time I can manage it, but when it gets overwhelming my reactions can be suboptimal (like, wildly inappropriate when I was a kid, but as an adult pulling an Irish goodbye and just leaving, which can be a career limiting move when you are in the workplace).
interesting observation your sibling also made. its commonly described as making the sufferer IRATE at the person causing of the sound which matches your comment
anyone who experiences willing to shed light? id guess if the sufferer expects we all dislike certain sounds, causing them intentionally is especially hateful?
Another observation is that they're either idle sounds (pen clicking, finger tapping) or necessary secondary sounds made during some activity. It's literally impossible to unwrap a piece of candy without making some noise, and damn near impossible to stir a liquid without the stirrer hitting the container once.
>id guess if the sufferer expects we all dislike certain sounds, causing them intentionally is especially hateful?
I think it's pointless to attempt to look at it rationally, given the reactions I've heard seem entirely irrational and disproportionate.
I remember one time I was at work and a coworker on the opposite end of the room was using what I thought was the exact same model of mechanical keyboard I was using, with blue switches. I had never realized just how loud those things were until then. I kept glancing at him and could feel myself getting unreasonably annoyed, but I really had no grounds to say anything under any circumstance, given I had been using those very same switches in that same office very recently. What really struck me was how the same noise would sound pleasing when I made it and annoying when someone else made it, and I wondered if I had bothered someone with my typing, or if it was just me. I don't know if I'll use my own keyboard with clicky switches if I share an office with someone again.
I also thought I was exceptionally good at masking. Turns out I was exceptionally good at showing a differently weird version of myself that was still quite clearly weird.
Oh wow, I was just feeling grateful that I don't have misophonia, but then you had to mention chewing noises. I had that for decades. It wasn't all the time, but it didn't have to be loud or open-mouth or anything. It would just switch on and I couldn't hear or think about anything else. I daydreamed doing violent things to make the person stop, even when I logically knew it wasn't even slightly loud or unusual or ill-intentioned.
It almost never happens anymore, thankfully. Once every other month or so.
(Note that I am not autistic, or at least undiagnosed and my guess is that I wouldn't be. I just have some fairly mild autistic tendencies. I have a toe on the spectrum, or something. Those tendencies have a pretty dramatic impact on my life, but I think in a mostly neurotypical way -- we boring people can have similar problems too!)
I guess I don't really understand "masking". I made all of the decisions I would make if I was feeling overstimulated. I scheduled the coffee date for later. I put on headphones to block out the noise. I turned down going to the charity thing. But then I lost because I was "masking too hard"?
In my mind these decisions were literally the opposite - I was being honest about what the character wanted and was making space for myself.
Is masking about faking interactions with other people? But nearly everything that I get dinged for about masking doesn't even involve others. Is it about hiding symptoms from others? Or from hiding things you don't like from yourself?
Replied a bit more on another comment, tl;dr this is a quite silly simulator that is not representative of autism and you’ve found the biggest tell (almost everything is masking by the scoring algorithm).
You could replace it with an HP bar or Foobar bar and it’d have just as much meaning. I grew up taking care of my autistic sister and have a couple diagnoses of my own, I found it almost offensive that this claims to be representative of autism because of how generic and distanced it is (ex. “Masking” is collapsed down to being the same as “spoon” discourse with depression)
Is it supposed to work. I am in the spectrum and I feel like while energy may go to zero, there is in reality a separate resilience masking, where you actually keep up for the rest of the day. Also cannot relate to medication. I don’t think that’s a necessary part of the experience.
Almost certainly not ADHD. "Massively increased appetite" is not a typical side effect of ADHD meds, which are typically stimulants which have the opposite effect (and mine give me nausea on top of that). And "drowsiness and brain fog" are what they're trying to combat.
From the complaints I've heard from friends, those sound like pretty typical side effects for SSRIs. (Bupropion OTOH is both a stimulant and an antidepressant, and may be more effective for people with comorbidity ADHD and depression; the POV character should talk to their psychiatrist)
Buproprion is an anti-depressent with some stimulant properties, but it isn't a stimulant. It generally takes several weeks of treatment before it has any therapeutic effects on ADHD. Stimulants work immediately.
The only medication I know about that some people on the spectrum take are antipsychotics and that's for specific situations, but maybe if you're in that situation life seems even more like a dystopian text based adventure game.
So, bigger and more important question here. How do I help neuro-divergent folks in a work environment? There's no one size fits all here, everyone is different, and not just on a spectrum sliding scale. How do I glean what is important for neuro-spicy individuals beyond "just ask?"
Welcome thoughts on what has worked and what has not worked.
This is one of those things where I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things like awkwardness, feeling out of place, or running out of the desire to socialize. Everyone wants an answer for why they have unpleasant experiences that aren't, "That's just life".
There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.
These labels are useful insofar as grouping experiences together that tend to co-occur makes it easy to talk about certain categories of aggregate experiences or strategies for navigating life, but I think too many people relegate too much importance to these arbitrary labels, like "autism", derive too much of their identity from them, and too often use them as excuses to not deal with life's challenges and complexities head on.
Look into the history of autism research and you'll find a history of fraud. People like Bruno Bettelheim simply lied their way to prominence and now we are on a road of ever-expanding diagnostic criteria and an ever-growing autism industry to the point where it is now trendy to self-diagnose on social media.
Recall that psychology has had a gigantic replication crisis, and that the founders of the field like Freud and Jung were charlatans, and that there is no agreed-upon mechanistic explanation for autism, and that a primary diagnostic tool is a literal questionnaire, and that psychology and psychiatry have been abused for political reasons by every totalitarian government of the 20th century.
Given all this, we should have some humility about this topic. Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
And maybe we can normalize the idea that employees have special emotional needs that can be accounted for on an individual basis without medical permission slips or any need for wielding constructed identities.
When I was in grad school, I worked in a lab that performed research on children with Asperger's syndrome (AS), mainly through fMRI and DTI brain imaging techniques. AS was merged into Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but at the time was considered a high-functioning form of autism. I met dozens of children with AS; they were typically between 9-13 years old. All the children I met were clearly autistic. I'm not going to attempt to describe what that means here, but the nature of their disorder was evident, compared to other disorders and compared to the age-matched controls [1]. Back then I'd confidently tell you I could easily pick out the kids in a classroom with an AS diagnosis. These days, I have no confidence I could do so (mostly due to false negatives).
[1] anecdote: at the end of explaining the fMRI procedure to the participant children and their parents, I'd ask if the child had any questions. Neurotypical children would usually ask about any reward $ for completing the task. AS kids would usually ask something poignant about the experiment.
I agree that there is a "there" there. But I'm not confident in the ability of our culture to define it in a mature way, or use the knowledge responsibly. I don't want to see therapy culture continually creeping into the mainstream. I don't want people to start medicalizing the traits of those in their families and social circles.
And since every phenotype exists along a normal distribution, there will always be resemblances and fuzziness, and no clear lines demarcating order from disorder.
But it is also obvious that nonverbal people who are stimming most of the day and can barely tie their own shoelaces exist, and these people need to be cared for and studied by responsible professionals in mature and private settings with their loved ones.
I still remember my psychology class in high school pretty well. It was memorable cause we’d spend a week learning about some theories Freud came up with, and then there would be a very short footnote of “turns out it was all totally made up and never scientifically verified in any way”. I was like what? So psychology isn’t science??
Recently a friend explained to me that Freud really wasn’t a scientist, but he was so influential in getting western cultures to think about the mind in new ways that we still learn about him. Like nobody cared about psychology until he get famous
I don't think it's any less science, inasmuch as science seeks to explain the natural world. It's just at a higher level of complexity and a different point in the learning curve than more externally observable levels of science.
Would we say that Copernicus was a charlatan or not a scientist because the heliocentric model turned out to be wrong? As you acknowledge, Freud pushed the collective understanding further.
The 19th century was a wild time. Everything was a science back then. That's why communists speak of the "immortal science of Marxist-Leninism." Marx literally said he was performing science, but that wasn't seen as an absurdity because that is how everyone spoke.
It wasn't until the mid-20th century when people started to get more serious about defining science. Philosophers started critiquing it in the early 20th century like the Vienna Circle and Popper, and eventually the definition of what constitutes science was narrowed down to one that was defined as a particular sort of empiricism.
Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
I agree that a healthy dose of skepticism and acknowledgement of our rudimentary understanding is warranted, but it does start to sound a little anti-science. I don't think there's anything wrong with continuing to explore and attempting to explain or put words to these things even though they are near the highest level of complexity in nature and the hardest to empirically evaluate.
Are NSAIDs considered to be medicalizing large swathes of the human condition (or caffeine, or alcohol for that matter)? Where is the line between a universally accepted and ubiquitous pharmaceutical and an overmedicalized one? I think we should be moving more towards the question of "do you feel like this medication benefits you or would benefit you?" than "do you check these boxes in the DSM and officially receive this diagnosis".
Objectively, I understand what you're saying here, and agree that it's almost certainly happening.
Subjectively... I see people around me casually doing things that I simply cannot do. I'm 41 years old, and not once do I recall performing any action without actively forcing myself to do it. That includes things as small and trivial as getting up from my desk to use the restroom.
I can't relate at all to the concept of a "habit". Combing my hair requires an explicit decision to do so. I usually have to find my brush, since there's no consistent place I put it. When I'm done, I'll forget that I wanted to put it back where it belongs while actively being frustrated with myself for not doing so the previous day.
It's glaringly obvious to me that other people don't struggle with the things I struggle with; at the very least, they don't struggle to the same degree. It's exhausting.
Oh, and I've never even been diagnosed with autism. I have ADHD. What I described above is classic "executive dysfunction".
I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients.
Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone.
> I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum.
Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible.
> Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
You are grossly over-diagnosing.
When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.
A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Autistic individuals have systemic changes in their mind and body which let them see life from a different perspective.
People with executive function disorder have issues with rapid thinking, focusing, and other things that can work in their favor often enough to be passed on.
> A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Speaking in cryptic aphorisms doesn't help anything.
Psychiatry isn't a field where everyone has a single perspective. There is a lot of debate within psychiatry and much research exploring different perspectives.
However, I don't think it's appropriate for a non-psychiatrist to start diagnosing half of the population with a disorder or 1 in 8 people they meet with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
An untrained perspective is not on the same level as the professionals and researchers.
You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem.
Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher
> You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population.
I'm not assuming anything. I literally explained that the only way it's possible is for someone to avoid the general population and only socialize in environments with extreme bias.
The more important point is that diagnosing autism is not something you can do by simply meeting people in social situations. It's something that takes training and experience by professionals, not an untrained person who sizes people up as they meet them in a social capacity.
Again, psychiatry is in its infancy. Many professionals use outdated models or stereotypes in practice. Living as an autistic individual can make it easier to clock other autistic people, because it's rare to meet someone who functions or thinks the same way you do and sticks out like a sore thumb. For example, "thinking in pictures" is not a universal autistic trait, but it's a pretty well known one.
We’re about 7% of the general population. But also, there’s almost certainly more than one biological condition that can produce an autistic-type neurodivergence. The shared experience is now called “autistic” but we don’t have enough data to know how many specific root causes there are.
> To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
Almost all of my social circle is somewhere on the spectrum, and quite a few are diagnosed.
So I can say with some authority that there are absolutely some people who use it as an excuse, which is made even more apparent than the people that aren't using it as one. TikTok and other high-information-low-veracity social media is only making this trend worse. It's not bigotry to acknowledge that.
(Most of said individuals ended up getting cut out of said social circle, after the people actually making an effort got tired of them constantly using their disability as an excuse not to even try to modify bad behavior)
That said, I'm not against diagnosis, or even self-diagnosis. Improved diagnosis is a good thing! But mostly because it makes it easier to understand how you can structure things to adapt to it. Or to quote a coworker's email signature:
> “Undiagnosed neurodivergence is like being handed a video game that has been set to hard mode, but having people tell you over and over "it's on easy, why do you keep dying? " Diagnosis is learning the game is on hard mode. It doesn't make it easier, but you can strategize.”
I agree completely with this comment, though most often I see it for ADHD. It's a level of nuance that people don't seem to be able to handle, though. People want to be on either the "just suck it up, losers" side or the "the duty of society is to make sure nothing is ever hard for anybody" side. It pisses me off to see people take advantage of the accommodations that are needed by some, and saddens me when people who legitimately need accommodation for some things end up depending on it for everything.
It would be nice if there were objective tests that said exactly where someone is, but those are both impossible and would be subverted even if they were possible.
There will always be humans who take advantage of a system. Why do you, like the parent commenter, think that is in question here? No one here is espousing the extreme position you put in quotes.
Because I am seeing how this is playing out in classrooms. Tons of kids are requesting accommodations. Some need those accommodations, some don't, and the ones who do often don't need all of the accommodations they're getting. Anyone who pushes back -- eg, a teacher calling out a BS requirement -- is demonized and seen as ableist. Among the kids, anyone who doesn't request an accommodation that they don't need but could get, is seen a foolish. And access to those accommodations produces a lot of kids who don't even try to improve their executive functioning to what it could be. And people know it, so a stigma is developing where people who need it have to prove that they're not taking advantage of the situation.
Parents are doing the best they can, but in the end they're still making decisions for other human beings who are not them, and those human beings are going through a time of life that is undeniably hard and requires growing to be able to do all kinds of things they couldn't formerly do. How can the kids know what is reasonable difficulty and what is excessive due to their neural makeup?
It's a tricky and nuanced situation, and so I really do see people falling into the opposing extreme camps. I agree that humans will take advantage of any system. That doesn't really have any bearing on how things are going, and whether people are seeing the nuance clearly or not. My personal experience is witnessing kids who are taking advantage of accommodations and failing to grow as a result, and how the system cannot distinguish which of those accommodations are appropriate and which aren't. It's also witnessing kids who need accommodation but won't ask for it, because they or their parents believe that muscling through is necessary, or that their problems aren't real. How are those not examples of extreme positions?
My point is that in order to get better at this, we need to be doing the hard work of figuring out what's real and what's not, or even how real it is, and what interventions do and don't work. Surely it's not controversial to say that giving a procrastinator twice as much time to finish their tests is not always the right thing? It can hurt as easily as it can help. And yet, it is the right thing for some people, for some situations. If it takes me 10 minutes to solve a quadratic that takes you 5, getting a failing grade is not going to help me learn, nor does it mean I'm incompetent at mathematics.
If you don't think people are saying "just suck it up", you're not looking very hard. Same if you don't think people are saying that we should offer any and all accommodations to anyone who requests.
The audio stuff, the concentration stuff, the always coming late and so aren't difficult to categorize in terms of "normal" and "not normal", when they're basically constant and have been since a very young age. It's simply being in the long tail of the frequency distribution or not, wherever you set that line.
> There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.
A lot of people are in the short head of the distributions when it comes to nearly all of these markers. Some people are in the long tails for a large number of them. Those are the ones we label. Being in the short head doesn't mean one is never awkward or never late or annoyed by certain noises, it means that they're so at a frequency that's common.
Ah yes the good old "well everyone experiences symptom X sometimes" canard.
Yeah you might experience symptom X but for me symptom X is literally crippling. You can take your minimization of the autistic experience and go jump off a cliff with it.
We are commenting on a post where someone created a game that presents normal challenges everyone faces as if it was an "Autism Simulator".
It is exactly this kind of generalization that I'm referring to in my comment - "I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things"
If anything, we are both equally frustrated by the fact that everyone who has experiences they consider "autistic" will happily jump on the bandwagon, despite the fact that it is a relatively small percentage of the population who has experiences that are sufficiently severe or unusual to warrant any kind of label at all.
Nobody likes high pitched noises, everyone is distracted and disorganized, everyone has trouble concentrating or feels overwhelmed when lots of things happen at once, taking lots of medication is hard on the body for everyone, socializing in unfamiliar settings or for long periods feels uncomfortable, interacting with coworkers is weird, many people get lost in the details of things, many people like to spend long periods focused on their interests, some people have really good memories for certain things, etc, etc, etc.
That doesn't make labeling yourself as autistic useful unless your experiences are preventing you from living the life you want to live, and even then, its only useful as a tool to find strategies of getting through that life, the label has no value in-itself.
I too experience many of these things, and I have been called autistic by numerous people independently, but in that tongue-in-cheek manner of our generation that has watered it down a lot. I'm nothing even close to the people on Love on the Spectrum, or the kids in grade school that were essentially in special ed.
I think yeah the language has gotten very ambiguous and the "spectrum" is so wide and ill-defined that we need more and better words, but, I do also feel like it isn't just everyone's shared experience. I do feel like there are a lot of people who don't really experience these things, that aren't stuck in a constant self-conscious hyper-analysis and reflection loop, and are able to just kind of go with the flow a bit more (which is not to say that they don't have troubles or anxieties).
Edit: I will also note that I did have a similar reaction to you to this game. I didn't even go past the intro because I felt like I knew what it was. I would call this something like autism-lite, and it probably is pretty widespread, particularly in HN-like circles. It does feel a little bit confusing and even offensive to compare it to "capital A autism," an actual disability, but that's where our lexicon is right now.
> I think yeah the language has gotten very ambiguous and the "spectrum" is so wide and ill-defined that we need more and better words, but, I do also feel like it isn't just everyone's shared experience.
We used to have other words. Asperger's used to be a separate condition but was merged into one diagnosis. I wonder if there was a reason the experts who study this decided to go with fewer words?
Have you tried adding additional adjectives? That's usually what I do when the word I want is too general, and isn't as specific as I want to be.
I don't really talk about it, I don't go around telling people I'm autistic, whatever it is is minor enough that I'm able to mask easily, if anything I casually reference "my ADD."
I sometimes jokingly refer to "my spectrum," but I think that word is not great either because it implies a linear gradation, when I think it's a higher dimensional space like a personality star chart.
Yes. And, as you have eloquently said in your other comments in this thread, the label CAN (not DOES but CAN) readily become value-NEGATIVE, if it becomes in itself an object of fixation that draws time and emotional energy away from the basic, brass-tacks work of living life as best as one can, whatever that has to look like for each individual.
It is an obvious error to pretend that this does not or cannot happen—an error no more and no less obvious than to pretend that it must or always happens.
I think that what this game tries to convey is that these challenges, while perhaps universally present, have a distinct and punishing effect for a subset of people. I think that it takes an interesting approach at communicating that even someone who might seem to be functioning “effectively” could be essentially living their life on a knife’s edge of dueling energy/masking mechanics.
If your response to the game is to argue about the usefulness/value of the autism label, and to insinuate that it normalizes some kind of “bandwagon” effect, rather than feeling empathy that a colleague sitting next to you might be in mortal fear of what happens if their “energy bar” dips beyond their control - then perhaps we need more of this type of experience and conversation, rather than less.
I agree that autism has become a label for the "shared experiences of things", and that people often derive their identity from the label to an unhealthy and unproductive degree.
However, I strongly disagree that the only use of the label is for developing personal coping skills. I shared your mindset for most of my life, having seen the negative effects of basing one's identity around it, but in the past couple years I've come to see the utility of the autism label and accept it for myself.
Its function (in the modern sense) is to be a tag for shared experiences, that's not a side effect. A sizeable portion of the population shares a similar grouping of frustrations with -- and difficulties functioning in -- society at large. It would be great if direct communication, respect for sensory processing issues, acceptance of stimming and other unusual behaviors, etc. etc. were widespread without the need for a special label, but society at large is slow to change; if the label is the catalyst needed for us to be more accepting of those different than us, so be it.
The typical reaction from a non-ND person to seeing [non-disruptive] autistic behaviors is one of fear or light disgust; however, give that same person a box to put those behaviors in and they understand how to look past them, and see you as a human. That's my experience, anyway. The loudest champions of autism often have a different perspective, one more based around identity; I see issues with that for the same reasons you describe, but nonetheless the label as a whole still carries utility on a societal level too.
I have asthma. The last time I had an asthma attack that was severe enough that it could have become fatal was when I was 8 at my friend's house with a few cats(*).
But, everyone gets short of breath some times. Everyone wakes up with the feeling of a congested chest occasionally. Everybody is limited in the exercises they can do by their lung capacity and exercise tolerance.
But because after working very diligently, by your logic, I don't have asthma. Because I can run, and rock climb, and do all the life stuff that I wanna do.
Except that logic is fucking stupid! Because when I got covid a few years back, I was using my rescue inhaler constantly because I could feel my lungs starting to close up, felt just like the asthma attacks I would get when I was younger. But because I learned to use the techniques and habits I built up when growing up, and I made sure it never progressed far enough towards an attack that needed medical intervention. I don't have asthma, right? I should have thrown away my inhaler years ago because I was never using it?
The culture of treating mental health by different rules, from outwardly physical health, is fucking stupid, and I can't wait for that meme to die!
And it's especially egregious when people use that meme to then weaponize it to exclude people from the groups with shared experiences, weaknesses, skills, and needs.
If you really feel the need to be exclusive, and tell other people that their experience is invalid, and demand that they preform their rock bottom for you, before you'll believe them. Might I suggest instead of telling other people that the way they describe their life is wrong, instead try adding the prefix subclinical. As in my asthma (through work and effort), is subclinical.
E.g. instead of being an asshole who says "that doesn't count as austism" you can say "most people who claim to be autistic are lucky subclinical". Then you still get to invalidate the experiences of others, But you do so in a way that's slightly less hostile and gaslighting.
(*): Does the time I was sick count as an attack? Had I ignored those symptoms, would it have gotten worse, would I have needed to visit the hospital? Would you still try to tell me that this is different because I was also sick, so everything else doesn't matter?
>I should have thrown away my inhaler years ago because I was never using it?
Inhalers expire after a year, so yes, you should have, and you should have gotten a new one. I only learned this after getting a fresh one at the start of COVID because I hadn't had one in several years. Pretty sure growing up I had the same inhaler for like 8 years, so obviously it still works OK after a year, just relaying what my doctor told me 5 years ago.
> And it's especially egregious when people use that meme to then weaponize it to exclude people from the groups with shared experiences, weaknesses, skills, and needs.
> If you really feel the need to be exclusive, and tell other people that their experience is invalid, and demand that they preform their rock bottom for you, before you'll believe them. Might I suggest instead of telling other people that the way they describe their life is wrong, instead try adding the prefix subclinical. As in my asthma (through work and effort), is subclinical.
The fact that people have started applying social-justice-y terminology ("gatekeeping," "weaponize," "shared experiences," etc) to medical diagnosis is a clear sign we've gone too far. "You can't question my diagnosis because it's part of my identity! Stop gatekeeping me!"
Please. "Austism" is not a settled category and it's okay to argue about boundaries. The irony here is that autistic as an adjective means "unfeeling" e.g. "He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings". When sorting out the definition of autism (and similar conditions), we should be a little more autistic.
Yes, if you have something to add - something more substantive than just a snotty dismissal of the autistic experience rooted in the superficial observation that everyone occasionally experiences the "same" things.
> The irony here is that autistic as an adjective means "unfeeling"
The real irony here is your insistence that you have something to add to this discussion while leading with a decades-old myth that people with autism don't feel emotions.
Completely agree. On the autism spectrum, I'm almost certainly very low. But going through the simulator felt like... yeah this all sucks but is very much in the realm of things that I experience and feel on any given day. It didn't feel enlightening, it felt deeply familiar.
It's definitely the case that some people have a much larger magnitude of experience or persistence of experience. And for some, it's at levels that do make functioning in society quite difficult or impossible.
And yet, I think the point you are quite rightly making is that many people who are decidedly low on the spectrum are now adopting the identity of autism as a way to explain why life is hard.
I don't know why people feel inclined to adopt the label. I don't care that they do, they can call themselves whatever they want. But I do wonder if there are more productive ways of perceiving yourself, if you are indeed very much capable of functioning in society.
Then there's actually people who live their entire existence and every waking moment on the spectrum, and compensating for it - which is what the topic of discussion is. You minimizing it or thinking it isn't real isn't entirely helpful to discussion and frankly is pretty insulting.
Autism is called a spectrum disorder not because it ranges on a smooth continuum from "no autism" to "lots of autism".
It's because there a handful of associated symptoms for autism and different people have a different mixture of them. You don't need an equally large amount of all symptoms in order to be autistic.
Think of it more like a light spectrum where there are different mixtures of hues for the symptoms, but autism still implies some amount of significant overall intensity. In short, it's a spectrum, not a continuum.
If you experience some or all of the symptoms associated with autism but at a level that doesn't significantly impair your overall functioning, then that's not a diagnosis of autism. Just like everyone who gets sad isn't depressed and everyone who worries doesn't have generalized anxiety. That's just normal human variability and life challenges.
I have encountered this definition of "spectrum", as a vector of numbers that go 0 to 100, rather than a single number that goes from 0 to 100 (which you call "continuum" IIUC).
But... I mean, if you asked 100 people what they think a spectrum means in this context, how many of them would think it meant "vector" rather than "real number"? I would guess fewer than 10. I consider myself a fairly well-informed nerd, but I think I had encountered many usages of "spectrum" describing a single trait for many years, and I think this is the second time I've ever encountered someone using the "vector" definition (the first one was also using it to describe autism). Has this linguistic battle already been lost? Does it improve clarity to insist on the "vector" definition?
(I've personally been using the phrase "collection of imperfectly correlated traits")
> If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere.
No, because the endpoints of the spectrum are not defined as 0% autistic and 100% autistic.
The spectrum definitionally only includes people diagnosed with autism.
Your approach is like saying "there is a 'how bad is the cancer' spectrum" where 0 is "no cancer" as opposed to something like "cancer but easily curable." No reasonable definition of "cancer suffering spectrum" would include "doesn't even have cancer."
No, you're just heavily implying it and minimizing it. I'm telling you it's extremely insulting. You can take that for what it is or don't, I don't really care.
he's saying that the label Autism includes different traits that various people have or don't have. He's falsely using that semantic manipulation to imply that people use it as an excuse not to deal with the conplexities of life.
saying "that's insulting" doesn't impact his assertion. you have to meet their logic where it is to disagree. lucky this case was so easy.
Not disagreeing with the content of what you said. However, sometimes telling people they sound insulting (unintentionally) has its own value, outside of the logical debate-making about the content of what was said.
I can't speak for everyone, but for myself the scenarios in this simulator basically don't affect my life at all. Annoying radio ad, "That's annoying". People team requests my participation at some event, "No thanks". Don't want to go to work, "oh well". If someone suggested we get coffee I'd be excited. I've never even considered not taking meds I've been prescribed. Other things seem normal to me. I put on ANC headphones at my office job all the time.
While going through the simulator, I was shocked with the response to some choices and situations. I was not aware that these things were so disruptive to some people.
I don't consider myself autistic, but a lot of the situations in the game are familiar. That's an extreme version of me on a bad day. On a good day (enough food, sleep, etc) I can handle it, sometimes explicitly thinking about it, sometimes no action required.
The normal simulator is the negative space in this game. The people on the party committee. The networking event. Your mom who has called three times. Just imagine those activities boosting all of your stats.
> The people on the party committee. The networking event. Your mom who has called three times. Just imagine those activities boosting all of your stats.
It’s a problem when our definition of “normal” is the blended combination of every more outgoing and more successful person we see combined into one composite super-person.
Most people don’t do anything like a party committee. Most people don’t go to networking events and of those who do, many don’t network or socialize much. Most parents don’t call three times per day.
Yet it’s easy to see (or imagine) all of these behaviors and mentally blend them up into a composite idea of what “normal” means in a way that is far from average.
I see this a lot in students self-diagnosing with ADHD right now: Their mental model of “normal” is actually more like a 99th percentile studying and self-discipline machine, not a typical student. The way they describe “normal” or neurotypical people is more like superheroes with super abilities who have infinite motivation to study for 8 hours per day after cleaning their house to spotless precision and never touching their phone for a break. They have mentally erased the average person from their minds and replaced it with a hypothetical super person who doesn’t exist.
There are plenty of people who would not consider some or even all of those activities (depending on circumstances) enjoyable, most of them probably don't consider themselves autistic.
I don't think that extreme is normal. Yes, there are people who take an energy boost and are never worried by situations you mention, but they are rare.
No. Joining party planning committees, socializing at networking events, and calling people multiple times are not things that the average person seeks out.
I don’t think it would be possible, as a lot of what ASD people process consciously is processed subconsciously by neurotypical people (which contributes greatly to ASD burnout).
Something I’ve thought might be a helpful AI app, for a product like smart glasses or earbuds with integrated cameras, if it were possible, is a live nonverbal communication translator, to help with the cognitive load of ASD people, as cognitive empathy is often a performance issue socially.
I’ve seen a lot of criticism that using AI as a cognitive crutch is unhealthy, but the same argument could be made about mechanical advantages, beasts of burden, or machines, reducing humanity’s physical fitness. AI’s potential to be a cognitive force multiplier is its killer app.
I played it a couple times and found that a lot of scenarios just didn't have an option for what I would actually want to do in real life. A few examples:
- One scenario had a team unboxing an espresso machine and making too much noice by using it, clinking cups and laughing. The options were to put on noise canceling headphones, find a different desk away from the noise, or just endure it. Personally I'd take a break and go join them, and I don't even like coffee.
- The scenario where the user is in a room with a PM and a couple other people debating the tone of copy on a website, and the conversation is meandering without clear turns (iirc): there were only options to essentially hurry the conversation along or not participate at all, but IRL I'd join in with the other three debating the tone and just generally be bullshitting/sidetracking/meandering the conversation because I like to talk to people.
- The scenario where somebody comes up and asks for a new feature without clear acceptance criteria: the options were to turn to the computer and type out acceptance criteria in front of the person (which feels passive aggressive to me); tell them you'll do it; or ask them to schedule time with you to hammer out the criteria. I would've just chatted with them right there about the feature they wanted, let them know that XYZ is what I think the acceptance criteria is at the end of the conversation, and if that's wrong they'd correct me.
Most of what you'd do is the last thing I'd want to do (I have autism). You don't say if you have autism or not, but going by what you just said I would guess not.
What's 'normal' for me is pretty much the same thing, but without the intense reactions to the light and sound stimuli. And the rest generally toned down.
Imagine having basically infinite social energy and no situation where you'd tend to react super negatively to socialization itself. But most things extra are very boring and you only live for things not related to your work.
I'm not autistic and social interactions are incredibly energy draining for me. Granted I'm quite an introverted person, but not having autism doesn't mean you get pumped up from being around people.
It's a valid frustation... sadly the social bits are often useful.
E.g. communication tends to work best if you have A: trust and B: a mental model for the other person. A is a buffer against friction. B is essentially API documentation about this specific person
Yes, they're useful. But B: doesn't occur naturally for some of those with Autism. Sometimes names with faces is near impossible, at a baseline. Masking with those individuals, or feigning interest can be exhausting. Dancing around not wanting to discuss outside-of-work life can make one stand out, etc.
There's no polite way to tell such individuals to f- off, of course, and it's often expected.
I agree, which is why it drives me crazy to be on HN and see people be like "if you want to work as a programmer you must live breathe eat sleep code and have a resume of Github commits three miles long."
Had a "people" guy at a previous employer. At every corporate social thing, he'd run around with his huge DSLR camera and take pictures to post on the company social media, to show how this is a great place to work.
He was an irritating person even without his camera. I hate having my picture taken, and I don't consent to having my face posted on social media. Later, when the company realised that setting money on fire isn't a solid business strategy, he was thankfully fired.
I had an over-enthousiastic guy at work. I don't know what pills he was on, but I'd love some. Once during lunch I was sitting with my coworkers, having a completely shitty day. Suddenly he showed up "oooh, you all look so lovely, let me take a photo" and pulled out his phone. I subconsciously responded with death stare full of hatred. Would love to see the photo someday.
I think this is nice as it underlines how certain seemingly small things can feel incredibly disturbing to another individual (non-autistic one as well!)
It seems like one of those games that I'm going to recall in various situations in the future.
On sounds - as a non autistic person but as someone with a good "audio memory", music and sounds especially in an office can absolutely get on my nerves. It's mostly the repetitiveness.
Being able to hear songs in your head sounds great until you have the same one on repeat for days.
This morning it's "the things we do for love". Not sure where that one came from.
Also high pitched sounds (seagull deterers) or electricity buzzing. I learnt at a physics class at high school that I could hear higher pitches than other kids as well, although now that I'm older I've probably lost some of that.
It's easy to get Energy or Masking to 0, but no matter what I tried I can't have the game end by getting Competence or Relationships to 0. Is it possible at all? I'm just curious what the ending texts will be for those...
Even when clicking responses that seem like they should make relationship go down and energy up, like giving a minimal response, instead it makes energy go down a lot and relationships go up.
It changes with age too. Like the first question I was presented with was 1. Take time for self-care, 2. Get straight to breakfast and work prep.
Yeah in my 20s, and early 30s, I could eat breakfast while logging onto the computer and starting to work.
But now in my 40s I take some time for self-care, not sure if it counts, but it's difficult to answer a question like that with either or.
Decades on the computer has forced me to do Yoga every morning too. So it's not like I want to do it, I just realized that I have to.
I lost when I went to a work outing instead of staying home, but I had RSVP'd to the outing. This is what the game doesn't cover, I never RSVP unless I can keep my word. Never commit!
I like the bit about the rattling hvac or whatever. Years ago before I knew I was on the spectrum, the A/C system in the office I worked at was noisy (to me), and barely worked in the summer. Nobody seemed to notice or care.
The noise was distracting to me so to complained, after a long while they eventually got someone in... but they just put in a really noisy fan in the office close'ish to our desk.
They didn't fix it the extra fan did nothing, it couldn't pull more air then it was given.. obv.. so then I had even more noise and the A/C system still didn't work.
I gave up trying to get it improved, and worked with headphones most of the time.
No one else finds it an issue.
At the end of the day when staying late and the A/C systems turns off, I can feel a huge load lifted of my shoulders, and I can think much clearer.
Also the lights are horrible, if I'm working alone in the weekend I'll leave them off, it's so much nicer, less harsh. But again I seem the only one who noticed and is affected by it.
I eventually got so burnt out, crashed and quit... have been unemployed for... many many years now. Hard to say why I couldn't another job. I think maybe PTSD of my (first) and last experience, along with intense anxiety to just start. (interviewing is a painful experience, not only do I have to answer and ask questions, but need to fake eye contact, make small talk etc, all to get a job I'll probably have to bail out of.
I've tried to do some self-employed stuff, but nothing has given much income. (living with parents, I feel terrible about it, but no idea how to escape my living hell)
I chose to skip breakfast. I am never hungry in the morning. I almost never have breakfast. I eat "late" the night before, like around 8-10 pm. Maybe that's bad? IDK.
While the topic is eating, I hate lunch around noon on a workday because it disables my higher brain functions for a couple of hours. It is almost mandatory however because what else am I supposed to use that mandatory break for? Just vegging out? That's pointless. I'm not working construction, I don't need to rest my body, I'm doing screen work. What I need is them not riding my back about how I'm not always laser focused on the BS they have us do. My brain decides when I need to put work aside and think about things that aren't such tedium.
Getting "old internet" vibes from this one. Good job.
I'm not at all familiar with Autism, and I have no idea what "Masking" means at all, but every option I choose seems to lower that stat, to the point where I never make it to day 2. Is there a cheat sheet that lists the "correct" selections at each step?
> Getting "old internet" vibes from this one. Good job.
Thank you. Neovim has radicalized my design sensibilities and I really miss the internet I used in the 90s as a kid.
> I'm not at all familiar with Autism, and I have no idea what "Masking" means at all, but every option I choose seems to lower that stat, to the point where I never make it to day 2. Is there a cheat sheet that lists the "correct" selections at each step?
Wow, thanks for the link, this and the other replies have been helpful.
I approached the game as a non-neurodivergent person making whatever the natural decision I personally would have made in each situation, and ended up dying to the "masking" every time! It kind of gives me an appreciation that what comes naturally to me, at no cost, imposes a tremendous cost to others. I suppose that might have been the whole point of the site. Well done.
Masking is just acting in a way that you normally wouldn't, but have to. Think of a spy blending in avoiding to get caught, it's a conscious effort not to screw up and it takes more energy/willpower from you than not having to pretend to be someone else. I guess it gets harder the more different from yourself you have to act, like having an itch you can't scratch or will get "punished" somehow, damn.
Masking is someone suppressing their natural autistic behaviors. It's not even necessarily conscious but it takes a large toll on mental energy. Besides the energy required for the masking itself there's the compounding effect of setting unrealistic expectations in others. The better someone is at masking the more is expected of them which creates an even larger drain on mental energy.
>Masking is someone suppressing their natural autistic behaviors.
Well, masking is done by everybody, not just autists, but in this game it's used to refer to that specifically. Arguably autists have to do it more, or feel the exhaustion from it more strongly.
Scrolling through the comments and noticed that they are a pretty good autism simulator for working in tech with autism. The entire cast of typical characters is represented.
- guy that thinks everyone has the tism and the spectrum is everyone
- this guy has more trouble reading the room than anyone. but it is the lack of empathy and not autism
- guy that thinks everything is a microaggression towards his autism and ironically makes it harder for other autists
- guy with probable schizoid personality disorder that thinks struggling with people and social issues is just life because everyone is stupid and annoying
- guy who read Bad Therapy once and now thinks autism is a tiktok trend
- insufferable fedora guy that thinks psych is unscientific
- probably secretly has severe depression and is making it everyone else's problem by being a jerk. whenever called out 4 being jerk blames the autism he probably doesn't actually have
- guy who thinks the solution is just be yourself
- guy with trauma from being themselves landing them on a PIP
A primary problem in tech is how everyone is seriously lacking in social skills and empathy. This is exhausting for autists and everyone. The real autism simulator is just existing in tech.
Nice game, but indeed simplified. Did not make it to day 2. Autism is a huge spectrum. I have a family member who needs constant care in a facility because he will try and destroy everything he does not like, but also another one who has light Asperger’s syndrome and functions like society would like him to be as long as you respect his social capabilities. As with most mental things, because people can’t see or sense it, they don’t understand and it gets very very difficult to even acknowledge or respect it.
I think this clip of Man of Steel did a very good job of showing how Autistic people get bombarded with sensory information. There are comments under the video claiming that this mirrors their experience.
Zack Snyder described perfectly the ADHD/ Autistic experience growing up in one single scene. Intentionally or not. This movie made me feel less alone in this world. Superman helped me realize that wasn't a freak. I just perceived the world differently. Thank you Zack. I will forever be grateful for Man of Steel for many years to come
> As with most mental things, because people can’t see or sense it, they don’t understand and it gets very very difficult to even acknowledge or respect it.
Compounding this issue is the fact that people often refuse to accept that a mental thing is actually a physiological thing, albeit harder to fix because it’s currently poorly understood. People’s mental models of brain-related conditions often create a separation of the person from their physical self, either due to some subconscious or conscious belief in a metaphysical representation of the condition.
not autistic but i also mask like crazy at work. my experience is its the default mode in consulting
the first 2 years i had a sense that i needed to read between the lines in many conversations and asking for clarity on topics of budget, clients, and contracts was not done. to be clear: asking for details on requirements is completely normal and encouraged
ive become competent at compartmentalizing after 5 years. ive offered unsolicited advice to my less socially aware coworkers which only lead to more confusion as they had not noticed things said "between the lines" and have almost no interest in clients
i cant imagine having to mask through day-to-day life and a job which demands masking by people without disability. no wonder i didnt make it to dinner in the sim
Love the aesthetics of this. Very cool. Love that its a game for web and just a really interesting choose your own adventure deal.
As for the game itself, it seems a bit punishing / too pessimistic? I don't want to be insensitive but I don't think my choices would lead my character, who was maintaining a full time job for this long, to collapse at their desk midday and be fired.
"Since you've decided to not disclose your autism at work, you'll be raw dogging it today and every other day. This seems marginally better than the alternative of being potentially passed over for promtotions or raises."
I was passed over without disclosure. When I did disclose, they tried to fire me. It would be great if they add a feature where you're told for a decade by peers, leads, and managers that you're at the next level, but never actually get there. Then they try firing you while the internal interviews give feedback about how you're likely overqualified for roles at your level. How's your mental health doing after that? The game should add a part about wanting to get hit by a bus during your commute so you cana avoid the torture.
It's extra fun when you manage to get positive feedback from colleagues and hit all your concrete performance expectations, but then at review time you still get poor marks because it's a stack ranking system, so, as far as your manager is concerned, there was never a realistic option to give one of the limited supply of good scores to you instead of one of the people who have enough spoons left at the end of the work day to permit some enthusiasm for the quarterly optional-but-actually-mandatory after-hours team Whirlyball outing.
@giantg2 dude I feel you. I've never disclosed but I've heard about people being retaliated against for doing so over the years.
I wish I could have added this story knot. I'll open source it soon and you'll see how crufty dealing with inkle is https://www.inklestudios.com/ in JS. Credit to the folks working on inkle but something like this is pushing the tech beyond what it says on the tin.
Non-autistic people also get this. It's in your salarypayer's best interest to keep you thinking you're on the precipice of getting a raise (so you work harder), but without actually giving you one (so they don't have to pay up). This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends, and it's a simple exchange of money for work where at least one party employs people whose entire job is to shift the exchange rate in their favour while convincing you they aren't.
That's a Manichean perspective that probably applies in a lot of workplaces, but definitely doesn't uniformly apply to competitive software jobs. In a competitive software shop, your employer is probably motivated more by retention, churn, and motivation concerns than they are over whether they can hold on to the extra comp money it would cost to raise your level. Losing a performing developer is very expensive.
I don't doubt at all that a lot of software developers have had the experience you describe, but when you describe it as intrinsic to the economics of commercial software development, I think you're bound to end up in some weird places.
But practically every "competitive" software job uses stack ranking that's mostly centered on an individual team or a few teams where 20% of the people have to be given a bad rating regardless of objective performance.
I think stack ranking sucks ass and I agree that it's prevalent but even stack ranking isn't well-modeled by an executive team looking to squeeze every penny out of each employee. Some of the most notorious stack rankers also have some of the most notoriously generous comp packages.
I'm not seeing TC having gone up over the last 7-8 years with those "notoriously generous comp packages" places. Your typical senior eng at FAANG is still getting $350-450k/yr TC. Yet, inflation has changed a lot and the stocks at these companies have skyrocketed. They're only raising the bar in terms of competition for employees to stick with the company and not with their compensation.
wanna say you are right. maybe the impact is different on neurodivergent, thats hard to have hard data on. HRs job is litterally to use a certain budget to fit all the ppl in, thats why they never give a raise if you dont ask, unless they need to give it to cover other risks (retention).
best lesson for me was an HR manager explaining it to me, after finally after 3 years i asked pretty please to give a lil raise, i was still trainee after all that time.
he smiled and said he thought id never ask. made me senior on the department matching my input. and told me this exact fact. He said, why should i give you a raise if you seem happy where ur at? never complain, never ask, never get.
its harsh but its good to understand certain hashness. Then you can work around it, step over that bridge, and be more active in tracking your input, their expectations, and showing them the mismatch deservant of a raise or promotion.
its often peoples shyness or false expectations that get them in such a situation where they feel very under valued. they are because they under value themselves or dont know how to translate/express their value to another persons perspective. another harsh truth. Especially if you are neurodivergent, the way you see things and another is further apart, so your words need to do more to reconcile that difference to generate mutual understanding.
in an ideal world this would not happen or be needed, ofcourse. but we dont live in an ideal world, and there is no switch to flip to make it an ideal world.
It might be experienced by non-disabled people, but I would say it disproportionately affects people with autism. Promotions are political and most people on the spectrum are at a disadvantage in the political realm due to the way ASD tends to affect social behavior etc. I've seen everyone other dev that joined around my time is at least 1-2 levels further than me. We can see these impacts in data for things like disability pay gap research.
my personal experience is this is usually something i see well meaning religious people caught up in. when ive met autistic people in similar situations they have been vocally agitated and frustrated by it, which i would say is the first step in learning to work around it
Blue collar workers have understood this for a long time, and even occasionally took up arms against their employers. It's the white collar folks who are just starting to figure this out.
> This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends
But I've repeatedly told over the years by clever libertarian software engineers that I don't need a union because it's better to just go to the boss with your concerns, instead of making things so adversarial.
This is an "all lives matter" flavor of comment. Discussing difficulties that autistic folks often have, which are usually exacerbated by autistic traits and struggles but not caused by autism, does not mean nobody else has those troubles.
But it's common and extremely frustrating for anyone neurodivergent to be told "but everyone feels that way" whenever they discuss any of their issues.
I got diagnosed with aspergers.
Never got past the fact the entire world treated me like a burger.
Felt so burned i feel like I can never have a normal life like I did before the diagnosis.
Feels like my life is worthless and if complain to anybody they will just throw me in jail or the hospital again. Like I'm trapped in hell and unable to ever be normal.
All I pray for everyday is to find a partner who lets me have some sense of justice against the ones who caused this.
I feel like Apple is to blame and if I'm being honest until they comply with my every wish I'm never going to not be able to not be a homicide victim.
The side-effects are vaguely evocative of antipsychotics or some sort of antidepressant.
There's no specific autism medication that I'm aware of, but psychiatric diseases often have plenty of comorbidity. There's some ADHD popup in the game that distracts you with Wikipedia, there's misophonia, it sounds like the character has a whole mix of different things.
Had I paid more attention to that, I probably would have skipped them instead of saying I’d take the normal dose.
Some questionable doctor prescribed me something like that a couple months ago as a precursor to dealing with ADHD. He said it would take a few weeks to build up in my system with once daily pills. I took a single pill and didn’t sleep for 3 days, and felt “off” for a good week or three. Never again.
My doctor tries to put me on antidepressants but I'm scared of side effects. My main complaint is that my energy levels are virtually zero despite relatively healthy lifestyle.
My doctor was asking me about taking a sleep study to see if I have sleep apnea. Many people in my family had it, but I’ve been told I don’t snore, and while I don’t have energy, I don’t fall asleep at the drop of a hat like they all did before getting a cpap.
I really don’t want to do a sleep study, as it sounds like nightmare fuel, so I got an Apple Watch which is supposed to be able to signal if there is a possible issue over the course of a month. I’ve had a couple days in normal range, but most days show elevated breathing interruptions. If it signals me after the end of the 30 days, I guess I’ll feel forced to get a sleep study. While I hate the idea of needing a cpap, being tired all the time isn’t fun either.
How old are you? There's like a zillion health factors. I've struggled with this because if IBS and getting older.
Taking Ubiqunol now, red light therapy for mitochondrial health - there's a bunch of other related supplements. Started exercising. Energy is better now.
A bunch of medications are commonly used to help manage it, though. And it's so often co-morbid with other diagnoses (these are all just classifications we made up anyway, so that they're two "different" things is basically just semantics, it's all happening in one brain, like we could easily and no-less-reasonably halve or double the number of labels we apply to these same situations and the underlying reality would be unaffected) that it's common to be diagnosed autistic but also taking ADHD meds or mood stabilizers or antidepressants or what have you, under other diagnoses.
Damn, it's way past the time for me to take my SSRIs, because I forgot to take Adderall earlier in the day and zoned out on HN instead when I should've been finishing that API.
Narrator: the actual task didn't call for an API redesign, but if we're doing things, we're doing them The Right Way™ or we don't do them at all, right?
This. I have no medication as I built up immense resiliency and masking mechanisms over the course of my life. Others may take a cocktail of meds just to make it to lunch.
It’s a condition that exists on a spectrum, as does its treatments or coping mechanisms. That said, I’m the “take my assigned medication” type, so I always took the full dose in the game.
A lot of times they take an SSRI to be able to manage their emotions better and not be triggered by daily life. That’s what I remember when I was trying to help an autistic friend deal with having autistic children that were having a lot of issues.
Edit: Just asked her and the final cocktail they have settled on is aripriprazole (Abilify, an atypical antipsychotic) and hydroxyzine (first-generation antihistamine with anxiolytic and sedative properties).
I sent her the game and she said it was hard haha. I asked if that was what autism feels like and she said this-
“Not for me but I have ASD. For my son, it would be similar but different since he can't tell me what is going on in his head. I can only guess with him, poor lamb.”
I'm pretty strongly in the difference camp. It giveth and taketh away. I can't get through a full meal hearing people chew food without some background noise going but I also completed my PhD before I was 30 so it feels wrong to call it a pathology ya know?
What I was getting at in my question is,
in response to the question about medication,
is the intent to "fix" a perceived "problem",
or should any medication taken be tuned to provide support for coping with a world that can be actively hostile to neurodivergent people.
Any psychological disorder is treatment-worthy iff the patient suffers from it. So not just "you were diagnosed", but "you were diagnosed, have problems caused by it, suffer from those problems, and want relief". So yes to both, treatment can be intended to fix a problem that a patient suffers from that is just related to his perception of things. But it can also be intended to support your interactions with a hostile environment that you suffer from.
FWIW (and I do have relevant personal experience) "fixing" is not in the option set. One can only cope. SSRIs, VPA, amphetamines or whatever (including alcohol, THC, DMT and opiates), they just shift the person's perception/consciousness a bit so it might become more copeable in the current society. That is all.
Game just _assumes_ you drink coffee. That's a big decision, and I'd say coffee wears you down at least as much as everything else on the long run. Sure, short-term effects can be good, same as alcohol.
Moderate consumption of coffee is fine. I'm not aware of any severe damage from drinking a cup a day. I don't think the comparison with alcohol is apt.
Not for everybody on the spectrum. I certainly see the difference if I go a week with coffee and no coffee -- the weardown and overwhelming effects slowly accumulate with coffee.
If the author feels overwhelmed, I'd say coffee should be tried first. It's not easy (caffeine addiction is real, especially for the spectrum), but it gets easier and easier with time.
It's not clear how distinctive a lot of mental health conditions are. For the most part we're just making up labels for groups of signs and symptoms, after all. To the extent the labels are "real" things mostly rests in their utility—I mean, that's sort of true of all labels for everything (what's a chair?) but these are far more fluid than most.
It could be that autism really is, exactly as we describe it and conceive of it, in some meaningful way defined by actual reality, a thing.
It could be that it's ten different things that aren't actually connected at all, but happen to look kinda similar. Some of which either are a variant of ADHD (or vice-versa, doesn't much matter) or just happen to include similar symptoms and behaviors that respond well to the same drugs and therapies we use to tread ADHD.
(now, to some degree we do have real tests we can do to pick up e.g. genetic markers of certain disorders, but these largely remain just another clue, not exactly solid proof, with some exceptions)
To illustrate: imagine we couldn't ever see the inside of a human body and just had to guess at what was going on when something went wrong. We'd probably have something we just called "bad kidney" that was actually several different problems, and we'd just throw drugs and other therapies at it until (often, but not always) some set of those relieved the symptoms. Meanwhile, sometimes it's a kidney stone, sometimes it's cancer, et c. And maybe we even have a whole step that's trying to figure out if it's "bad kidney" or "bad bladder" and sometimes we'd get that right, but sometimes wrong, but also some of the same medicines work for either (depending on the actual cause) so we might incorrectly diagnose "bad kidney" then accidentally correctly treat "bad bladder", and think we were right all along.
> how big could a potential overlap be between ADHD and autism?
The lack of executive function is overlapping, but this particular post might be more of an ADHD simulator.
The very first "Follow the morning routine" or not is where this veers off my experience of the spectrum.
"Changing plans because of situations internal or external" is hard.
The option should've been "Spend 20 minutes making eggs again, because the yolks weren't the right kind of runny", miss the train, take a cab to work, but tell the driver that you've now got a system for eggs which you didn't have today (yeah, fun fact, the recipe was off because they don't refrigerate them over in France).
There seems to be a prevalent pop psych view that a bunch of these conditions (Autism, ADHD, Anxiety-Depression, OCD) are sort of clustered together and people who manifest one will often manifest symptoms of others. It gets muddier because a lot of these conditions are understood as spectrums and different people who identify with them may manifest them in vastly different ways. I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
These are just labels we apply to buckets of symptoms. The underlying problems and biological differences that can cause these buckets of symptoms probably will be found, and then we can re-categorize things quite a bit. My bet is we do this within the next couple decades.
What causes difficulty is that actual symptoms of one of these buckets can cause behaviors and coping strategies that look like other ones.
Another issue is that these symptoms are not specific. What one neurodivergent person means by "I have sensory issues" is vastly different from another neurodivergent person, and your psych health provider will dig into those specifics and try and tease out which label fits the best, or whether it's even an example of that symptom. How those symptoms affect you is the entire point.
>I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
And you have that same feeling towards "blind" or "deaf" right? Since a lot of blind people struggle to lead "normal" lives but there are accomplished blind software devs right here on HN
Consider how many people live life with some sort of mild delusion and yet are perfectly functional 99% of the time. The brain is complicated and cannot ever be reduced to single dimensions like that, and it is weirdly good at still functioning when part of it is broken in some way, like with Broca's area or Phineas Gage.
Yes, "syndrome" and "disorder" are vague labels that don't have hard cutoffs or any test you can objectively run. That's the point of those words. When you have a hard test you can run, it becomes a "disease".
I also wonder if we kinda screwed ourselves by expanding pre-existing labels for disorders that appeared similar, instead of using a mixin pattern of describing the spectrum. So you could have a Photosensitivity and Social Inertness "Disorder" instead of people constantly debating whether your combination of symptoms is "bad enough" to be called Autism.
With Autism, as noted elsewhere in this thread, a general social understanding of it is required to help normalize environments that don't exclude autistic people. Having specific labels could, on the one hand, help bring focus towards the specific needs of those people. On the other hand, it's harder to convince people of a 100 different neurodiverse profiles than one...
The diagnostic criteria and symptoms have substantial overlap, ultimately everything in the DSM is a descriptive diagnosis not based on a mechanistic understanding of neurobiology so it's VERY likely that our categories don't map 1:1 to the underlying causes.
One is impulsive, the other requires structure. The two are not mutually exclusive though, because both conditions are pretty diverse. AuDHD is a term used to describe people with both.
This is a massive oversimplification of both autism and ADHD which approaches uselessness. Impulsivity is one possible symptom of ADHD, but doesn't even begin to describe the experience, and by itself paints an incorrect picture of the experience. Same for autism and structure. I know plenty of people with autism who absolutely do not deal in structure.
I know it feels nice to be able to craft a simple narrative, but this narrative feels more harmful and misconstrued than useful.
I have autism and have a lot of trouble with routine and rigid timelines. But I also have ADHD, so I suspect there is some internal struggle there. I want to have routine for a lot of things, I just can’t seem to make it happen.
Significant enough that the DSM-iV recognized ADHD symptoms as symptoms of autism and didn't allow a comorbid diagnosis of both conditions because of this. (The DSM-V does recognize both as possibly occurring together.)
I love the idea of a tool to help people build empathy and better understand the experience of someone with autism. I wonder what this simulator would be like from the perspective of a young child going through school. Is that something that sounds interesting to you that you would consider creating? Thanks for sharing.
If you're from a well off family, you can be oblivious to everything and still have what you need to live so in my experience things were a lot easier. For me once I became self-aware, it turned into a tradeoff of outgrowing sensory issues (i.e. fire drills being pure hell) and weird speech issues and learning social skills, with worse executive functioning and anxiety and energy and still not being socially proficient enough to not be some level of offputting, and now the social skills matter much more so it's a bigger obstacle even though I'm a lot better at them.
Not sure about this. I am high functioning autistic. It ended my game because I called my mom and that was somehow overly taxing. I call my parents and sibling sometimes when I feel drained emotionally. Not everyone hates communicating with their family.
This is sort of silly. Everyone has to "mask" at work. I do not care if the HR lady tells you to "bring your whole self". Unless your whole self happens to be precisely what they want, it is a lie. And nobody is that conflict avoidant, fake-happy, and deeply committed to shareholder value while upholding the strongest standards of ethics and work ethic.
This is a grind for pretty much everyone. To give you the other side, to someone extroverted and socially attuned, the fake nonsense is more grating and insulting than it is to you, I'd guess. Life is hard and everyone has his cross to bear.
That desk thing hits a nerve as someone on the other side of it.
It is not about "hot desk" but just not being able to see that some time you will need to reorganize how you sit. And not everyone will get the perfect spot.
Is it really a thing for some people that you need to sit on the same place always? I was never sure how much it offended some people or if they were just being comfortable.
There are point diffs on your stats each turn. The positive diffs are always the same for the same choices regardless of day.
The negative choices have an additional 25% added to them each day, so -10 the first day for a choice would be -12 (floor) the second day, -15 the third day, etc.
Very nice game. Barely made it to getting to the office and receiving orders from a manager. I could completely relate to the "hot desk" experience, that's something that would irritate me. I do not claim to be in the spectrum, nor have any diagnosis to claim or reject it. Again, congratulations for the game and the feeling.
Question: are there any good resources out there for leading those that are neurodivergent? I haven't led anyone that's neurodiverent yet but it's something I think alot about.
"Story mode" thinkers should be considered atypical, detached from reality, IMO. Coworkers convinced the political prison of job culture is just and honorific, for example.
I swear I went home from work but then got fired from my job for falling asleep at my desk. I don't understand what happened. (And even if I did fall asleep at my desk, who fires an employee for falling asleep once?)
Bummer - this has been the hardest code I've ever had to write test coverage for. I'm using https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ for the story routing with inkjs so I'm not surprised that there are some lingering weird-paths.
It's been long enough(about 7 years) since I worked in an environment like this that I've been seriously considering going back to it lately. I played one round of your game, and that was enough to make it completely obvious to me what a fucking terrible idea that is.
Thank you for making this, I think you just saved me from flushing two years of personal progress down the toilet in the name of... What? Fucking business logic? I'll pass on that, I think, and keep improving my life on my own terms.
And maybe address the question why, again and again, I keep finding ways to convince myself that this is what I want my life to be. No matter how many times it leads me to crash and burn and have to spend years picking up the pieces.
Seriously, thank you. If I ever meet you, I will buy you a beverage to your liking, to go, so you can go home and enjoy it in peace.
Eh, this just feels like "software engineering simulator." I don't have autism but a good bit of this feels familiar (am I on the spectrum?) I'm an introvert and have struggled to cope with corporate work for a while.
What helps:
- Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?
- Owning your calendar and timing for meetings to better suit your energy.
- Regular therapy and reflection, honestly.
- Regular exercise, doesn't matter who you are or what form, this is essential.
I can respect that this "simulation" fosters empathy, but worry that it also awfulizes/catastrophizes solvable problems. Figuring out functional routines and managing burnout is just as big a part of the job as writing code. It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.
Heck, this isn’t even specific to software engineering. It’s basically just a “getting through the workday” simulator. I think there are a great many people who find working in an office exhausting. Personally, I was so much happier once I switched to remote work.
> Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful... How much of the need here is self-imposed?
Autistic people don't come into the world as fully formed adults with irrational ideas about the need to mask. They start off as children and attempt to socialize with other children. The autistic child in a neurotypical world just "being themselves" finds themselves repeatedly kicked out of friend groups and rejected by everyone sometimes including by their parents. This is deeply traumatic to a young child's psyche. Unloved and rejected, a solution appears! I'll just pretend to be like the other kids, even though they're stupid and wrong. They may actually objectively be stupid, but apparently they don't like being told that to their face. Pile on another decade or two of this, and hey, this child, now older and wiser, has autistic masking tendencies that cause them to burn out. Blame the now-adult person with autism all you want to absolve yourself of a need to concern yourself with other people's problems, but that's not actually helpful for those people suffering from autistic burnout.
I mask as a coping mechanism for ADHD and Social Anxiety. This masking causes me harm. I learned it in the way you describe.
The most helpful learning I've gotten through years of therapy has been to: (1) recognize what I'm doing (2) not beat myself up about it (3) try small steps to change my behavior so that I can feel good about it.
I'm the only person who can unlearn this for myself. I don't blame anyone who masks, and have nothing but empathy for the experience, but I'm proposing they can find a different way.
> It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.
You might as well be telling a wheelchair-bound person that it's their responsibility to find a way up a flight of stairs or maneuver a cramped bathroom stall.
> Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?
Masking is not always conscious, in fact it's largely unconscious. So many autistic people will go through their day around neurotypical people and feel burnt out by lunch and have no idea why. They don't necessarily realize they're burning tons of mental effort just talking to people or dealing with stimuli.
Autistic people learn to mask just to get by day to day. It's not like they got issued a "How to be Autistic: Masking for Success" guide book when they were born.
Isn't that just being introverted? Also, if it's unconscious then a "simulator" shouldn't present an option. The PC should simply react automatically to the detriment of some stat. It sounds like for something to qualify as "masking" it must be a conscious choice, otherwise it's some other thing.
I still think it's important to (1) notice what's causing the problem, bring it into consciousness (2) understand the behavior (in this case: masking) and reckon with it if if's causing a bad outcome (burnout.)
Easier said than done. For me, therapy has been life-changing for helping me notice and understand unintentional behaviors.
Eh. No not really. There is a threshold to even be considered on the spectrum.
Most people have 2 legs and 2 arms. Some people don't (birth defects, injuries, accidents, disease, etc). There is a spectrum of missing appendages, but to say everyone is missing at least part of an appendage is not correct.
The definition of autism has changed to pull in masses more people over the years, so if you're an older software engineer you may be autistic using the up-to-date definition.
With the DSM-5 and it's removal of Asperger's as a separate diagnosis the diagnosis criteria has been made stricter. People that would have formerly been diagnosed as Asperger could theoretically not be anymore under ASD.
The percentage of people with autism in a population is very stable and we know there is a huge genetic component to it.
People are getting diagnosed more but the amount of people with autism has likely stayed stable.
Which is really, really good thing. A diagnosis is live changing. The earlier you get diagnosed and the more supportive your network is, the better the outcome.
Solid slice of the more extreme side of the autism spectrum for those who can still function within “normal” society, albeit with some assistance and tolerance.
I’m lucky enough to be on the lower/moderate side of things, but man all of this stuff hit home in its own way. Annoying noises (for me it’s the whine of cheap electronics or the chaotic bass of some music genres/upstairs neighbors), the forceful imposition of others in my space (“cameras on!”, scented cleaners, voluntold activities), and the daily task micromanagement to get by (do I call a friend/family member since they’ve texted me three times today about a trivial matter, or do I watch comfort shows and work on a personal project?).
This shit is hard, and adding in the requirement to engage in political maneuvering to succeed and thrive makes it exponentially worse.
I just want to do a good job and go home to live the best life I can. I suspect most autists are the same.
Extremely disappointed about the amount of ableism in the comments. Yes, some kids these days pick the autism label when they probably shouldn't, but that does NOT mean you get to shit on actually disabled people
Plenty of autistic people experience actual disability. And masking isn't just "what everyone does at work". Masking is a trauma response. Autistic people in genral have been abused for their 'abnormal' behavior to the point of being so traumatized that masking is not even a choice. They must hide for fear of further abuse and harassment.
Abuse such as "everyone's a little autistic" and "that's not a disability" or "you just want attention"
Making passing judgements on someone's disability that you clearly don't understand makes you a bigoted asshole. Stop it.
Yes, some kids these days pick the autism label when they probably shouldn't, but that does NOT mean you get to shit on actually disabled people
You shouldn't shit on anyone, but you do raise a good point: how do you know who the actually disabled people are?
If some people who claim autism offer as evidence experiences that almost all neurotypical folks can relate to, people are going to be skeptical. You can call them bigoted assholes, but you're unlikely to shame anyone into suspending their skepticism.
Hmm...I recognize the opening description well as someone who has ADHD. But honestly I don't know anyone who is neurotypical for whom the description wouldn't apply as well.
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
It's things like having a grating monotone, and having to pause before speaking and willing yourself to adopting the right tone for your state of mind and the effect you want to have on your audience. Every. Time. You. Speak.
It's like being an actor, except the whole world is your stage, and you have to be conscious of your character, lines, and motivation, the entire time you're awake.
I’ve learned so much, and it took only a few minutes. What a treat.
I had no idea about masking, even though I’ve been doing it for as long as I remember being alive. Aaaah, it’s so draining. When I was younger (in my 20s) I used to think there’d come a time when I’d finally come out of my shell. I’m pushing 40 now, but the shell is only thicker, the cave deeper, the walls taller. Instead of dreaming that one day I’ll be “like everyone else”, I’m contemplating the day I’ll cease to exist. Funny.
Sad that autism has become such a trend. I have a niece on the spectrum and it was obvious at a very young age luckily she is more high functioning now via years of therapy.
No one wants to hear it but there is a vast difference between those on the spectrum and those not. I am in tech and i have never met anyone autistic. This is because the sad reality is that autism makes it that hard to hold down a job even if high functioning.
It is grossly over exaggerated by many and used as an excuse. This is not saying anyone here does that but in media it is extremely common. This only makes it harder for those who do suffer from it. The majority of autism stereotypes are almost all on the high functioning side. Closer to the low functioning side, it is very sad.
People are tired of being forced to do bullshit meaningless or net negative stuff, obey people they don't respect on a deeper level etc. People live in a way like captive animals in a zoo. Everything is urgent, the sky is falling, but all behind a glass screen.
But the only vocabulary they have to express all this is therapy speak and mental health. So everyone has ADHD, autism, PTSD, anxiety, depression, bipolar and more. When it's often actually a lack of purpose, a lack of enduring value, being a standardized cog in a machine, ripped of context and roots, atomized, etc. But this is not valid vocabulary, we are modern people, we have chemical imbalances and not nonsense medieval concepts. Medical labels still have power even in a lifeless bureaucratic corporate HR hellscape. Medical diagnoses and credible claims of unsafe work environments. Anything else, they sleep. These two and they listen.
> we have chemical imbalances and not nonsense medieval concepts
That is not how the brain works. The whole chemical imbalances thing is a gross over-simplification. Honestly how it is used in pop science is often very analogues to the medieval theory of Humorism.
> When it's often actually a lack of purpose, a lack of enduring value, being a standardized cog in a machine
If you are subjected to an toxic environment it is a very healthy and good reaction to be unhappy about this.
Yes, psychologist mostly focus on the individual. That is their job. They can't fix unemployment, alienation of labor and so on. Those are societal issues that need political solutions.
However, this does not mean ADHD, autism, PTSD and so on are not real issues.
If I lived in a perfect utopia, I would still have ADHD. If ADHD were made up, why do my genetic children also have a 40% chance of having ADHD? Why would that not be true if I adopted someone?
These are real and disabling things that need specific treatment.
I agree with most of this. Though it gets really conceptually murky what a mental illness is and the DSM diagnosis checklists are quite different from how diagnoses work in "body"-medicine. The psychiatrist blogger Scott Alexander has written a lot about this.
For the common person, psychology and therapy are a new skin on spiritual guidance, shamanism, or rituals like Catholic confession.
> That is not how the brain works. The whole chemical imbalances thing is a gross over-simplification
I know and I was implying disagreement by the placement of that sentence in the context. I was trying to present what the common notion is. If it's a chemical imbalance, it can't be your fault. We trust science, we are physicalists. It has to be imagined as some miswiring or chemical problem for it to be respectable and taken seriously.
> If I lived in a perfect utopia, I would still have ADHD. If ADHD were made up, why do my genetic children also have a 40% chance of having ADHD? Why would that not be true if I adopted someone?
Personality and temperament differences exist yes. What we decide to label as a disease diagnosis is an entirely orthogonal question. ADHD is often diagnosed in rigid school environments that look nothing like homo sapiens' evolved natural habitat. It's not necessarily a disease not to flourish there. Yes I understand that given the environment, it makes sense to try to help as best as we can, and we can't single-handedly change society with a magic wand. Of course.
Ok, I slightly misunderstood and I see now better where you are coming from.
Yes, you are not wrong but as a ADHD person it comes off as super invalidating.
It is kind of like discussions where gender radical people tell to trans people that gender is just a social construct. Like it is but that doesn't exactly help trans people.
I mean I am sure you recognize this as you wrote.
> Yes I understand that given the environment, it makes sense to try to help as best as we can, and we can't single-handedly change society with a magic wand. Of course.
Still, I do believe that you massively overstate socially constructed aspect of having ADHD and underestimate the physical reality of it.
Yes, my environment makes a huge huge difference. But, as someone who was diagnosed very late in life, it was always with me. Even when I was alone. Even when I thrived. It is a fundamental part of who I am.
Not having a diagnosis earlier set up for constant spirals of failure, for internalized self hate. It did not allow me to find strategies to cope effectively.
I couldn't find or build the environment I needed because I didn't know my needs. This is why the diagnosis must come first.
ADHD is a disability and it is a real as being deaf or not being able to walk.
Once this is on the table, it's hard answer in a way that doesn't come across as being the asshole. But that's kind of my point. People tie identities and emotions to labels. It reframes how people react. Since it's real, you're given support. If it were fake, you'd get scolded. The shift in view that I got from Scott Alexander is that the arrow points the other way around. Since we see people who can benefit from some support, and we generally don't want to be assholes and want the support to be paid by insurance etc, we have to declare the thing as a Disease(TM). But this categorization is in good part necessary due to the bureaucratic system we live in. There are many ways that societies have conceptualized such things. All the way to demon possession. In comparison blindness is much easier to understand mechanistically.
> But the only vocabulary they have to express all this is therapy speak
What? I deal with all of that and more at work, and I just roll my eyes (to myself) and think "it's a paycheck."
If you're lucky you might find a sense of purpose and value at work but it's not really normal from what I've experienced. Even if you like the people you work with, the job itself is probably mostly bullshit. The only jobs I've had that weren't were the jobs that had very standardized tasks: making burgers, framing walls, painting, cutting grass. There's not much bullshit in those jobs because it's very clear what you are there to do. And you can turn around at the end of the day and look at the wall you built. That doesn't mean you might not feel like a cog in a machine.
IMO most people should find purpose and value outside of work. Work is just how you pay for those things.
ok, I went through it as a relatively normal software engineer (though i certainly can empathize with a lot of on-the-spectrum behavior in kind if not in intensity) - I have 3 takeaways.
1. Things that I brush off or bounce back from have a cumulative effect that leaves some autistic people 'in the red'. It affects them and sticks with them more than it does to me.
2. Options that are not at all realistic or sensible to me like 'not taking meds' - i would never consider skipping a prescription. several cases offered responding with formal processes and complaints that are wildly inappropriate for the offense. Are you showing that to an autistic person these terrible choices somehow seem to be viable?
3. This sample environment is over-the-top with caricatures of the worst sort of job activities populated by judgemental and sneering villains. Are you trying to show that to an autistic person they only see a day full of the very worst things - that they fixate on these problems and don't put them in context with the rest of the experience?
An uncharitable person could take away that autistic people are fragile, make poor choices, and only see the worst in the people around them.
Maybe this was more meant as a comic rant that autistic people could enjoy as a parody of their shared experiences? I'm not actually sure this is accomplishing what you want.
Thanks for playing and agreed! I have a disclaimer in the [About] modal
Autism is an extremely diverse and complex phenomenon. No two autistic people experience the world in the same way. This simulation is based on the experiences of a single autistic individual and is not representative of all autistic people, although, I suspect many autistic people will recognize some aspects of their own experience in this simulation.
Thats a bit uncalled for. This is a game made by someone shaped by their perspective on the world. It can be appreciated as such without applying your own additional intent.
I think masking is pretty general across the board. Even severe Autism. My daughter acts completely different in different contexts. Some could say we all do but you'll know it when you see it esp when the mask is gone.
A lot of the behaviors this seems to force I don't understand - like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not. I am well aware that for kids with autism frequently there are feeding issues, but what's going on in the "simulation" is very not clear to me.
Similarly, I don't understand the decisions related to the driving environment: it appears to be a personal vehicle, surely you, as the owner, can make the interior environment something that's as close to personally comfortable as possible? Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.
Related, what is or isn't masking seems very confused. To begin with, it's not just code for "hiding or not hiding behaviors that appear socially irregular." But it's also not the case that deciding whether to participate in a non-working-hours event is or isn't masking in of itself.
Presenting behavior in a socialized way when necessary is a skill that's harder (as I understand it) for those on the autism spectrum, but I don't think that makes every application equivalent to masking.
> A lot of the behaviors this seems to force I don't understand - like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not. I am well aware that for kids with autism frequently there are feeding issues, but what's going on in the "simulation" is very not clear to me.
I lost interest after the breakfast question. For someone who’s physically fit (which this person likely is) skipping breakfast shouldn’t cause a noticeable drop in energy. If it does, then there may be more going on than just autism.
you also don't fall asleep at your desk as a response to a birthday party in the office early in the morning after a good nights' sleep, but if you play a one-sided game in this that's what happens.
it's not a reality simulator, incredibly few video games are.
the whole thing seems like a conflicted struggle between "I want to make a game" and "I need to get my points across", often to the detriment of the game-part.
It's an interesting concept though.
My lived experience is that high stress situations frequently make me feel like just going to sleep.
> It's an interesting concept though
Why? It's a multiple choice game with different outcomes. Hardly groundbreaking.
You don't feel it immediately. Notice the bar doesn't reset the next day. You don't feel breakfast immediately but your workout later in the day and tomorrow will be affected by this.
You have definitively diagnosed yourself as not being on the spectrum.
Hard to describe, but there is a tendency to self-sabotage (for lack of a better term) that you have to take into account. Sure, it may be my car, and I may have control of the radio, but I don't always act upon the need to adjust my environment.
This is correlated with the amount of energy and attention you have to give to processing your environment, much like the health bars in the game UI.
What if you're like gay and always struggling to stay in the closet?
Then you’re like a closeted gay autistic person. Speaking for a friend.
> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.
I can relate to this in that I barely have any energy in the mornings to do anything no matter how early I set my alarm, then end up skipping everything except the bare minimum to function, or maybe less depending on if I happen to have more energy that day.
I feel like setting your alarm earlier, thus reducing the amount of sleep you are getting, may be the wrong thing to do.
Is there a connection to autism there?
Autism has become a culturally dominant force that's displaced other kinds of neurodiversity almost completely. All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family.
The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.
What other kinds of neurodivergence is it masking?
You did give examples, but only for ways it perhaps fails in promoting empathy for groups with similar problems.
I understand where you're coming from, and I would even agree with the denotation of every sentence in your first paragraph, but I think you're missing a lot.
Being "culturally dominant" is not a good thing for autistic people: it's not autistic voices that dominate, but mostly eugenics groups, with the occasional well-meaning (but usually uninformed) activist group trying to oppose the narrative. If you're familiar with the kind of "anti-racist" corporate training that's mostly just white guilt with a few racial stereotypes thrown in, then you know how far "well-meaning" can take you.
While we can draw many analogies to autistic masking, autistic masking is qualitatively different to the examples you've listed. We have other words for the other things (e.g. "talking white" is a special-case of "situational code-switching", and "staying closeted" is a special-case of something that I don't know a name for). You're skirting (and, I think, crossing) the line between analogy and appropriation in your first paragraph. (See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440873, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45441925)
I'm not really sure what you mean by your "actually does the opposite" remark in the second paragraph, unless you're automatically treating this interactive description of autism made with care, by someone with personal experience of being autistic, as the kind of rubbish that's made by "well-meaning" ignorants for low-quality corporate training.
People with other flavours of neurodivergence have produced similar "simulators" (a kind of RPG, really). You might be familiar with Spoon Theory, originally devised to describe the psychological burden of living with lupus? That simulator is a TTRPG.
Not sure, it's just my experience and I was diagnosed autistic at an early age
Ya, I'm curious about this as well. I'm not a morning person, and certainly am always just-scraping-by until about 1 pm. But is this some mild autism? Or is this just how I am? Or is there even a sensible distinction between those two phrases?
> But is this some mild autism?
Everyone seems to self-diagnose as slightly autistic these days. “I’ve noticed that I have personal quirks. Must be autism. Couldn’t be that everyone has their own personal stuff to deal with.”
I think this is maybe related to imposter syndrome. “There are people who can easily do this thing that I struggle with. Maybe I’m not qualified./Maybe I’m autistic.”. This thought process assumes others aren’t struggling and also tends to look to those who excel rather than the average so it’s biased anyway.
> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.
If you're talking about what happens after the first day, I think it's not due to any of the "stats" but rather because your first day is long and so you're running late on the second day, and for whatever reason you have nothing ready-to-eat at home. (Might be related to that option to go to the grocery store that you probably didn't take.)
In other words, it's seemingly a narrative-driven obstacle.
> it appears to be a personal vehicle, surely you, as the owner, can make the interior environment something that's as close to personally comfortable as possible? Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.
Could be a rental car. Though my guess here is that the author actually comes from a place where the combination of culture and socioeconomics means they commute via public transit; and so they're actually trying to translate their experiences of the social impingement of public transit into analogous experiences when driving.
(Personally, I think a better translation would be being stuck in gridlock, or getting on a highway via an onramp where you keep getting cut off, etc, where there's an autistic itch there to get the other human drivers to realize that, when driving, they should "realize they're all cogs in a global optimization problem and so drive as predictably as possible, in order to decrease burstiness and so increase throughput, even at the expense of their individual perceived end-to-end latency.")
> Related, what is or isn't masking seems very confused. To begin with, it's not just code for "hiding or not hiding behaviors that appear socially irregular." But it's also not the case that deciding whether to participate in a non-working-hours event is or isn't masking in of itself.
AFAICT the "masking" gauge seems to be some rolled-up combination of 1. an odd domain-specific form willpower ("spoons" but you can only spend them on masking-related tasks, and when depleted you can't mask even if you still have motivation to do other things), with 2. a measure how close others are to deducing from your behavior that you are in fact on the autistic spectrum. (As if that's something you could ever expect to keep your coworkers and boss from realizing about you over years of continuous interaction.)
I say this because of the interaction I encountered about coming to a charity event, where literally being explicit about how you have a problem dealing with that kind of social situation... decreases the "masking" gauge. If it was purely #1, I'd expect the gauge to go up. It's only under interpretation #2 where it would go down.
(Or maybe you could describe the "masking" gauge in classical D&D terms as a WIS stat where masking attempts are Will-based saving throws?)
Honestly, I'd like to just see the source code for this. I'm surprised it's not linked; I feel like reading the source (hopefully with a lot of code comments about why the given heuristics were chosen) is the obvious "next step" to the game communicating what it wants to communicate.
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
Why do both eating a proper breakfast and skipping breakfast affect your masking negatively? No one is around, what difference does it make?
Also, everyone has to mask at work.
This is because autistism advocacy groups misuse the word mask. It is supposed to refer to extra work you have to do playing a specific persona. E.g. at a party pretending to be a character from a movie or a book. And especially trying to force yourself to become that persona to fit in.
A lot of people in the advocacy space use it to mean basic things like being well behaved or being nice to people. Everybody has to be well-behaved at work. Everybody has to consider the feelings of others etc.
The idea of "wearing a mask" in the sense of being polite is older than the notion of masking in autism. For example, P. G. Wodehouse used it a few times in the 1920s to refer to the social expectations made on aristocratic families. E.g. from 1922:
> I didn’t like the chap, but we Woosters can wear the mask. I beamed a bit.
In this sense everyone masks. In fact they mask almost all the time from the time they get up until maybe the time they go to bad. Masking in autism originally referred to something different that was specific to autism.
The way it's used now it essentially just means "it's harder for me to fit in." Which is true but doesn't tell you anything about autism from a psychological point of view beyond the obvious fact that it's harder for us to fit in.
I've mentioned to relevant people a couple of times in the past that I generally feel like I am "acting" in most social situations. Like I have an idea as to who/how I need to be in that moment and act accordingly. I'm used to it and it's not really something very conscious in the moment, but if the event lasts a long time it gets kind of draining since you have parallel tracks going - reading the room, predicting what reaction someone expects at any time, issuing that reaction, etc. It's not that I don't enjoy the events, but I can "fill up" on interaction quickly and want to go home early to recharge.
I figured that was just being an introvert.
> people in the advocacy space use it to mean basic things like being well behaved or being nice to people
Thank you for this comment. As a family member of a young AuDHD person I am continually battered by a combination of their behavior (which directly and un-ignorably degrades the experience of everyone around) and by various 'advocacy' ideas that use phrasing like that to not-so-subtly imply that it's actually our bad for daring to expect to "not be hit," or to not be forced to constantly base our whole lives on one person's preferences, etc.
It's tough sometimes to figure out what's real, what's a fair expectation, what's something that can be learned/unlearned, and what's just inevitable.
Having had personal experience with this problem, there is actually a simple but difficult solution to your problem:
Focus in the effect if the person's action on you, and set hard boundaries for yourself.
Note that boundaries are in this specific form:
"If you do X in Y situation, I will do Z"
The consequence to the instigating person (the Z part) is important. The person you described likely has a deficit in empathy, so feedback on actions has to happen to modify behavior.
Note that I'm not saying to hit back. Consequences are generally best when withdrawing something of value than adding something of negative value.
For example: "If we're watching a movie and you are physically rowdy, you will have to leave the living room and entertain yourself in your room".
Focua on how things affect you, and what actions you can take in response to boundary breaking behavior. Then be ruthlessly firm and consistent about it.
> The person you described likely has a deficit in empathy
Sorry, but I have to correct this because it's a common misunderstanding. It's actually a name collision.
People on the autism spectrum struggle with theory of mind, which is also called "cognitive empathy." We can have difficulty understanding the mental states and emotions of others.
On they other hand, we're often higher than average on what's called "emotional empathy" or "affective empathy." Many autistic people get very distressed when others are unhappy or are suffering. For example, autistic folks are over-represented in the animal rights movements and other movements to reduce suffering.
Somebody who lacks empathy in the everyday use of the word is someone who does not care if others are suffering. That is not a symptom of autism, and never has been going back to the start of research on the topic.
Yeah I like to think of it as active roleplaying instead of having to put in an effort. Most people have to put in some effort in social situations, heck I catch myself saying unproductive things to my partner if I slip completely into passive mode.
If you feel like this, you may be on the spectrum (not an insult btw).
Masking for neuro typical people is very easy, even if emotionally draining. My wife is the perfect example - her personality is to be nice to everyone and to connect with people. A lot of times this leads to prolonged conversations with people, which then she complains about, but its basically like saying you are tired after going on a long bike ride - there is some enjoyment in the activity.
Whereas for neuro-spicy people, masking is the equivalent of spilling seeds on the floor and having to pick up each one with tweezers to put them back. Its both exhausting and not enjoyable.
No, parent is right: everybody "masks" at work. Call it putting on a persona, playing a role, whatever - but as you said, it's less effortful for some than others.
I wouldn't even say its less effort. Its a whole different kind of effort. A social neurotypical person willingly engages in interactions and "masks". A person on the spectrum only engages because they have to.
Everybody has a social battery, but while some are working with a USB PD 240W monster you can't take on an airplane, others have to get by with an iPhone Air (and they can't disable background refresh).
It's true that different people require different amounts of effort to do and approach it with different tactics, but fundamentally almost nobody streams their inner monologue straight out of their lips, and I think when it does happen is actually much more associated with TBI and inhibition disregulation than ASD. (Which is not to say that it doesn't require a different approach or more effort for those with ASD.)
Yes, it's performing tasks in software that most people perform in hardware.
Yeah this is a thing that gets me. Everyone has to mask because otherwise there'd be a more conflict over shit that doesn't matter then there likely already is during meetings and stuff.
Some of the messaging too is just... off-putting/patronizing. "Brave the grocery store"? I know social situations can be tough on people but it's not you're being asked to kill the chicken and process it or grow the veggies. Is resiliency so low that it's a battle to go pick up necessities?
Maybe I was blessed to grow up in a poor, not exactly stable household at least for a while.
Yep... If I didn't mask while at work and home, I'd probably be annoying my family and coworkers with state and local land use politics issues all the time.
Its a bit of a misnomer.
Skipping breakfast reduces the caloric energy you have. Eating a full breakfast is basically going against your instinct. Optimal thing for autistic people would be a energy bar that is both healthy, has good texture, and makes you feel full.
The game puts the "masking" definition right in the start page, no need to deduce. I also dislike how any form of self care reduces your masking even if you're alone.
It's designed to make you lose in a couple of days, which would imply you're not a highly functional autist, and hence I wonder how the heck did you get a job without others noticing your autism?
Like I said, implication is a bit weird.
For example, self care with video games would be different. I think the author was just trying to demonstrate that self care in the normal sense isn't the same to spectrum folks
I was surprised to find that skipping my medication which causes drowsiness instantly caused my energy to crash to zero and lose the game. I think this is well intentioned but weirdly designed.
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
Isn't that just part of everyday life as a grown-up?
Some people find this process intuitive to the point they don't realize they're doing it, and others have to be actively thinking about it or it doesn't happen at all. Those with autism are more likely to tend towards the latter.
This seems in the same direction as "doesn't everyone get sad?" for folks with depression. It's not a matter of this not being an experience for others, as much as it is how much energy it takes to get through it.
"Energy" in this case as a stand-in for willpower, for emotional regulation, for actual physical energy.
For some people it comes easier than for others. I personally don't feel like I mask all the time, only sometimes when I want to tell my colleague that he's a moron, but I don't.
> Isn't that just part of everyday life as a grown-up?
Yes it is.
The question isn't if you mask, it's what you are masking and to what extent.
There is a big difference between having sense enough not to wear your favorite gimp suit to work and not knowing how to make small talk and have to do it as performance everyday when you are at work.
Yes, but it's more intense for people who find eye contact distracting or outright unpleasant on a visceral level, or who are suppresssing stimming urges that a 'normal' person doesn't experience in the first place.
I don't like the premise of this game. If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine. They can find other people to spend time with.
You can probably find a good community where you are, and if not just move to SF which is something like the autism homeland. Being autistic there is valorized and even imitated in sort of amusing ways.
Masking is a kind of hell, living someone else's life. Unmasking and living as yourself feels scary at first but the people who will love you that way can only find you if you live that way.
I've gotten much farther in life by masking it to some extent. Those gains in life allowed me more freedom overall and let me do more of what I enjoy.
"Just be yourself" is a good message in a movie, but everyone has to play a role to some extent to get where they want to be.
Masking doesn't (only) mean presenting as 100% neurotypical with the goal of others not even realizing you're autistic. It's also what you call any amount emotional labor you go through, trying to decrease the amount of emotional labor that other people have to expend on dealing with the ways you would, if not masking, approach interactions/tasks/etc differently.
If you imagine neurotypical and autistic as two "languages", then masking is when an autistic person is going to the effort to speak the neurotypical language, so as to remove the burden from neurotypical people of having to parse the autistic language. Most of the time, unless the interaction is very short and one-shot, the autistic person will still come off as speaking the neurotypical language "as a second language" rather than speaking it "fluently"; but it is the lived experience of many autistic people that this is still less disruptive in mixed company than just letting go and going full native autistic and expecting neurotypical people to be the ones to adapt. (Even in SF, a randomly-selected group of people often contains a few people visiting from elsewhere, who have never interacted with [non-masking] autistic people before, and so have never learned to "speak" autistic.)
Which is not to say that it isn't nice to find other autistic people to hang out with, where you can just let your hair down and "speak your native language" together! But it's not like this is something people avoid doing, if they get the chance. It's just that in most places in the world, you're rather unlikely to stumble into groups consisting solely of autistic people. (Except maybe in engineering-led tech companies!)
> If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
No thank you. I very much prefer to remain employed.
I get enough accommodations as it is; society is built on give-and-take and I’ve found a stable medium. My masking is part of that compromise. Without it I would just be entitled.
For clarity, I am not autistic (as far as I am aware) but I do have personality traits and quirks that absolutely have made my life challenging. As I have gotten older I have learned to mask those traits and it has led to far more success in life. While I still have trouble maintaining relationships, I at least can curate a professional reputation that has granted me benefits.
I am not saying this to claim that those with autism should mask, but I think the advice in this comment could be misinterpreted. While we should all be able to live as authentic selves, the reality is that this comes with trade-offs. We should evaluate those trade-offs independently and determine which of our personality traits are worth masking and which are not.
Am AuDHD.
To be direct: this is a recipe for failure in a neurotypical world.
I agree with you with regard to the resulting personal relationship quality. However, there is a *massive* practical/economic cost.
I worked in Tech for 30 years. Burned out hard. Then I got my autism diagnosis.
I lived sincerely. I was punished for it.
I then tried to conform—masking before I quite knew what it was. I just knew that it required enormous effort to remain "composed".
Nope, still punished. The mask wasn't good enough.
Not only that, I began to loathe who I was becoming because of the mask. And I saw the added cost of how it was wrecking my marriage.
I'm now into year 3 (2.33) into unemployment with no idea what's next. I just know that it can't involve any masking whatsoever.
And that, in of itself, means I will be far "less successful" in this neurotypical world.
I'm audhd in real life and I've been unable to get to day 3 in this game after 5 tries. I don't know what that says about me, the spectrum, this way, or the way I live my life, but I think I also don't like the premise much either.
This game is an interpenetration of one persons experience and is too tightly defined by their daily routines. I collapsed on day 1 and got fired.
I’ve played it in real life and lasted 300+ days a few times and I don’t recommend that experience at all. The nice thing about a game, at least, is that losing doesn’t matter.
I have aspergers (not sure the term is even used anymore) and eye contact is very uncomfortable, but I try to do it (or fake, it as I have to wear glasses and can take them off) because in day to day life not having eye contact when having a conversation is seen as rude and the last thing I want is for everyone that I have a one time conversation with to think I'm rude.
> If you're autistic, don't mask
I strongly agree. Masking is a maladaptive strategy and it's described that way in the literature.
But you do have to figure out who you are and what matters to you. A lot of autistic people spend much of their youth trying to be other people and only really figuring out what they like when they're in their 30s, 40s, or older.
Masking is hell, I agree. But the person you are underneath isn't guaranteed to be something that people like to be around either.
> They can find other people to spend time with.
In the context of this game world, that circumstance manifests as the player getting fired from their job. Perhaps a person would like to keep their job and so does things they otherwise wouldn't like to do.
IDK if it says something about me, but my first couple tries at the game I misunderstood what masking was.
I thought when my Masking score went down, it meant I was showing my true colors too much and exposing myself as autistic (to the detriment of my career). Took me a minute to realize it was the opposite.
I first learned that it was possible to intentionally act "normal" when I was 12 (I'm now 47). So I spent a lot of years studying people to figure out how to do those things they did automatically but I had to do manually.
Later I learned it's called masking and a lot of people like yourself think of it as bad.
But it made my life immeasurably better.
I hated how I acted and how people reacted to me when I was young.
I wouldn't even know how to turn off the "masking behavior" now and I never would have become who I am without it.
Maybe it's because I was young and didn't know any other people like me but I don't think labelling this survival technique as hell is right for everybody.
This isn’t just an autistic thing. Everyone has to learn to temper themselves to fit into society and get along with others.
That's true, of course. It's a matter of degree and scale.
SF, famously affordable for people who have decided to skip success in social, academic and professional arenas. What is this, a trust fund satire?
> If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
What does “masking” mean to you? Because when I search for autistic masking I get a really wide range of behaviors from suppressing physical rocking to attempting to learn social skills.
Some masking might be counterproductive or even harmful. Some of the stuff I’m finding listed as masking is just basic being an adult stuff, though. If “don’t mask” means “don’t try to improve yourself” then it’s terrible advice.
Yikes. I suppose "Just stop masking" is great advice if you're in a highly privilege position where you don't have to worry about losing your job. But that does track with suggesting autistic people "just move to San Francisco," where my crippling disorder is "imitated" in "amusing" ways.
> You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine.
Some of those people sign my paycheck though.
Screw that. There’s nothing inherently good about authenticity. Be yourself when it’s good to be yourself. Don’t when it’s not. Try to change “yourself” when it’s beneficial to do so.
That's an interesting take. Most humans have a viscerally negative reaction to unmasked autistic behaviours, in the same way they might react to a strange spider. A mix of fear and disgust. You quite literally cannot build a life for yourself without masking unless you're already financially independent. Once you have enough power and F-U money, sure, go for it. In the meantime it's not really a realistic solution.
Spiders are good, especially in your house. They are eating something. Whatever they are eating, is worse than a spider.
It doesn’t matter what is true about most spiders, the point of the comment is about how most people react to the sight of one.
You're so close to understanding the analogy
Is it the meme about normal people beating autists, autists beating psychopaths and psychopaths beating normal people?
No. It's that it doesn't matter that spiders are good, millions of people will crush them on sight.
For example?
Somewhat orthogonal, but if the spider is not a Brown Recluse (if you live where those are), then it is competition for them.
This is a really privileged perspective. Most people have to be professional abuse takers if they want to make rent.
I do agree that “masking is bad” is sometimes taken too far. It doesn’t justify being harmful to other people. But the chronic toxic positivity that workplaces demand, because people want to delude themselves into believing it isn’t corrosive to sell one’s time and dignity for survival, is exhausting and unsustainable for autistic people.
> believing it isn’t corrosive to sell one’s time and dignity for survival
It's possible to survive without doing that - start your own business.
It's just tremendously more work to come up with a good and working business plan, and to find a funding source to help actualize that plan, when you're too good to "sell your time and dignity" to at least get seed money.
I don't get this mindset that the whole idea of working for someone else is degrading. Working for someone else is outsourcing a very tough part of business -- the strategy and funding -- to someone else. In exchange for this turnkey arrangement, you receive far less money than would a sole proprietor who managed to hatch the idea and deliver the same value on their own, successfully, but you also make far more money than the (zero or negative $) you would in the 90% likely scenario where your business fails.
Nobody is being forced to work for others -- but to get money you do have to provide value worth paying for to someone. Extreme self-sufficiency, owing nothing to anyone, is also an option -- you can get a loan and buy a few acres of farmland for less than a car and do your own thing there.
In my opinion the entire structure of scrum and sprints is structured to help people with autism and adhd. Most workplaces that produce creative output are much more focused on soft power, networking, and hard deadlines—things that really don’t work for the “au-dhd” crowd.
It’s easy to remove the locus of control by saying “this environment wasn’t built for me” but do appreciate how much it actually /is/ created for you.
My experience has been 100% the opposite. Daily public status check-ins, top-down decisions, every work interaction mediated through artificial structure? The points are made up, the deadlines are obviously fake, but everyone acts as if they are real? Except when they're not?
That, on its own, would make it clear the environment wasn't built for me.
The fact that the environment was very obviously built for management—for information to flow up so that decisions can flow down—but also that nobody is willing to acknowledge that? That just makes it even clearer.
I've worked in an environment that did feel like it was built for me, and it was pretty much the opposite of scrum/agile/etc. I had real trust with a clearly defined area of ownership. I was responsible for managing the interfaces and interaction points around my area and, occasionally, for real deadlines (with real context!), not a slog of fake short-term deadlines that exist just to create pressure. I didn't have to break down or justify my work in terms of bite-sized tasks that could roll up into somebody's spreadsheet.
And the best part? We got more done, faster, than conventionally managed teams.
If the culture hadn't been totally ruined by a reorg, I'd still be there. I'm still sad I haven't been able to find anything similar since. But, having experience that, I am only more confident that scrum et al are absolutely not built for me.
Of course the environment was built for management. But if you have ever been in management you know that getting useful updates on progress is like suqeezing blood from a stone.
I didn’t say that anyone liked the process, but I assure you that the average autistic engineer would actually do worse in a more feeeform environment. They would like it more though.
It is sometimes difficult to get progress reports because it's difficult for the people who are doing the work to figure out where they are in the process. For example, imagine that you have some tickets; "Add create method, "Add delete method", "Add list method". You take the first ticket, and decide to add the RPC server, and the authentication infrastructure, and the test harness, and the CLI wrapper. What do you say on the progress update? "You've been working on this for a week, why isn't at least one of those done?" The answer is because the tickets are pieces of value that the business wants to ship (you can ship without delete, I guess), but it's not actually how the software is assembled. What happens is that someday, you say "I'm done with create" and then 2 hours later say "I'm done with delete and list". That makes execs feel like they're being misled, but it's true.
Of course, if you actually enumerate the "how" and not just the "what" in your ticketing system, you can get a much more realistic view. "Add foobar RPC server", "Hook auth into the foobar RPC server", "Add foobar subcommand to CLI", ...
I think everyone does better with a clear set of expectations, autism or not. That's why we do design docs, design reviews, and try to put a realistic set of work into the ticket tracker. I would say personally, though, 99% of the time I don't really need to do that to get a good result out of myself. I can just say "by next Tuesday I will have this subsystem done". Typically this is done with heroics rather than good planning (Monday becomes a longer-than-average workday), so I try to avoid it, but I definitely understand why people want a more freeform environment.
> (you can ship without delete, I guess)
And some management type will say when you're halfway through 'add' that they'll cut 'delete', but it's impossible to automate anything without a delete option, so you implement it anyway during your testing and then they get mad.
You're just describing a high-trust/senior team. That same group of people would have made scrum seem cool too.
Scrum can protect you some really nasty stuff.
Scrum is pretty bad for au-dhd crowd. It misses proper checks on business interference, which makes things even worse. It is constant pushing the worthless points (why not a time unit), kpi is about scoring points or useless improvements which have to happen anyway (merciless refactoring, yeah!). Devs could simply atomize every task and win this stupid game, but then you lose oversight and we get to lie number whatever. Everyone should be responsible, most people ain't generalists. They are specialists often.
Kanban gives more flexibility. Scrum seems to fall apart like that eventually leaving a power vacuum for tasks out bound of scrum. Active products have constant support questions.
Then you have SAFE, which is even worse. Waterfall but then even worse. Coordination seems to be very complex, the diagram is close to unreadable. Looks like a badly designed production street for its purpose.
That is a problem. For who is it created exactly?
> the worthless points (why not a time unit)
The story points people won the battle against time units, claiming that "complexity" can be measured and quantified better than "hours" could, but in every place I've worked, people just treat them as though they're actually some unit of time. Product managers and my bosses always believe you can do arithmetic with that (multiply engineers assigned to project by 2 to cut time in half right? Sum up 25 points and be confident 5 engineers can complete them all in a week right?)
Then we occasionally have to pretend to really care why our "velocity" isn't arbitrarily higher or why it's less than it once was, when all of the tasks have estimates from 1-5 with at least a 1-point margin of error. There's so much noise that no amount of smoothing yields useful data that you can use to achieve "certainty" -- such as that X project will be done in Y number of sprints, which is what senior management craves most, but can never safely be promised unless you have a death wish.
Basically I'm convinced at minimum like half of teams that "do agile" or "do scrum" are just cargo-culting and derive no particular benefit from it. I don't think I'd even do estimation of any kind if I ran a software team as I saw fit.
I had to laugh about your comment, this is exactly how it goes. People are used thinking in time units.
Then you have modified fibonacci, which make me puke. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20. I get special headaches because of names like this.
However you can find this page if you adding them up by as strings, it isn't connected, but attack on titan was a good anime: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/123581320
Weird coincidence. I need to sleep, spend a lot today in my headspace.
Scrum is literally a scam though. It was invented by some guy not even worth remembering who sold it to both sides (buyers and sellers of software). On the buyer side, the incentive was to encourage the seller to use scrum to communicate progress. On the seller side, they are encouraged to use scrum because the buyer wants it, and it "proven" to be an effective management tool.
There are too many unknowns to deal with to actually make use of it, and managing the unknowns is a whole other aspect of management outside scrum. This is why most scrums essentially devolve into ad hoc work per sprint with very loose planning.
What project estimation/management process would you suggest as an alternative?
Its not so much as estimation as a whole work style, but
Make it work -> Make it right -> Make it fast
is arguably the best way to go about things, then structure your work around that.
Ive done this with greenfield projects when I used to work for Amazon (while still ironically operating under scrum), and was able to get SD2-SD3 promo within 2 years (entering an an SD2).
In terms of planning work, you basically allocate people as necessary. The first part deals with a lot of unknowns, so estimation is pointless - basically everyone is on board in terms of getting software up and running and talking to other software.
Once you have that, making it right is a lot easier to estimate because you can do a lot more fine grained planning (like for example, a certain team member that worked on a feature can add all the correctness and unit testing way faster than someone who has not)
Then making it fast is basically just optimizations, which can be done by a subset of team members while the rest work on adding features (and adding features needs to be done in the same way - make the feature just work, make it correct for all use cases, and then make it optimal)
Just rank by date needed order on a kanban board and work your way through everything in order. If it's constant fight to meet deadlines it will be clear enough that things are backed up.
In my opinion the entire structure of scrum and sprints is structured to help people with autism and adhd.
No, it’s the opposite. Daily performance check-ins are exhausting and humiliating. The cops show up at your house every day with guns drawn.
A trap autistic people fall into is believing things will get better if a metric is imposed. “Oh, now I just have to beat the metric, not worry about being well-liked.” No, now you have to do both. New written rulers don’t make the shitty unwritten ones go away. It just became monotonically easier to get fired and monotonically harder to get promoted.
When management imposes a metric or quota, it’s time to get a union. Unfortunately, this is not something we have the skills to do alone, but it is a way to fight back against those who hate us.
If there was a fund to help remove sprints, scrum, Jira and standups I would donate to it.
It's like a factory but the people are the machines.
Probably many of the people who hate writing code for a PM at work, love working on their own open source project.
And the difference is freedom.
Hear, hear.
I think higher management likes to believe that those things (sprints, scrum, Jira and standups) provide a safety net against lazy employees not working hard enough, so they cling to them. Of course, they actually do little and are pretty easy to game. Their failure to magically make all software work predictable and deterministic and all developer time fungible actually means that you still need a manager involved and close to the work to identify people who BS their way through everything and take way longer than they should.
I'd rather be in an environment where you are given access to simple tools like kanban to prioritize and track work, and for people who don't deliver, the manager just fires them (maybe with one warning).
This, it is costly, certain personal walks away. Proper roles seem to emerge anyway.
The cost of control and the costly overhead has everything to do with atomizing the work load. Just like in a distributed system. The synchronization mechanisms get more complicate.
The more layers, the less trustable the organization, since every manager under their manger, is a potentially corruptable.
This makes the communication lines unclear and makes people over promise. Also distributing the workload has diminishing returns.
I am not a fan of scrum or other systems.
I wonder how much of this is company- or team-dependent. I don't mind sprints, but I also choose what to put on them myself with very rare (like twice-yearly, tops) requests from my manager.
I don't have a PM.
Scrum gives you (the team member) the power to decide what your commitment for the next sprint will be.
If you have a manger, that decides this, or the PO decides this, IMO that’s a key problem of your scrum implementation.
Why would you expect freedom at work? Employment is by definition working for someone else, so you are going to be working on their goals, not yours.
Working on somebody else's goals, and being systematically micromanaged are two very different things.
This is a fallacious argument.
I've been in the software business since 2007, which was also when I first met Jira and Scrum (at least something with 14 days sprints).
My first encounter with Scrum (or whatever it was) was good. It felt good to work in cycles and reprioritize twice a month.
Since then I have seen various versions of working systems and various versions of broken systems.
The two last projects have been extremely agile, the current project has exactly 5 mandatory meetings in an average week:
- 3 x stand ups that typically take <10 minutes and never more than 15.
- 1 stand up plus planning (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 20 minutes)
- 1 stand up plus voluntary demo + retro (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 30 minutes)
The previous project had a lot more structure but also worked well.
Common themes:
- Communication is 2 way
- Both teams are friendly and competent
- Customer care about results and leave programming to us
- Clear communication about what they hope, but without stress. Especially the first project were the stakes were serious: if we manage to hit the deadline we knew we would save the organization millions, but if not, nobody was in trouble. It was an actual challenge, not a scary thing.
Have I seen dysfunctional Scrum and Agile as well? Yes!
Some examples:
- endless estimation meetings which not only eats programmer hours but also mean that everyone feel they have to match the estimates
- one way communication (in a loop from customer - ux - programmer - tester - customer). Doesn't help if there are 14 days sprints when every sprint is a mini waterfall
- taking time of the project to do agile workshop after agile workshop while continuing to be absolutely rigid
- "release" after "release" but no actual customer
- "finish one thing" taken to mean that styling has to be perfect even on placeholder pages
It’s built to make upper management happy with the facade of productivity, middle management employed, while they squeeze the most out of the workforce and keep up the constant pressure (endless sprints).
It’s not built for the product team (devs, designers, QA).
In some cases, coincidentally, it might be good for some neurodivergent folks, I guess…
…as long as they don’t mind the constant bugging for updates, interruptions, and constant pressure… I’m sure it’s an environment where people with ADHD etc shine.
I agree with this
In my opinion the entire structure of scrum and sprints is structured to help people with autism and adhd.
Unfortunately the principles are rarely adhered to.
Hard disagree.
It's there to help management control the 'au-dhd' crowd with a manufactured focus that rarely aligns with what they could naturally focus on.
No, just no.
As someone with ADHD, I am orders of magnitude more productive when I do freelancing than in an SCRUM based corporate environment and much happier. And I mean orders of magnitude, I am not being dramatic. (Though that only works if I work on something I am interested in otherwise my lows are even lower.)
Task switching is a typical issue for both ADHD as autism people and SCRUM has so much. Just the damn dailies are complete murder for my mental health and productivity.
The problem with SCRUM is that it focuses on everyone being a cog in the machine. Everyone replaceable. At best it allows teams to self-organize (in theory, seldom in practice) but does not acknowledge individual needs of team members.
Whenever you are forced to be around people, you are forced to put on your mask and perform. Exhausting.
I love it, I have been meaning to put together a similar simulation to demonstrate the effects of interruptions and context switches on developers.
Something like the following: - a game or puzzle which requires working memory, like matching pairs or some puzzles that need a lot of working memory and/or flipping between screens - this gets interrupted by fullscreen interruptions of someone's face, and text asking questions, or announcing something, and you have to pick an answer or a reaction (multiple choice) - it could start with questions like 'hi, are you busy?' or 'can I ask you a question?' - answers which tries to end the conversation quickly could lead to even more demanding reactions or questions - interruptions stating there is an emergency can lead to a lot of questions and answers which then leads you to discover than it is in fact not an emergency - once one of these engagements finish you can return to the game and try to complete it - you'll get multiple interruptions like this - other interruptions can also flash up, like a notification that a meeting is due in x minutes - it could then have a short simulated meeting, perhaps just a line by line scroll of dialogue between others, where you need to say nothing - however, at some point someone will ask you directly about one of the items discussed, and you will be given a set of fairly ambiguous multiple choice answers which you will have to try out until you get to the 'correct' one - at the end of the meeting you return to the working memory task/game - this gets interrupted by someone then asking you about the action points in the meeting - return to the game - get notifications about the end of your work day coming up - more interruptions, etc.
I will share the source code in a few days once it's cleaner. It'd be relatively easy to fork it and plug a new story into the code :)
I tried this -- I am undiagnosed, but my kids are diagnosed. On one hand I thought parts over-dramatized, on the other hand I thought parts were watered down.
Misophonia for me does not give me any choice. Either the noise stops or I am leaving. If necessary I will explain later. If the noise stops I am possibly leaving anyway in case it starts again. Fortunately in my case the trigger is pretty obscure, like nails on a chalkboard type of rarity -- people don't actually do that so often.
The explanations I thought were dramatized. One of the challenges I think people with autism have is trying to explain their reactions and coming up with things that neurotypical people cannot relate to. It is more like reflexes. I'd be slack-jawed if my co-worker asked me to explain why my leg moved when the doctor hits my knee, "it just does that when you hit it that way", "probably something to do with ligaments, or tendons? IDK". Could you make an "undiagnosed" mode where your scores just go up and down?
And the options -- when the people team came through at $bigcorp and announced tiny hotdesking, I filed all the necessary paperwork, gave constructive feedback, worked with my manager etc, but started looking for new work immediately and noped out at the first opportunity. The people team was happy to close the file which was growing fat with demerits like not hanging my coat the right way, but my peers and reports were upset. well done people team! This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
I am not autistic in any way afaik, but "tiny hotdesking" sounds like a torture come up in the seventh circle of hell.
> This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
No company is supportive of neurodivergence, if it actually causes a difference. They are supportive if your issue is you need to wear noise cancelling headphones, and they can put your photo on the careers page about how they support neurodivergence.
Something I am not quite able to compute is why they are so rigid. I paid for a house with enough rooms that I turned one into a generous office. My peers tell me my hobby productivity is off the charts. There is / was no price at which I could solve for an acceptable office environment at this company. At any company I have worked with or heard of.
I get that there is back biting and intensive score-keeping, resentment etc, but the act of putting everything on a synchronized linear scale (with sub linear progression) seems cruel. Some people like tchotchkies, some people don't like those esoteric office snacks, some people like mouthwash and shoe polish and fancy towels in the restroom. Why gatekeep it all and shove the same exact bundle of goods down everyone's throats?
If they were really minimaxing your next unit of work, this is not an optimal strategy. It's just lazy, a children's tale of how an office might be.
Because for most people, someone reacting with disinterest for the thing they care about is a rare and upsetting event, not their entire life's experience. That's what it means to be "normal", you align better with your peers. Most people don't need what you need. Most people can work with what you can not. You are choosing to be the exception. You chose to be like this, so unchoose it and stop being a problem.
Of course... That's the quiet part. The out loud part is just dismissing everything you say and passing you over for promotion.
The objections you have raised, the things you have said. I really understand what you mean. There's evidence all around that the aspects of our experience isn't alien at all. Why can't others see that? At this point I think that not seeing it is necessary mental infrastructure for some people. It's a bridge over an abyss that for us broke.
I think the solace I get is that this line of work tends to funnel people of our disposition into it. So we find ourselves less alone than we normally would.
> This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
It's easy to mouth slogans, and modern companies employ teams of specialists in that department. You can't trust their words, which should be assumed to be lies, only their actions (especially their actions when they're under some pressure).
Here's an absurdly clear example: I recently listened to these podcasts about Saudi Arabia's Neom project. It is hyper-dysfunctional and was run by a guy who literally bragged about treating his subordinates as slaves trying to work them to death. But all the responses from the project are pitch-perfect corporate "we value our employees," "we follow best practices," etc.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/neom-pt-1-skiing-in...
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/neom-pt-2-the-emper...
If a company professes to be supportive of neurodivergence, it means either (1) they're supportive of neurodivergence; or (2) they are hostile to neurodivergence and have gotten into trouble for it, so have strong motivation to claim that they are supportive. There will probably be written policies and strongly-worded emails that are supportive of neurodivergence, which enable them to continue being hostile to neurodivergence.
I would guess there's far more of (2) going around than (1).
This is an overly polarized view -- what does "supportive" even mean? What forms are actually deemed permissible? -- but it's probably more right than wrong.
It's like the schools with posters everywhere declaring "Zero tolerance for bullying" or "Bully free zone". Except that there is no (1) at those places. Those signs mean they have a problem with bullying and haven't come up with any solutions.
TIL misophonia.
I’ve realised in recent years that I’m quite far on the spectrum. Very obvious when I was young but am exceptionally good at masking now so most people don’t realise.
Nowadays I experience misophonia in “attacks” that just come on. Recently I was on public transport and the noise was suddenly so unbearable that I had to get the hell out of there, hadn’t really felt like that since I was a kid. Fight or flight feeling. When I was a kid I had a lot of hearing tests as a result, ASD was not on anyone’s radar.
Didn’t realise this had a name.
I carry silicone putty ear plugs with me pretty much all the time.
They are very squishy and I can place then in my ear and depending on how thick I make them, they have varying levels of blocking out sound. Super useful if I want extra blocking or just a little light blocking so I can still hear things around me, but dampened.
They have been a life changer for me. The best kind I've found are Mack's. Maybe they would help you too.
my sister has this which led to many awful fights that i didnt understand. now i send this graphic to people in order to describe it: https://scontent.fhio2-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/130843014...
This is a question out of genuine curiosity and not intended to minimize misophonia in any way:
I do not see any examples of a "naturally occurring" sound there. Is the sound supposed to be human generated in some way? That would feel a bit incongruent with my understanding of it as a pure stimulus response situation.
Yes, natural sounds do trigger it (for me). The difference is that if it is a natural sound, it becomes a problem to be solved - intermittent dripping from taps, the noise of the wheel in my daughters hamster enclosure, or something tapping a window are specific cases I can cite. Those incidents resulted in a) me learning how to replace a leaking faucet assembly (the taps and faucet were one unit) , b) upgrading to a better, quieter hamster wheel, and c) trimming a tree.
When people are the cause it becomes more challenging. People feel attacked when you tell them they are chewing loudly, or they think you are weird when you complain about the sound of the specific pen they are using makes when they are writing on the paper bothers you. Couple misophonia reactions with ADHD justice sensitivity and the emotional reaction can overload my rational comprehension that it is quite normal to make, tolerate, and ignore those sounds to make the stupid fucking meat between my ears feel like I am being targeted by whoever is making the noise. 95% of time I can manage it, but when it gets overwhelming my reactions can be suboptimal (like, wildly inappropriate when I was a kid, but as an adult pulling an Irish goodbye and just leaving, which can be a career limiting move when you are in the workplace).
interesting observation your sibling also made. its commonly described as making the sufferer IRATE at the person causing of the sound which matches your comment
anyone who experiences willing to shed light? id guess if the sufferer expects we all dislike certain sounds, causing them intentionally is especially hateful?
Another observation is that they're either idle sounds (pen clicking, finger tapping) or necessary secondary sounds made during some activity. It's literally impossible to unwrap a piece of candy without making some noise, and damn near impossible to stir a liquid without the stirrer hitting the container once.
>id guess if the sufferer expects we all dislike certain sounds, causing them intentionally is especially hateful?
I think it's pointless to attempt to look at it rationally, given the reactions I've heard seem entirely irrational and disproportionate.
I remember one time I was at work and a coworker on the opposite end of the room was using what I thought was the exact same model of mechanical keyboard I was using, with blue switches. I had never realized just how loud those things were until then. I kept glancing at him and could feel myself getting unreasonably annoyed, but I really had no grounds to say anything under any circumstance, given I had been using those very same switches in that same office very recently. What really struck me was how the same noise would sound pleasing when I made it and annoying when someone else made it, and I wondered if I had bothered someone with my typing, or if it was just me. I don't know if I'll use my own keyboard with clicky switches if I share an office with someone again.
Interesting how they're all noises people make. It's not chirping birds, or running motors, or anything that could occur when no one else is around.
I also thought I was exceptionally good at masking. Turns out I was exceptionally good at showing a differently weird version of myself that was still quite clearly weird.
I gaslit myself over it for so long. It makes me see red when I hear open-mouth chewing noises. Totally illogical.
Oh wow, I was just feeling grateful that I don't have misophonia, but then you had to mention chewing noises. I had that for decades. It wasn't all the time, but it didn't have to be loud or open-mouth or anything. It would just switch on and I couldn't hear or think about anything else. I daydreamed doing violent things to make the person stop, even when I logically knew it wasn't even slightly loud or unusual or ill-intentioned.
It almost never happens anymore, thankfully. Once every other month or so.
(Note that I am not autistic, or at least undiagnosed and my guess is that I wouldn't be. I just have some fairly mild autistic tendencies. I have a toe on the spectrum, or something. Those tendencies have a pretty dramatic impact on my life, but I think in a mostly neurotypical way -- we boring people can have similar problems too!)
I guess I don't really understand "masking". I made all of the decisions I would make if I was feeling overstimulated. I scheduled the coffee date for later. I put on headphones to block out the noise. I turned down going to the charity thing. But then I lost because I was "masking too hard"?
In my mind these decisions were literally the opposite - I was being honest about what the character wanted and was making space for myself.
Is masking about faking interactions with other people? But nearly everything that I get dinged for about masking doesn't even involve others. Is it about hiding symptoms from others? Or from hiding things you don't like from yourself?
Replied a bit more on another comment, tl;dr this is a quite silly simulator that is not representative of autism and you’ve found the biggest tell (almost everything is masking by the scoring algorithm).
You could replace it with an HP bar or Foobar bar and it’d have just as much meaning. I grew up taking care of my autistic sister and have a couple diagnoses of my own, I found it almost offensive that this claims to be representative of autism because of how generic and distanced it is (ex. “Masking” is collapsed down to being the same as “spoon” discourse with depression)
Is it supposed to work. I am in the spectrum and I feel like while energy may go to zero, there is in reality a separate resilience masking, where you actually keep up for the rest of the day. Also cannot relate to medication. I don’t think that’s a necessary part of the experience.
Agree. The idea that autististics rely on a large box of daily pills is insane. -chugs coffee
I don't really relate to a lot of it, it's mostly a crude caricature of my experience, though it's still funny.
I believe the medication here is for ADHD, given there's a "special event" at one point.
Almost certainly not ADHD. "Massively increased appetite" is not a typical side effect of ADHD meds, which are typically stimulants which have the opposite effect (and mine give me nausea on top of that). And "drowsiness and brain fog" are what they're trying to combat.
From the complaints I've heard from friends, those sound like pretty typical side effects for SSRIs. (Bupropion OTOH is both a stimulant and an antidepressant, and may be more effective for people with comorbidity ADHD and depression; the POV character should talk to their psychiatrist)
Buproprion is an anti-depressent with some stimulant properties, but it isn't a stimulant. It generally takes several weeks of treatment before it has any therapeutic effects on ADHD. Stimulants work immediately.
The only medication I know about that some people on the spectrum take are antipsychotics and that's for specific situations, but maybe if you're in that situation life seems even more like a dystopian text based adventure game.
I know of some taking antidepressants (for obvious reasons, because depression is a common effect).
And I know of some taking ADHD meds for their co-morbid ADHD (autists have a higher probability for ADHD).
So, bigger and more important question here. How do I help neuro-divergent folks in a work environment? There's no one size fits all here, everyone is different, and not just on a spectrum sliding scale. How do I glean what is important for neuro-spicy individuals beyond "just ask?"
Welcome thoughts on what has worked and what has not worked.
What's it like for people not on the spectrum? Can someone share a "Normal Simulator"?
This is one of those things where I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things like awkwardness, feeling out of place, or running out of the desire to socialize. Everyone wants an answer for why they have unpleasant experiences that aren't, "That's just life".
There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.
These labels are useful insofar as grouping experiences together that tend to co-occur makes it easy to talk about certain categories of aggregate experiences or strategies for navigating life, but I think too many people relegate too much importance to these arbitrary labels, like "autism", derive too much of their identity from them, and too often use them as excuses to not deal with life's challenges and complexities head on.
Look into the history of autism research and you'll find a history of fraud. People like Bruno Bettelheim simply lied their way to prominence and now we are on a road of ever-expanding diagnostic criteria and an ever-growing autism industry to the point where it is now trendy to self-diagnose on social media.
Recall that psychology has had a gigantic replication crisis, and that the founders of the field like Freud and Jung were charlatans, and that there is no agreed-upon mechanistic explanation for autism, and that a primary diagnostic tool is a literal questionnaire, and that psychology and psychiatry have been abused for political reasons by every totalitarian government of the 20th century.
Given all this, we should have some humility about this topic. Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
And maybe we can normalize the idea that employees have special emotional needs that can be accounted for on an individual basis without medical permission slips or any need for wielding constructed identities.
When I was in grad school, I worked in a lab that performed research on children with Asperger's syndrome (AS), mainly through fMRI and DTI brain imaging techniques. AS was merged into Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but at the time was considered a high-functioning form of autism. I met dozens of children with AS; they were typically between 9-13 years old. All the children I met were clearly autistic. I'm not going to attempt to describe what that means here, but the nature of their disorder was evident, compared to other disorders and compared to the age-matched controls [1]. Back then I'd confidently tell you I could easily pick out the kids in a classroom with an AS diagnosis. These days, I have no confidence I could do so (mostly due to false negatives).
[1] anecdote: at the end of explaining the fMRI procedure to the participant children and their parents, I'd ask if the child had any questions. Neurotypical children would usually ask about any reward $ for completing the task. AS kids would usually ask something poignant about the experiment.
I agree that there is a "there" there. But I'm not confident in the ability of our culture to define it in a mature way, or use the knowledge responsibly. I don't want to see therapy culture continually creeping into the mainstream. I don't want people to start medicalizing the traits of those in their families and social circles.
And since every phenotype exists along a normal distribution, there will always be resemblances and fuzziness, and no clear lines demarcating order from disorder.
But it is also obvious that nonverbal people who are stimming most of the day and can barely tie their own shoelaces exist, and these people need to be cared for and studied by responsible professionals in mature and private settings with their loved ones.
I still remember my psychology class in high school pretty well. It was memorable cause we’d spend a week learning about some theories Freud came up with, and then there would be a very short footnote of “turns out it was all totally made up and never scientifically verified in any way”. I was like what? So psychology isn’t science??
Recently a friend explained to me that Freud really wasn’t a scientist, but he was so influential in getting western cultures to think about the mind in new ways that we still learn about him. Like nobody cared about psychology until he get famous
I don't think it's any less science, inasmuch as science seeks to explain the natural world. It's just at a higher level of complexity and a different point in the learning curve than more externally observable levels of science.
Would we say that Copernicus was a charlatan or not a scientist because the heliocentric model turned out to be wrong? As you acknowledge, Freud pushed the collective understanding further.
The 19th century was a wild time. Everything was a science back then. That's why communists speak of the "immortal science of Marxist-Leninism." Marx literally said he was performing science, but that wasn't seen as an absurdity because that is how everyone spoke.
It wasn't until the mid-20th century when people started to get more serious about defining science. Philosophers started critiquing it in the early 20th century like the Vienna Circle and Popper, and eventually the definition of what constitutes science was narrowed down to one that was defined as a particular sort of empiricism.
That, too, has its own problems.
Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
I agree that a healthy dose of skepticism and acknowledgement of our rudimentary understanding is warranted, but it does start to sound a little anti-science. I don't think there's anything wrong with continuing to explore and attempting to explain or put words to these things even though they are near the highest level of complexity in nature and the hardest to empirically evaluate.
Are NSAIDs considered to be medicalizing large swathes of the human condition (or caffeine, or alcohol for that matter)? Where is the line between a universally accepted and ubiquitous pharmaceutical and an overmedicalized one? I think we should be moving more towards the question of "do you feel like this medication benefits you or would benefit you?" than "do you check these boxes in the DSM and officially receive this diagnosis".
Objectively, I understand what you're saying here, and agree that it's almost certainly happening.
Subjectively... I see people around me casually doing things that I simply cannot do. I'm 41 years old, and not once do I recall performing any action without actively forcing myself to do it. That includes things as small and trivial as getting up from my desk to use the restroom.
I can't relate at all to the concept of a "habit". Combing my hair requires an explicit decision to do so. I usually have to find my brush, since there's no consistent place I put it. When I'm done, I'll forget that I wanted to put it back where it belongs while actively being frustrated with myself for not doing so the previous day.
It's glaringly obvious to me that other people don't struggle with the things I struggle with; at the very least, they don't struggle to the same degree. It's exhausting.
Oh, and I've never even been diagnosed with autism. I have ADHD. What I described above is classic "executive dysfunction".
I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients.
Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone.
> I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum.
Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible.
> Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
You are grossly over-diagnosing.
When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.
A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Autistic individuals have systemic changes in their mind and body which let them see life from a different perspective.
People with executive function disorder have issues with rapid thinking, focusing, and other things that can work in their favor often enough to be passed on.
> A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Speaking in cryptic aphorisms doesn't help anything.
Psychiatry isn't a field where everyone has a single perspective. There is a lot of debate within psychiatry and much research exploring different perspectives.
However, I don't think it's appropriate for a non-psychiatrist to start diagnosing half of the population with a disorder or 1 in 8 people they meet with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
An untrained perspective is not on the same level as the professionals and researchers.
This boils down to "I think you are wrong because you are not an authority figure."
You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem.
Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher
> You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population.
I'm not assuming anything. I literally explained that the only way it's possible is for someone to avoid the general population and only socialize in environments with extreme bias.
The more important point is that diagnosing autism is not something you can do by simply meeting people in social situations. It's something that takes training and experience by professionals, not an untrained person who sizes people up as they meet them in a social capacity.
Again, psychiatry is in its infancy. Many professionals use outdated models or stereotypes in practice. Living as an autistic individual can make it easier to clock other autistic people, because it's rare to meet someone who functions or thinks the same way you do and sticks out like a sore thumb. For example, "thinking in pictures" is not a universal autistic trait, but it's a pretty well known one.
We’re about 7% of the general population. But also, there’s almost certainly more than one biological condition that can produce an autistic-type neurodivergence. The shared experience is now called “autistic” but we don’t have enough data to know how many specific root causes there are.
> To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
Almost all of my social circle is somewhere on the spectrum, and quite a few are diagnosed.
So I can say with some authority that there are absolutely some people who use it as an excuse, which is made even more apparent than the people that aren't using it as one. TikTok and other high-information-low-veracity social media is only making this trend worse. It's not bigotry to acknowledge that.
(Most of said individuals ended up getting cut out of said social circle, after the people actually making an effort got tired of them constantly using their disability as an excuse not to even try to modify bad behavior)
That said, I'm not against diagnosis, or even self-diagnosis. Improved diagnosis is a good thing! But mostly because it makes it easier to understand how you can structure things to adapt to it. Or to quote a coworker's email signature:
> “Undiagnosed neurodivergence is like being handed a video game that has been set to hard mode, but having people tell you over and over "it's on easy, why do you keep dying? " Diagnosis is learning the game is on hard mode. It doesn't make it easier, but you can strategize.”
I agree completely with this comment, though most often I see it for ADHD. It's a level of nuance that people don't seem to be able to handle, though. People want to be on either the "just suck it up, losers" side or the "the duty of society is to make sure nothing is ever hard for anybody" side. It pisses me off to see people take advantage of the accommodations that are needed by some, and saddens me when people who legitimately need accommodation for some things end up depending on it for everything.
It would be nice if there were objective tests that said exactly where someone is, but those are both impossible and would be subverted even if they were possible.
There will always be humans who take advantage of a system. Why do you, like the parent commenter, think that is in question here? No one here is espousing the extreme position you put in quotes.
Because I am seeing how this is playing out in classrooms. Tons of kids are requesting accommodations. Some need those accommodations, some don't, and the ones who do often don't need all of the accommodations they're getting. Anyone who pushes back -- eg, a teacher calling out a BS requirement -- is demonized and seen as ableist. Among the kids, anyone who doesn't request an accommodation that they don't need but could get, is seen a foolish. And access to those accommodations produces a lot of kids who don't even try to improve their executive functioning to what it could be. And people know it, so a stigma is developing where people who need it have to prove that they're not taking advantage of the situation.
Parents are doing the best they can, but in the end they're still making decisions for other human beings who are not them, and those human beings are going through a time of life that is undeniably hard and requires growing to be able to do all kinds of things they couldn't formerly do. How can the kids know what is reasonable difficulty and what is excessive due to their neural makeup?
It's a tricky and nuanced situation, and so I really do see people falling into the opposing extreme camps. I agree that humans will take advantage of any system. That doesn't really have any bearing on how things are going, and whether people are seeing the nuance clearly or not. My personal experience is witnessing kids who are taking advantage of accommodations and failing to grow as a result, and how the system cannot distinguish which of those accommodations are appropriate and which aren't. It's also witnessing kids who need accommodation but won't ask for it, because they or their parents believe that muscling through is necessary, or that their problems aren't real. How are those not examples of extreme positions?
My point is that in order to get better at this, we need to be doing the hard work of figuring out what's real and what's not, or even how real it is, and what interventions do and don't work. Surely it's not controversial to say that giving a procrastinator twice as much time to finish their tests is not always the right thing? It can hurt as easily as it can help. And yet, it is the right thing for some people, for some situations. If it takes me 10 minutes to solve a quadratic that takes you 5, getting a failing grade is not going to help me learn, nor does it mean I'm incompetent at mathematics.
If you don't think people are saying "just suck it up", you're not looking very hard. Same if you don't think people are saying that we should offer any and all accommodations to anyone who requests.
There will always be humans who take advantage of a system, that is not in question.
Believing that "too many" autistic people are using it as an excuse - an entire category of people - is bigotry.
The audio stuff, the concentration stuff, the always coming late and so aren't difficult to categorize in terms of "normal" and "not normal", when they're basically constant and have been since a very young age. It's simply being in the long tail of the frequency distribution or not, wherever you set that line.
> There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.
A lot of people are in the short head of the distributions when it comes to nearly all of these markers. Some people are in the long tails for a large number of them. Those are the ones we label. Being in the short head doesn't mean one is never awkward or never late or annoyed by certain noises, it means that they're so at a frequency that's common.
Ah yes the good old "well everyone experiences symptom X sometimes" canard.
Yeah you might experience symptom X but for me symptom X is literally crippling. You can take your minimization of the autistic experience and go jump off a cliff with it.
We are commenting on a post where someone created a game that presents normal challenges everyone faces as if it was an "Autism Simulator".
It is exactly this kind of generalization that I'm referring to in my comment - "I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things"
If anything, we are both equally frustrated by the fact that everyone who has experiences they consider "autistic" will happily jump on the bandwagon, despite the fact that it is a relatively small percentage of the population who has experiences that are sufficiently severe or unusual to warrant any kind of label at all.
Nobody likes high pitched noises, everyone is distracted and disorganized, everyone has trouble concentrating or feels overwhelmed when lots of things happen at once, taking lots of medication is hard on the body for everyone, socializing in unfamiliar settings or for long periods feels uncomfortable, interacting with coworkers is weird, many people get lost in the details of things, many people like to spend long periods focused on their interests, some people have really good memories for certain things, etc, etc, etc.
That doesn't make labeling yourself as autistic useful unless your experiences are preventing you from living the life you want to live, and even then, its only useful as a tool to find strategies of getting through that life, the label has no value in-itself.
I too experience many of these things, and I have been called autistic by numerous people independently, but in that tongue-in-cheek manner of our generation that has watered it down a lot. I'm nothing even close to the people on Love on the Spectrum, or the kids in grade school that were essentially in special ed.
I think yeah the language has gotten very ambiguous and the "spectrum" is so wide and ill-defined that we need more and better words, but, I do also feel like it isn't just everyone's shared experience. I do feel like there are a lot of people who don't really experience these things, that aren't stuck in a constant self-conscious hyper-analysis and reflection loop, and are able to just kind of go with the flow a bit more (which is not to say that they don't have troubles or anxieties).
Edit: I will also note that I did have a similar reaction to you to this game. I didn't even go past the intro because I felt like I knew what it was. I would call this something like autism-lite, and it probably is pretty widespread, particularly in HN-like circles. It does feel a little bit confusing and even offensive to compare it to "capital A autism," an actual disability, but that's where our lexicon is right now.
> I think yeah the language has gotten very ambiguous and the "spectrum" is so wide and ill-defined that we need more and better words, but, I do also feel like it isn't just everyone's shared experience.
We used to have other words. Asperger's used to be a separate condition but was merged into one diagnosis. I wonder if there was a reason the experts who study this decided to go with fewer words?
Have you tried adding additional adjectives? That's usually what I do when the word I want is too general, and isn't as specific as I want to be.
I don't really talk about it, I don't go around telling people I'm autistic, whatever it is is minor enough that I'm able to mask easily, if anything I casually reference "my ADD."
I sometimes jokingly refer to "my spectrum," but I think that word is not great either because it implies a linear gradation, when I think it's a higher dimensional space like a personality star chart.
There's some controversy around Asperger too, which made the name problematic anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Asperger
> the label has no value in-itself
Yes. And, as you have eloquently said in your other comments in this thread, the label CAN (not DOES but CAN) readily become value-NEGATIVE, if it becomes in itself an object of fixation that draws time and emotional energy away from the basic, brass-tacks work of living life as best as one can, whatever that has to look like for each individual.
It is an obvious error to pretend that this does not or cannot happen—an error no more and no less obvious than to pretend that it must or always happens.
I think that what this game tries to convey is that these challenges, while perhaps universally present, have a distinct and punishing effect for a subset of people. I think that it takes an interesting approach at communicating that even someone who might seem to be functioning “effectively” could be essentially living their life on a knife’s edge of dueling energy/masking mechanics.
If your response to the game is to argue about the usefulness/value of the autism label, and to insinuate that it normalizes some kind of “bandwagon” effect, rather than feeling empathy that a colleague sitting next to you might be in mortal fear of what happens if their “energy bar” dips beyond their control - then perhaps we need more of this type of experience and conversation, rather than less.
I agree that autism has become a label for the "shared experiences of things", and that people often derive their identity from the label to an unhealthy and unproductive degree.
However, I strongly disagree that the only use of the label is for developing personal coping skills. I shared your mindset for most of my life, having seen the negative effects of basing one's identity around it, but in the past couple years I've come to see the utility of the autism label and accept it for myself.
Its function (in the modern sense) is to be a tag for shared experiences, that's not a side effect. A sizeable portion of the population shares a similar grouping of frustrations with -- and difficulties functioning in -- society at large. It would be great if direct communication, respect for sensory processing issues, acceptance of stimming and other unusual behaviors, etc. etc. were widespread without the need for a special label, but society at large is slow to change; if the label is the catalyst needed for us to be more accepting of those different than us, so be it.
The typical reaction from a non-ND person to seeing [non-disruptive] autistic behaviors is one of fear or light disgust; however, give that same person a box to put those behaviors in and they understand how to look past them, and see you as a human. That's my experience, anyway. The loudest champions of autism often have a different perspective, one more based around identity; I see issues with that for the same reasons you describe, but nonetheless the label as a whole still carries utility on a societal level too.
I have asthma. The last time I had an asthma attack that was severe enough that it could have become fatal was when I was 8 at my friend's house with a few cats(*).
But, everyone gets short of breath some times. Everyone wakes up with the feeling of a congested chest occasionally. Everybody is limited in the exercises they can do by their lung capacity and exercise tolerance.
But because after working very diligently, by your logic, I don't have asthma. Because I can run, and rock climb, and do all the life stuff that I wanna do.
Except that logic is fucking stupid! Because when I got covid a few years back, I was using my rescue inhaler constantly because I could feel my lungs starting to close up, felt just like the asthma attacks I would get when I was younger. But because I learned to use the techniques and habits I built up when growing up, and I made sure it never progressed far enough towards an attack that needed medical intervention. I don't have asthma, right? I should have thrown away my inhaler years ago because I was never using it?
The culture of treating mental health by different rules, from outwardly physical health, is fucking stupid, and I can't wait for that meme to die!
And it's especially egregious when people use that meme to then weaponize it to exclude people from the groups with shared experiences, weaknesses, skills, and needs.
If you really feel the need to be exclusive, and tell other people that their experience is invalid, and demand that they preform their rock bottom for you, before you'll believe them. Might I suggest instead of telling other people that the way they describe their life is wrong, instead try adding the prefix subclinical. As in my asthma (through work and effort), is subclinical.
E.g. instead of being an asshole who says "that doesn't count as austism" you can say "most people who claim to be autistic are lucky subclinical". Then you still get to invalidate the experiences of others, But you do so in a way that's slightly less hostile and gaslighting.
(*): Does the time I was sick count as an attack? Had I ignored those symptoms, would it have gotten worse, would I have needed to visit the hospital? Would you still try to tell me that this is different because I was also sick, so everything else doesn't matter?
Fellow asthmatic here:
>I should have thrown away my inhaler years ago because I was never using it?
Inhalers expire after a year, so yes, you should have, and you should have gotten a new one. I only learned this after getting a fresh one at the start of COVID because I hadn't had one in several years. Pretty sure growing up I had the same inhaler for like 8 years, so obviously it still works OK after a year, just relaying what my doctor told me 5 years ago.
> And it's especially egregious when people use that meme to then weaponize it to exclude people from the groups with shared experiences, weaknesses, skills, and needs.
> If you really feel the need to be exclusive, and tell other people that their experience is invalid, and demand that they preform their rock bottom for you, before you'll believe them. Might I suggest instead of telling other people that the way they describe their life is wrong, instead try adding the prefix subclinical. As in my asthma (through work and effort), is subclinical.
The fact that people have started applying social-justice-y terminology ("gatekeeping," "weaponize," "shared experiences," etc) to medical diagnosis is a clear sign we've gone too far. "You can't question my diagnosis because it's part of my identity! Stop gatekeeping me!"
Please. "Austism" is not a settled category and it's okay to argue about boundaries. The irony here is that autistic as an adjective means "unfeeling" e.g. "He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings". When sorting out the definition of autism (and similar conditions), we should be a little more autistic.
> it's okay to argue about boundaries
Yes, if you have something to add - something more substantive than just a snotty dismissal of the autistic experience rooted in the superficial observation that everyone occasionally experiences the "same" things.
> The irony here is that autistic as an adjective means "unfeeling"
The real irony here is your insistence that you have something to add to this discussion while leading with a decades-old myth that people with autism don't feel emotions.
Completely agree. On the autism spectrum, I'm almost certainly very low. But going through the simulator felt like... yeah this all sucks but is very much in the realm of things that I experience and feel on any given day. It didn't feel enlightening, it felt deeply familiar.
It's definitely the case that some people have a much larger magnitude of experience or persistence of experience. And for some, it's at levels that do make functioning in society quite difficult or impossible.
And yet, I think the point you are quite rightly making is that many people who are decidedly low on the spectrum are now adopting the identity of autism as a way to explain why life is hard.
I don't know why people feel inclined to adopt the label. I don't care that they do, they can call themselves whatever they want. But I do wonder if there are more productive ways of perceiving yourself, if you are indeed very much capable of functioning in society.
Is this confirmation bias?
Do you think Autistics are a small group so you're finding a way to argue that?
Why do you care if a person you think has minor struggles labels themselves autistic?
Then there's actually people who live their entire existence and every waking moment on the spectrum, and compensating for it - which is what the topic of discussion is. You minimizing it or thinking it isn't real isn't entirely helpful to discussion and frankly is pretty insulting.
Autism is called a spectrum disorder not because it ranges on a smooth continuum from "no autism" to "lots of autism".
It's because there a handful of associated symptoms for autism and different people have a different mixture of them. You don't need an equally large amount of all symptoms in order to be autistic.
Think of it more like a light spectrum where there are different mixtures of hues for the symptoms, but autism still implies some amount of significant overall intensity. In short, it's a spectrum, not a continuum.
If you experience some or all of the symptoms associated with autism but at a level that doesn't significantly impair your overall functioning, then that's not a diagnosis of autism. Just like everyone who gets sad isn't depressed and everyone who worries doesn't have generalized anxiety. That's just normal human variability and life challenges.
I have encountered this definition of "spectrum", as a vector of numbers that go 0 to 100, rather than a single number that goes from 0 to 100 (which you call "continuum" IIUC).
But... I mean, if you asked 100 people what they think a spectrum means in this context, how many of them would think it meant "vector" rather than "real number"? I would guess fewer than 10. I consider myself a fairly well-informed nerd, but I think I had encountered many usages of "spectrum" describing a single trait for many years, and I think this is the second time I've ever encountered someone using the "vector" definition (the first one was also using it to describe autism). Has this linguistic battle already been lost? Does it improve clarity to insist on the "vector" definition?
(I've personally been using the phrase "collection of imperfectly correlated traits")
> If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere.
This is faulty logic. Just because it's a spectrum doesn't mean every single human is on the spectrum.
> If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere.
No, because the endpoints of the spectrum are not defined as 0% autistic and 100% autistic.
The spectrum definitionally only includes people diagnosed with autism.
Your approach is like saying "there is a 'how bad is the cancer' spectrum" where 0 is "no cancer" as opposed to something like "cancer but easily curable." No reasonable definition of "cancer suffering spectrum" would include "doesn't even have cancer."
No, you're just heavily implying it and minimizing it. I'm telling you it's extremely insulting. You can take that for what it is or don't, I don't really care.
he's saying that the label Autism includes different traits that various people have or don't have. He's falsely using that semantic manipulation to imply that people use it as an excuse not to deal with the conplexities of life.
saying "that's insulting" doesn't impact his assertion. you have to meet their logic where it is to disagree. lucky this case was so easy.
Not disagreeing with the content of what you said. However, sometimes telling people they sound insulting (unintentionally) has its own value, outside of the logical debate-making about the content of what was said.
I can't speak for everyone, but for myself the scenarios in this simulator basically don't affect my life at all. Annoying radio ad, "That's annoying". People team requests my participation at some event, "No thanks". Don't want to go to work, "oh well". If someone suggested we get coffee I'd be excited. I've never even considered not taking meds I've been prescribed. Other things seem normal to me. I put on ANC headphones at my office job all the time.
While going through the simulator, I was shocked with the response to some choices and situations. I was not aware that these things were so disruptive to some people.
I don't consider myself autistic, but a lot of the situations in the game are familiar. That's an extreme version of me on a bad day. On a good day (enough food, sleep, etc) I can handle it, sometimes explicitly thinking about it, sometimes no action required.
The normal simulator is the negative space in this game. The people on the party committee. The networking event. Your mom who has called three times. Just imagine those activities boosting all of your stats.
> The people on the party committee. The networking event. Your mom who has called three times. Just imagine those activities boosting all of your stats.
It’s a problem when our definition of “normal” is the blended combination of every more outgoing and more successful person we see combined into one composite super-person.
Most people don’t do anything like a party committee. Most people don’t go to networking events and of those who do, many don’t network or socialize much. Most parents don’t call three times per day.
Yet it’s easy to see (or imagine) all of these behaviors and mentally blend them up into a composite idea of what “normal” means in a way that is far from average.
I see this a lot in students self-diagnosing with ADHD right now: Their mental model of “normal” is actually more like a 99th percentile studying and self-discipline machine, not a typical student. The way they describe “normal” or neurotypical people is more like superheroes with super abilities who have infinite motivation to study for 8 hours per day after cleaning their house to spotless precision and never touching their phone for a break. They have mentally erased the average person from their minds and replaced it with a hypothetical super person who doesn’t exist.
There are plenty of people who would not consider some or even all of those activities (depending on circumstances) enjoyable, most of them probably don't consider themselves autistic.
I disagree. I'm not autistic but pretty much everything in this simulator would stress me out to one degree or another.
I don't think that extreme is normal. Yes, there are people who take an energy boost and are never worried by situations you mention, but they are rare.
Those things stress me out. Am I not normal?
No. Joining party planning committees, socializing at networking events, and calling people multiple times are not things that the average person seeks out.
Cool take, well put.
I don’t think it would be possible, as a lot of what ASD people process consciously is processed subconsciously by neurotypical people (which contributes greatly to ASD burnout).
Something I’ve thought might be a helpful AI app, for a product like smart glasses or earbuds with integrated cameras, if it were possible, is a live nonverbal communication translator, to help with the cognitive load of ASD people, as cognitive empathy is often a performance issue socially.
I’ve seen a lot of criticism that using AI as a cognitive crutch is unhealthy, but the same argument could be made about mechanical advantages, beasts of burden, or machines, reducing humanity’s physical fitness. AI’s potential to be a cognitive force multiplier is its killer app.
It’s pretty great. You don’t have to find ways to interject in conversation that you are on the spectrum like some weird ass non sequitur.
I played it a couple times and found that a lot of scenarios just didn't have an option for what I would actually want to do in real life. A few examples:
- One scenario had a team unboxing an espresso machine and making too much noice by using it, clinking cups and laughing. The options were to put on noise canceling headphones, find a different desk away from the noise, or just endure it. Personally I'd take a break and go join them, and I don't even like coffee.
- The scenario where the user is in a room with a PM and a couple other people debating the tone of copy on a website, and the conversation is meandering without clear turns (iirc): there were only options to essentially hurry the conversation along or not participate at all, but IRL I'd join in with the other three debating the tone and just generally be bullshitting/sidetracking/meandering the conversation because I like to talk to people.
- The scenario where somebody comes up and asks for a new feature without clear acceptance criteria: the options were to turn to the computer and type out acceptance criteria in front of the person (which feels passive aggressive to me); tell them you'll do it; or ask them to schedule time with you to hammer out the criteria. I would've just chatted with them right there about the feature they wanted, let them know that XYZ is what I think the acceptance criteria is at the end of the conversation, and if that's wrong they'd correct me.
Most of what you'd do is the last thing I'd want to do (I have autism). You don't say if you have autism or not, but going by what you just said I would guess not.
What's 'normal' for me is pretty much the same thing, but without the intense reactions to the light and sound stimuli. And the rest generally toned down.
The burn out due to unproductive meetings would probably be at a similar scale
Imagine having basically infinite social energy and no situation where you'd tend to react super negatively to socialization itself. But most things extra are very boring and you only live for things not related to your work.
Or that's how I imagine it at least
I highly doubt that describes the average neurotypical experience. Maybe an extreme one.
I don't have Autism, and none of those things apply to me.
I don't have autism and it's nothing like that.
Modify all the social interactions that subtract energy and instead have them add energy.
I'm not autistic and social interactions are incredibly energy draining for me. Granted I'm quite an introverted person, but not having autism doesn't mean you get pumped up from being around people.
> Someone from the "People Team" appears at your desk with a bright smile and a clipboard.
THE WORST! Why can't we just work?! Do stuff, make money, get the f- out.
It's a valid frustation... sadly the social bits are often useful.
E.g. communication tends to work best if you have A: trust and B: a mental model for the other person. A is a buffer against friction. B is essentially API documentation about this specific person
The social bits are how most people build A and B
Yes, they're useful. But B: doesn't occur naturally for some of those with Autism. Sometimes names with faces is near impossible, at a baseline. Masking with those individuals, or feigning interest can be exhausting. Dancing around not wanting to discuss outside-of-work life can make one stand out, etc.
There's no polite way to tell such individuals to f- off, of course, and it's often expected.
let's put a pin in that, circle back
looping in Useless Manager Alice and Useless Manager Bob, let's get some time on the calendar to discuss
We're a family here.
I agree, which is why it drives me crazy to be on HN and see people be like "if you want to work as a programmer you must live breathe eat sleep code and have a resume of Github commits three miles long."
It's a job, not a religion.
Seems like an unrelated (maybe even opposite direction) complaint. Plenty of autists are obsessed with programming and technology.
10 hour day in the terminal just to come over here and find this! Me obsessed? Hell yes!
It’s my personal escapism from the everydayness of existence.
Boy, that's a straight shooter with upper management written all over him!
Had a "people" guy at a previous employer. At every corporate social thing, he'd run around with his huge DSLR camera and take pictures to post on the company social media, to show how this is a great place to work.
He was an irritating person even without his camera. I hate having my picture taken, and I don't consent to having my face posted on social media. Later, when the company realised that setting money on fire isn't a solid business strategy, he was thankfully fired.
I had an over-enthousiastic guy at work. I don't know what pills he was on, but I'd love some. Once during lunch I was sitting with my coworkers, having a completely shitty day. Suddenly he showed up "oooh, you all look so lovely, let me take a photo" and pulled out his phone. I subconsciously responded with death stare full of hatred. Would love to see the photo someday.
I think this is nice as it underlines how certain seemingly small things can feel incredibly disturbing to another individual (non-autistic one as well!)
It seems like one of those games that I'm going to recall in various situations in the future.
The ADHD modal is hilarious.
Thank you I was quite proud of it. The popup topics are from various special interests of mine :)
On sounds - as a non autistic person but as someone with a good "audio memory", music and sounds especially in an office can absolutely get on my nerves. It's mostly the repetitiveness.
Being able to hear songs in your head sounds great until you have the same one on repeat for days.
This morning it's "the things we do for love". Not sure where that one came from.
Also high pitched sounds (seagull deterers) or electricity buzzing. I learnt at a physics class at high school that I could hear higher pitches than other kids as well, although now that I'm older I've probably lost some of that.
It's easy to get Energy or Masking to 0, but no matter what I tried I can't have the game end by getting Competence or Relationships to 0. Is it possible at all? I'm just curious what the ending texts will be for those...
Even when clicking responses that seem like they should make relationship go down and energy up, like giving a minimal response, instead it makes energy go down a lot and relationships go up.
It changes with age too. Like the first question I was presented with was 1. Take time for self-care, 2. Get straight to breakfast and work prep.
Yeah in my 20s, and early 30s, I could eat breakfast while logging onto the computer and starting to work.
But now in my 40s I take some time for self-care, not sure if it counts, but it's difficult to answer a question like that with either or.
Decades on the computer has forced me to do Yoga every morning too. So it's not like I want to do it, I just realized that I have to.
I lost when I went to a work outing instead of staying home, but I had RSVP'd to the outing. This is what the game doesn't cover, I never RSVP unless I can keep my word. Never commit!
I like the bit about the rattling hvac or whatever. Years ago before I knew I was on the spectrum, the A/C system in the office I worked at was noisy (to me), and barely worked in the summer. Nobody seemed to notice or care.
The noise was distracting to me so to complained, after a long while they eventually got someone in... but they just put in a really noisy fan in the office close'ish to our desk. They didn't fix it the extra fan did nothing, it couldn't pull more air then it was given.. obv.. so then I had even more noise and the A/C system still didn't work.
I gave up trying to get it improved, and worked with headphones most of the time. No one else finds it an issue.
At the end of the day when staying late and the A/C systems turns off, I can feel a huge load lifted of my shoulders, and I can think much clearer.
Also the lights are horrible, if I'm working alone in the weekend I'll leave them off, it's so much nicer, less harsh. But again I seem the only one who noticed and is affected by it.
I eventually got so burnt out, crashed and quit... have been unemployed for... many many years now. Hard to say why I couldn't another job. I think maybe PTSD of my (first) and last experience, along with intense anxiety to just start. (interviewing is a painful experience, not only do I have to answer and ask questions, but need to fake eye contact, make small talk etc, all to get a job I'll probably have to bail out of.
I've tried to do some self-employed stuff, but nothing has given much income. (living with parents, I feel terrible about it, but no idea how to escape my living hell)
I’ve had a rough week. Clicked on this from the couch while screwing off work, Game of Thrones on the TV. Had to laugh.
I chose to skip breakfast. I am never hungry in the morning. I almost never have breakfast. I eat "late" the night before, like around 8-10 pm. Maybe that's bad? IDK.
While the topic is eating, I hate lunch around noon on a workday because it disables my higher brain functions for a couple of hours. It is almost mandatory however because what else am I supposed to use that mandatory break for? Just vegging out? That's pointless. I'm not working construction, I don't need to rest my body, I'm doing screen work. What I need is them not riding my back about how I'm not always laser focused on the BS they have us do. My brain decides when I need to put work aside and think about things that aren't such tedium.
Getting "old internet" vibes from this one. Good job.
I'm not at all familiar with Autism, and I have no idea what "Masking" means at all, but every option I choose seems to lower that stat, to the point where I never make it to day 2. Is there a cheat sheet that lists the "correct" selections at each step?
> Getting "old internet" vibes from this one. Good job.
Thank you. Neovim has radicalized my design sensibilities and I really miss the internet I used in the 90s as a kid.
> I'm not at all familiar with Autism, and I have no idea what "Masking" means at all, but every option I choose seems to lower that stat, to the point where I never make it to day 2. Is there a cheat sheet that lists the "correct" selections at each step?
I got a chuckle out of this because it's how I felt IRL for a long time. Especially "every option I choose seems to lower that stat" This is a good rundown https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/behavio...
No cheatsheet but I'll opensource the code in a few days when i clean it up a bit
Wow, thanks for the link, this and the other replies have been helpful.
I approached the game as a non-neurodivergent person making whatever the natural decision I personally would have made in each situation, and ended up dying to the "masking" every time! It kind of gives me an appreciation that what comes naturally to me, at no cost, imposes a tremendous cost to others. I suppose that might have been the whole point of the site. Well done.
Masking is just acting in a way that you normally wouldn't, but have to. Think of a spy blending in avoiding to get caught, it's a conscious effort not to screw up and it takes more energy/willpower from you than not having to pretend to be someone else. I guess it gets harder the more different from yourself you have to act, like having an itch you can't scratch or will get "punished" somehow, damn.
Even just learning that there’s a word for this has kinda opened my eyes
Masking is someone suppressing their natural autistic behaviors. It's not even necessarily conscious but it takes a large toll on mental energy. Besides the energy required for the masking itself there's the compounding effect of setting unrealistic expectations in others. The better someone is at masking the more is expected of them which creates an even larger drain on mental energy.
>Masking is someone suppressing their natural autistic behaviors.
Well, masking is done by everybody, not just autists, but in this game it's used to refer to that specifically. Arguably autists have to do it more, or feel the exhaustion from it more strongly.
Scrolling through the comments and noticed that they are a pretty good autism simulator for working in tech with autism. The entire cast of typical characters is represented.
- guy that thinks everyone has the tism and the spectrum is everyone - this guy has more trouble reading the room than anyone. but it is the lack of empathy and not autism
- guy that thinks everything is a microaggression towards his autism and ironically makes it harder for other autists
- guy with probable schizoid personality disorder that thinks struggling with people and social issues is just life because everyone is stupid and annoying
- guy who read Bad Therapy once and now thinks autism is a tiktok trend
- insufferable fedora guy that thinks psych is unscientific - probably secretly has severe depression and is making it everyone else's problem by being a jerk. whenever called out 4 being jerk blames the autism he probably doesn't actually have
- guy who thinks the solution is just be yourself
- guy with trauma from being themselves landing them on a PIP
A primary problem in tech is how everyone is seriously lacking in social skills and empathy. This is exhausting for autists and everyone. The real autism simulator is just existing in tech.
I'm not autistic but in the intro it says "promtotions" instead of "promotions".
I think that's the most I can deal with today ;)
Hahaha good catch will patch this.
Amazing. Loved the ADHD interruption with the wikipedia page, spot on, and hilarious
Really appreciate the effort you put into this and being vulnerable sharing your own personal experience so openly with us
Thank you
Nice game, but indeed simplified. Did not make it to day 2. Autism is a huge spectrum. I have a family member who needs constant care in a facility because he will try and destroy everything he does not like, but also another one who has light Asperger’s syndrome and functions like society would like him to be as long as you respect his social capabilities. As with most mental things, because people can’t see or sense it, they don’t understand and it gets very very difficult to even acknowledge or respect it.
I think this clip of Man of Steel did a very good job of showing how Autistic people get bombarded with sensory information. There are comments under the video claiming that this mirrors their experience.
Man of Steel - The World's Too Big, Mom
https://youtu.be/VcdFURryKjA
Zack Snyder described perfectly the ADHD/ Autistic experience growing up in one single scene. Intentionally or not. This movie made me feel less alone in this world. Superman helped me realize that wasn't a freak. I just perceived the world differently. Thank you Zack. I will forever be grateful for Man of Steel for many years to come
> As with most mental things, because people can’t see or sense it, they don’t understand and it gets very very difficult to even acknowledge or respect it.
Compounding this issue is the fact that people often refuse to accept that a mental thing is actually a physiological thing, albeit harder to fix because it’s currently poorly understood. People’s mental models of brain-related conditions often create a separation of the person from their physical self, either due to some subconscious or conscious belief in a metaphysical representation of the condition.
not autistic but i also mask like crazy at work. my experience is its the default mode in consulting
the first 2 years i had a sense that i needed to read between the lines in many conversations and asking for clarity on topics of budget, clients, and contracts was not done. to be clear: asking for details on requirements is completely normal and encouraged
ive become competent at compartmentalizing after 5 years. ive offered unsolicited advice to my less socially aware coworkers which only lead to more confusion as they had not noticed things said "between the lines" and have almost no interest in clients
i cant imagine having to mask through day-to-day life and a job which demands masking by people without disability. no wonder i didnt make it to dinner in the sim
If you've met on autistic person you have met exactly on autistic person.
this is a fun idea and I like it. You're experience wont be the same as my.
Love the aesthetics of this. Very cool. Love that its a game for web and just a really interesting choose your own adventure deal.
As for the game itself, it seems a bit punishing / too pessimistic? I don't want to be insensitive but I don't think my choices would lead my character, who was maintaining a full time job for this long, to collapse at their desk midday and be fired.
"Since you've decided to not disclose your autism at work, you'll be raw dogging it today and every other day. This seems marginally better than the alternative of being potentially passed over for promtotions or raises."
I was passed over without disclosure. When I did disclose, they tried to fire me. It would be great if they add a feature where you're told for a decade by peers, leads, and managers that you're at the next level, but never actually get there. Then they try firing you while the internal interviews give feedback about how you're likely overqualified for roles at your level. How's your mental health doing after that? The game should add a part about wanting to get hit by a bus during your commute so you cana avoid the torture.
It's extra fun when you manage to get positive feedback from colleagues and hit all your concrete performance expectations, but then at review time you still get poor marks because it's a stack ranking system, so, as far as your manager is concerned, there was never a realistic option to give one of the limited supply of good scores to you instead of one of the people who have enough spoons left at the end of the work day to permit some enthusiasm for the quarterly optional-but-actually-mandatory after-hours team Whirlyball outing.
Stack ranking has got to be one of the dumbest and most toxic ideas in tech.
Pitting teammates against each other like that? It's a guaranteed way to kill off mentoring, knowledge sharing, and any real sense of collaboration.
> Stack ranking has got to be one of the dumbest and most toxic ideas in tech.
Not just tech, but business in general.
@giantg2 dude I feel you. I've never disclosed but I've heard about people being retaliated against for doing so over the years.
I wish I could have added this story knot. I'll open source it soon and you'll see how crufty dealing with inkle is https://www.inklestudios.com/ in JS. Credit to the folks working on inkle but something like this is pushing the tech beyond what it says on the tin.
Non-autistic people also get this. It's in your salarypayer's best interest to keep you thinking you're on the precipice of getting a raise (so you work harder), but without actually giving you one (so they don't have to pay up). This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends, and it's a simple exchange of money for work where at least one party employs people whose entire job is to shift the exchange rate in their favour while convincing you they aren't.
That's a Manichean perspective that probably applies in a lot of workplaces, but definitely doesn't uniformly apply to competitive software jobs. In a competitive software shop, your employer is probably motivated more by retention, churn, and motivation concerns than they are over whether they can hold on to the extra comp money it would cost to raise your level. Losing a performing developer is very expensive.
I don't doubt at all that a lot of software developers have had the experience you describe, but when you describe it as intrinsic to the economics of commercial software development, I think you're bound to end up in some weird places.
But practically every "competitive" software job uses stack ranking that's mostly centered on an individual team or a few teams where 20% of the people have to be given a bad rating regardless of objective performance.
I think stack ranking sucks ass and I agree that it's prevalent but even stack ranking isn't well-modeled by an executive team looking to squeeze every penny out of each employee. Some of the most notorious stack rankers also have some of the most notoriously generous comp packages.
I'm not seeing TC having gone up over the last 7-8 years with those "notoriously generous comp packages" places. Your typical senior eng at FAANG is still getting $350-450k/yr TC. Yet, inflation has changed a lot and the stocks at these companies have skyrocketed. They're only raising the bar in terms of competition for employees to stick with the company and not with their compensation.
I lose interest in salary equity discussions when the entire range we're discussing is more than I currently make. :)
wanna say you are right. maybe the impact is different on neurodivergent, thats hard to have hard data on. HRs job is litterally to use a certain budget to fit all the ppl in, thats why they never give a raise if you dont ask, unless they need to give it to cover other risks (retention).
best lesson for me was an HR manager explaining it to me, after finally after 3 years i asked pretty please to give a lil raise, i was still trainee after all that time.
he smiled and said he thought id never ask. made me senior on the department matching my input. and told me this exact fact. He said, why should i give you a raise if you seem happy where ur at? never complain, never ask, never get.
its harsh but its good to understand certain hashness. Then you can work around it, step over that bridge, and be more active in tracking your input, their expectations, and showing them the mismatch deservant of a raise or promotion.
its often peoples shyness or false expectations that get them in such a situation where they feel very under valued. they are because they under value themselves or dont know how to translate/express their value to another persons perspective. another harsh truth. Especially if you are neurodivergent, the way you see things and another is further apart, so your words need to do more to reconcile that difference to generate mutual understanding.
in an ideal world this would not happen or be needed, ofcourse. but we dont live in an ideal world, and there is no switch to flip to make it an ideal world.
It might be experienced by non-disabled people, but I would say it disproportionately affects people with autism. Promotions are political and most people on the spectrum are at a disadvantage in the political realm due to the way ASD tends to affect social behavior etc. I've seen everyone other dev that joined around my time is at least 1-2 levels further than me. We can see these impacts in data for things like disability pay gap research.
The difference, I think, is that non-autistic people aren't as inclined to believe the same lie when it's told over and over for years.
my personal experience is this is usually something i see well meaning religious people caught up in. when ive met autistic people in similar situations they have been vocally agitated and frustrated by it, which i would say is the first step in learning to work around it
Blue collar workers have understood this for a long time, and even occasionally took up arms against their employers. It's the white collar folks who are just starting to figure this out.
> This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends
But I've repeatedly told over the years by clever libertarian software engineers that I don't need a union because it's better to just go to the boss with your concerns, instead of making things so adversarial.
This is an "all lives matter" flavor of comment. Discussing difficulties that autistic folks often have, which are usually exacerbated by autistic traits and struggles but not caused by autism, does not mean nobody else has those troubles.
But it's common and extremely frustrating for anyone neurodivergent to be told "but everyone feels that way" whenever they discuss any of their issues.
I got diagnosed with aspergers. Never got past the fact the entire world treated me like a burger. Felt so burned i feel like I can never have a normal life like I did before the diagnosis.
Feels like my life is worthless and if complain to anybody they will just throw me in jail or the hospital again. Like I'm trapped in hell and unable to ever be normal.
All I pray for everyday is to find a partner who lets me have some sense of justice against the ones who caused this.
I feel like Apple is to blame and if I'm being honest until they comply with my every wish I'm never going to not be able to not be a homicide victim.
Apple? Now I'm curious. I mean, they suck obviously (but so do a host of other big tech companies), but what has Apple done to you specifically?
What is the medication you're supposed to take? Ritalin or something?
The side-effects are vaguely evocative of antipsychotics or some sort of antidepressant.
There's no specific autism medication that I'm aware of, but psychiatric diseases often have plenty of comorbidity. There's some ADHD popup in the game that distracts you with Wikipedia, there's misophonia, it sounds like the character has a whole mix of different things.
Had I paid more attention to that, I probably would have skipped them instead of saying I’d take the normal dose.
Some questionable doctor prescribed me something like that a couple months ago as a precursor to dealing with ADHD. He said it would take a few weeks to build up in my system with once daily pills. I took a single pill and didn’t sleep for 3 days, and felt “off” for a good week or three. Never again.
My doctor tries to put me on antidepressants but I'm scared of side effects. My main complaint is that my energy levels are virtually zero despite relatively healthy lifestyle.
My doctor was asking me about taking a sleep study to see if I have sleep apnea. Many people in my family had it, but I’ve been told I don’t snore, and while I don’t have energy, I don’t fall asleep at the drop of a hat like they all did before getting a cpap.
I really don’t want to do a sleep study, as it sounds like nightmare fuel, so I got an Apple Watch which is supposed to be able to signal if there is a possible issue over the course of a month. I’ve had a couple days in normal range, but most days show elevated breathing interruptions. If it signals me after the end of the 30 days, I guess I’ll feel forced to get a sleep study. While I hate the idea of needing a cpap, being tired all the time isn’t fun either.
How old are you? There's like a zillion health factors. I've struggled with this because if IBS and getting older.
Taking Ubiqunol now, red light therapy for mitochondrial health - there's a bunch of other related supplements. Started exercising. Energy is better now.
There's no medication for autism, nor there really is supposed to be any.
A bunch of medications are commonly used to help manage it, though. And it's so often co-morbid with other diagnoses (these are all just classifications we made up anyway, so that they're two "different" things is basically just semantics, it's all happening in one brain, like we could easily and no-less-reasonably halve or double the number of labels we apply to these same situations and the underlying reality would be unaffected) that it's common to be diagnosed autistic but also taking ADHD meds or mood stabilizers or antidepressants or what have you, under other diagnoses.
Ponders
Damn, it's way past the time for me to take my SSRIs, because I forgot to take Adderall earlier in the day and zoned out on HN instead when I should've been finishing that API.
Narrator: the actual task didn't call for an API redesign, but if we're doing things, we're doing them The Right Way™ or we don't do them at all, right?
Autism is a super diverse condition so varies pretty wildly person-to-person.
This. I have no medication as I built up immense resiliency and masking mechanisms over the course of my life. Others may take a cocktail of meds just to make it to lunch.
It’s a condition that exists on a spectrum, as does its treatments or coping mechanisms. That said, I’m the “take my assigned medication” type, so I always took the full dose in the game.
People are touting Leucavorin. (It doesn't work) There are a lot of different things people have tried.
Xanax, Zolpidem, Belsomra, and a fifth of your favorite.
A lot of times they take an SSRI to be able to manage their emotions better and not be triggered by daily life. That’s what I remember when I was trying to help an autistic friend deal with having autistic children that were having a lot of issues.
Edit: Just asked her and the final cocktail they have settled on is aripriprazole (Abilify, an atypical antipsychotic) and hydroxyzine (first-generation antihistamine with anxiolytic and sedative properties).
I sent her the game and she said it was hard haha. I asked if that was what autism feels like and she said this-
“Not for me but I have ASD. For my son, it would be similar but different since he can't tell me what is going on in his head. I can only guess with him, poor lamb.”
Do you view autism as a pathology or a difference?
I'm pretty strongly in the difference camp. It giveth and taketh away. I can't get through a full meal hearing people chew food without some background noise going but I also completed my PhD before I was 30 so it feels wrong to call it a pathology ya know?
Is it rare to complete a PhD before 30?
Not much rarer than completing it at all, probably. It's still certainly an accomplishment.
I just looked it up - I guess it's not! As I said in another thread, paid the price, didn't receive the intelligence.
What I was getting at in my question is, in response to the question about medication, is the intent to "fix" a perceived "problem", or should any medication taken be tuned to provide support for coping with a world that can be actively hostile to neurodivergent people.
Any psychological disorder is treatment-worthy iff the patient suffers from it. So not just "you were diagnosed", but "you were diagnosed, have problems caused by it, suffer from those problems, and want relief". So yes to both, treatment can be intended to fix a problem that a patient suffers from that is just related to his perception of things. But it can also be intended to support your interactions with a hostile environment that you suffer from.
FWIW (and I do have relevant personal experience) "fixing" is not in the option set. One can only cope. SSRIs, VPA, amphetamines or whatever (including alcohol, THC, DMT and opiates), they just shift the person's perception/consciousness a bit so it might become more copeable in the current society. That is all.
Game just _assumes_ you drink coffee. That's a big decision, and I'd say coffee wears you down at least as much as everything else on the long run. Sure, short-term effects can be good, same as alcohol.
Seriously. Skip coffee.
Moderate consumption of coffee is fine. I'm not aware of any severe damage from drinking a cup a day. I don't think the comparison with alcohol is apt.
Not for everybody on the spectrum. I certainly see the difference if I go a week with coffee and no coffee -- the weardown and overwhelming effects slowly accumulate with coffee.
If the author feels overwhelmed, I'd say coffee should be tried first. It's not easy (caffeine addiction is real, especially for the spectrum), but it gets easier and easier with time.
This may be incredibly offensive, but how big could a potential overlap be between ADHD and autism?
It's not clear how distinctive a lot of mental health conditions are. For the most part we're just making up labels for groups of signs and symptoms, after all. To the extent the labels are "real" things mostly rests in their utility—I mean, that's sort of true of all labels for everything (what's a chair?) but these are far more fluid than most.
It could be that autism really is, exactly as we describe it and conceive of it, in some meaningful way defined by actual reality, a thing.
It could be that it's ten different things that aren't actually connected at all, but happen to look kinda similar. Some of which either are a variant of ADHD (or vice-versa, doesn't much matter) or just happen to include similar symptoms and behaviors that respond well to the same drugs and therapies we use to tread ADHD.
(now, to some degree we do have real tests we can do to pick up e.g. genetic markers of certain disorders, but these largely remain just another clue, not exactly solid proof, with some exceptions)
To illustrate: imagine we couldn't ever see the inside of a human body and just had to guess at what was going on when something went wrong. We'd probably have something we just called "bad kidney" that was actually several different problems, and we'd just throw drugs and other therapies at it until (often, but not always) some set of those relieved the symptoms. Meanwhile, sometimes it's a kidney stone, sometimes it's cancer, et c. And maybe we even have a whole step that's trying to figure out if it's "bad kidney" or "bad bladder" and sometimes we'd get that right, but sometimes wrong, but also some of the same medicines work for either (depending on the actual cause) so we might incorrectly diagnose "bad kidney" then accidentally correctly treat "bad bladder", and think we were right all along.
Pretty big. The key word is "comorbidity"; having one of them means you are more likely to have the other than a random person.
There's also an overlap in traits.
I'm AuDHD (autism + ADHD). You can read about my ADHD side if the experience (with memes!) here:
https://romankogan.net/adhd
What a weird word for things that are non-lethal. Why don't they just call it correlation?
"morbus" also means disease, not just death.
Neither autism nor ADHD are diseases.
> how big could a potential overlap be between ADHD and autism?
The lack of executive function is overlapping, but this particular post might be more of an ADHD simulator.
The very first "Follow the morning routine" or not is where this veers off my experience of the spectrum.
"Changing plans because of situations internal or external" is hard.
The option should've been "Spend 20 minutes making eggs again, because the yolks weren't the right kind of runny", miss the train, take a cab to work, but tell the driver that you've now got a system for eggs which you didn't have today (yeah, fun fact, the recipe was off because they don't refrigerate them over in France).
There seems to be a prevalent pop psych view that a bunch of these conditions (Autism, ADHD, Anxiety-Depression, OCD) are sort of clustered together and people who manifest one will often manifest symptoms of others. It gets muddier because a lot of these conditions are understood as spectrums and different people who identify with them may manifest them in vastly different ways. I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
> prevalent pop psych view
It's called comorbidities. It's very common in mental health conditions.
>pop psych
It is not "pop-psych", it is reality.
These are just labels we apply to buckets of symptoms. The underlying problems and biological differences that can cause these buckets of symptoms probably will be found, and then we can re-categorize things quite a bit. My bet is we do this within the next couple decades.
What causes difficulty is that actual symptoms of one of these buckets can cause behaviors and coping strategies that look like other ones.
Another issue is that these symptoms are not specific. What one neurodivergent person means by "I have sensory issues" is vastly different from another neurodivergent person, and your psych health provider will dig into those specifics and try and tease out which label fits the best, or whether it's even an example of that symptom. How those symptoms affect you is the entire point.
>I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
And you have that same feeling towards "blind" or "deaf" right? Since a lot of blind people struggle to lead "normal" lives but there are accomplished blind software devs right here on HN
Consider how many people live life with some sort of mild delusion and yet are perfectly functional 99% of the time. The brain is complicated and cannot ever be reduced to single dimensions like that, and it is weirdly good at still functioning when part of it is broken in some way, like with Broca's area or Phineas Gage.
Yes, "syndrome" and "disorder" are vague labels that don't have hard cutoffs or any test you can objectively run. That's the point of those words. When you have a hard test you can run, it becomes a "disease".
I also wonder if we kinda screwed ourselves by expanding pre-existing labels for disorders that appeared similar, instead of using a mixin pattern of describing the spectrum. So you could have a Photosensitivity and Social Inertness "Disorder" instead of people constantly debating whether your combination of symptoms is "bad enough" to be called Autism.
With Autism, as noted elsewhere in this thread, a general social understanding of it is required to help normalize environments that don't exclude autistic people. Having specific labels could, on the one hand, help bring focus towards the specific needs of those people. On the other hand, it's harder to convince people of a 100 different neurodiverse profiles than one...
The diagnostic criteria and symptoms have substantial overlap, ultimately everything in the DSM is a descriptive diagnosis not based on a mechanistic understanding of neurobiology so it's VERY likely that our categories don't map 1:1 to the underlying causes.
One is impulsive, the other requires structure. The two are not mutually exclusive though, because both conditions are pretty diverse. AuDHD is a term used to describe people with both.
This is a massive oversimplification of both autism and ADHD which approaches uselessness. Impulsivity is one possible symptom of ADHD, but doesn't even begin to describe the experience, and by itself paints an incorrect picture of the experience. Same for autism and structure. I know plenty of people with autism who absolutely do not deal in structure.
I know it feels nice to be able to craft a simple narrative, but this narrative feels more harmful and misconstrued than useful.
I have autism and have a lot of trouble with routine and rigid timelines. But I also have ADHD, so I suspect there is some internal struggle there. I want to have routine for a lot of things, I just can’t seem to make it happen.
I've seen Twitter use "AuDHD" for the intersection. It's big enough to have its own label and subgroup who identify with it.
Not at all - the stat I've heard is that 30-50% of autistics also have ADHD
Significant enough that the DSM-iV recognized ADHD symptoms as symptoms of autism and didn't allow a comorbid diagnosis of both conditions because of this. (The DSM-V does recognize both as possibly occurring together.)
So autism feels like meter managing survival games? Not saying to be dismissive, because I can see how stressful living like that is.
The back-to-back Robert Caro mention and unskippable ADHD Wikipedia popup hit too close to home.
Now I'm wondering how far on the spectrum Robert Moses was.
We might be best friends.
I love the idea of a tool to help people build empathy and better understand the experience of someone with autism. I wonder what this simulator would be like from the perspective of a young child going through school. Is that something that sounds interesting to you that you would consider creating? Thanks for sharing.
If you're from a well off family, you can be oblivious to everything and still have what you need to live so in my experience things were a lot easier. For me once I became self-aware, it turned into a tradeoff of outgrowing sensory issues (i.e. fire drills being pure hell) and weird speech issues and learning social skills, with worse executive functioning and anxiety and energy and still not being socially proficient enough to not be some level of offputting, and now the social skills matter much more so it's a bigger obstacle even though I'm a lot better at them.
Not sure about this. I am high functioning autistic. It ended my game because I called my mom and that was somehow overly taxing. I call my parents and sibling sometimes when I feel drained emotionally. Not everyone hates communicating with their family.
Oh, am I autistic then? :-|
Honestly I think everyone feels like this to some degree and most people are hiding their contempt for the structures at work.
This is sort of silly. Everyone has to "mask" at work. I do not care if the HR lady tells you to "bring your whole self". Unless your whole self happens to be precisely what they want, it is a lie. And nobody is that conflict avoidant, fake-happy, and deeply committed to shareholder value while upholding the strongest standards of ethics and work ethic.
This is a grind for pretty much everyone. To give you the other side, to someone extroverted and socially attuned, the fake nonsense is more grating and insulting than it is to you, I'd guess. Life is hard and everyone has his cross to bear.
That desk thing hits a nerve as someone on the other side of it.
It is not about "hot desk" but just not being able to see that some time you will need to reorganize how you sit. And not everyone will get the perfect spot.
Is it really a thing for some people that you need to sit on the same place always? I was never sure how much it offended some people or if they were just being comfortable.
Bro, I'm not autistic, but 99% events in this game would trigger me even more than in your game.
Eg.: party near my desk (near my office, even in my office) I will personally cancel their "party", or message each of their bosses etc.
I think, the best thing you can do is to don't care about anybody, "I'm (we're) here to work, if you're not here to work then GTFO".
"Let's have camera's on"...ehm no thanks ;-) etc.
I'm still polite though, I would say highly polite, but if anyone behaves like an idiot, then they will have a problem with me.
Is really being autistic, meaning you take shit from other people all the time? I'm not sure.
I mean they say it's a spectrum.
Is it possible to even make it through day 2?
Maybe if you're very careful but probably not.
There are point diffs on your stats each turn. The positive diffs are always the same for the same choices regardless of day.
The negative choices have an additional 25% added to them each day, so -10 the first day for a choice would be -12 (floor) the second day, -15 the third day, etc.
Nice game this is all i can say
Thank you so much!
Very nice game. Barely made it to getting to the office and receiving orders from a manager. I could completely relate to the "hot desk" experience, that's something that would irritate me. I do not claim to be in the spectrum, nor have any diagnosis to claim or reject it. Again, congratulations for the game and the feeling.
Thank you! Hot desking is a nightmare regardless of if you're on the spectrum or now.
Question: are there any good resources out there for leading those that are neurodivergent? I haven't led anyone that's neurodiverent yet but it's something I think alot about.
Great question - been hoping people reply to this comment with resources.
This is one audiovisual representation of Autism that some of us can relate to.
https://psyche.co/videos/enter-the-sensory-world-of-an-overs...
Autism is as difficult as the oregon trail. Woe is me.
Thank you! I sent this to my family so that they may get a clue!!!
Have you heard of Depression Quest? It's a very similar idea: a text adventure about managing depression.
It faced some controversy in its day. Do you think now is a better time for games like this?
I must have vaguely remembered it. I knew I had seen this idea before with some other thing but couldn't place it. What was the controversy?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate
Remove the medication part than this seems like a normal day in IT as a single man.
Ugh, it’s like replaying the trauma of my life the last ten years… 10/10.
Autism is not atypical but normal evolutionary marker for higher intelligence: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/9/msaf189/8245036
"Story mode" thinkers should be considered atypical, detached from reality, IMO. Coworkers convinced the political prison of job culture is just and honorific, for example.
Autism may be the price of human intelligence [1]
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/09/250927031224.h...
I paid the price. I still haven't received the intelligence.
I was about to say, when do I get my prize?
You're posting here, this is the prize.
Consider how many people cannot even know what ycombinator is.
Harsh as this sounds, this is the truth.
Yeah but, intelligence isn’t exactly rewarded in society, execution is. And this site takes away time from that… :P
I dare say autism is the pride of human intelligence.
Or this could be another cope
Anything but admitting environmental effects of pollution, plastics, and over medicating.
True, nobody ever says that pollution, plastics, and over-medicating are bad. Keep fighting the brave fight!
> and over medicating
don't forget the vaccines and tylenol, RFK Jr
autism predates the widespread use of plastic by generations
The Nazis had already holocausted autistic people.
I swear I went home from work but then got fired from my job for falling asleep at my desk. I don't understand what happened. (And even if I did fall asleep at my desk, who fires an employee for falling asleep once?)
> who fires an employee for falling asleep once?
Happened to my grandfather even though he was probably the best damned cab driver in all of Michigan.
When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather.
Not screaming in terror, like the passengers in his car.
I will never forget my grandpa's last words.
> Stop shaking the god damn ladder you little shit!
> best damned cab driver
Did he fall asleep at the wheel, while driving? I can see that being a fireable offense.
New screen for the game:
>> Someone posts an old joke on Hacker News
>> You interpret it literally.
Bummer - this has been the hardest code I've ever had to write test coverage for. I'm using https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ for the story routing with inkjs so I'm not surprised that there are some lingering weird-paths.
It's been long enough(about 7 years) since I worked in an environment like this that I've been seriously considering going back to it lately. I played one round of your game, and that was enough to make it completely obvious to me what a fucking terrible idea that is.
Thank you for making this, I think you just saved me from flushing two years of personal progress down the toilet in the name of... What? Fucking business logic? I'll pass on that, I think, and keep improving my life on my own terms.
And maybe address the question why, again and again, I keep finding ways to convince myself that this is what I want my life to be. No matter how many times it leads me to crash and burn and have to spend years picking up the pieces.
Seriously, thank you. If I ever meet you, I will buy you a beverage to your liking, to go, so you can go home and enjoy it in peace.
/g
Eh, this just feels like "software engineering simulator." I don't have autism but a good bit of this feels familiar (am I on the spectrum?) I'm an introvert and have struggled to cope with corporate work for a while.
What helps:
- Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?
- Owning your calendar and timing for meetings to better suit your energy.
- Regular therapy and reflection, honestly.
- Regular exercise, doesn't matter who you are or what form, this is essential.
I can respect that this "simulation" fosters empathy, but worry that it also awfulizes/catastrophizes solvable problems. Figuring out functional routines and managing burnout is just as big a part of the job as writing code. It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.
Heck, this isn’t even specific to software engineering. It’s basically just a “getting through the workday” simulator. I think there are a great many people who find working in an office exhausting. Personally, I was so much happier once I switched to remote work.
> Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful... How much of the need here is self-imposed?
Autistic people don't come into the world as fully formed adults with irrational ideas about the need to mask. They start off as children and attempt to socialize with other children. The autistic child in a neurotypical world just "being themselves" finds themselves repeatedly kicked out of friend groups and rejected by everyone sometimes including by their parents. This is deeply traumatic to a young child's psyche. Unloved and rejected, a solution appears! I'll just pretend to be like the other kids, even though they're stupid and wrong. They may actually objectively be stupid, but apparently they don't like being told that to their face. Pile on another decade or two of this, and hey, this child, now older and wiser, has autistic masking tendencies that cause them to burn out. Blame the now-adult person with autism all you want to absolve yourself of a need to concern yourself with other people's problems, but that's not actually helpful for those people suffering from autistic burnout.
Not the angle I'm coming at it from.
I mask as a coping mechanism for ADHD and Social Anxiety. This masking causes me harm. I learned it in the way you describe.
The most helpful learning I've gotten through years of therapy has been to: (1) recognize what I'm doing (2) not beat myself up about it (3) try small steps to change my behavior so that I can feel good about it.
I'm the only person who can unlearn this for myself. I don't blame anyone who masks, and have nothing but empathy for the experience, but I'm proposing they can find a different way.
> It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.
You might as well be telling a wheelchair-bound person that it's their responsibility to find a way up a flight of stairs or maneuver a cramped bathroom stall.
> Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?
Masking is not always conscious, in fact it's largely unconscious. So many autistic people will go through their day around neurotypical people and feel burnt out by lunch and have no idea why. They don't necessarily realize they're burning tons of mental effort just talking to people or dealing with stimuli.
Autistic people learn to mask just to get by day to day. It's not like they got issued a "How to be Autistic: Masking for Success" guide book when they were born.
Isn't that just being introverted? Also, if it's unconscious then a "simulator" shouldn't present an option. The PC should simply react automatically to the detriment of some stat. It sounds like for something to qualify as "masking" it must be a conscious choice, otherwise it's some other thing.
Absolutely agree with this.
I still think it's important to (1) notice what's causing the problem, bring it into consciousness (2) understand the behavior (in this case: masking) and reckon with it if if's causing a bad outcome (burnout.)
Easier said than done. For me, therapy has been life-changing for helping me notice and understand unintentional behaviors.
The reason it's called a "spectrum" is that everyone's on it. :)
Eh. No not really. There is a threshold to even be considered on the spectrum.
Most people have 2 legs and 2 arms. Some people don't (birth defects, injuries, accidents, disease, etc). There is a spectrum of missing appendages, but to say everyone is missing at least part of an appendage is not correct.
This is currently how autism is viewed.
Where are gamma waves on the visible light spectrum? It's a spectrum, which means everything is on it!
The definition of autism has changed to pull in masses more people over the years, so if you're an older software engineer you may be autistic using the up-to-date definition.
No. It got stricter.
With the DSM-5 and it's removal of Asperger's as a separate diagnosis the diagnosis criteria has been made stricter. People that would have formerly been diagnosed as Asperger could theoretically not be anymore under ASD.
The percentage of people with autism in a population is very stable and we know there is a huge genetic component to it.
People are getting diagnosed more but the amount of people with autism has likely stayed stable.
Which is really, really good thing. A diagnosis is live changing. The earlier you get diagnosed and the more supportive your network is, the better the outcome.
I could hear the misophonia dialogue
I've just got fired for calling my mom.
Not enough meetings or e-mail.
Autism is not one thing.
Is it possible to win?
Most I was able to do is day 2. Probably realistic.
I died of dysentery. I didnt know that was even possible.
Based hidden burnout scenario
you are advertising this in the wrong place
Whoever chose flashy colors for this is a motherfluffer :')
It's a default Neovim theme: murphy
Oh well: "ouch" is all I my eyes have to say ^^
"Masking" to me just sounds like being a person. I want to tell my boss fuck you, but I can't. So I say I am frustrated.
Wait sleeping doesn’t restore eneger to people who have autism wha?
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/physica...
I woke up, didn't focus on self care, didn't take medication, and got fired immediately. That doesn't feel very realistic
Solid slice of the more extreme side of the autism spectrum for those who can still function within “normal” society, albeit with some assistance and tolerance.
I’m lucky enough to be on the lower/moderate side of things, but man all of this stuff hit home in its own way. Annoying noises (for me it’s the whine of cheap electronics or the chaotic bass of some music genres/upstairs neighbors), the forceful imposition of others in my space (“cameras on!”, scented cleaners, voluntold activities), and the daily task micromanagement to get by (do I call a friend/family member since they’ve texted me three times today about a trivial matter, or do I watch comfort shows and work on a personal project?).
This shit is hard, and adding in the requirement to engage in political maneuvering to succeed and thrive makes it exponentially worse.
I just want to do a good job and go home to live the best life I can. I suspect most autists are the same.
You are most definitely not alone! There's many of us.
I feel called out :)
I see u
Extremely disappointed about the amount of ableism in the comments. Yes, some kids these days pick the autism label when they probably shouldn't, but that does NOT mean you get to shit on actually disabled people
Plenty of autistic people experience actual disability. And masking isn't just "what everyone does at work". Masking is a trauma response. Autistic people in genral have been abused for their 'abnormal' behavior to the point of being so traumatized that masking is not even a choice. They must hide for fear of further abuse and harassment.
Abuse such as "everyone's a little autistic" and "that's not a disability" or "you just want attention"
Making passing judgements on someone's disability that you clearly don't understand makes you a bigoted asshole. Stop it.
Thank you for saying this.
Yes, some kids these days pick the autism label when they probably shouldn't, but that does NOT mean you get to shit on actually disabled people
You shouldn't shit on anyone, but you do raise a good point: how do you know who the actually disabled people are?
If some people who claim autism offer as evidence experiences that almost all neurotypical folks can relate to, people are going to be skeptical. You can call them bigoted assholes, but you're unlikely to shame anyone into suspending their skepticism.
Wait, this isn’t normal?
Did you use HN as training data?
I'm on HN pretty regularly so, in a sense, yes
can you migrate this off of vercel
amazing. realistic too. i had a burnout after 2 moves
Hmm...I recognize the opening description well as someone who has ADHD. But honestly I don't know anyone who is neurotypical for whom the description wouldn't apply as well.
Wow this game gives me some serious anxiety, haha.
The last game I want to play is "Me Simulator"
Right off the bat, I don't do "self-care" in the morning and I don't eat breakfast, so I can't get past #1
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
is this even autism specific?? ha
"I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face" ― Franz Kafka
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth" - Oscar Wilde
It's things like having a grating monotone, and having to pause before speaking and willing yourself to adopting the right tone for your state of mind and the effect you want to have on your audience. Every. Time. You. Speak.
It's like being an actor, except the whole world is your stage, and you have to be conscious of your character, lines, and motivation, the entire time you're awake.
I’ve learned so much, and it took only a few minutes. What a treat.
I had no idea about masking, even though I’ve been doing it for as long as I remember being alive. Aaaah, it’s so draining. When I was younger (in my 20s) I used to think there’d come a time when I’d finally come out of my shell. I’m pushing 40 now, but the shell is only thicker, the cave deeper, the walls taller. Instead of dreaming that one day I’ll be “like everyone else”, I’m contemplating the day I’ll cease to exist. Funny.
love the ADHD popup intrusion.
Sad that autism has become such a trend. I have a niece on the spectrum and it was obvious at a very young age luckily she is more high functioning now via years of therapy.
No one wants to hear it but there is a vast difference between those on the spectrum and those not. I am in tech and i have never met anyone autistic. This is because the sad reality is that autism makes it that hard to hold down a job even if high functioning.
It is grossly over exaggerated by many and used as an excuse. This is not saying anyone here does that but in media it is extremely common. This only makes it harder for those who do suffer from it. The majority of autism stereotypes are almost all on the high functioning side. Closer to the low functioning side, it is very sad.
People are tired of being forced to do bullshit meaningless or net negative stuff, obey people they don't respect on a deeper level etc. People live in a way like captive animals in a zoo. Everything is urgent, the sky is falling, but all behind a glass screen.
But the only vocabulary they have to express all this is therapy speak and mental health. So everyone has ADHD, autism, PTSD, anxiety, depression, bipolar and more. When it's often actually a lack of purpose, a lack of enduring value, being a standardized cog in a machine, ripped of context and roots, atomized, etc. But this is not valid vocabulary, we are modern people, we have chemical imbalances and not nonsense medieval concepts. Medical labels still have power even in a lifeless bureaucratic corporate HR hellscape. Medical diagnoses and credible claims of unsafe work environments. Anything else, they sleep. These two and they listen.
> we have chemical imbalances and not nonsense medieval concepts
That is not how the brain works. The whole chemical imbalances thing is a gross over-simplification. Honestly how it is used in pop science is often very analogues to the medieval theory of Humorism.
> When it's often actually a lack of purpose, a lack of enduring value, being a standardized cog in a machine
If you are subjected to an toxic environment it is a very healthy and good reaction to be unhappy about this.
Yes, psychologist mostly focus on the individual. That is their job. They can't fix unemployment, alienation of labor and so on. Those are societal issues that need political solutions.
However, this does not mean ADHD, autism, PTSD and so on are not real issues.
If I lived in a perfect utopia, I would still have ADHD. If ADHD were made up, why do my genetic children also have a 40% chance of having ADHD? Why would that not be true if I adopted someone?
These are real and disabling things that need specific treatment.
I agree with most of this. Though it gets really conceptually murky what a mental illness is and the DSM diagnosis checklists are quite different from how diagnoses work in "body"-medicine. The psychiatrist blogger Scott Alexander has written a lot about this.
For the common person, psychology and therapy are a new skin on spiritual guidance, shamanism, or rituals like Catholic confession.
> That is not how the brain works. The whole chemical imbalances thing is a gross over-simplification
I know and I was implying disagreement by the placement of that sentence in the context. I was trying to present what the common notion is. If it's a chemical imbalance, it can't be your fault. We trust science, we are physicalists. It has to be imagined as some miswiring or chemical problem for it to be respectable and taken seriously.
> If I lived in a perfect utopia, I would still have ADHD. If ADHD were made up, why do my genetic children also have a 40% chance of having ADHD? Why would that not be true if I adopted someone?
Personality and temperament differences exist yes. What we decide to label as a disease diagnosis is an entirely orthogonal question. ADHD is often diagnosed in rigid school environments that look nothing like homo sapiens' evolved natural habitat. It's not necessarily a disease not to flourish there. Yes I understand that given the environment, it makes sense to try to help as best as we can, and we can't single-handedly change society with a magic wand. Of course.
Ok, I slightly misunderstood and I see now better where you are coming from.
Yes, you are not wrong but as a ADHD person it comes off as super invalidating.
It is kind of like discussions where gender radical people tell to trans people that gender is just a social construct. Like it is but that doesn't exactly help trans people.
I mean I am sure you recognize this as you wrote.
> Yes I understand that given the environment, it makes sense to try to help as best as we can, and we can't single-handedly change society with a magic wand. Of course.
Still, I do believe that you massively overstate socially constructed aspect of having ADHD and underestimate the physical reality of it.
Yes, my environment makes a huge huge difference. But, as someone who was diagnosed very late in life, it was always with me. Even when I was alone. Even when I thrived. It is a fundamental part of who I am.
Not having a diagnosis earlier set up for constant spirals of failure, for internalized self hate. It did not allow me to find strategies to cope effectively.
I couldn't find or build the environment I needed because I didn't know my needs. This is why the diagnosis must come first.
ADHD is a disability and it is a real as being deaf or not being able to walk.
> it comes off as super invalidating.
Once this is on the table, it's hard answer in a way that doesn't come across as being the asshole. But that's kind of my point. People tie identities and emotions to labels. It reframes how people react. Since it's real, you're given support. If it were fake, you'd get scolded. The shift in view that I got from Scott Alexander is that the arrow points the other way around. Since we see people who can benefit from some support, and we generally don't want to be assholes and want the support to be paid by insurance etc, we have to declare the thing as a Disease(TM). But this categorization is in good part necessary due to the bureaucratic system we live in. There are many ways that societies have conceptualized such things. All the way to demon possession. In comparison blindness is much easier to understand mechanistically.
> But the only vocabulary they have to express all this is therapy speak
What? I deal with all of that and more at work, and I just roll my eyes (to myself) and think "it's a paycheck."
If you're lucky you might find a sense of purpose and value at work but it's not really normal from what I've experienced. Even if you like the people you work with, the job itself is probably mostly bullshit. The only jobs I've had that weren't were the jobs that had very standardized tasks: making burgers, framing walls, painting, cutting grass. There's not much bullshit in those jobs because it's very clear what you are there to do. And you can turn around at the end of the day and look at the wall you built. That doesn't mean you might not feel like a cog in a machine.
IMO most people should find purpose and value outside of work. Work is just how you pay for those things.
Thanks, I hate it. Keep an eye out for Nathan Grayson sliding into your DMs though.
Will do - best ingest for DMs is my substack https://blog.drjoshcsimmons.com/
ok, I went through it as a relatively normal software engineer (though i certainly can empathize with a lot of on-the-spectrum behavior in kind if not in intensity) - I have 3 takeaways.
1. Things that I brush off or bounce back from have a cumulative effect that leaves some autistic people 'in the red'. It affects them and sticks with them more than it does to me.
2. Options that are not at all realistic or sensible to me like 'not taking meds' - i would never consider skipping a prescription. several cases offered responding with formal processes and complaints that are wildly inappropriate for the offense. Are you showing that to an autistic person these terrible choices somehow seem to be viable?
3. This sample environment is over-the-top with caricatures of the worst sort of job activities populated by judgemental and sneering villains. Are you trying to show that to an autistic person they only see a day full of the very worst things - that they fixate on these problems and don't put them in context with the rest of the experience?
An uncharitable person could take away that autistic people are fragile, make poor choices, and only see the worst in the people around them.
Maybe this was more meant as a comic rant that autistic people could enjoy as a parody of their shared experiences? I'm not actually sure this is accomplishing what you want.
The blinking Autism Simulator text, in black on yellow, in the upper left is very distracting.
Maybe that's the point? I heavily dislike it when people put blinking stuff on websites.
Lol my life is an autism simulator
Cool game. That said, autism is a spectrum. You can’t just say “this iz wut autism like.”
Thanks for playing and agreed! I have a disclaimer in the [About] modal
Autism is an extremely diverse and complex phenomenon. No two autistic people experience the world in the same way. This simulation is based on the experiences of a single autistic individual and is not representative of all autistic people, although, I suspect many autistic people will recognize some aspects of their own experience in this simulation.
Thats a bit uncalled for. This is a game made by someone shaped by their perspective on the world. It can be appreciated as such without applying your own additional intent.
I think masking is pretty general across the board. Even severe Autism. My daughter acts completely different in different contexts. Some could say we all do but you'll know it when you see it esp when the mask is gone.
This was too real thanks I hate it.
lol, failed immediately, you have to be honest
good writing. you should write a short story. i would read.
Thank you :) My book is available on Amazon. Not sure if I'm allowed to directly link in comments but search "ex nihilo simmons"