Slashdot Mirror
Autism Traits Prove Valuable for Software Testing
Back in 2009 we ran a story about a Chicago based non-profit company that trained high-functioning autistic people to be software testers. Two years later Aspiritech has grown to offer services in Belgium, Japan and Israel. Autistic debuggers are used by large clients like Oracle and Microsoft and have proven to be so good in fact that companies are now recruiting to meet demand. From the article: "Aspiritech's board of directors includes social service providers, therapists, a vocational expert and a software engineer. The nonprofit also received start-up advice and consultation from Keita Suzuki, who has co-founded a similar company, called Kaien, in Japan. Aspiritech has hired and trained seven recruits with Asperger's syndrome. These recruits have since worked on software-testing projects for smartphone and cloud-computing applications. Aspiritech now offers functional-, compatibility- and regression-testing, as well as test-case development, with experience in cloud-computing platforms including Salesforce."
do well at software testing. That's really the story here. Autism is irreverent. This very idea is based upon a lot of wrong information about people with Autism.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe it's over-self-diagnosed, but there's a proper clinical diagnosis, and it's a serious condition. The person with Asperger's does have significant strengths, though, and they tend to align with technology skills, so there's no real surprise here to those who know about Aperger's.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Science only very rarely shows that some hypothesis is correct. More often, it shows that every other tested hypothesis is wrong, and that the one that's left is just the most likely.
The "vaccines cause autism" hypothesis has been tested, and is shown to most likely be wrong. The "magic space fairy causes autism" hypothesis hasn't yet been tested, or the "too many hard sneezes while pregnant causes autism" hypothesis, nor a few hundred others. We have such a long way to go...
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Asperger's is a mild form of autism. One of it's characteristics is that the people who have it focus very intently on what they're doing for extended periods of time. As a result, they make excellent programmers and testers because they'll put in hours without even realizing the time has gone by.
In a sense, Asperger's is almost the reverse of ADD.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Maybe it's just me, but this reminds me of focus from Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
There's this impressive new field of mathematics called "statistics" - you may have heard about it already on Slashdot. Using statistics, yes, you can often make statements like "x does not cause y". By comparing people with and without x to see if they have the same or different rates of y. If the rates differ, x and y are related. If the rates are the same, then, no, x and y are not related.
Conveniently, this was done back when people started blaming autism on vaccines. The rates were the same. The severity was the same. The ages were the same.
Also conveniently, arguments like "different chemistry" are not an effective magical charm against statistics. Especially in the case of autism, where common genes have already been identified, and people with those genes still have the same autism rates whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.
A different type of brain would certainly be a condition of sorts.
The actual statement that you make is that "x is UNLIKELY to case y" along with a degree of confidence. artor3's comment is stated as an absolute so don't bother tossing stats into the discussion. Stats deals with estimation, likelyhood, probability, forecasting, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_intervals and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance
artor3's comment is also stated without citation. Not a good start :(
Online essays don't necessarily point either way -- my text messages often span over 3 messages (diagnosed nearly 5 years ago, had plenty of time to deal with the symptoms), and I've read about a high-functioning autistic guy who's one of the best speechwriters in America (Send in the Idiots, a short book if anyone is interested). Check out some of the posts over at wrongplanet some time if you don't believe me; sitting behind a screen makes it a lot easier to communicate, as one can think about what they want to say and take their time with it. Also, there's nothing like body language to compound the difficulty of communicating.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.