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Workers On Autism Spectrum Finding Careers In Software Testing
rjmarvin writes According to Autism Speaks, about 85% of people who have autism in the United States are currently unemployed or underemployed, but a social enterprise organization called Meticulon is training autistic individuals for highly skilled jobs in software testing. According to Meticulon, autistic people often possess sharp memory and pattern matching skills as well as attention to detail, making them ideal candidates for software testing jobs. Each year's crop of autistic students or Meticulon Consultants is tested and evaluated to develop their MindMap, a unique profile of skills and ideal work environment ultimately used to find these trained software testers an ideal job.
The hard part is finding what that "thing" is and being able to integrate it into your life in a beneficial way.
The thing about a spectrum: there's no hard line.
Don't overassociate here. You can enjoy the work, solving problems, figuring out patterns, without showing any substantial regressive symptoms. You could arbitrarily declare me autistic to fit your model, based on the fact that I hate noise, and I'm moderately introverted, but to me, those are just personality traits, and I doubt a clinical diagnosis would agree.
As the parent of someone with Autism and likely someone who is undiagnosed himself, I hate that group. They blame Autism on vaccines and want to find a "cure" for Autism. My son and I don't have a disease. We don't need to be cured. We need assistance in dealing with the neurotypical (non-Autistic) world. If you were to "cure" every Autistic person, you'd eliminate a lot of people looking at things differently. I'd wager that a lot of the eccentric geniuses throughout history had Autism. Imagine where we'd be without them.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
One of the things about Autism is it is subjectively diagnosed based on symptoms, so there is no way to really tell for sure if it one condition or 20. With the difficulty researchers have been having in finding causes and whether the causes are genetic or enviromental, my suspicion leans toward multiple conditions with overlapping symptomologies.
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