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I worked in software development. Trust me, there were plenty of autistic folks in that field. We knew they were different. It didn’t matter. Now I teach software engineering, and the percentages haven’t changed . Giving a name to something doesn’t make it more prevalent.
Honestly, and this isn’t meant to make them feel unwelcome, but anecdotally I find there are a lot more neurotypicals in dev than ever before.
I’ve noticed that some of my students seem to be more motivated by the income potential and really don’t enjoy the work itself. Given the upheaval due to AI, I wouldn’t be surprised if that kind of student disappears.
I’ve been in the tech industry for 20 years. I undertook an IT degree in 2004 (for microprocessor architecture) and another in 2014 (for software engineering).
Both times I observed three distinct styles of student. The first were those who heard they could make big money in IT. They didn’t have any interest in the field, knew little to nothing about computers, and massively underestimated the difficulty of the course work. Very few of these made it past first year.
The second group were the “enthusiasts”, the kind of people who ran their group’s local LAN party every month and own an ethernet hub. The kind who reformat their PC every 6 weeks to keep it running fast. They built their own PC when they were 16. These kind think first year is a breeze, and don’t even read the text book, but are quickly out of their depth in second year.
Finally are the autists. These are the ones who you can just tell they have a deep special interest in the field. You ask them a question about metaprogramming in Python, or database denormalization and they talk your ear off for an hour. These people read the whole textbook in the first week of class. They correct the professor when he gets something wrong (but politely, by email, after class).
My point is, in my experience, there are always some percentage of neurotypicals and those who are motivated by the money in every year, and has been for more than 20 years. I don’t think it’s getting more prevalent. Maybe now due to higher levels of diagnosis and increasing social awareness, it’s easier to spot the autists, and perhaps due to the AI boom, the money chasers are easier to spot too.
When I went back to college for a degree in networking during the pandemic it was similar. A few people were clearly there without any passion or natural affinity to IT, some had the natural affinity and/or passion but couldn’t keep up, and ultimately out of the 50 or so students who I started with in the fall of the first year, only about 12 of us made it to graduation. There was a group of 30+ year olds launching second careers who helped eachother work through it all (I don’t think any of them had the natural affinity but maybe the passion), and a group of 20 year olds who had a natural affinity for tech who made it, and I fell somewhere in the middle age-wise (but I have both the passion and the natural affinity)
I have a junior colleague like that, he’s even confessed out loud that he chose to become a programmer because he thought it was a good career. He got his first job and immediately realized that he absolutely hated it but by then, according to him, it was too late to change careers, better just power through it.
His code is so sloppy, he always does the bare minimum to get the task done (for example copy and pasting the same code seven times, with bugs, instead of creating a new function), he really doesn’t care. I’ve been assigned to clean up after him so many times it’s not even funny.
About 25 years ago I saw this (the first dotcom boom). I was a TA with office hours and had a significant number of people outright say “just give me the answer” when I would try to explain something they didn’t understand.
I recall a lounge discussion where someone switched majors away from CompSci towards communications, but said they just planned to get “a” bachelor’s degree and then some easy certification to become a programmer, because CompSci was too hard and they could get a payday without it.
Yeah the revealing moment came to me when i sat in a 3rd semester IT university course and somebody in the audience asked “what’s a local variable?”
really seems to be in it for the money. that, or they had a bad day.
Well it has become very popular. Large amount of people doing it now.
But but but vaccines!
See also:
The number of left-handed people increased due to the trauma of WW1 and WW2. No more increase since wars have stopped in the world. Amazing.
Is there evidence that trauma causes left-handedness? I’d always heard that this was due to people no longer being punished for being left-handed, making it a good comparison for people fearmongering about rising rates of recorded transness or autism.
That would also imply that the trauma of ww1+2 are continuing to make people born in the 90s and 2000s left handed
Yes, its a quantum epigenetic resonance effect. I can sell you some crystals to treat it, if you like.
I would like 4 epigenetic resonator crystals to go, please. Please make sure they are chock full of orgone.
So much orgonne.
Orgone! We don’t need no stinking
orwhen we got!(!a and !b)!But that’s what ‘orgone’ means, ‘or gone’. Which I support, because fsck Boolean operators.
It’s a joke that the rise in left handedness correlated to the time period of the war. It’s just pointing out a spurious correlation, and falsely equating the two.
Either you just whooshed really hard, or I am by posting this. I genuinely can’t tell if this is sarcasm.
Oh I couldn’t tell that the comment I was replying to was being sarcastic, I’m a tad autistic.
I think that poster is wrong by attributing it all to the war, but what they’re implying with trauma is physical trauma causing the non-functioning, or requiring the amputation, of a right-handed person’s right hand. Probably a lot more acceptable to be left-handed when your right one has been blown off and all.
I’m pretty sure it was just a joke about correlation and causation.
Yeah butvwe cant bully them now and that makes me sad.
Skill issue: git guud
You’re abusing me!
Yep, my older friend tells me often that he used to be left handed, but his parents forced him to become right handed by either beating him whenever he used his left hand or by tying up his left hand to his side for long periods of time, just to force him to use his right hand.
Still does certain stuff with his left hand, but he can no longer write with it, since it is too shaky now.
isn’t shakyness a typical symptom of PTSD?
That’s a great analogy.
beat me to it
“He’s a gifted boy”
Proceeds to question him and blame him when he is, shockingly, not good at everything but only a set of skills that go well with a logical brain.
People like things to fit into neat little boxes. If you’re smart, you’re smart. If you’re dumb, you’re dumb. If you’re smart in some ways, and dumb in others, you’re confusing and they hate it.
reminds me of these statistics:
Without more context hard to infer what it’s trying to say, but I think basically, 12% of the population is left handed, but before 1950 we ignored them or forced them into being right handed?
I say forced, because my dad (born in the late 40s, hella boomer) is left handed by nature and he told me as a kid his mom used to take whatever he was holding in his left hand and moved it to his right so he became right handed. Ironically he broke his right hand when I was a tween breaking up a little league brawl and started using his left again, so now he’s really ambidextrous.
My grandfather was naturally left-handed, forced to write with his right hand in school, then after school found he could no longer write with decent penmanship with either hand. His penmanship was always terrible for his entire life
Folks in 2003: “you’re the weirdest person I’ve ever met” Same folks these days: “really? You don’t look autistic”
- You made our life miserable.
- You are intolerant.
I feel these statements are missing.
Some autistic people can be selfish or rude like anyone else but people focus on them being weird instead. Weirdness is the problem of the intolerant normie who feels uncomfortable.
Oh, being “rude” is another accusation that haunts a lot of us. We’re called selfish and rude when we fail to recognize social cues, through no fault of our own.
The first description provided by dictionary.com lists “rude” as: discourteous or impolite, especially in a deliberate way. To me, they key word there is “deliberate.”
Consider growing up being called “rude” or “selfish” despite your best attempts at getting along with others. Imagine thinking you’re making a thoughtful response, one where you already attempted to consider another person’s feelings, but you misinterpreted the situation. Nobody around you is straight-forward or elegant enough to explain to you why what you said was “rude,” they just throw the word at you and say it’s your fault for not trying harder.
Just like anyone else, some autistic people will internalize that term and decide that attempting to be “polite” is an impossible battle. Without the guidance to do a “post mortem” on situations and relationships that go sour, some people may decide, “What’s the point?” and give up trying.
It’s not a healthy response for sure, but I think it goes far in understanding where pre-existing childhood accusations turn into harmful, lifelong labels.
And whoever it decides to do violence to about it, yes.
Gosh i love mental health and normalcy.
No but see i need some one to bully and if it’s explained then i havr to work harder to justify myself.
I’m almost 50 and I never even considered it would be a possibility until much later in life, the autistic kids were at the deep end of the spectrum and in special classes, that couldn’t be me. I was just a weirdo, luckily there were some other weirdos, mostly they were the punk and alternative kids, later ravers. All things considered I had a pretty decent growing up but I could have been a lot more successful in school. One of my teachers in HS said straight up I was a loser who would never amount to anything.
Diagnosed at like 5 or 6 because I was reading at highschool level but didn’t act normal enough.
That didn’t help me in the slightest especially in that time period.
Fuckers
Yup. The difference now is that people are getting diagnosed. A friend of mine got diagnosed with add in her mid 60s, then got diagnosed with autism in her mid 70’s. I met her when she was ~80, and she said that getting the autism diagnosis made her life finally make sense. She always had it, she just didn’t understand why she was different.
People who don’t comply with some societal norm or other are always seen as “weird” or just “quirky” by those who do, especially those who make a huge effort to fit in.
This applies to just about everything, including the behaviours of the neurodivergent.
IMHO, what makes it a problem is that the judgmental takes (i.e. “weird” rather than merely “quirky”) are accepted and even condoned in present day society which de facto means the bullying linked to negative judgements against people for being unusual is accepted and even condoned.
PS: To pick up on what others said, having the explanation “Autism” does seem to make it less socially acceptable to be judgemental about it.
A diagnosis just makes it slightly more awkward to call kids names or tell them they’re doing it wrong.
They liked calling kids names.
It also becomes a problem for people as it means that there is a medical reason for certain behavior. You can’t just treat all kids the same.
And I suspect that autism and ADD just happens to be at the forefront of culturally identifying and accepting neurodiversity.
I’ve always thought of the phrase “to call somebody a name” as weird.
Like, sure, everybody has a name. Where’s the problem?
As society continues to refine a shape of ideals, those that were once normal will continue to be labelled as abnormal. Until eventually those that fit the ideal of “normal” are outnumbered.
“I suffer from proacism.”
“Oh, what’s that?”
“There’s nothing interesting about me. I try, but my mind is underpowered and my personality dull. I can’t help but concentrate on the least exciting thing happening in the room. I’m not allowed in unpredictable environments in case I get injured. I’m terrible at sports but I like watching them, especially paying attention to all the commentary.”
The world will one day be ours
I’m willing to bet that being neurospicy is actually the default, and the neuromilds, the mayonnaise brains, they’re actually the broken ones. They’re just so fucking forceful with their bullshit they convinced the world to do things their way.
What, you’re telling me you fell OFF the spectrum? Are you ok? Do you need help communicating honestly? Just say exactly what you mean it’s ok, I know you judge others for no reason but we don’t do that. You can just be honest. Or you can lie and blame me for not understanding you that’s fine too you fucking prick.
Neurotypicals are just the majority minority. They’re ~40% of the population, which isn’t the majority, but it is the largest single group of people. It’s also a lone circle on an otherwise overlapping Venn diagram, because all of the other circles preclude being neurotypical. So if you’re meeting someone for the first time and are going to make assumptions about them, the default is to assume that they’re probably in the largest, most monolithic group. Assuming any other group has a large probability to be wrong, because even though 60% is the majority, it is split amongst a bunch of much smaller circles.
All of the other circles on the diagram are messy. They overlap, they have their own special quirks, the lines around the circles are blurry, and that 40% monolith also says that the 60% (broken apart into much smaller circles, so nowhere near as united) is weird and should just fit in. So yeah, neurotypical became the default.
I also tend to think of it like stars: there’s infinitely many stars, just as there’s infinitely many different kinds of NDs, but one star is much much bigger than all the others, that’s NT, and that’s why so many people assume it’s the default.
“Lazy” is when you’re so scared and anxious that you can’t think anymore. Someone’s always telling you what to do and how to do it, anyway. There’s even a rubric for art.
I always wondered because the go to term was introverted. My mom actually had a story on almost being held back really early on. Like first grade. Most of my courses were honors in high school.
